Eastern & Western , An Interwoven Approach to Mental Health
My life has been effected by mental illness since I was 14 years old. I can't begin to describe the pain and suffering I've been through in this lifetime due to a myriad of mental health diagnosis, however I have created a life that is full of rewarding experiences with work and friends and family. I have reclaimed my mind as my own through the many healing periods of my life with a combination of western and eastern approaches. And I have not taken my diagnosis lying down, I have created my own truth by exploring many different ways to understand it. I am also on a medication that is effective, I devote my mind and body to an enriching yoga practice and workout routine, I practice clean eating habits, and I maintain a healthy energetic body through a meditation practice that keeps me feeling connected to the most important parts of myself.
My mental health management began in high school with traditional therapy and then eventually an anxiety medication. Over time, I began to realize that anxiety was not my only worry, pun very much intended. Getting the right diagnosis can take years for symptoms to really present as parts of a diagnosis and it definitely was this way for me. It took until I was in college and presenting symptoms of clinical mania and psychosis to receive the right diagnosis and then subsequently the right medication. I did not choose my symptoms, I did not cause my psychosis to happen, it was the right conditions for the right storm and that was just the way it happened. There may have been some predisposition to the brain imbalance, there may have been contributing factors but it was all meant to unfold in the way that it did. That can be a hard part of living with any mental illness, when the brain has the question of "why?" that always wants to be answered and it just simply can't in most cases. Over the years, I have learned to make meaning around the experiences that my mental health diagnosis presented me with and one of those ways is by understanding my experiences through different lenses.
One of those lenses is acknowledging that my experiences are very innately psychic and that my energy body is permeable in ways that are not normal to most people. I feel that I give and receive messages to people psychically. This has led to a lot of distress for me at times however when I was given tools to help manage my psychic abilities, I felt like I had a lot more control of my psychic life. I could let others energies go from my energy body, I could ground them out and cord cut our connection. I could also take unclear, confused energy and transmute it into something else using a rose blowing technique that I have perfected over time. These techniques helped me to feel that I had more agency as a human being and not just as a psychic conduit for others energy when I didn't want to be. I was no longer just an empath being overwhelmed by the energies of others, I was an empowered, powerful psychic with a lot to share with the world.
Did my therapist recommend these techniques? No. I had to be referred to psychic classes by friends and learn these things on my own and did they offer something that I couldn’t have gotten any other way? Yes. I feel that it is part of my purpose to share this story with others so that I can offer my tools as a way to maybe in some way, assist others with the same struggles. I want to not only share what I have learned but to also teach, guide and assist you in your journey with mental health from this very nuanced perspective.
This perspective has only grown more nuanced in my study of a philosophy called human design. In only a year into my formal "experiment," what they call living with the knowledge of your bodygraph definition, I am able to understand when energy is my own and when it is conditioned by others and the collective. My life has truly been changed so much by this study in that it gives me language to talk about how my outside world has affected me and how I can decondition myself from that influence. This is also something that I believe is part of my purpose, to learn about and share with others their human design insights. I believe its part of a radical shift in understanding who we are and who we are in relationship to others and truly helps us to practice interdependence.
Not only do I have these practical tools, of psychic meditations and human design, but I also have leaned into ancient tools of spiritual connection with my spirit guides as well. The story of that is for another blog post, but it has been something that has helped me along my journey as well.
This is not to say that I don't also see my cognitive behavioral therapist regularly. My condition comes with a lot of navigating the murky waters of relationships and my career and my therapist is really good at being an advocate for me in those ways. As someone who has a lot of symptoms to manage, regardless of the way you frame my diagnosis, I benefit from both her very grounded in psychology perspective as well as the more eastern techniques that I lean into as well. I also take very effective mental health medications that have radically changed the way my body and mind function as well. However I couldn't do life without the combination of all of these techniques, eastern and western. It's an interwoven approach.
