Posted by JohnD
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:45:00 GMT
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Please note that this post has been revised to reflect commentary on Jill Bolte Taylor’s reliance on the right brain—left brain model. See the note at the end of this post.
If you have any interest at all in the relationship between the brain and your awareness of who you are, please go straight to this site. Read the excerpt from Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
. Then listen to the podcast of Terry Gross’s interview with the author on Fresh Air. I heard it this morning on the radio, and it’s provided more insight about the human power to heal than all the books and articles I’ve read to date.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags analytical thinking, associational thinking, brain, euphoria, healing, intuition, Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscience, recovery, religion, spirituality | no comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 17 May 2008 22:16:00 GMT
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In writing about heightened states of mind I’ve experienced, I keep wondering about what they mean, what they are. Are they signs of a spiritual reality pushing into the midst of the everyday world? Or are they artifacts of mental disorder? The first time I had such an experience, as a college student, I thought I was going crazy and even wrote a poem about this episode of “madness.” It was only six years later when I had a similar experience – which I accepted without doubt as spiritual – that the earlier one took on new meaning as having that same quality. I was no longer afraid of it and didn’t have to push it off as a bizarre and crazy moment. Instead I came to focus on such experiences as part of a way to find healing in the midst of depression as well as deeper insight into life. Spiritual experiences could be one more way to struggle through a chronic condition. But could the experience of depression be another force like spirituality that can terrify but also push me to new awareness? Could the sheer suffering of mental illness be experienced in a spiritual way?
That’s the question behind the quietly intense German film, Requiem
. It tells the story of a young woman who experiences seizures and hears strange voices. These have long terrified and confused her, but eventually she comes to interpret the suffering in purely religious terms.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags belief, Catholic Church, culture, depression, exorcism, mental illness, religion, Requiem, society, spirituality, treatment | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 10 May 2008 17:42:00 GMT
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I’ve found that there is a longing for spiritual closeness just as there is a longing for an emotional bonding to another human being. But it is a form of longing, of human need, that I spent years ignoring. I’ve written here about longings arising from depression and inner devastation, emptiness and loss. Those longings tend to break up relationships, work life, family, but I’ve experienced spiritual longing as a draw toward a sense of closeness to a different dimension of life, a spirituality that is transforming when I can handle it and so remote from credibility when I’m shutting down.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags Catholic, contemplation, depression, enlightenmnet, God, peacefulness, prayer, religion, self, spirituality, Thomas Merton, vision, wholeness | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:53:00 GMT
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Ever since reading about Bill Wilson’s
struggle with alcohol and the role that religious experience played in his recovery, I’ve had hope that spirituality can also be decisive in undoing the impact of long-term depression. William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience
was so important to Wilson and other founders of AA, wrote in that study that the world is divided into two broad classes of people as far as religion is concerned, the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born take the world as it is, sum up their problems and successes and move along in life with a core acceptance of themselves and the religious practice they were raised with. The twice-born, as you might suspect, run into problems. They long for and work hard at finding a second birth into a new life of spiritual fulfillment. James describes them as the “sick souls who need to be twice-born in order to be happy.” Hmm, wonder where I fit.
Sick soul? Now I’m not saying that depression is a spiritual sickness, but my search for a way to get beyond that condition at least coincides with another lifelong search, the driving need to understand spiritual life.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity, Spirituality and Depression | Tags AA, Bill Wilson, depression, dreams, healing, reality, religion, spirituality, transcendence, wholeness, William James | 7 comments
