Call Me Bipolar Do You?

Table of Contents ORIGINAL Manuscript 40,000 words +

Two articles published in Austrailia in 2004 are included below to show part of the manuscript documented.

Preface

Why am I writing this story? What are my intentions? An introduction.

Where am I now? Perspective on 25 years of consciously emerging along with an early mislabel of bipolar. 2005
1. Attention Diversity & Delightful
1. Bipolaring as a Verb, Just a Different Norm
1. No Scientific Proof for Chemical Imbalance – What are we Buying Into?

III. The First Mystical Moment – Is it just my imagination running away with me?

Spiritual Emergenc-Y or Manic episode? Prime time Mid 20’s.

Getting cought up in the matrix labeling system.

Telling the Truth of a Spiritual Download
1. Order is Found in Chaos, Nothing to be Angry About
1. Research Scientist or Just Crazy
1. Breaking Down – Breaking Through
1. Little Miracles Along the Way – some bizarre experiences
1. God Within, Without and All About
1. Ego Check! What is This Savior Message?
1. Fight or Flight?

Who’s Really Crazy? Checking in – Checking Out – Life in the Mental Institution
- A Night in The Loony Bin
- I am in Big Big Trouble
- No Quicker Route to Crazy Than to Lock up a Sane Person
- Aborting and Feeling Spiritually Raped
- Be Authentic with Authentic People
- Can’t we Save Some $$$ and Collaborate Together?
- The Magical Tool of Dialogue
- The Inquisition
- Just Act Like a Patient
- Time to Go Home

VI. My first Dark Night of the Soul

Suicide thinking? Maybe it’s about Dieing to Die to oneself & Dieing to Live

Living Hell and They Think I’m Well
1. Bipolaring Training Ground for Style Flexing

VII. Moving underground in the matrix – forgetting to remember

VIII. Finding an Undercover Cover

– a business path with a spiritual mission

Accomplishing career success, In and out of the Dark Night

The undercover overcoat is wearing thin

No Pain, No Gain. What are we Teaching Ourselves?
1. Something’s Not Quite Right Yet
1. Enter the Holistic World & Alternative Medicine
1. The Message in my son, my sun
1. Dark Night of the Soul for Dummies

The last hurrah – finding the landing spot at last,

Or so I thought

Safe House to Ease the Journey Through Spiritual Transformation
1. Magical Moments in Transitioning
1. Thinking Now I am About to Awake and get to my mission
1. Not Again, Not Again – I’m Taken Away From my Mission
1. Get Those Boundary Skills Developed
1. Back on Track – Maybe Not

Surprise – the landing spot is not it after all.

And by the way, Janet, you don’t know squat.

A. All Gone – Finding the Something in the Nothing

XII. NOT Back on Track – The final Dark Night – selecting the unknown path

Just Say Thank you
1. Closure on Spiritual EmergencY
1. Leaping into the Arms of the Universe
1. Soft Warm & Gentle Grace
1. Back & Forth – No More Swinging
1. Call a Meeting with God – Someone Will Show Up
1. “How Are You?”
1. Free Falling in the Abyss – Give Your Place a Name

XIII. Spy in the House of Crazy 2: Bergen Regional Report

XIV. Is She or Isn’t She Bipolar?

Quiz
1. How do I Know I will never again
1. Disciplines Installed
1. What’s missing from my life?

PostScript: The End
Appendix

Dissertation Study: The Timeless moment: A Study of Transcendent Experience Through a Focus o n the Nature & Integration of the Noetic Quality of the Experience. Joan Waldron, PHD. J. Werner participation. 1997
Differences Between Spiritual EmergencE & Spiritual EmergencY, Grof, C. The Stormy Search For The Self
Differentiation Between Spiritual Emergence & Psychiatric Disorders, Grof, C.
Notes to Families and Friends
Personal Treatment Plan-Then and Now
Recommended References and Resources for further study
1. Books, Websites, Media, Therapeutic Centers/Safe Houses, Other Research

XIX: My Vision: 2012 Ready or Not Here we come!

Testimonies

Afterward

Spiritual Emergency 1979 Style – and still emerging 2004 – PART 1 of 2
A Bipolaring story with a spiritual emergency twist

Published: Spiritual Emergence Network, Australia, May 2004

Author: Janet Werner [email protected]

Introduction/Overview

How do I think that I am bipolar? – because they said so when I was 25.
I didn’t believe them then, but no one would believe me, so I learned to shut off my own voice and go underground for the next 25 years, slowing down on the attention to my natural spiritual emergence emerging within. Some part of me took on the label of “manic depressive” in 1979. I began to forget the message of the spiritual ‘diamond in the rough’ of my first official “manic episode” as it was labeled. It wasn’t until late in the 1980’s that I found a truth in the more accurate label, Spiritual Emergency, from Stanislav and Christina Grof, in Spiritual Emergency, When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis.

My spiritual emergency occurred while I was studying for an M Ed in Guidance and Counseling from the College of NJ, USA. Since graduating, I’ve enjoyed a successful consulting life as an entrepreneur, working with some of the most ambitious, brilliant leaders of the great corporations around us. I made between 250K and 500K annually doing what I loved the most – teaching about self-empowerment, inviting employees to construct their own vision, designing breakthrough rethinking programs and specializing in easing the journey for corporate America through change, transition and onto transformation. Those were the needs I found I could be of service to with my ‘bipolaring gift’.

I have met many entrepreneurs and corporate executives who wouldn’t pass a bipolar test even if you gave them the right answers. Some, I believe, exhibit ‘bipolaring’ behaviors, and maybe we all do in some way. To me ‘bipolaring’ is a verb, an experience of two contrasts – two extreme contrasts – highs and lows, elation and depression, creativity and blankness, boundless energy and the stuckness within inertia. To what extent have many, maybe each of us, experienced these contrasts? Labeled bipolars may simply experience an extreme of these extremes, an extreme demonstration of normal human experience perhaps with a spiritual message – at least that’s my view, my personal experience. Many times simply turns into complexity if caught up in a restricted, dishonoring, get-well plan from the mental illness perspective. I don’t believe in the term ‘mental illness’. From checking out my observations of many people in all walks of life I conclude that I am really no different from you, I am similar to you, and yet I am so very different because I have experienced an intensity of these contrasts and have been offered a label a long time ago. . . a label that has taken me almost 25 years to release.

From 1979 to 2003 I bought into the medical model that I have a chemical imbalance and require lithium. Throughout my 25-year journey into the present, I flip-flopped back and forth, reaching for lithium and then rejecting the medication. Reaching for another pharmaceutical drug like Welbrutrin or Haldol and then rejecting it’s suppressing effects. And most importantly, always reaching for my spiritual message, spiritual practice, spiritual emergence that was begging for attention.

In 2004, I now learn that there is no scientific proof that manic depression or other mental illness labels are based on chemical imbalance. My holistic doctor was the first to offer me this new truth. Later, I read that the American Psychiatric Assoc. conceded that brain science has not advanced to the point where scientists or clinicians can point to readily discernible pathologic lesions or genetic abnormalities that in and of themselves serve as reliable or predictive biomarkers of a given mental disorder or mental disorders as a group. . . Mental disorders will likely be proven to represent disorders of intercellular communication: or of disrupted neural circuitry. (see: David Oaks, MindFreedom)

The operative word for me is communication. Disordering of intercellular communication or disrupting of some neural circuitry just may be a useful breakdown in communication in order to breakthrough.

Manic Depression, Bipolar is understood by the masses as some kind of chemical imbalance. Why do we place so much attention on struggling to find balance eg, between home and work, between what others want and what we want, between inner ideals and outer reality? Isn’t the human body based on an original program of homeostasis? Isn’t there underneath all of this struggle for balance some natural balance(ing) and order(ing)? Isn’t contrast of two opposites or two extremes the contrast that offers a rocket of desire (see Abraham Hicks, Robert Fritz or Meg Wheatley, among others who write about the value of dynamic tension, of chaos and contrasts to evolve a new order).

Might there be an evolutionary message, a message of communication, a message of communion coming through the strength and courage of bipolaring individuals and perhaps from the many demonstrations of extreme mental and emotional expression?

My first labeled manic episode in 1979 became a spiritual emergencY, and now continues as an ongiong spiritual emergencE. Stanislav Grof states in an interview with Dr. David Lukoff, There exist spontaneous non-ordinary states that would in the west be seen and treated as psychosis, treated mostly by suppressive medication. But if we use the observations from the study of non-ordinary states, and also from other spiritual traditions, they should really be treated as crises of transformation, or crises of spiritual opening. Something that should really be supported rather than suppressed. (see Dr. Lukoff’s Spiritual Emergency Resource Center)

My spiritual emergency came on like an unexpected, rapid volcano of gentle and loving energy bursting forth both inner peace, along with access to an overwhelming download from universal intelligence. In 1979 I learned that my inner conviction, my inner spirit, my will power had the strength to hold the power of this nuclear energy within me. I also learned my limitation to hold this alone, without support. Having read many personal testimonies from labeled bipolars I sense some similar themes.

Spiritual emergencies warrant the DSM-IV diagnosis of Religious or Spiritual Problem (V62.89) even when there may be symptoms of a mental disorder present, including hallucinations and delusions. In this way Religious or Spiritual Problem is comparable to the category Bereavement for which the DSM-IV notes that even when a person’s reaction to a death meets the diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Episode, the diagnosis of mental disorder is not given because the symptoms result from a normal reaction to the death of a loved one. – Dr. David Lukoff.

I was having a normal reaction to a normal, yet extraordinary, spiritual emergence, or so it began that way… I never had hallucinations or heard voices although I consciously witnessed what would be observed as delusional thoughts and out-of-touch emotions. Out of touch for me was my gateway for getting in touch with a deeper, more evolutionary message. Now in 2004 there is a global network of folks doing this, this evolutionary reaching, intentionally on purpose. (see: Barbara Marx Hubbard, Gateway Community)

I originally had a positive mental model of what was happening inside of me but lacked sufficient information about spiritual emergencE. My surrounding support circle also lacked the broader, mental model that would give me the safety, the room to fully express and experience the natural transformation. I became a spiritual emergencY.

Instances of such confusion are not uncommon among people who become dazzled by contact with truths too great or energies too powerful for their mental capacities to grasp and their personality to assimilate…
– noted by Roberto Assagioli, MD, the first to draw the connection between spiritual emergencies
and psychological problems.

In 1979, I was not confused initially; I was in the process of sorting my ego self from my spiritual Self. I was witnessing my own manic episode while also witnessing this inner, spiritual volcano emerge. I found myself in a self-monitored, self-funded, scientific research project, studying and logging this inner transformation. My research funds were cut off before I was able to complete the live experiment. I became confused when this fabulous miracle shut down on December 20, 1979. I had no reference for it opening and had no anticipation of it shutting down so abruptly.

Having scanned through the manic-depressive bipolar research I have come to believe that the personal testimonies are the most significant messages in all of the literature. Much of the ‘scientific’ literature is documented by scientists and medical professionals who seem to have no experiential perspective. I have also noticed that the research paints a pretty bleak and scary picture for the bipolar community – documentation is filled with words like mental illness, disorder, %’s and #’s you can expect to commit suicide, coping with, dealing with, struggling with that bipolar thing. If you were bipolar or a family of a bipolar to what extent would you be motivated to read about, learn from, believe you could benefit from document after document that insisted on using words for you or your loved one as a disorder? Can you imagine living your life out here on earth as a DISORDER? Who wants to be a disorder and how does that move someone to healthy self-esteem, wellness and evolution?

This personal testimony shows that self can observe self, self can heal thyself, even through the extraordinary intensity and ego temptations of a manic episode. My contribution here is to reveal the truth of conscious processing of spirit during an elongated, manic time-period, and the requirement for a supportive, spiritual community and treatment plan.

I truly believe now is the time for a collaborative partnering approach. It is 2004, a time of integration and collaboration. My message is an invitation to the medical community and my pharmaceutical colleagues to join together in research based support for an integrated, holistic and honoring approach to ‘wellnessing’, for and with mental health consumers. That consumer group may just include the majority of every human inhabiting this earth. How might we ease this journey together in peaceful advocacy for spirit emerging?

A Spiritual Emergency or Bipolar Manic Episode?

It was 1978 and I was in my early twenties. Almost two years had passed after I had gotten married (a week following college graduation in 1976). I was hitting a bit of turbulence in my marriage and in my life, so I made a decision to do something useful, enrolling into an M Ed program back at the College of NJ.

1978 turned into 1979, as you would expect, and I was a graduate assistant running a residence hall. As those who knew me would expect I found a field of dreams to play with, a mission to expend my energy on, a territory to explore, a freedom to create and do my thing. I was having a ball. My coping strategy was to use my self-found formula of retreat/renew/return to engage, and then retreat/renew/return to engage – it all seemed to work very well, until. . .

In Autumn, 1979 I was having a wonderful time back at my home campus with my new found freedom, but brewing underneath was a desire to be fully free from a stifling and disappointing marriage. On October 3rd 1979 I placed the decisive phone call to my then husband, Fred – “I want a divorce.” I took my wedding ring off at the end of that call and reclaimed my full freedom. In making that decision a surge of energy embraced me like a mini-volcano. I felt free… It took a day or two before I realized what it meant – I was going to be divorced at 25!

Up until then I don’t think I had any appreciation for what that word divorce could mean to a life on a track moving forward. No appreciation for what it would mean for my mind, my heart, my way of knowing, my being. I was going to end what I had just started two years ago and which was planned to last a lifetime. I was beginning a process that was divorcing my fantasy, my dream and of strongly held beliefs in traditional values (until death do us part), divorcing from how I made certain choices – initiating a process, that would trigger from such a deep space within, an opportunity to fully reexamine my spiritual structure. It was the most significant turning point in my life, which would change it forever, propelling me into the depths and onto a new path.

I drove home and told my parents but I don’t remember much of our conversation. All I remember is walking out the front door of that home of tradition and stability… walking out alone, knowing at some level I had to face a good portion of this next trek on my own two feet. I was driving back to collage feeling extreme pain, fear and aloneness at a depth that I had not known until then. This was my first real introduction to the valley of transition between endings and a new beginning. The floodgates were about to open. I remember driving and crying, and then crying from the depth of my soul out and up to the heavens, “God, please take this pain away, please take this fear away, please somehow help me drive, help me deal, help me somehow.” It really was only a moment later from that clear request from the depth of my soul, driving down Rte 1, when it felt like the heavens opened up and the tears instantly stopped. It really happened that way – like a lightening bolt.

Mind you I was still driving, or someone was driving while I was in the drivers seat, and – wa la – it felt as if the heavens opened up right there way above the windshield of my car. I can almost remember looking up to the sky and feeling as if the clouds opened up to some big burst of sunshine, which came right down to my car and into me, into my forehead. I was changed or something was changed – all I know is that the pain washed away in an instant and I was fine. I felt strong, clear, safe and in some way a sense of “I’ve got you covered. All is well.”

Ok, I’m still here driving back to college but the entire inner landscape of my feeling, being and knowing shifted. I didn’t seem to get overly engrossed in what was an extraordinarily profound moment. All was well. I proceeded back to the campus. This, I learned later, was my first real big mystical moment, mystical opening that would build and last for the next three months.

I don’t know what exactly happened that evening or the following days and I don’t remember telling anyone much about it. I just felt grounded, in perspective, knowing I had a job and a Masters Degree to attend to and that I was clearly getting a divorce. I also felt an energy within, which began to build momentum. I was feeling pretty good. I had a focus for my energy – completing my degree, the residence hall job, the college students, and just about any program or project I wanted to start. I had energy. I had a positive orientation. I had a sense of discipline to focus on what had to be done and I always enjoyed finding ways to apply my creativity.

I began to find myself with a building intensity of ideas, ideals and unbridled energy – of insight. I could feel that something wanted to come out (I believe my inner guide had some valuable guidance for me but I had forgotten how to listen). I would often find myself feeling so great and then at any moment bursting into tears, remembering my pending divorce and the unknowingness of what that would mean.

I shrugged it off and just returned to my routine. I don’t think, back then, I knew about the transition curve and the space between endings and new beginnings. And I certainly didn’t know much about the process of transformation lurking beneath the surface.

I began noticing my disinterest in sleep and an increasing desire to journal – a process of ‘retreat and renew’ secured from my early-teen life. I think perhaps I would have gone crazy if I didn’t have my journal. Volumes were being filled.

What was really going on inside me? What was I witnessing within as others were witnessing this growing of energy, of emotion, of intensity, of periodic crying? It wasn’t apparent at first, as I had learned earlier on to shut down my inner voice. So, as the spirit works, it will speak louder and louder until it is heard. And the spirit began to speak loudly (I didn’t hear voices, it was simply that knowing, a knowing that there was a message or messenger coming through).

What was I downloading? My inner experience began to be flooded with theories, philosophies, ancient text and wisdom from many of the great thinkers in our history books. It almost was as if I could see the archives of information written across the air in front of me – but I didn’t see it as in a hallucination – and I didn’t hear voices – I just received it, knew it and wrote it down. I really didn’t know where it was coming from – I just knew I wanted to write it down – or at the very least by writing it down I felt relief from the barrage of the information download. I knew I wasn’t one for a great memory for facts and history, so it didn’t seem like a memory dump. It seemed as if some great big archive opened up and I tapped into a wavelength that I wasn’t used to. Throughout this time I felt a knowing about universal intelligence and about other dimensions existing but I hadn’t read enough at that point to define it. I remember the chaotic feeling of receiving so much information and I also remember noting that there is great order in chaos. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that I was introduced to quantum physics and chaos theory. It was all so familiar to me, but I had never studied it formally at that point – I just downloaded it and documented it and experienced it.

I was writing long hand as fast as I could. It almost became scribble and shorthand because I wanted to capture the volumes that were coming through. I didn’t feel out-of-control, yet I felt an urgency to document. I remember acknowledging the download as some form of spiritual gift or spiritual intervention and one that I should keep quiet about. (A large part of the content of my journal I dumped one night down the incinerator shoot. I acted on the belief that if anyone would read it surely I would be locked up inside an institution.)

I didn’t try to understand it or make sense of it – just found myself writing as fast as I could. It felt as if this was an opening that wouldn’t remain open forever. And it didn’t. After that night, writing took on a much more peaceful or introspective or analytical form. I began writing about what was happening to me. I wrote as if I was being guided to document, for research purposes, what was transpiring within a manic episode. I just had this inner knowing that something very profound was occurring, and someone would want to know about once it was all over. I also operated on the assumption that if I dared to share this with anyone that I would be stopped, put on some kind of medication and labeled at best, or at worst just locked away. I was excited and I was scared. (Remember I was in my Masters program for counseling and had some frame of reference in regard to breakdown and ‘going crazy.’)

I was well into what later became officially labeled as my 1st manic experience. I knew inside that although I was demonstrating the manic phase quite clearly according to the books, I was also experiencing a spiritual opening. I could tell that there were two different processes happening within me. While I could read the symptoms and indicators of a manic experience I also was experiencing a parallel exposure to what I later learned was a spiritual emergency. It took 10 years for me to find a documented home base, a landing spot, to call reality and to validate my knowing.

I was 25, enrolled in an M Ed program, surrounded by “open thinkers”, counseling professors, a loving college community and I felt ALONE in this experience. Being alone was not a new experience for me, yet this ‘alone’ was beginning to feel a bit much. My little attempts of self-disclosure didn’t get me too far and often resulted in a puzzled look at best and a sense of fear brewing in the other – I could just tell where that would lead so I shut up and shut down to an extent. I proceeded to act on my inner guidance (which was often in at least two tracks and sometimes three. One track for the breaking down/the manic moments, one track for the spiritual grace that was moving through me and one track for just routine, regular, ground-level life responsibilities of school and work). I didn’t want to be stopped or put into an institution. I wanted to discover what seemed not to be fully understood either about the manic experience or the spiritual transformation that was well underway within me.

I was no longer just the happy, ambitious-driven youth. I was no longer just the creative program director on my college campus. I was no longer just a Masters Degree candidate with a keen intellect. I was all of these, I was none of these and I was certainly in a role, a place, a space of unknown mystery that in some strange way seemed that it was something to follow forward. It never occurred to me to depart this spiritual path. Somehow I felt covered, protected even, in the fearful facing of each day with no one I felt I could confide in. Keeping quiet seemed like the logical posture to assume until I felt safer and had greater clarity of articulation.

I documented the steps each day of what felt like ‘breaking down’. When I wrote I functioned like a research scientist watching someone labeled “manic” from behind a hidden mirror. I documented the observations and then I also documented what I was learning from my inner being about the parallel spiritual movement within. I discovered and validated that there was a genius living inside of me. After all, how many folks in the middle of a nervous breakdown stop, pause, observe self from a separate view, capture it in documentation and then proceed on with the breakdown remembering to go to class?

I was documenting it all the way down (this was the scariest time) and then beginning to document it on the way back to normalcy (this was the most empowering time). I would observe my colleagues around me on a daily basis and note where I was congruent in behavior and where I was a little ‘off.’ Folks around me became my guideposts, my models back to ‘normalcy’. I was well on my way in journaling my way back to a calibration that would be accepted and peaceful in the matrix program I was living, but somewhere along the way I was stopped in my tracks. I knew I was on to something and in control of bringing myself back yet somewhere inside me I must have chosen to halt my process, because that’s what happened. It’s easy to be tempted into thinking that someone ‘out there’, or perhaps ‘the universe’ stopped me. I now recognize it is only possible for me to do the starting and the stopping, even if consciously it doesn’t make sense that I would choose such a thing as to stop my own spiritual emergence. This recognition of choice, personal choice, free will, even when executed at an unconscious level is one that I now trust.

I would like to be able to fly if everyone else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous.
-12 year-old girl quoted by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd.

I was smack in the middle of a classic “nervous breakdown”, as I understood it from my college studies. I could tell when I felt crazy, ie when I had a notion that I could fly, I knew not to take it literally. I lived on the 10th floor, took one look at that window and said to myself, “Don’t even think about it. You are not going to test this spiritual thing that far – you, human being, do not know how to fly yet”. When I could hear my guidance that easily and instantly after the crazy thoughts popped in, I knew I was ok and not going to succumb to what seemed like an out-of-control, manic episode. I had absolute faith in myself at this point, and faith that God was covering my back.

For a few weeks I had the unbelievable experience of walking around that college campus, in many ways as sane as the next one, but also with this private, inner, spiritual growing and expanding just happening within me and ALL around me. I could feel the empowerment of belief and faith and ideals and vision and insight grow within me each day – some kind of continuous access to some kind of universal intelligence. I honored it then (just as anyone in the spiritual transformation process of the 21st century would, but it was 1979), and I was scared by it. In some ways I had no idea of what I was doing. In some ways I did. I chose to listen to my inner guide. Where is the spiritual transformation ‘safe house’ when you need one?

I started to witness little miracles, synchronicities or bazaar, unexplainable, ground-level manifestations develop into a familiar pattern… one that later on in my 40’s I would learn are the indicators of moving through a spiritual transformation and onto perhaps a next step in evolving as a human being (Barbara Mark Hubbard, Emergence, 2001). I also noticed that my energies were having an impact on others in some strange ways. Others were being affected in some way by the energy that was resonating within and around me. I often noticed how I could energize an individual or group of folks around an idea or program, and just light up the fire of excitement.

Somewhere through these brief weeks, an inner knowing built up and clarified. This was not a spiritual perspective that I was brought up with in my Lutheran Church, nor one that I was familiar with at the time. It seemed to me that this was some sort of new truth emerging within – so I should consider it. The ‘knowing within’ became known at that time to me as I have God within, God is within me, I am God – and I said to my self, Oh my God, this is unbelievable. I experienced this overwhelming sense of love, peace, inspiration and courage, and was getting a knowing from somewhere that God is not just up there in heaven, God is within me. Wow what a concept. I stayed with it, honored it but didn’t tell anyone. This was really almost too much to take. And then I felt a sense that, I am Jesus reborn. I remember looking at my eyes in the mirror and seeing/sensing/feeling a powerful strength of love and compassion, of depth and of eyes that weren’t quite the way I remembered my eyes looking. There was deep peace, deep love, deepness. When I looked into my eyes I was overwhelmed with a sense of Jesus actually there inside me, peaking through the windows of my soul.

The notation that, I am Jesus was not one I would buy into. I said to myself, No way – that is a crazy voice, that is blasphemy, that is a manic moment – got to monitor myself more in my thinking – I am hanging out on the edge here, over the edge perhaps, with no mentor, no guide, no peer and it can get a bit disorienting. But I knew I could tell the difference between crazy thoughts of manic and peaceful, gentle thoughts of spirit. I considered the idea that if Jesus is reborn in me then he must be rebirthing in others and maybe that is how He is here with us, rebirthing in each of us. I wondered, was this what was described as the second coming – that at some point all of humanity would experience Jesus, God, Buddha, Mohammed, Allah… re-emerging within each of our human bodies? Hmmm – sounded like it could make sense, so I left it there for consideration and reframed myself back to God is within me. I believed I was discerning and I was. And I also believed that no one would believe me.

Dr. Lukoff explains that one of the main risks observed following ecstatic mystical experiences is ego inflation, in which an individual develops highly grandiose beliefs or even delusions about their own spiritual stature and attainment. Many theorists have seen this as an occupational risk associated with seeking spiritually transformational experience. (Gary Rosenthal, Spiritual Choices: The Problems of Recognizing Authentic Paths to Inner Transformation)

I now wonder why so many testimonies of manic episode have this theme of feeling like a savior, or The Savior. I wonder why this particular message is still rejected today as a distinction of delusion in the manic phase as opposed to a real spiritual message trying to come through. I wonder what truth is attempting to be revealed from so many folks experiencing a similar conviction of being Jesus reincarnated.

At that time I was able to hold the knowing of God within and feel the beauty of that knowing. I was ok, and knew that no matter what I would be ok. Even if I was put into an institution I would never deny to myself what I now knew – that God was with me and within each of us, and I was receiving some kind of spiritual download of knowing and energy. Thank God for that knowing because I would soon have to rely on it for my sanity.

Well, as a manic experience would have it, one thing turned into another – and things seemed to get a little out of hand. On one night, after exposing a few too many manic behaviors, a convening occurred. The counseling center got together with my resident director who connected with my roommate who all converged on me in my apartment. I got wind of what was about to happen via a tele call from the counseling center – Stay right where you are, we are coming over. Well that’s all I had to hear. I was scared my fate was about to meet up with me. Flight won over fight. I grabbed my friend and ran down the back stairwell, ten floors to ground level and escape to freedom. . . but then, stop, pause, where were we going? We really knew we couldn’t go anywhere and get resolution so we decided to go back up to the apartment and face what was about to happen. I called my parents (I knew they wouldn’t understand but I did feel that I wanted them there), so they soon showed up too.

I knew where I stood with what was going on within me. I knew that if I were given just a little bit more time and ONE authentic capable, perhaps therapeutic collaborator that I would be able to complete this significant phase in my spiritual emergence breakthrough. . . a breakthrough from the matrix that I learned to live within. I dug my heels in to hold onto my conviction, my belief, my truth.

I also knew what they had all decided was going on within me. In my dorm apartment we proceeded through an endless series of conversations, one after the other, of friends, counselors, my parents – all trying to convince me to let go and go with them – we had an appointment at Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital. I was now in the fight mode and took a stubborn stance on my spiritual perspective, yet said nothing. The folks all seemed to be saying the right and loving things as if they were speaking with a woman in a manic moment. I could fully appreciate their perspective and felt their deep concern and attempt at wise guidance for my well being. I just wondered which one would do the same for my perspective – listen to and validate my inner knowing of spiritual emergence… No one as it turns out, not in 1979.

I remember when I had to go to the bathroom my mother had to follow me inside – she was on suicide watch. Can you believe this? Of course you can, the books are filled with advice about suicide watch during a manic or depressive state. Can you imagine what it feels like to be looked upon as one who would commit suicide when I was fully conscious of my values, my process, my commitment to God and my spiritual journey? I was fully in humble awe about the spiritual emergence and what it could mean if I could just followed it – and they think I want to kill myself! That thought or option had never entered into my being, but was just another annoying perception/assumption to deal with. Given enough of these labels and bizarre perceptions from others, a person really could go crazy!

That perception and language of suicide followed me through each and every dark night of the soul that I was to experience, and I was to have quite a few. Not once could I consider it seriously or literally. I did learn to use the word to interpret a deep, frightening feeling of despair. I discovered many years later that during the depressive side to my bipolar experience, indeed I wanted to die. The downside to manic or a profound spiritual opening is so extreme, so painfully frightening, such an absence of spirit – you feel you are dead already. You are dead but your body is still moving, your eyes still seeing, your heart still yearning for life to reenter, and you know there isn’t a drug in the world that can take that moment away. Many have found that over time the prescription drugs can do their thing and ease the symptoms. They did not stop the pain for me and I now know the pain was there for a reason – to feel it, to reach to the only Source who could transmute it, transform it. No matter how dark the dark night of the soul became, something inside of me held on; something inside of me chose to let go and trust.

I heard the word die differently, in a way that was so useful to the spiritual transformation process – I wanted to die to all or most of what I knew. I wanted to end the patterns of greatness to derailment, of extreme creativity to blankness, of ‘Joan of Ark belief’ to despair. I wanted to die to my path, die to the life of hiding from some truth and fully allow an emergence from within. This is a very, very, very difficult space to hold yourself through…to surrender all memories of who you are and what you do, to trust that a higher being actually is there to carry you, to relinquish and say good bye to yourself, believing that there is a landing spot on the other side.

What did Linus do when his blanket was in the dryer? What is it like to let go of the trapeze you are swinging on and not yet catch the grip of the next trapeze? If you find yourself in the middle of a spiritual emergency and can not bear this free fall moment of eternity – Stop, pause, take three deep breaths and say, all is well, over and over until some peace is received. Stop, pause and stand still when lost in the forest, says poet, David Whyte, the forest knows where you are. Reach for your inner resources, take a pause, and know that something or someone will come through to help you.

Meanwhile, back to 1979 in my dorm apartment, I am surrounded and stopped in my tracks. I am about to make a choice to go with the flow that seems to be more powerful than me, surrender to the mounting resistance within my community, within the surrounding system and within me… I had an appointment with Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital.

Editor’s note: This is the end of part one of Janet’s story. Part two will follow in the next issue which picks up her story with: Who’s really crazy? Checking in and Checking out Life in the Mental Institution.

Part 2 posted on Spiritual Emergence Network web site http://www.spiritualemergence.org.au/pages/Personal_Accounts/SEN%20-%20Personal%20Account%20_%20Janet%20Werner.pdf

Spiritual Emergency 1979 Style – and still emerging 2004

A Bipolaring story with a spiritual emergency twist

Editor’s note: This is part two of Janet’s story, featured in the last issue of Emergence. Part one dealt largely with her experience of an expanding state of consciousness while she was studying for a MEd in Guidance and Counselling in NJ, USA in 1979. Having a context to understand her experience , and limited enlightened support from her network, she devised a system of coping with the intense experience by channeling her excess energy into numerous activities and creative projects, and extensively journaling in order to document, process and monitor her progress. Intuitively she believed she was going through a process of spiritual transformation, but simultaneously she was aware that she was exhibiting classic textbook symptoms of mania, delusion and having a nervous breakdown. Breaking down and breaking through was the reality she knew to be true. The institution would not hear her reality in 1979. Part Two picks up her story with her reluctant entry into various psychiatric wards where she was labeled “Bipolar”, medicated accordingly and her process was aborted and discredited…

Part 2 includes some updated considerations evolving since Part 1.

Introduction to Part Two:

Looking back on my experiences in 1979, it is clear that while I was exhibiting bipolaring behaviors I was engaged in a parallel reality described as spiritual emergenc-Y. The treatment I received under the limited label of manic-depressive was painful, dishonoring, and not efficacious. It prolonged my struggle for 25 years. Having wrestled with 5 dark nights of the soul and a battle on and off psychiatric medication I am now living more freely in 2004 never ever to return to the confines of the mental illness context. I live simply now, integrating good common sense nutrition, exercise, creative forms of expression and most importantly an engaged trusting and loving relationship with my son. I embrace the ongoing process of spiritual emergenc-E with daily attention, responsibility and discerning interaction within my community. My interest is to ease my own journey forward as I also ease the journey of others as they wish to participate. I begin here with some references to offer a broader context from which to assimilate my story and to assimilate your story with greater ease although mind nudging for some.

In part 1 of this article I offered a number of examples where my ‘manic’ experience included mystical moments. A Gallup Poll survey assessed the incidence of mystical experience in the general population indicating that it has been rising during the past decades.

1973 = 27%

1986= 42%

1990 = 54%

Abraham Maslow, PhD describes the mystical as an aspect of everyday psychological functioning. www.internetguides I wonder what the 2004 statistic would reveal. Perhaps we shall come to learn that indeed mystical experience is more common than we think and not tossed off as some manic’s delusional notion.

In the book, Spiritual Emergency, When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, Stanislav Grof, M.D. and Christina Grof, view many episodes of unusual states of mind as crisis of the evolution of consciousness or spiritual emergencies comparable to the states described by the various mystical traditions of the world.

I agree with the Grofs that spiritual emergencies are unique to each individual and should not be squeezed into categories nor treated with any template prescription. My story offers one woman’s articulation of a real life account that validates spiritual emergency from the mislabeling and mistreatment of manic depressive illness. Listed below are the forms documented by the Grofs that I too experienced. You may read further descriptions in their book, Spiritual Emergency. 1989

My personal experience included:

Shamanic crisis
Awakening of Kundalini
Episodes of unitive consciousness (“peak experiences”)
Psychological renewal through return to the center
Crisis of psychic opening
Communications with spirit guides and “channeling”

I am inarticulate at this time if they included:

Conscious past-life experiences
Near-death experiences
Experiences of close encounters with UFO’s
Possession states

The mystical connection is described by Dr. David Lukoff assessing these states as a transient, extraordinary experience marked by:

– feelings of unity

– sense of harmonious relationship to the divine

– euphoria

– sense of noesis (access to the hidden spiritual dimension)

– loss of ego functioning

– alterations in time and space perception

– sense of lacking control over the event

Ref: www.internetguides.com)

One of the significant mystical moments in the previous article describes the night where I experienced a spontaneous and rapid downloading, my mind was flooded with historical names, ancient text, philosophies and wisdom from many of the great thinkers of our past. All I knew to do was to write as fast as I could into my journal. A few days later I burned that journal out of fear that someone would think I was crazy. As of this writing I am noting a connection to the research behind The Davinci Code found in Secrets of the Code by Dan Burnstein. He includes a statement with many interconnecting hidden stories from ancient text that uncovers the denounced Gnostic mystical ecstatic experiences along with a consideration that Gnostic “heretics” may have been on a more humanistic, more meaningful, more feminist and more “Christian” spiritual path than what has triumphed so far in currently accepted text. My view has always been, since 1979, that the momentary openings into the collective unconscious I experienced were not mine alone, that I shared this experience with others around the globe and that we have a responsibility and an opportunity to free ourselves by expressing the content of that download. I have yet as of this writing deciphered the content of that one particular download in 1979 and intend to. In 2004 many are experiencing downloads of this nature. I invite your expression and encourage a practice of breathing deeply, taking it slowly, step by step.

Sandra Stahlman (www.well.com) explains this experience thus:

The unusual sensations which accompany mystical experience, Deikman refers to as ‘perceptual expansion’, awareness includes stimuli which are usually filtered or repressed, such as our own electrochemical processes. As such information-limiting processes are deautomatized, boundaries of self expand to include a wide source of knowledge previously withheld from conscious awareness.

As I experienced my first exposure to deautomatization and widening of conscious boundaries I also retained some amount of my structured self, a self who would study, document and monitor observations of the deautomatized self. It was extraordinary and exhausting to do this alone.

At the point where I resume this story in 1979, I was engaged in two interlinking processes… I was working my way back up from a spiritual emergency “breakdown ”to a new state of normality and functionality, and I was also having a real, ground-level psychological nervous breakdown. Actually, that was good news but I didn’t fully realize that until I had to repeat the breakdown over and over again,.finally breaking through 25 years later. Breakthrough follows breakdown if it is allowed, nurtured and supported.

The late Loren Mosher, a San Diego psychiatrist, documents findings from his Soteria House project (early 1970’s), standing up for the premise that individuals in severe personal emotional crisis (labeled schizophrenic or mentally ill) can and do move through to recover from psychoses, craziness, whatever you want to call it, given a few simple elements:

– a nurturing home-like supportive social based environment

– an attitude to understand what’s really going on inside the individual along with a suspension of judgement by the ‘professional’

– relationships of respect and dignity with the staff

– personal choice and personal responsibility

See www.mindfreedom.org/loren_mosher

Who’s Really Crazy? Checking In and Checking Out Life in the Mental Institution

Back to 1979 and my dorm apartment – I am surrounded, I am stopped in my tracks and am about to make a choice to go with the flow, give in to the mounting resistance within my community, within my surrounding system and within me.

The system became stronger as the numbers of professional folks, loving friends and family joined me in my apartment. It looked like a convention. I wanted it to be a party. It turned out to be convergence of ‘tough love’. They all meant well, I could imagine. They took turns meeting me one to one in my bedroom. Each one sitting with me face to face, my eyes holding steadfast to an inner conviction. Each of them were trying every which way to convince me that I was in a breakdown and that I needed help. I already knew that I had broken down. I agreed that I needed help. I wanted one open minded therapist who was familiar with the construct of a spiritual emergency. Why couldn’t I have been asked what I knew and what my plan was?

Each of them was trying to give me as much respect as they could from the limited perspective they held. I knew not one of them would buy into my story, nor trust me that I could move through this without institutionalizing. Staying in my dorm room was not in the cards. Going home with my parents was not a healthy option to me, as I did not believe we would be able to converse on the truth that I was experiencing. My choice was to sign in to the mental health institution. I decided that the only way out of this was to walk through it on their terms at least for a time being.

Someone drove me to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital nearby, where I was given a bed and a roommate. The room was dark and cold and felt like a cell. I spent one night in that “loony bin” of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. It was a dismal and depressing environment, not to mention scary, for even the most sane of visitors. I continued to journal as I lay in my bed trying to stay safe from what felt crazy all around me. There were folks prancing around like fairies in a garden and others screaming through the night. I was not one of them. I knew that, but no one else seemed to know that. My psychiatrist came to visit me the next morning and I told him that I was getting out of there. No discussion, no convincing. I was signing myself out. I played their game and I decided that I would take my chances at home. I called my Dad and asked him to pick me up before I went crazy. I knew that some place deep inside he would support me, although he was scared – his little girl was having a breakdown because the professionals said so. He also believed that this was not the place for me. He hated that place too, and I was taken home the next day.

I couldn’t talk with my family, nor my friends and definitely not the psychiatrists. It felt as if there wasn’t a soul in the world who I could talk with, who would just listen, fully listen and consider what I was saying and value me, trust me that there was another way to go about this dilemna – this extraordinary experience that was happening. I wanted NOT to be seen as a problem to be solved but as a human being with a spirit that wanted to emerge; to emerge within a safe place where patience and tolerance for the extraordinary was valued. I found no such place at this time. I learned to talk with myself and with God. You know, when you talk to yourself in a loony bin they write you up on their little chart. So you have to be careful about this talking with yourself and with talking with God. Neal Diamond Walsh didn’t come out with his book yet “On Conversations with God.” – so when you are labeled you could get into some sticky trouble if anyone caught you talking with God. I kept it under cover.

I was told by The College of NJ that I had to stay home until a psychiatrist approved me to return to college. Thankfully my mom took me to a cool psychiatrist (there are some cool ones out there) and after a brief discussion (I chose to share a little bit of this spiritual transformation thing without getting too dramatic) – Something inside of him saw, felt my inner stability – he wrote me a note to return to school. Only a few days had gone by and I was back on the college campus. I hadn’t yet learned to see myself as a problem nor an illness. I also don’t remember if at this point I was put on any medication.

I walked back into my residence hall and said, “I’mmm back”. No one believed I would be back so soon. Why do folks insist on believing that this has to be so complicated and take so long?

While I proceeded to continue my degree and my work in the residence hall – nothing seemed to be the same as before. Things became more difficult to cope.. I began to consider the mental model of being a problem and being an illness. I could sense the doubt from others. The pressure was building. Trust from home wasn’t there. Trust at the college seemed to be missing. I was alone. I must have been under careful watch by folks at the campus because it wasn’t but two weeks and… here we go again.

It’s interesting in this system that once a person gets labeled manic there’s not too much you can do that doesn’t get looked at as manic. Why can other people be busy and I’m being manic? Why can other people be creative and I am being manic?

I was told that I couldn’t do anything other than go to class and carry on my job in the residence hall as a graduate assistant. No creative programs, no assembling people for any reason, no fun activities to launch – and it was Christmas time – surely they didn’t mean – no Christmas activities. It was December 5^th and my German heritage brought me up as a little girl celebrating St. Nicholas Day every December 6^th. Each year my sisters and I would look forward to some little pre-Christmas celebration with our tradition of putting a plate under our bed and receiving goodies in the morning from St. Nick. It’s just what we did and what I knew. So in the residence hall position I was used to offering programs and activities and doing silly, unique things for the students to experience – it’s just what we did and what we knew, it was expected. Not thinking for a moment that what I was about to do was taboo, I ran around the floors at midnight on December 5th slipping a plate of goodies under the door of each of my student staff member’s rooms with a note – Happy St. Nicholas Day as celebrated in Germany – love Janet. Well that innocent little fun activity became a perception that I was out of touch with reality, out of control, and a clear demonstration that I was manic – maybe dangerous to the students – and that I needed help that couldn’t be provided if I stayed at school.

I was called in by the professionals, who told me I had to leave the college campus – I must decide to commit to Rutgers Mental Health Institute or leave school, go home and not proceed with the completion of my Masters Degree. The message was clear: under no circumstances could I return without spending time at Rutgers Mental Health. I had finally received the full-blown, control message from the system. Did I have free will and a choice? Sure. Was there a strong set of assumptions directing the course of my treatment? Yes. Was there a control model at work? Absolutely.

Ok, so I was caught up in a system of perceptions, beliefs, assumptions, and some observable instances of mania behavior as documented in the abnormal psych archives. I clearly knew I was having a parallel transformation experience, one that would move me to a breakthrough, one that would provide such fabulous learnings and a new life ahead, that seemed beyond my dreams but within my reach. I had a mental construct of what reality I was in yet the context I was in would not explore this reality with me.

For just a moment I will introduce the term schizophrenia into this story for the purposes of including the messages below and to draw connections to my personal experience which was NOT labeled schizophrenic, although it could have been. The great psychiatrist, Carl Jung defined schizophrenia as a condition where the unconscious overwhelms the ego-consciousness with contents from the deepest unconscious taking mythic, symbolic form. Under certain personal crisis, all the psyche’s energy is sucked back out of the personal, conscious area, into what we call the archetypal area in order to re-organize the Self. Jung believed that schizophrenia is a self-healing process where pathological complexes dissolve themselves. This description as well as the two entries below is taken from an interview between Dr. John Perry and Michael O’Callaghan found on www.global-vision.org/interview/perry.html.

The late Dr. John Weir Perry, a Jungian psychiatrist, author, “The Far Side of Madness”, showed that when given the space to go through the visionary experience in a safe environment, the non-ordinary state of consciousness tends to end spontaneously after about 40 days, with few relapses. Dr. Perry founded an experimental residential facility called Diabasis where individuals were able to go through a complete falling apart and coming-back together-again – “weller than well.” He offers guidance to the subtle therapist to facilitate psychological shiatsu. www.global-vision.org

R.D. Laing, psychiatrist, author, “The Divided Self”, shook up the psychiatric establishment in the 1960’s when he showed that the person who gets labeled schizophrenic is usually the identified patient in a larger network of family and societal relations which are themselves dysfunctional and whose members share responsibility for the outcome.

www.global-vision.org

Why was it so hard to believe or trust that in some strange way I was being guided to monitor and document my breakdown, breakup and breakthrough? I knew I was having a classic psychological breakdown. I also was charting my self-observations, holding myself accountable to socially acceptable behaviors, and using an internal tool box to deal with the entire chaotic experience. I absolutely remember the day I wrote in my journal, “I think I have gone down and apart enough – time to start moving back to piece humpty dumpty together.” Some inner guidance moved me to journal instructions to take it step by step, stage by stage and watch each behavior during the day to see how I was moving through childhood notions and adolescent feelings. I didn’t receive clarity on this language until in 2003 when I read Barbara Hubbard’s book, Emergence, where she describes the stages on the spiritual transformation journey. Barbara describes the movement from childhood to youth in a similar way that I had been guided in 1979. At the time it seemed a little ‘nuts’ to be my own spiritual therapist, but now it might be admired, at least by the Evolve Community in Santa Barbara, California. (www.evlove.org)

Written for the Psychology Department, University of Connecticut, 1990, http://easternhealingarts.com/Articles/SpiritEmerge.html Tom Adams suggests that a spiritual emergenc-E is more likely to turn into a spiritual emergenc-Y when:

No conceptual framework exists to support the experience with which to understand and accept the phenomenon with equanimity.
Someone has neither the physical or emotional flexibility to integrate the experience into life.
Family, friends or helping professionals of the person having the experience see the phenomenon in terms of psychopathological symptoms which have no possibility of being positive. (Bragdon, 1988)

A sampling of Adams’ summary by Grof and Grof (1986) for determining potential for positive outcome include:

The ability to see the condition as an inner psychological process, capacity to form an adequate working relationship and spirit of cooperation.
Absence of an organic brain disorder or physical disease responsible for mental dysfunctioning.
Reasonably good general physical condition allowing the client to endure the stress associated with the experiential work.
Absence of a long history of conventional psychiatric treatment which generally make the application of new approaches more difficult.

Adams offers Dr. Lukoff’s criteria for determining if a psychotic episode is likely to have a positive outcome. Two out of the four, Dr. Lukoff suggests, should be satisfied.

Good pre-episode functioning as evidenced by no previous history of psychotic episodes, maintenance of a social network of friends, intimate relationship with member of the opposite sex (or same sex if homosexual), some success in vocation or school.
Acute onset of symptoms during a period of three months or less.
Stressful precipitants to the psychotic episode such as major life change or passage which results in identity crisis.
Positive explanatory attitude toward the experience as meaningful, revelatory, and opportunity for growth.

It is December 1979 and my therapeutic community was operating on the medicated control model. I could feel the horror inside of being so misunderstood, of being treated subordinate to my own process by the credentialed professionals, of being boxed up and labeled for shipment to some institution that would set my boundaries, that would treat me in confinement until they gave the approval to return to my home base and in accordance to some researched guidelines. This last trigger for them was only St. Nicks Day! If I wanted to graduate by June 1980 I had to face my greatest fear – sign myself up for a loony bin vacation, walk into that institution with all of it’s medical models and charts and rules of how to behave – agree to the medication and therapy prescribed and leave when they say I am well. I feared being subject to electroshock – “what if I get zapped and they zap the spirit out of me,” I thought. I was not only scared. Trauma set in. I began to log the anger and the rage inside from such dishonoring of a human spirit. This anger and rage took 20 something years to pay for and release.

I’m wondering what my life would have been like had I been trusted and believed in during that 1979 significant space. I’m wondering what these past 25 years (50% of my life so far) would have manifested had I not aborted my spiritual transformation and been supported, held gently, validated, collaborated with through the mystery.

Well I was on my way to a mental institution and . . .

I sat, I paused and I felt a guidance… Before you leave the residence hall go and stop by to say good bye to your two friends who believed in you even though they didn’t really understand anything that was going on. I knocked on a door and there stood my two student resident counselors who I had grown to love. I told them I was leaving and made one request of them: I need to know if you believe in me. I didn’t plan what I was going to say it just came out that way. They stood in the doorway and easily responded, Janet we believe in you. That was all I needed, and I left. I felt empowered by their statement of authentic belief in me. I learned again that a hug and the words, I believe in you had a powerful and life-giving effect on me.

The next I remember was walking on the Rutgers campus toward this big building with glass doors. Behind those doors I knew there were locks, and in just a few moments I would be signing myself into a place that, down to the cells of my soul. I knew I didn’t belong in. I walked down that sidewalk with the mantra, I believe in you Janet, We believe in you Janet. A strength came over me and my walk was easy. I entered. I had no idea how long I would be there. I wanted to be out for Christmas and Christmas was only three weeks away. I wondered if I would be subject to electric shock therapy and never return. I felt the horror, the trauma for some moments about the possibility of being jailed for life, of some sick play on life this was for me to face the possibility of really loosing it, loosing my life and living out a hell in a straight jacket. There is no quicker route to ‘crazy’ than to lock up a sane person with no way out. The fear was real. I decided to face the fear. I had a choice and I made a choice to hold my sanity. I walked forward somehow knowing deep within – All is well. I had my journal with me, I had my God with me, and for sure someone in there would believe me.

The journal only seemed to get me in more trouble and validate to the all-knowing psychiatrists that I indeed was nuts and manic. The more they said, ah huh, ah huh, pretending to really listen, the more I grew frustrated and the faster I talked and the more I proved to them that I was indeed in a manic phase. Manic people talk fast. But so do people who are falsely convicted of a crime that they didn’t commit. It takes a nice steady and powerful lawyer to stand by the innocently convicted to settle them down to some place of confidence and assure them that they will receive a fair trial. I didn’t have that lawyer. I didn’t have that doctor. I didn’t have a family member or community who believed in my innocence – no one who believed in my sanity. I was convicted, without a fair trial, of being in a manic phase and not in control. I was having a spiritual emergency requiring a significantly different process for emergence, not suppression.

In my reality I was a frustrated young woman alone on a spiritual transformation process with no framework to follow. I was trying, with all of the patience and tolerance I could summon up, to explain that something else in addition to a nervous breakdown was happening. Yes I was breaking down and I was breaking through – something that seems to be ok to do in 2004, but in 1979 it wasn’t too popular. I never quite broke through. My spiritual process was eventually aborted to an extent. Aborting a spiritual process at a certain point (according to Barbara Marx Hubbard), and especially as cellular memory is being reconstructed, can be more destructive to life than never having started the spiritual process in the first place. I didn’t know this, nor much of anything else about the human transformation process – all I felt was that I was in Big, Big trouble.

In 2004, I have clarity about the price I paid for aborting my spiritual process in 1979. Consciously aborting a spiritual emergency has a trauma to it that has a sense of “spiritual rape”, the violation of a system inserting itself into my being in a way that I can’t stop, although I am pleading for my life. This “spiritual rape” by a system on a young girl’s being was a control over my soul’s emergence, a sedation of my heart and soul. And to some extent it was a “spiritual rape” of self to self – of choosing to abandon myself and succumb to the system allowing it to assert itself to me.

I know now not to try to talk to someone who really doesn’t want to listen. I know now not to attempt to convince any one of anything that they are not open to learning, especially with the experts. I know now to keep my mouth shut and be authentic only with those who are authentic, and to practice discernment. But at that time, I didn’t know these things, and I found myself a patient at Rutgers Mental Health Institute. There were many folks with various expressions of psychotic, neurotic and spiritual postures. Some of them were patients. This space wasn’t as bad as Trenton Psychiatric – a bit more homey and civilized. There was a brighter atmosphere with a living room table and a couch in the community room.

Meanwhile – I was put on Lithium, labeled ‘manic’ and monitored to insure that I swallowed the tiny pink pills. I was afraid as I swallowed my first one… I vow that this pill will not take my spirit away from me. I had no idea of what the pill was or what it would do to me. And knowing that I was going through a different understanding of the experience I wasn’t sure if it was going to mess me up or take away the insights that I had found. Each night I would meditate and affirm to myself – I release the power of these pills and I affirm my spiritual belief in the transformation – so I could sleep fine. I had a secret and I wasn’t going to tell anyone. Me and God would have to handle this by ourselves. You know, Let Go and Let God or maybe something like Let Go and Partner with God – and I did.

They ran me through all kind of tests looking for tumors or signs of epilepsy or some other brain malfunction – I really wonder why insurance programs let them do this – this was a big waste of money – they could have just asked me and I would have told them that I didn’t have a tumor or anything like it – I could have saved the State of NJ a good deal of time and money on all of these tests if there was only a slight consideration of a parallel spiritual emergency taking place requiring a significantly different treatment plan.

I asked myself: What is it that I am here for? Since I am not mentally ill, what is my purpose here? There must be something for me to do as I pass the time and attempt to get out of here with my sanity.

It didn’t take long to find folks to chat with. There was this one young lady who never took care of herself, never changed her clothes, her hair always a mess. One day, not too long after we met she began following me around, asking for my curling iron and make-up. She desired to care for herself and to look pretty. She took charge of making a shift.

Then there was a young rambunctious man named, Jamie. Jamie was always running around either starting a revolution or fleeing from one. It seemed to me like he was living out a war in his head and had the spirit to fight for something. He would exclaim – revolt, a revolution is coming! And I would say Jamie, no more revolutions, how about evolution instead – a bit more peaceful. He seemed to calm down.

There was also this nice old man. He was all crinkled up with his facial expression squished into contortions, his hands folded in fists and bent over – he never sat up straight and looked at you. We used to sit at the table and chat. In what seemed like a few hours from our first conversation this crinkled up little old man sat up with combed hair and hands comfortably resting in his lap and looked me in the eyes as we chatted. I don’t remember what we said but I do remember the transformed appearance that he was wearing.

Then there was this other young woman tortured by her visions of little people dancing around on the top of her soda can. She was so frustrated because she didn’t like them there and she didn’t know what to do so she asked me, how do I get these little people dancing on my soda can to stop? I paused, and something came out of my vocal cords in a simple matter of fact way. I told her, Just tell them to get off of your soda can. She did, and they were gone. How about that, good for you, I said, and left.

Today I see these moments as an exchange of pure ‘Dialogue’. Dialogue is the 2000-year-old practice of pausing, authentically meeting the other as equal, honoring self and the other, and speaking from a spiritual non-judgemental center. Dialogue is a tool brought forth to the modern world by physicist David Bohm and the project at MIT, to bring more coherence, more learning into communication and to allow breakthrough in evolving consciousness. In the living room at Rutgers Mental Health Institute the patients and I were engaging in this ancient practice of true Dialogue and experiencing it’s natural transformational effects.

I began to find my purpose here and took on a role of chatting with the patients – with clear intention to hear their reality, to meet them with validation that what they were experiencing was truth for them (how do I know and how do you know and how do the brilliant psychiatrists know that what they see isn’t really there, seeing into some other dimension?) How possible is it that ‘crazy making’ is stimulated or exacerbated through invalidation of another’s reality? To what extent might the simple tool of Dialogue be of value in ‘easying’ this journey through mental illness, spiritual transformation and the daily challenges of communing together?

What I found out was that through authentically meeting with them not as crazy patients, and through acknowledging their experience as real (from every cell in my body) that I did not promote more of the same ‘delusions’. The opposite occurred, the delusions and intensity and struggle seemed to disapate. We were making some good progress. I knew that I was resonating an energy, a spiritual energy within that did not feel like the old, normal Janet I had known, yet it was not totally unfamiliar – just a bit phenomenal. I trusted me and I sent a message of trust to each of the patients – not as a planned counseling intervention – I was just being natural.

I was witnessing that through some powerful belief and energy I was affecting the healing of others – with simple listening, simple validation and simple unquestionable belief. I trusted myself to monitor the ego self that could get carried away with what we were experiencing as spontaneous healing. I had enough religious upbringing to honor God out there and not necessarily me in here for any miracles that were happening. I could feel and see what I believed was Spirit working through me. Authentic, truth seeking and loving Spirit. Patients around me were transforming fairly easily. They knew it too. The entire ward took on a different energy. Things were different and moving along nicely. But then…

First, the patients had a meeting after which one came to tell me that they didn’t trust me. They thought that I was a spy from the medical team because I wasn’t like one of them. Yeah, I said to myself, at least some folks in here can see reality! It took a little more ‘truth telling’ and being with them to convince them that I was indeed a patient, and I also told them that I didn’t believe I belonged in there. They agreed. I found a home base.

Then, after a few days I was called into a big room filled with medical folks all sitting in a circle. I was given a chair right smack in the middle of the circle. It felt like an inquisition was about to take place. I didn’t know why I was called in but it certainly didn’t seem like a surprise birthday party. What happened next was a barrage of questions from various points in the circle – it was weird and crazy. It felt as I were a criminal under interrogation – What do you think you are doing in here, young lady? What are you doing with the patients? Who do you think you are? I paused and thought and said, I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m not doing anything – just trying to get out of here. They let me go. I learned my lesson that day to deny my voice and my knowing, to protect myself in order to survive when the perception within the system is so strong against you – just lie and get by.

I think I knew what they were expecting me to say. I was identified as a bipolar patient in a manic episode, and ‘manics’ can often think or feel like they are saviors commissioned by God to help heal the world. I don’t really know what they thought, but I assume that they had noticed the various transformations that were taking place. They were seeing their sick patients make breakthroughs and shifts at a rate that was unfamiliar. I do know that when I walked out of that room I felt that my purpose driven activity had been taken away. I sat sadly alone on the couch by myself and this nice counselor came up to me. All he said was, Janet, act like a patient. I looked at him, but didn’t say anything. I heard the meaning within his words that was useful to me, and started acting just like the other patients. I withdrew at times, I didn’t chat and help as I did before. I minded my own business and I thought to myself: What a lesson in life… Stop helping others and get rewarded. This was a painful notion to consider, I felt angry at a system that would reward me for focusing on myself, and discourage me from helping others. Sure enough, not a full day passed and I was brought into another room and given a test. I passed the psychological test and I was released to go home with an approval to return to school.

It was December 20^th when I walked out the door. At that time I was still operating on the belief that there was this wonderful spiritual emergence evolving within me, and that somehow I was ‘covered’, spiritually. Over the past weeks inside the institution and the preceding month at school, I always found a way to move forward – to find the diamond in the rough seas – to be connected with my center and with my Source. Now it was time to go home.

I am home with my bottle of little pink pills that my mom makes sure I take and swallow. I sit on the couch, withdrawn and isolated in a home filled with a mom, a dad, and two sisters and it is Christmas. We don’t seem to have much conversation about my hospital experience and nothing of my spiritual experience. It’s almost as if it didn’t happen, and to me it was the most frightening and profound experience of my life. There I was, sitting at home as the middle child living out her worst nightmare, isolated and alone in her reality, right in the middle of a loving family. I was quiet and withdrawn and beginning to get confused, beginning to rapidly loose my connection with Source and loose my belief that this story has a positive ending. I was unaware of the anger I covered up, the anger at everyone and everything in the entire system, and an anger at myself that didn’t yet surface. I felt deceived by my own inner knowing and naiveté. I felt alone and abandoned by my Source, by my God, and I was greeted by a cooperative traveler – depression. An appropriate reaction to the situation of suppression, non-communication and invalidation.

It was only a few days away from a true celebration of Christmas – the birth of Christ as we believed – a truly spiritual time. And since I had been going through a spiritual transformation truly this would be the most fabulous spiritual Christmas ever. Was I in a fantasy world? Was I on drugs? Yes. A truly spiritual time it was. A joyous celebration it was not. While I didn’t know it at the time, this was to be my first trek into the depths of the shadow side of spiritual transformation…

My three months of what the psych crew called my bipolar manic phase was also a parallel powerful spiritual opening and introduction to what took me the next 25 years to learn about – this mass spiritual awakening and transformation thing so many are speaking about these days in 2004. Once I aborted my spiritual breakthrough, I began my first journey into what I later learned was The Dark Night of the Soul. I wish that there were a book and a guide to get through what was the most hellish six months of my life. This was to be repeated four more times through the course of the next 20 years.

My First Dark Night of the Soul

Many of us have by now heard or read of the Dark Night of the Soul, as called by St. John of the Cross. Carolyn Myss describes it as the period of time when you feel you cannot contact God and it feels dark all around you (See, Spiritual Madness). You truly feel alone when you can’t seem to even contact God. This is where that great message from Footprints in the Sand comes in handy. You know when you can only see two footprints and you feel alone – stop relying on your seeing and feeling and REMEMBER – those two footprints are God, Goddess, your higher being or whatever you believe in – carrying you. Well, at least for me the message is REMEMBER, these are not my lone footprints even though I can see my feet walking alone – even when I feel I am alone. I am not alone. This is the Dark Night… the place where one really has the opportunity to learn alone is not alone.

Carolyn Myss, where are you in 1979? I couldn’t make any contact with God out there or God in here. Couldn’t find him, her or anyone resembling the feeling of Spirit within. All gone… or so I thought.

The funny thing was that, following my winter break at home I went back to the college campus where everyone seemed to think all was well. Mind you I was on some heavy prescription drugs at that time. I remember my speech slurring when I tried to run a meeting and my friend Greg had to take over, to speak for me. I was so humiliated, so frustrated, and so saddened that my drug filled body showed up. I couldn’t quite find me too easily – the happy, inspired, smiling Janet who used to be called ‘sunshine’ was not shining too well. I had found my way back to college and I was determined to find my way back to me, and somehow I did over the next six months.

I continued with my classes and my job as a graduate assistant. Each week I saw the psychiatrist and had my blood monitored to insure that I was taking the tiny pink pill. I remember, Dr. Young noting one day that my level had been dropping to below the therapeutic level. Oops! I wondered if I would get in trouble. I had cut my dosage as I began feeling more grounded and not so much in the horror of the Dark Night. I was feeling kind of dulled and was hoping that perhaps by cutting the dosage it would help to bring my spirit back.

I also remember through my interactions with Dr. Young that I needed to learn how to answer the question: How are you Janet? with a slow and steady, Just fine. You see, while there was an expectation for me to get “better” through the medication and therapy there was also a watch out for me which must have gone something like this – if she answers “how are you” with a robust “great today” – she is probably cycling back onto another manic phase. Can you believe this? Well, one day I was feeling pretty good because I had a day without feeling the hell of the dark night. I was progressing forward, reaching forward, believing forward that this all too shall pass, and praying forward, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I would get little glimpses of sunshine coming through and would receive incremental moments of peace and even joy along the way – the dark night was indeed lightening up. I could now believe that I wasn’t doomed to therapy and just coping – indeed I would find the sunshine again. With these little moments of sun peering through I would be so thankful, even if it was just for a few moments or hours or a day. At these moments, if I were asked: How are you? I would say: Great, yeah! – and then I remembered Dr. Young instructing me to say, Just fine is what we are after, it doesn’t have to be “great”–“ just fine” is the goal.

I became more vigilant about noticing what others expected, and monitored myself accordingly. This must be one way that bipolars become so excellent at reading the landscape, reading others, and in some way mastering an ability to be a camelian at will (in leadership classes they call it ‘style flexing’).

I spent time reading the perceptions from my community – Janet must be thinking more sanely now – she doesn’t seem to talk about God or have that exuberant energy anymore, she’s not orchestrating any programs or activities – so things must be ok.

What a view of sanity and reality, I thought to myself. Little did most know that I was living a HELL within. The down side of the manic phase or a spiritual emergency aborted came on just as can be predicted – deep depression slipped in. But I still had my memory of the October thru Dec magical period. And I still had my faith, or belief in faith at least. Yes, I was experiencing depression and it felt like hell, but I was different for knowing what I had been exposed to spiritually, and I carried that with me through my hell for most of the next six months. The Dark Night of the Soul description would have been a more useful template to follow than the dark side of depression – if you are manic then you may get to experience depression. If you abort a spiritual emergency you get to experience the Dark Night of the Soul as well.

June 1980 – I graduated on time with my classmates, despite the minor interruption of a manic depressive episode or a spiritual emergency. I finished my M Ed partially because I used my time at Rutgers Mental Health Institution and my journal of experience with which to write my graduate papers. It was easy to leverage the insight I had gained from the inside out. I handed in my papers on group therapy and counseling theory from an experiential perspective, my professors accepted them and I passed the requirements to graduate.