It's time to re-think how we think about our thinking.

Before I begin, I know that if you are experiencing difficulty with your mind, its extremely challenging, isolating, hard to express and how anything that makes it even slightly more bearable can feel a god send. I hear you.

We have an extremely disempowering cultural narrative around 'mental health'. It is a subject that's narrative has become dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and its profligates.

When our mental processing, our minds, become challenged, when they enter into a state of confusion, deep sorrow, of overwhelm, of despair, or panic, of fear, of anxious thought, or of apathy, we can find ourselves in a downward spiral.

There is two main avenues in which we find ourselves being deeply challenge in our minds,

1. Is as the result of an event or collection of events that break apart our hopes for the future, our perspective of the past, and or our self image. Such as; a sudden loss of a loved one or a job, a betrayal by a friend, the break up of an intimate relationship, the breakdown of a business, a challenging health diagnosis, or a debilitating illness. We can call this path “apparent causality” for the sake of this discussion.

2. We can also find ourselves feeling these negative experiences in our mind, dark thoughts, racing fears, sorrow, depression, fear, self judgment, self loathing and apathy, without any clear or obvious cause, we will call this “unapparent cause”

In cases of apparent causality, while it is a challenge to move through the events and to rebuild, we have the benefit of understanding the cause of our pain, so while we are in unknown territory, we are working through a known reason for being there. This helps us to create a concept of our dis-ease which equips us to more readily work through it. It is more comprehendible to those around us as to why we are suffering, so it is easier for our friends and family to act compassionately toward us. Whilst the causes are always painful and unique to our experience, they are relatable to our collective understanding.

In the case of unapparent cause, we find ourselves completely in the unknown, wondering what the heck is wrong with us. We may find that we frustrate our friends and family, that tell us our lives are great and that there is no reason to be down. We may find we question ourselves and generate further feelings of self loathing, which further exacerbates the issue. We may find that we further isolate ourselves, and stop expressing ourselves, to avoid the feelings of not being understood by those we love.

You can then add into both of these scenarios that we as a culture are in the middle of a mental health epidemic, as we are exposed to and embedded in an extremely fast paced, high demand, competitive, consumerist, materialist technological culture that puts a lot of strain on our minds. Add to that we have a mainstream media and government that use fear as a means of implementing their agendas, and we have faced heavy isolation, and a general sense of loss of security.

If we are courageous enough to seek help, we of course turn to the medical industry, which is now demonstrably the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharmaceutical industry wants to portray a narrative that our nature has failed us, and as such we need a pharmaceutical saviour.

It wants to portray that no matter if you are experiencing an unapparent cause or an apparent cause mental health issue, that you are biologically, genetically, or chemically broken. That what you are experiencing is just the result of chemical imbalances and that medication is the solution to redress the imbalance. We have been reduced from a vast and holistic human being having a unique and nuanced personal experience. To a biochemical machine that’s having a mechanistic failure.

When in truth either we are experiencing a healthy response to chaotic circumstances. Circumstances that would require us to experience (feel and express) powerful but hard to move through emotions, such as, but not limited to; grief, pain, shame, anger, remorse or sorrow. Emotions that we have not been well cultivated to be able to feel and express.

Perhaps our bodies may be responding with anxiety, a pre-fight or flight mode that is elicited by the body when we encounter something unexpected, anxiety is there to be an acute experience to momentarily freeze us while we comprehend what we have encountered, before we decide if we are going to fight, or fly from that thing. However many of us find ourselves in a state of chronic anxiety, which is being stuck in a purgatory of perpetual preparation for fight or flight, without entering into the action that would transfer that energy into activity and expression.

Perhaps because the thing thing we are preparing to encounter isn’t here yet to encounter, like a speech that’s coming up or a job interview. Or we have encountered something in our past that challenged us, that we fear we might meet in our future.

For many due to the pace, and shutdown nature of our society we encountered something we never truly comprehended, leaving us without a concept of the chaos we met, leaving a younger part of ourselves caught in the past, left behind in a state of fear until the wisdom from the encounter has been rescued.

Or in the unapparent we may be dealing with suppressed emotions, and traumas, an under nourished body, a blunted will, a lack of acknowledgement, the shadows handed down to us from our parents.

Shame we have suppressed, sexuality we don’t know how to deal with, a body and mind that are not in congruence.

Perhaps we have not yet created a peaceful concept of our own mortality, and the anxiety we feel around death gets attributed to parts of our lives that are more present to our awareness. But underneath we fear the grand unknown of death, which we have pushed down in us.

We might have come into contact with our own shadow, glimpsed at the darkness that is in every single one of us, we may have acted through this darkness. You can’t be benevolent without a concept of malevolence. You can’t know how to be kind, without knowing how to be cruel. We have a poor understanding of this in our culture.

We may be living a life that is out of alignment to who we truly are on the inside. We may feel unseen, unheard, our gifts un-given, our stories untold, our art unshared. We may have an issue with a genetic predisposition, but that of a predisposition that predisposes us to living in a different way than the way we are, many of us are living the life we are expected to live, that our family and society laid out to us, not the life we would love to live. Or the life that our own nature calls us to.

These are just a handful of the many reasons that can be way outside of our conscious awareness as to why we fall into difficulty in our minds. Of course for us to experience that difficulty, there is going to be a biochemical component that generates the experience. So that we can bring into our awareness our disharmony.

However, we have been prayed upon by the pharmaceutical industry.

They offer us a label in the form of a diagnosis, this gives us a form of “known” that helps us to feel more sane, and more in control, it also gives us a story that we can pass onto our peers and family as to why we are struggling.

Unfortunately for many of us this only serves to ensnare us in a vicious cycle.

The drugs that we are given block us from being able to experience the truth of our experience. Which is a massive relief, if that experience is proving extremely difficult to contend with. We may be experiencing a full hell, however the source of the difficulty does not subside in our medicated states, we just become deaf to it.

In most cases we are diagnoses with a 'mental illness', not all, but most cases, we are experiencing a healthy response to a disharmonious circumstances either in the interior or exterior of our lives.

We are extremely pain adverse in our society, and we have a narrative that happiness is the only emotional state that we should be experiencing. When in truth all of our emotions, just as the seasons, are vital. If we find ourselves in a mental winter, rather than being supported to feel our way through and to allow for its developmental pathway to be complete. We are told we are depressed, and must at once be medicated out of our solemnness.

We aren’t afforded the space to heal.

There are times when pharmaceutical intervention is necessary, even life saving. As a last resort measure. That should be taken alongside a programme designed to aid us into a place where we can come off the medication and begin to actually heal, rather then being kept in a place of perpetual illness, so that we can be prescribed medications that numb away the symptoms. So that in our disfunction we can remain a ‘functional member of society’.

I have been in some dire situations with my mental health, I have lay pretty much motionless for weeks on end, without the motivation to do anything other than stare blankly into space, fully empty, numb, dead inside.

I have had such raging anxiety that I have had use all of my courage not to have a panic attack as the waiter comes round to me to ask for my food order.

I have suffered such pain and anguish from losses that the future seems a place I do not want to go, the past a place too painful to revisit and the present to filled with agony to be in.

I have felt like every brain cell has been screaming at me,

like my inner world is a barren desert, lifeless and hopeless.

I have fantasised repeatedly about how it would feel to jump in front of a car.

I have medicated myself in these states, with booze, with cannabis, with drugs such as lorazepam, diazepam, with sleeping pills.

If you are taking something to support your mental health currently, no that you have no judgment from me. Only understanding. I would have taken anything that was put in front of me.

I know, that there is only one way through to the other side, and it is not a pharmacological one. Of course our chemistry is going to reflect our disposition. The chemistry is part of what is mediating the experience, not the driver of the experience.

If you are dealing with some mental health issues, if you are in a place where you are having to take medication that stops you from hearing your body, that artificially alters your mind and brain chemistry, without that change coming from within.

Then I have for you a message of both hope and encouragement.

You are being called into an inward journey, a journey of meeting your fears, confusions and traumas, of meeting your light and your love, your courage and your significance.

You are not a helpless victim of your genetics.

That is bullshit.

Our mental health struggles have been commodified and exacerbated.

In 2020 The antidepressant market alone was a $20 billion dollar industry.

Nearly all of our mental struggle is a healthy response to an unhealthy culture. Much of it is in response to our disconnection from our bodies.

We need to wake up.

You can be free,

You can feel joy, vibrance, peace and confidence.

But you may have to feel some difficult emotions along the way.

You are already no stranger to that.

You are way more powerful than you have been lead to believe.

If you are taking meds, use this time, to empower yourself.

I have felt the pain, this is why I was so keen to be a contributor

to Mindfully Empowered.

I believe in your mind, I believe in your body, I believe in your soul.

I believe that those three things need to br brought back into harmony with each other.

I believe that is a journey of listening,

Not a journey of blocking.

It is a journey that you have to walk for yourself

But not one you have to walk by yourself.

It is a journey of Self Realisation.

Its time that we re-write the story around the performance and integration of our minds.

It’s time we started living our lives.

It’s time we started feeling our lives.

You can start your journey of Empowerment today

At Mindfullyempowered.co

Whatever you do, do not suffer in solitude and silence, no matter how messed up things feel when you are alone with your thoughts in your head, be brave enough to speak them out to someone that will just listen without judgment. I have seen many people transform their experience, often more quickly than you expect.

You can change the pattern.

Thank you for reading,

Thank you for being you,

Your suffering is not meaningless.

Peace be with you my friend,

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