Tag: mania
These are very personal questions: What is spiritual to you? When and where do you feel spiritual? How do these spiritual feelings get blocked or expanded?
We can carry these questions throughout our lives. Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of them.
I will focus on three specific spiritual practices: psychological relationships, meditation, and psychedelic plant medicines, including cannabis.
Spiritual practice is about psychological relationships because if our spiritual practice doesn’t improve our relationships with others, what’s the point?
The practice of psychological relationships with others and with one’s inner life is a personal experience with spiritual meaning. This involves experiences of vulnerability, hurt, and confusion that teach us the depth of human love and kindness.
Spiritual practice is not only personal but also universal and objective. We need to look at our minds as they are, our human instincts as they are, and our relationship with the natural world. We are born, go through all the developmental stages, and then die. Life is both precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully, little by little.
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Cultural Mania in the Individual
A very large majority of people in the American culture have normalized mania. We are affected by this because we live in the culture. We participate in it, either to fuel or to heal it. “Trump is not a man apart. He is, instead, merely one of us writ large.” Michael D’Antonio who wrote the…
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Bipolar 1, Bipolar 2: Mania and Depression
When we look at the symptoms of bipolar 1 or bipolar 2, we see symptoms that are a result of unresolved emotional confusion about relationships, uncertainty about one’s place in the culture, and very little control of instinctual drives and emotions. When we move into adulthood and there is little or no guidance; mania and…
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Mania and the Manic Episode, Symptoms and their Meaning
It is important to define mania in two ways: By defining symptoms. What those symptoms mean for each individual. Many of those suffering with these symptoms only choose medication for treatment and disregard psychotherapy because the underlying suffering seems too painful or impossible to make any sense out of it. This is the reason for…
