ardenz,
I did start a thread once quite a while ago, I think on the relationship between the prophets and mental health or something like that.
I think it's very true we need to face it as a real problem, and own it. When I was getting psychiatric treatment I would tend to view bipolar disorder as something foreign. When I was very little and I had difficulties I'd often say "It's not me." because I felt so powerless and as part of my search for effective treatment was exorcised by a shaman. (Didn't really help.)
My practice tends to focus more on mindfulness exercises also. I'm a big fan of Thich Nhat Hanh. But one of the things I find very interesting is that during a time when I was doing mostly visualizations on the Tetragrammaton and not much mindfulness at all but dedicating an hour a day to meditation and an hour to prayer, when I got more manic I was able to recover much faster and on a couple occasions dissipate irrational thinking and the building feelings that stimulated it by saying once to myself inside my head, "No." It felt almost like in The Matrix where Neo is able to break through the programming. Everything slowed and a feather's touch stopped the freight train in motion and sent it away.
R. David Cooper whose path has taken him into Ultra-Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Sufism before settling down is a bit of an unconventional vipasana meditator in that he suggests the most important thing is that one is doing the practice. He told a story during a silent retreat of how, sleeping on stone slabs at a Buddhist retreat, while everyone else was struggling to accclimate and adjust, he was able to visualize himself embraced in G!d's arms and get to sleep more easily. My sense of things is really that any dedicated and focused practice is good practice. This review of meditation's effects does suggest that some types work better for developing certain skills than others:
IONS: The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation - A Review of Contemporary Research
I think the primary difference was between meditations that focus on ground and meditations that focus on figure but it's been quite a while since I read it.
I think what you say about being wary of highs is important not just for those of us who are bipolar but for spiritual seekers in general who might become strongly wedded to an experience. I've also read some things, relating to bipolar disorder, that the highs can for some people become like an addiction. A recovering alcoholic once related to me at a time I was doing very poorly in the language of alcohol recovery and 12-stepping.
_____________
mw,
I think it's very true. Course I had complete faith in the psychiatrists and the meds they were giving me and it still didn't do much good so I think that it can only be taken so far. A friend of my mother's passed away about a year ago to cancer despite her strong belief she could heal in part because, as part of her religion, she refused medical treatment.
There was an episode of a show we have in the states on pbs with Alan Alda about scientific frontiers. He was answering a grab bag of questions this time around. One of the things that it touched upon was a double-blind study being done at a university on the effects of cold remedies and beliefs about their efficacy. What he found is that the herbal stuff, even things like vitamin C, weren't really effective at all in stopping a cold. Those who got the treatment and those who got placebo caught colds with no noticeable difference in occurance. The only thing that strongly effected occurance and severity of symptoms was whether or not an individual believed s/he was getting the real treatment.
Dauer
I did start a thread once quite a while ago, I think on the relationship between the prophets and mental health or something like that.
I think it's very true we need to face it as a real problem, and own it. When I was getting psychiatric treatment I would tend to view bipolar disorder as something foreign. When I was very little and I had difficulties I'd often say "It's not me." because I felt so powerless and as part of my search for effective treatment was exorcised by a shaman. (Didn't really help.)
My practice tends to focus more on mindfulness exercises also. I'm a big fan of Thich Nhat Hanh. But one of the things I find very interesting is that during a time when I was doing mostly visualizations on the Tetragrammaton and not much mindfulness at all but dedicating an hour a day to meditation and an hour to prayer, when I got more manic I was able to recover much faster and on a couple occasions dissipate irrational thinking and the building feelings that stimulated it by saying once to myself inside my head, "No." It felt almost like in The Matrix where Neo is able to break through the programming. Everything slowed and a feather's touch stopped the freight train in motion and sent it away.
R. David Cooper whose path has taken him into Ultra-Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Sufism before settling down is a bit of an unconventional vipasana meditator in that he suggests the most important thing is that one is doing the practice. He told a story during a silent retreat of how, sleeping on stone slabs at a Buddhist retreat, while everyone else was struggling to accclimate and adjust, he was able to visualize himself embraced in G!d's arms and get to sleep more easily. My sense of things is really that any dedicated and focused practice is good practice. This review of meditation's effects does suggest that some types work better for developing certain skills than others:
IONS: The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation - A Review of Contemporary Research
I think the primary difference was between meditations that focus on ground and meditations that focus on figure but it's been quite a while since I read it.
I think what you say about being wary of highs is important not just for those of us who are bipolar but for spiritual seekers in general who might become strongly wedded to an experience. I've also read some things, relating to bipolar disorder, that the highs can for some people become like an addiction. A recovering alcoholic once related to me at a time I was doing very poorly in the language of alcohol recovery and 12-stepping.
_____________
mw,
I think it's very true. Course I had complete faith in the psychiatrists and the meds they were giving me and it still didn't do much good so I think that it can only be taken so far. A friend of my mother's passed away about a year ago to cancer despite her strong belief she could heal in part because, as part of her religion, she refused medical treatment.
There was an episode of a show we have in the states on pbs with Alan Alda about scientific frontiers. He was answering a grab bag of questions this time around. One of the things that it touched upon was a double-blind study being done at a university on the effects of cold remedies and beliefs about their efficacy. What he found is that the herbal stuff, even things like vitamin C, weren't really effective at all in stopping a cold. Those who got the treatment and those who got placebo caught colds with no noticeable difference in occurance. The only thing that strongly effected occurance and severity of symptoms was whether or not an individual believed s/he was getting the real treatment.
Dauer
