Mental Health and Choice
Everyone’s life is full of all kind of symptoms and co-morbidities.
It is just a matter of a continuum. Some have more, others less.
The same with health and the balance between the life instinct and the death instinct. Everyone is always in the midst of that struggle and each is in a different place along the continuum.
The professionals decide the points along these lines where things get labelled as a condition requiring special attention.
In the end our work is to become more conscious. More conscious of what? That we are a spiritual being having a human experience. That our identity is a spiritual one, first and foremost.
What this means is that our soul doesn?t have ADD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD. Our soul is not in the least bit anxious or depressed. And what do we mean when we say soul? We mean our essence, our base, the One in us. So, on the deepest level there is no dis-ease.
How does the realisation that we are essentially perfect, free beings help us if we are struggling and in pain? If we come back to the objective of becoming more conscious, consciousness implies that we have a choice to react, to behave in a certain way.
Now, sometimes we only realise that we were behaving in an unconscious way after the event, for example; ? we lose our temper and we only realise later that there was a chance, a choice moment, however fleeting to have responded without anger, calmly even.
The reasons we don?t feel like we have a choice, or even that it is an affront to your sensibilities that I even suggest there was a choice (given your family, given the drugs, given the regime, given the unfairness of it all) are complex and varied.
My only invitation here is to give us a starting point for discussion; When am I reacting out of my past, old behavioural patterns and fear, and when I am choosing to respond with alignment and integrity? And how can I do the things that set me up to have more alignment and integrity?
