Re: Unprocessed Trauma- Your Likely Root Cause

"The root of our problem is trying to restore our complicated gut ecosystem which has been lost though antibacterials etc... Explain how meditation/trauma healing is going restore that loss? ... Unless God decides to miracously heal us. But that is more prayer than it is meditation. Energy work does not "replace" beneficial gut organisms that have been lost, but only improves the efficiency of the organisms that are already there. A lady who did biofeedback on me who believed in energy work, chakra,"trauma healing" bla bla bla absolutley did nothing for my candida and in the meantime just took my $$$= a bunch of money making QUACKERY(as far as candida goes)"

I completely agree with you that antibacterials and antibiotics in particular are vastly overdone in our society and have turned down antibiotics several times much the chagrin of my doctors.  (Chewing three or four cloves of raw garlic a day can bring relief from many things including our gut ecosystem and even cancer.  Am convinced that is what granted me my 20 year healing from prostate cancer.)  

When you get to meditation though, I'll take exception to what your wrote.  Prayer and meditation are the same thing.  God is within each of us.   Here's the story of a suicidal woman who did more than prescription drugs (she threw them all away).  She even thought of suicide.  She her ills with meditation.  If you read her story you will find that she had a "eureka" experience as do many long time mediators.  In fact there can be many eureka experiences during meditation and it is a fantastic healing.  Meditation takes patience, something that bodies often don't have.  They have to be trained. 

Jane has one thing that many in our society who want a quick fix don't have and that is desire and commitment.  Call it stubbornness if you wish but it has led me through a lot of the quagmire that our society throws at us every day.

http://voices-of-recovery-schizophrenia.blogspot.com/2008/07/jane-alexander-m...

I am a 33 year old recovered survivor of 20 years of mental illness. This is what happened, and how I survived.

Like many of us with mental illness, it all started as I was growing up.

After years of child abuse and psycho emotional family histrionics I was depressed.

During the summer of 1989 at the age of 14 I tried to kill myself for the first time of eventually six major suicide attempts. Soon after I also experienced the first of several psychiatric hospitalizations. There in that place, I was diagnosed with terminal mental illness, 3 weeks after inpatient admission.

During my stay there, an experience which lasted over 70 days I was tested, examined, interviewed and therapied for weeks before a consensus diagnosis was rendered. The hereditary seeds of mental illness had sprouted early in me. I was told I had inherited an unknown chemical imbalance that in some way profoundly effected my thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

The diagnoses? Dual Axis 1 diagnosis: Manic Depression, or Bipolar Disorder 1 Schizoid Affective Disorder co morbid with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

After 8 years of clinical psychotherapy, 3 psychiatric hospitalizations, 4 years spent in residential treatment centers, group homes, mental health lock downs and 6 months of involuntary medications of perphenazine and lithium carbonate I remained absolutely and completely lost. Modern psychiatry had completely failed to help me heal from suicidal depression or any of my problems at all. In fact, the violation and mistreatment I experienced while in the juvenile mental health system only made me worse in every way.

Having experienced utter failure with the meds and therapy approach, I gave myself over to alternative healing. Along my path I have tried to keep an open mind in the interest of healing myself of mental illness permanently. As such, the following are just a sample of things I have undertaken in order to understand their effects on the mind body and emotions.

I have tried self medication, crystal healing, Saint John’s Wort, veganism, shamanistic purification rituals, flower essences and oils, vitamins and supplements of all kinds, toning, aura cleansing, chakra balancing, praying, chanting, music and sound therapy, touch therapy, reiki, toxin cleansings/flushings, teas, magnets, gems and precious stones, tantra, affirmations and daily quotes, positive thinking, deep tissue body work and movement therapies, ( Rolfing, Feldenkrais and Alexander ) chiropractics, in short, I tried everything.

Over the course of a 10 year journey down a path of spiritual, physical and mental healing. I personally explored, researched and experienced a wide variety of holistic remedies and alternative therapies in a desperate attempt to find my mind, myself and my body. I ran into false avenues of recovery along this path as well.

Many of those things seemed beneficial some times. Several of those therapies gave me very positive effects. Some of those therapies did absolutely nothing for me. None of them completely healed me of all my mental health problems.

The problems are called mental for a reason, they arise from the mind, and from the mind a cure must come. The cure for my mind was deep meditation. I had studied meditation off and on all my life since my teens but never with a focus on self therapy.

In my early 20s, left with nothing to lose and nothing worth losing. I gave myself over to the practice of genuine meditation. Alone, often in total isolation, over the course of thousands of hours, I went inside my being and reprogrammed my mind.

I never set out to beat bipolar disorder or any of my other mental illnesses. I set out to find inner peace. The promise of meditation was the promise of self understanding and becoming completely comfortable with life and being alive. More than anything, I needed to have my mind and heart back. I had to find a reason to go on.

In the process, I undertook a true holistic, yogic lifestyle. A true yogic lifestyle to me meant, living right, eating right, breathing right, exercising right, and taking care of myself until I was well again. I looked at myself as an experiment. The results of experimenting with my mental and emotional health would be effected by controls and variables.

In order to secure the space needed to accomplish this. I got rid of all excess detritus and negative forces and stress in my life. Bit by bit, I subjected myself to these control and variables. I gave myself to the process of healing and recovery with an open ended time commitment, knowing, that it was pointless to pursue life, until I had a reason to live. All the things people feel compelled or driven to do, college, career, family, relationships, romance, planning for the future, none of that had any meaning for me, and nor during the course of recovery, could I allow striving for any of those things to interfere with me. I was living one day at a time since my near death experience. That was all I could handle.

So as a means to an end I first put extreme physical distance between myself and everyone in my old life. I moved far away from my family, abusers and mentally ill people, and any physical location that could possibly trigger me. Then I put myself in isolation and lived alone for a long time. During this time I began my health experiments in diet and nutrition. I started practicing tai chi, yoga, chi gung and meditation full time. Gradually, the constant practice of these healing arts granted my body and mind enough inner calm and grace to begin serious, devoted and full time meditation practice. As soon as I was strong enough, I began the work of going within.

The first thing I did, was learn to relax. Twenty years of tension had ruined my nervous system and I needed to really learn to let go. Then I processed all the PTSD triggers until the flashbacks were gone, and no memory had any power over me. As I underwent this self psychotherapy, I learned cognitive behavioral therapy and applied it to myself. I combined introspective meditation and advanced chi gung techniques to permanently dissolve every trigger inside me, until they were gone as though they had never been there in the first place

Then the first year came and went without any depression whatsoever, for the first time in my memory. Then the second and third year came and went without depression as well.

During this time, I worked on anger, loss, abandonment, abuse and violation, anxiety, addictions, attachments, aversions, attractions, likes, dislikes, and all my past relationships. Another year went by without depression and now, my anxiety and neuroses were making similar remissions. This entire time, the voices in my head became quieter and quieter, less and less overwhelming. The cacophony, the chorus the storm, was, for the first time in my life, spontaneously abating.

During the summer of 2000 I went on meditation retreat for a week. Almost six months later, on the fourteenth day of a personal isolated sitting retreat, the most powerful meditation and spiritual experience of my life surprised me out of nowhere and changed my life forever.

Unasked for and unlooked for, I had a direct experience of Self. I came into contact with what lies deep inside us all. That discovery caused me to fall in love with myself. It was like being born again. It recharged my spiritual, physical and mental batteries restoring to me a passion for life and living. After literally thousands of hours of dedicated genuine and proper meditation practice, I finally had peace. In that moment of surrender and apprehension, all suffering left me and never returned. I knew who I was, what I wanted out of life, and for the first time in 25 years, I knew absolute unconditional self love.

For days I spontaneously laughed and cried, often simultaneously. I was free and I could never ever be trapped again in the same way. I knew I would never hurt myself again. I continued to practice, to keep wiping away the remaining detritus.

In the process my mind and the voices in the whirlwind inside my mind stilled and became calm. I was never manic again. I moved on. I had cured myself of my past, my present and now that I had a reason to live, I was going to have a future. I set about making more changes to my life and continued to transform and transition as a person.

At the age of 31, I had been depression and suicide attempt free for a decade. The mania was gone, the voices were gone, the triggers where gone. I had ceased self injuring for good.

All of this I accomplished on my own, largely in solitude and isolation, without psychotherapy, support or psychiatric drugs.

Finally, I had put my life, my past and my illness completely behind me. Then on my 32 birthday, I whimsically entered the word *bipolar* into Google. In seconds I found blogs, support forums, bulletin boards, chats and even personal videos on you tube, all discussing manic depression and schizophrenia. What I found was nothing less than heartbreaking and amazing.

While I was out of the mental health scene, meditating and living a yoga lifestyle in solitude year after year, Bipolar had become a mental health epidemic. Despite the lack of evidence, this mental illness is being blamed on genes and biology. The cause is unknown and cure apparently nonexistent. I was shocked and dismayed to find that nearly 20 years after my diagnoses the horribly unsuccessful treatment of psyche meds and therapy that had failed me were still the de rigueur management technique.

When I found out that people of all ages, including children were taking over a half dozen medications or under going ECT for depression and bipolar my spirit was moved.

Everywhere I look, there is supposedly no cure for any of these major Axis 1 mood disorders. Yet I have extracted the cure for severe mental illness on my own using myself as the experiment. It pains me to read blogs and support forums and watch videos and see only learned helplessness and hopelessness.

Once I was free of mental illness, and I knew who I really was under it all. I was able to finish growing up, to re-enter society, network and socialize, make friends, and finally get involved in personal and romantic relationships after a ten year break from them.

It is possible to heal yourself of bipolar and schizophrenia, permanently.

Without therapy or drugs. It is possible to shake off the disabling symptoms of these mental illnesses leaving you with your natural gifts and talents intact. It is possible to live a life free of medications and the mental health care profession, once you have learned how to therapy yourself. As a result I believe that there may be hope for everyone for a lasting permanent recovery from mental illness.

The road to permanent recovery is not easy or fast. At least for me, walking the path to permanent mental illness recovery was the single most difficult undertaking of my life. In my recovery, I have taken the road least traveled, and it has made all the difference.