It's A Small World!

I have been chewing on restarting a meditation practice for months. In inquiring about meditation and depression on the Internet, I found David Lukoff's "Meditation in Clinical Practice" course, which is how I ended up at this site. While the course did not answer all of my many questions, reading all of the postings at this site has certainly filled the gap. In particular I would like to say thank you to Jim Spira for all of those 1998 pages on clinical applications for depressive, anxiety and personality disorders. I have been all over the Internet looking for exactly that information for hours on end and where do I find it? Right here in San Diego in my own backyard. There is something exciting about knowing that info came from someone right here in my own community.

So I had restarted a meditation practice on a suggestion by a transpersonal therapist and meditator this past week with much hesitation. My hesitation stemmed from past experiences I had had both during and outside of formal meditation practice some years ago that one therapist called "powerful spiritual experiences." Well, they were profound and so was my state of mind at the time which I will refer to as "nonordinary."

It takes a little explaining how I got myself into the situation that allowed these experiences to emerge and why I stayed in that state for so long before finding appropriate treatment. But what I wanted to convey in this opening message is that I have had the experience of being both a provider of care and someone in desperate need of care. Now that I am firmly back in the consensual world after what transpersonal psychology recognizes as a spiritual emergency, I am forever altered and I have many, many questions about meditation and psychotherapy. I hope that this is a forum that can handle meditation questions from a very experiential level with respect to a diagnosis for depression and anxiety on the one hand, and from the transpersonal diagnosis of spiritual emergency manifesting as a shamanic crisis on the other.

I have read the entire list of postings at this site and there are so many things I would like to respond to that I don't know where to start. I will wait and see if my topic fits here first before continuing. Again, I would like to thank all of you for sharing your information which gives me the courage to restart a practice with much healing potential.

Replies:

Re:It's A Small World!, by mandala, 07/02/02 Re:It's A Small World!, by V. Genevieve Leak, R.N., 07/14/02 Re:It's A Small World!, by Meditator, 07/18/02 Re:It's A Small World!, by mandala, 09/19/02 Re:It's A Small World!, by Meditator, 09/24/02

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.