People often ask me why I can have a glass of red wine with dinner if I am a recovered addict. I tell them that substances are not the problem; the psychological state underlying the abuse is. Once I dealt with the underlying issues, and healed from them, the substances became irrelevant. Like most things…
A recent Harvard study dovetails nicely into what Dr Gabor Mate has been asserting for years. In the words of the researchers themselves, “childhood abuse leads to permanent changes in a seahorse-shaped area of the brain that can cause adult depression and drug abuse.” It also dovetails nicely into a recent surge of anecdotal evidence,…
In one hundred years, will the treatment of mental illness with a vast array of psychotropic drugs be seen as a success story, or a vast human tragedy? When I was diagnosed with Bi Polar Disorder in my early twenties, I spent less than thirty minutes in the psychiatrist’s office where I was given a…
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that insanity could be the antidote to culture. Perhaps people with a mental illness are tapping into something that the rest of us don’t and can’t see, not because we’re not capable of it, but because we are too programmed by the belief system of…
Pink is the colour most associated with womanhood, femininity, glitz, glamour, and fun. It’s also used as a symbol for one of the deadliest diseases that kills countless women and men. I wouldn’t have a problem with this, except that the foundation in question seems to be a lot better at finding funding sources than…
I like to describe the void as “the insubstantial netherworld where you are trapped in your own grief and pain”. The void is not fun; but it is infinitely compelling. There are things you will learn from it that you could not learn from any other experience. But like Hades, you don’t want to get…
There is a lot of finger pointing going on right now over the state of the economy. Governments blame the financial industry, banks blame the defaulted citizenry, and the citizens blame both. But the actual truth is that we all participated in this mess that we are now finding ourselves in. While it is true…
Robert M Pirsig is famous for having written Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), but to my mind he wrote a much more powerful and significant book called Lila (1991). The premise of the book is basically this: why would you trust an expert’s opinion over your own direct experience? This book had…
The way I see it, what we are witnessing right now is nothing short of humanity’s collective shadow being unveiled. This is a good thing, because it shines the light of day on what has so far been kept in the closet and hidden in the sand. It is a necessary step if we are…
One of the most powerful tools I used to transform my life was to stop seeing myself as a victim and instead believing that I had created every challenge in my life as part of my spiritual journey. In this way, the very things that threatened to destroy me were used as stepping stones toward…