brain health

How do we get ourselves to actually receive Love?

Pick A Love!

Pick A Love! (Photo credit: theotherway)

Despite the distance he had come, he still controlled much in his acts of intimacy.  The timing, the moves, the style, Bernard was not always aware even of how or when he called the how and when, but he did, still, on occasion, like someone with a clipboard and whistle.

He was sincere in his love-making.  It was not false.  He was even in love.  At odd moments of the day, the wonder of it would come over him.  Without forethought, he would respond to the magic and he would call her, needing her voice to reassure him.  He was in love with her and she loved him back.  The backside of where he came from reflected in his rearview mirror like inky, murky swamp-mass and his sense of salvation swelled around him.  He knew he wanted to be connected.  This was right.

Then, Bernard would be working in his shop, pressed under a cabinet, where he could reach the corner spot and she would be there.  Home from work, she would sidle up and want to …What did she want?  He was dirty.  He was involved.  He was not prepared for that.

How do we receive Love?  It is not the wanting.  It is not the need.  It is not even the availability of Love that opens us up to receive it.  Receiving Love is a quandary.

So often I hear patients complain, “I shouldn’t feel this way.  Everything is really good in my life.  I have so much.  I should be happy.  I should be grateful.”  And then they list some of these happy-life-qualifiers, and peter out into a shrug or cry before they are done.  Before either of us are convinced about how great their life is.  This list of why they apparently should receive Love is not enough to actually bring it in.

Bernard wondered how this was happening to him.  “No!” he would scream to unknown forces.  ”I want Love.  Don’t leave me!”  Bernard hated being an island.  The Bernard Island.  It had its own name.  It was landscape.

How do we receive Love?

And the dichotomy of wanting Love, of needing Love, of Love being available, yet while not receiving Love would acidly crawl up Bernard’s esophagus.  It burned.

How do we receive Love?

Love loved us first.

Love, Love everywhere and nothing to drink.  Is that the way it goes?

I propose that receiving Love is more than the perception of receiving it.

It flows across all of the paradigms and dimensions known and unknown.  Love is.  Receiving it therefore does not depend on its availability.

Our need is constant, integral of course to life’s breath.  In deep.  Out.  Love is.  Receiving Love is not dependent on our need.

Wanting Love, now that depends on our perceptions.  Knowing this, we can return to our earlier discussions on where perceptions come from – the brain and magic.  To know our want, we need both.  To receive Love, however, doesn’t depend on our wanting it.  Love comes because Love is.

Question:  How do you increase your Love quotient?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Grow your Love intake.

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Why Not Skip Medication and Go Naturallllllll?!

The little Train

The train was tarnished from soot.  The engineer, Jack, grimaced over the craft, while he hauled wood into the fiery oven hidden in her belly.  She was a steam engine and her whistle sounded through the air like a shiver breaking ice.

Indians watched from a bouldered distant peak.  They saw the smoke and marked its passage with each puff.

Just then, a mischievous current sucked up that chimney-spew like a genie to her lamp and the loud wind masked the sound of her turning wheels.  To the unfamiliar natives looking on, the tiny far off train appeared to have stopped, silent to them now and no smoke to ribbon the air.

Not so, though.  Jack did not know they were watched, he and his steely lady.  He did not know he was described in the mind’s of others.

Moving.  Not moving.  Progressing.  Stopped.

But the sensory descriptors were misleading.

Music please.  (Perhaps tom-tom pow wow drums.)

As in this tidy little parable, we think that when we get relief from symptoms, it means that the disease process is better.

Anxious?  Have a beer and vuala!  Better.  Can’t sleep?  Smoke some weed and, “Aaaah.”

No?  “Of course not!” we say.  “We don’t do those plebeian substances.  We use our medications as prescribed.  We don’t abuuuuse them.  If we need more, we ask for more.”

This dialogue is usually regarding benzodiazepines.  “Doctor, I can’t take antidepressants or those other meds!  Why is everyone always pushing drugs on me?  I’m just taking klonopin.”  Or, “Doctors over-prescribe!  I just need xanax!”

Brain disease runs something like the steam engine train.

The steam coming out of the chimney is what we see in symptoms, such as, anxiety, inner tension, fear, insomnia, irritability and so forth.  Get rid of the smoke and we think the disease is dealt with.  However, the train is still going.  The disease is still progressing, although not as notably disruptive as before.  To stop the train, we must stop the engine, or the disease process.  I’m not saying we must cure the disease, rather, just slow or stop the disease progress to treat it effectively.

Our goal is more than symptom management.  Our goal is to treat the underlying illness to preserve brain health and prevent against further injury.

Self-Care Tip:  When medically indicated, consider medical therapy.

Question:  When your symptoms improve, how do you continue toward treatment goals?  How do you go past getting “better” to full treatment?  Please tell us your story.

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Sleep Related Blog Posts – A Reference Guide

Sleeping German Shepherd

Sleeping German Shepherd (Photo credit: rightsandwrongs)

Organizing the “shelves” 🙂

  1. Sleep.  Be a Friend to Yourself.

  2. Sleep Hygiene – My Version

  3. Self-Care Does NOT Always Mean Doing What You Want

  4. Draw Sleep Hygiene Into Your Culture

  5. Sleep Is The Vital Sign Of Psychiatry

  6. Just Go To Sleep

  7. Good Sleep

  8. You Can’t Barter With It.  Sleep.

  9. Keep It Simple

  10. Regardless The Reasons Not To, Go Get Your Sleep

  11. Sleep Does Not Lose As Gracefully As He Lets Us Think

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Sleep. Be a friend to yourself.

English: Мy friend is Wikipedian. Русский: Мой...

English: Мy friend is Wikipedian. Русский: Мой друг – википедист. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Being a friend to yourself, comes just when we need it.  When conflicts of interest seduce us into confusion, into late nights of activity; a talk perhaps or a project, a subject of interest, yahoo news perhaps – it is then that being a friend to yourself lovingly redirects our thoughts to the priority of sleep.

During sleep, our friend reminds us that we will heal.  We will receive treatment for the stressful day, better than medicine.  We will allow our broken neuronal connections to regenerate.  Our pantry will restock for clear thinking, kind behaviors to ourselves and emotions with ingredients like cortisol, hormones and neurotransmitters.  During sleep, our memories will find there place in the folds between our cells and plant.

When someone wants to talk to us, a conflict grows importantly, or when we mistake good parenting for enabling bad sleeping habits in our children, our friend, Me, says sleep.  Clarity and inner congruence swath us then and we know that we can’t give what we don’t have.  Tomorrow we can do those things.  Now, it’s time to sleep.

To ally yourself with your friend, Me, keep a sleep journal for a week and see how it looks.

Self-Care Tip:  Sleep.  Be a friend to yourself.

Printable Sleep Diary

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Forget About Divisions In Knowledge.

The World Is Flat

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #103 – Forget about divisions in knowledge.  Be a friend to yourself.

Knowledge does not separate into parts of religion, diet, stars, or geometry.  It is one thing, although we may not see its entirety.  Like the blind men with the elephant, we might be standing by the foot or the trunk.  But it is one thing.  Spiritual truth, nature, physics, medicine, music, art, it’s the same story told in pieces and in different ways.

Working in psychiatry, I’ve struggled with this because it so often affects my freedom in practice.  It so often affects people’s choices for treatment, people’s choices for lifestyle and their own empowerment with self-care.  It affects the choices people make in medication therapy and in physicians.

Merging the tables of learning affects our quality of life either way.  If we are able to do this, we have less conflict, fewer chairs to walk around.  If we can’t, we find ourselves constantly checking the seating charts.  It’s terrible throwing a party where people don’t know what connects them.  There’s the same discomfort inside of us when our life paradigms are afraid of each other.

Take Crystal.  She is a Latina Catholic.  Or make her protestant Filipina, or say White Texan.  Crystal grew up thinking that what was said by her tias (aunts,) or her pastor, or performed by her grit and spine, lay like bookmarks between human behavior issues and the rest of her life.  Behaviors may have something to do with the church, or emotions with the girls room, or nothing to do with anything in her mind.  Thinking behaviors and emotions might relate to what gave her black hair color, and to why water separates from oil is just bizarre to her.

When, Thomas Friedman wrote The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, he was talking about a leveling of the playing field of commerce.  To take it further, I hear him talking about a flattening of prejudices, knowledge, access to information and hierarchies.  The world is too flat to separate the brain from the rest of the body.  When the world is flat, working as a psychiatrist means enlisting all of science, religion, social issues, hobbies, food preferences, and all the other things that make someone’s life worth living for their treatment.  When the world is flat, a patient trying to get help for their emotional-behavioral illness doesn’t separate it from anything else in their journey.

It turns out that we have a lot of information on where emotions and behaviors come from.  We should use it, don’t you think?

Of course, we don’t have it all.  Not close.  We don’t know how the soul factors in.  We don’t know what miracles are.  We don’t know God face to face.  But we do know that it is the same table of knowledge.  It is the same elephant in the room.  It all comes from the same Love.

Walk around.  Feel around.  Let your quality of life get better.  Don’t cut yourself off from another part of you if you don’t have to.

Question:  How are you keeping your personal journey one that is connected?  Or not?  Please tell me your story.

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My Essence – A Matter of Love

Betrayal?

Connecting that behaviors are linked to brain health is often confusing. The distance traveled to reach that point may have been long. It may have involved experiences painful to themselves and their loved ones.

For example, they may have lost a job because they couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. A divorce might have come after changing into someone irritable and angry. A trucker might no longer be able to drive on the freeway because of panic. But once they connect that this change in personality relates to a change in their brain health, how do they feel about that?

Some people feel relief. That they didn’t personally fail. That they aren’t a bad Christian. That it wasn’t because they didn’t try hard enough to “feel good,” to stop itching, to get up and do something with their life, to quit gambling, etc… Maybe they feel for a moment that judgment can be suspended for them.

However there is a group of people, maybe overlapping these, who feel betrayed. Betrayed by their very essence. The question of, if they can’t trust themselves, what is real in life at all? They struggle with the shame of betraying their own person. “Who am I if I’m not…?” and the questions roll on. It must be a question for all of us with changing bodies, Who are you if your mind gets sick?

There is the temporal line of thought, that if your brain changes, your memories, your personality, than you change. Your human form is different. Like getting your arm cut off, you have to grieve and grow a new picture of how you see yourself. A changing person through the span of life. This is in fact healthy adaptation.

There is also a thread in this weave of believing that our essence isn’t wholly related to our changing bodies. That somehow when the various curtains of life fall and open and the final curtain comes around, that this bit remains. I don’t think you can believe this unless you believe in a Love which is stronger than death.

Love is stronger than the death of my neurons, my dendritic connections, stronger than the death of my mind.

The adaptability needed for this life is a no-brainer. We can’t survive if we don’t. It takes courage to adapt when your person is changing. It takes courage when you are loosing yourself. Such courage, like someone in war or flight or determined movement that others could only imagine.

But how you define your essence also matters. I see it as a related step, but also apart from these excellent coping skills. I see it as a matter of Love. It’s win-win when Love weaves through you.

Self Care Tip #16 – Choose Love. Be a friend to yourself.