believes that the hospital wards and clinics set up to help those with addictions are in a deepening crisis. When he first was hospitalized he was seeing angels and alternately what he described as leering, negative entities. None of his nurses or therapists were equipped to help him sort out these phenomena. Jon believes, “Very few practitioners who work in these clinics understand that many of their clients are going through a spiritual emergency process that needs a different kind of treatment than they are used to offering. They simply don’t know the territory.”
Jon is passionate in his belief that these therapists need to be informed about the new understanding of spiritual emergency and the practical aspects of care of this phenomenon as soon as possible. Why? So they can be truly effective and meet the needs of a wave of people who are in a crisis similar to what he experienced. Jon feels that this wave is a result of the raising of consciousness that increasingly more people are now and will soon be experiencing.
The 12-step programs are too limiting, he believes. Jon says, “Young adults caught in addiction need to connect to the truth of their authentic hearts—the “Avatar” heart—that is fully free, profoundly connected to Spirit and their peers, empowered, and oriented towards a way of life that promotes health. This is what will lead them most effectively through their healing.” To assist in this effort, Jon now co-hosts a website, www.the-wakeup.com, to help individuals find the support they need.
When we care for those in spiritual emergency these days, we need to be open to using every resource at hand to insure a strong web of support to the person in crisis. This may mean in the future that diverse “spiritual emergence centers” will be created and they will collaborate with hospitals, health professionals including nutritionists, and diverse programs oriented towards wellness. Each resource has a place in the team approach to care and the fabric of community. Better we work together and expand the overarching concept of what we are working with, i.e., a person needing care is not just “the psychotic in Room 3” or “the addict who has been on cocaine for 5 years”, or “the kid in 5th grade whose attention is all over the place and has no self control”. Instead, each is first a soul reaching for more authenticity, more Light, more of the Truth of the Self...and each one may experience states of higher consciousness, as Jon did. If we can support the spiritual emergence of these people in the appropriate way, our culture will be enriched by the passion and brilliance of what each has to offer.
Building Community
An essential building block to success in recovery or creation of wellbeing is participation in community. That builds by itself as one attends support groups or classes. Each person is then no longer alone in their quest for a more workable, meaningful life, but is sharing with others. There is also a safe place to dialogue and to be oneself and a schedule offering something predictable, some structure to life that gives meaning. Convening regularly with those one is sharing deeply with becomes more and more like community—and can even become a “way of life” as one shares the path of honesty and skills necessary for increasing wellbeing. It simply feels good and works to support positive transformation.
In Del Ray, Florida, there is a peer group meeting called “Allyu” which means “extended family gathering” in Quichua (pronounced ketch-i-wa), an Incan language from the Andes of South America. Leadership rotates amongst members, and most importantly, all members coming from diverse cultures are given a time to feel heard and respected. Online forums are available to maintain connection. A leader in Allyu, Lise Neu, wrote me: “Ayllu has the intention of creating a world of harmony, balance and peace. A sister organization, “New Earth Tribes,” is a gathering in support of our young adults by way of passing down the ancient wisdom through ceremony and ritual. Through the support of like-minded brothers and sisters we create a Tribal-Peer Community that supports the building of a Global Community on the foundation of integrity, respect, honor, compassion and Love.”
Maintaining ongoing community is an essential component to success if these programs. One reader wrote about the Icarus Forum: “These forums saved my life, many times. People mentored me there, and gave me skills. Things I never would have thought of. These people and these skills are/were/will always be invaluable to my existence…[O]verwhelmingly, they gave me hope when I had none and MADE ME FEEL NOT ALONE. I am deeply, profoundly, eternally thankful for the Icarus forums." See the National Empowerment Center (NEC) for referrals to other community peer group support. Alternatives, Inc. in Framingham, MA offers more resources, particularly to those living with disabilities.
In sum, the core part of any treatment for disorientation with spiritual phenomena or disturbances related to addiction or emotional issues needs to be recognition of the phenomena being part of a larger spiritual emergence process, and using both the newer ways of encouraging spiritual emergence as well as collaborating with structures now in place. All resources can be employed to help the person in his/her process.
The Significant Role of Spirituality
When we attend the deepest levels of soul first and foremost, we create more encouragement and support for individuals to contact the soul within. As that connection is made, and strengthened, there is the potential for spontaneous remission of all symptoms and a giant step in personal growth or an accelerated process of healing. The connection is made through a variety of means, e.g. contemplation, meditation, study of books, guided meditation led by a facilitator, yoga, and/or visiting our church or practicing with our spiritual group of choice.
Marsha Linehan is a psychologist who is well-known as an expert in treating people with borderline personality disorder. These people have been known to cut on themselves, and often hover close to suicide or thoughts of suicide. In July of 2011, in the New York Times in a brief video, Marsha exposed the scars she has on her arms from cutting herself and told her own personal story of having been deeply depressed, having contemplated suicide, having been hospitalized as a young adult and what effected a transformation. Paraphrasing her: the most important part started when she went to her church and sat alone in despair one day. Suddenly, she saw Light all around her in the Church that seemingly came from another realm. That night, when she went home, she could sincerely say to herself for the first time, “I love myself”. From that point on, her life changed dramatically. She was no longer absorbed in negative thoughts, she went back to school, got a PhD in psychology, and went on to work effectively relieving the pain of people who suffer as she had suffered. She has worked for years at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution that functions also as a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School and is considered one of the best mental hospitals in the country. Her therapeutic style is to bring in spirituality as an important element in psychotherapy. Her story is a dramatic illustration of the powerful impact that spirituality can have on the course of treatment.
Concluding Thoughts
I like the way the term ‘spiritual emergency’ has expanded. What it used to represent in the 1980s was appropriate for that time, and what it is becoming today is appropriate for this time. In both cases, we recognize that the spirit of an individual is hungry to grow…in fact, the contents of the unconscious is bursting to the surface revealing its positive potentials and fragments that need to find their places as we become more knit together as a whole…and that growth will lead to a re-evaluation and change in relationships, lifestyle, thinking and perceiving. Like a caterpillar, the person needs to go into a chrysalis before he or she can become the butterfly. It’s a natural step in its evolution. It is very possible for individuals to extract learning from their experiences of extreme states and go on to be of great service to others, as the stories of Marsha and Jon illustrate.
I think more of us in the coming years will see that the bar on growth has been raised. It is now more obvious that recovery of wellbeing, being fully awake, or illuminated, is possible. More of us are now hearing and responding to that wakeup call; and more support services are in place to facilitate a positive outcome when we need special care on the journey.
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