How Spirituality Has Intertwined With My Mental Illness

How Spirituality Has Intertwined With My Mental Illness
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Very often, I experience fears due to spirituality and religion. For many years, I have fretted: What is the correct religious practice? Are some practices evil, and to be avoided? Can I do more than one practice at a time, while still remaining truly faithful to each on its own?

My sense of spiritual seeking began when I was in college. At the time, my mother had been taking spiritual philosophy classes at the School of Practical Philosophy, and she derived much profundity and enjoyment from the meditation practice that this place prescribed. Spirituality calmed her soul, and I noticed also that she became more cheerful and personable when compared to earlier times.

I wanted some of her change for myself too. For college, I studied classical music performance on the viola at the highly-demanding conservatory at Indiana University in Bloomington. I took music seriously, having my eye set on a career as a professional musician. Unbeknownst to anyone, I also struggled internally with clinical depression. Even though I was stabilized on medications, I still harbored tremendously negative thoughts within my core. The musicians around me appeared as appalling characters, and I felt utter bile and scorn towards them. Instead of finding camaraderie, I perceived colleagues to be competitive adversaries, people to be merely be “beaten” at the game of music.

When I would enter those small little windowless practice rooms at the conservatory, it always started with me setting my viola case on the piano, taking out my music from the large zippered pouch from my viola case. Then I would open the case and take out the bow, giving it a fresh coat of rosin for proper friction against the string. Perhaps I’d crack my fingers a bit before the viola came out and went under my left jaw. But then things went bad. The sound of the vibrating instrument rattled my head, and the negativity welled within me: You suck. Stop playing. This depression created an impenetrable wall in my mind. If I tried to push through it, it became a black hole that sucked in the very force that I used to try to eliminate it, perhaps like a sandbag made of quicksand. It drained me of my energy. After a few moments of this futile fighting, I would pack the viola away and get out of that room. You suck. You don’t practice enough.

I turned to spirituality to alleviate this grief. At the end of my junior year, I befriended a few people on campus who were affiliated with a meditation practice called Sahaj Marg. I learned about their beloved Master from India, the now-late Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari. After a few meditation sessions, I decided to become initiated and take up the practice for myself. For over a year, I did my best to meditate morning and evening, and also attended group meditation sessions every Sunday in Indianapolis, an hour’s drive away.

I derived a lot of meaning from this practice. I learned about the general Eastern mentality of spirituality, related to ideas of self-betterment towards the goal of self-realization, or Enlightenment. Devotion towards the Master was benign enough, and I really enjoyed the fellowship of the other abhyasis that I saw often at group meditations and weekend retreats. During the summer after my senior year at conservatory, I traveled to India to meditate in the presence of the Master himself, along with 50,000 other abhyasis.

As I wrapped up my bachelor’s degree, I worked with a psychiatrist to wean off my medications for depression. I believed that my meditation practice offered me peace, and that I would be fine without them. Sadly, my mental condition then began to decline, completely unbeknownst to me. During that summer whileI visited India, I was saddled with a romantic crush on one of the students from school. This crush transformed into a stalker-ish obsession, which overwhelmed me massively. Even as I meditated, the thoughts haunted me.

When returning to school to begin my master’s degree, also at IU, I began thinking that I had magic powers, which I physically felt in my body through my spine and extremities. I believed that meditating summoned this power, and that I could “transfer” it into the viola and the music that I played, thus creating magic in my performing. This concept renewed my practicing sessions, and no longer did depression cripple me. I found inspiration, yet my viola professor told me that my skills were declining. His feedback left me rather confused.

My obsession with magic powers escalated to the point where I thought I could receive secret messages from everything my eye fell on, from people to inanimate objects. These messages overwhelmed me, and soon my behavior became fearful. It was New Year when I staggered through New York City (my home), crying my eyes out with a befuddled mind. EMS workers came and took me to a hospital. My diagnosis changed from depression to schizoaffective disorder, and I was instructed to stop meditating.

I left graduate school and returned home to New York, still in a daze. I now mostly stayed home, listened to Queen on YouTube and wrote pen pal letters in German to people in Germany. While I tried to remain non-spiritual, the cravings for it still remained, yet it could only yield danger. When I tried meditating, closing my eyes, I would feel unbearable physical discomfort in my skull and bones.

It took me a full year to recover. I went back to school to become a public school music teacher, but halfway through the program, I developed psychosis again and had to drop out. All was not in vain though. While in this program, one of the students I befriended was a reiki healer. I started visiting him weekly for healings, and I responded well to this modality. Unlike meditation, this was a very gentle and benign experience. I simply would lay down and relax, and perhaps have a conversation.

My thirst for spirituality remained, becoming akin to an addiction. I was convinced that my mental illness was proof that there was something wrong and damned about my soul. At one point, I went to a storefront psychic who told me that I was being haunted by a spirit named Omar from my previous past life, who was exacting revenge on me for a dark magic pact we made during our lifetime. She charged me $1500 for a set of 24 candles, each probably costing no more than 50 cents. There were also 24 “stones,” merely flat glass stones for an aquarium tank, and she charged me $300 when I lost three of them. After putting down the money, I lost heart after seeing no results and stopped seeing her.

Time passed aimlessly, and I was unable to recover enough to get a job, so I went on disability. My pace of life became more idle, so I started writing songs with a guitar and went to many open mic nights in the city. I made many friendly acquaintances and had a good life for myself, developing as a songwriter. Yet it was unfortunate that I slowly gained weight from medications, eventually gaining 90 pounds.

Even though I was compliant with my medications, they would eventually stop working, causing me to cycle in and out of hospitals. It was October of 2011 when I experienced another relapse. This time, thoughts of perceived spiritual evil haunted me, and I then stumbled upon a YouTube video where a woman was getting an exorcism from a preacher at a Latino church in Brooklyn. Something struck me heavily then. I had a sudden realization that Satan was real, the bible and everything in it was real, and Jesus was real.

I grabbed a bible off my mother’s shelf and started reading voraciously, and after a few days it seemed my psychosis was staved off. There was new determination now. I began reading up on conservative Christian doctrinal views on contemporary phenomena such as politics and homosexuality, and also searched for conservative bible-believing churches in my neighborhood. Within a week, I found myself in a nearby Baptist church, chatting with believers. But while this first church was not to my liking due to its loud rock-style music, I found another church more to my liking, that with quieter music.

I attended thrice weekly for sermons and bible studies, forming cordial friendships with many of the people there. The bible became a fascinating document of nuance and perfection, and my understanding of it seemed to blossom quickly. This church was an Independent Fundamental Baptist church, and very often, evangelists from other affiliated churches would visit, hailing from missions efforts across the world.

After attending for six months, I attended a large bible conference in the Midwest for a full week, and so my faith was further solidified. I learned the dire importance of evangelizing in public, on the streets handing out gospel tracts, spreading the good news of Christ’s resurrection. One can only enter heaven if they believe in Christ, and if they don’t believe in him, they will go to hell. At the conference, I and the other believers in the pews had heavy hearts for the unsaved. A loving compassion welled within us as we resolved to do God’s work and evangelize as he would have us do.

After returning from the conference, I started going to the gym to lose weight. After joining my local women’s gym, I received sound nutritional advice from the manager which aided me in losing weight. I ate 1500 calories a day, and I ran like hell on that elliptical. I put a paper in front of me with bible verses, and when I got tired I would repeat verses in my head to keep going. After doing this for six months, by eating carefully especially, I dropped 50 pounds.

Yet I experienced another relapse. This time, I was haunted with thoughts that God told me I was “gay.” (There was nothing except the word “gay” ringing in my head, and it was inescapable.) I earnestly confided in many of the church people to try and reverse my condition, and they were supportive and kind in offering counsel and scripture to aid me in this struggle. But the word would not go away, and then psychosis returned. I went back to the hospital and was rehabilitated in a couple of weeks, but never returned to church. I was unable to renounce my former life and all of my friendships with “unsaved” people (pretty much everyone I knew). By clinging to the church, I would have had no personal life.

Spiritual yearnings still tempted me, and I experimented with Voodoo, Wicca and Nichiren Buddhism’s chanting of Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. I went off of my medications due to being utterly tired of having no recovery in my life. I then hit rock bottom, saddled with thoughts that I was the reincarnation of Beethoven and the Antichrist incarnate. I went to the hospital for another three months, facing potential long-term institutionalization. Thankfully, I began taking Clozapine, which helped me to improve and leave the hospital.

I then spent a full year in rehabilitative day treatment programs. It was here that I learned about the profession of the mental health peer specialist: a professional who has lived experience with mental illness, who then works with people who have such. The idea behind peers is that they understand what it’s like to have mental illness, unlike other degreed professionals.

This career opportunity piqued my interest. I pursued it, and ended up attending a nine-month training program to become a mental health peer specialist. I now have worked full-time at an agency for over two years. I am thankful for this precious stability I have, now for the first time in my life. My once long-lost dreams of a productive life are now my reality.

But even just two years ago, while already working, I ran into a woman who claimed she was a psychic. I confided in her regarding my past delusions, and then she told me that I was experiencing demons who would drag me to hell in the afterlife. She pressured me that her spiritual work needed to be done immediately, and she extorted over $9000 from me over the course of six months.

Spirituality is a tricky thing for me. The desire for a connection to a higher power made me very vulnerable, and I had sought counsel from many people to try and find it, that magic key to life. There has been a lot of self-denial, financial loss and social isolation, and the various imageries of different faiths have combined in my subconscious to then yield intricately designed delusions, both of grandeur and of esoteric emergency.

I get scared also. I feel that allegiance to one faith then contradicts another, and so I am a sinner wherever I turn. Regarding Christianity, I fear God’s wrath with what is conservatively written in the bible in comparison to my liberal lifestyle, and I also fear that some friends would not like me if they knew of my enjoyment of reading the bible. This Christian fear then drags me away from other modalities that I know work for me, again weighing me with the guilt of sin.

But is spirituality merely a “magic” force that makes dreams and prayers come true? What is the purpose of prayer or chanting anyway, if it is something beyond this? Within me now is a battle between the Eastern way and the Western way, the concepts of Salvation versus Enlightenment. Which is the correct way? Given that my mental illness has caused me to search in the first place, perhaps my pursuit of spirituality was fueled by a desire to have my suffering alleviated.

Currently, I basically do what feels right to me. This includes utilizing reiki, sometimes with crystals, reading the bible sometimes (I like the New Living Translation) and chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo when I feel like it. I have also gotten healing hugs from Amma the guru a few times. I also achieved a lot of grounding when I briefly investigated Overeaters Anonymous (OA) and the 12 steps. The 12 steps succinctly describe how to accept spirituality into one’s life in a benign and helpful way, with the purpose of overcoming addictions. Although I have not stuck with OA, learning about it finally allowed me to embrace spirituality in my life in a grounded, nonthreatening way.

This is all very personal to me, and I do not talk about it very much. But at the same time, I do not want to be eaten by my fears of spirituality. As a peer specialist, I have found enormous healing in sharing my stories with others. I now have found the words within me to share this story, and so I release it. If there are judgments from others, so be it. I would rather be safe among friends telling my story, instead of paranoid and isolated, hoarding my frightened fears to myself.

Let freedom reign.

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