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 Educate - Understand - Make Changes Through Taking Action by Kathleen Howe
In previous attempts to
receive a correct diagnosis for my mental health problems, I was never successful. I visited between fifteen to twenty different counseling centers within a time frame of six years. These attempts to receive qualified and experienced mental health treatment with
a believable diagnosis caused me further traumas and humiliations. After my self education concerning mental illnesses like my own, I can very well say that my symptoms might
very well have been escalated in light of the many traumatic experiences I had in those counseling centers. In most cases the counseling centers simply prescribed up to four different anti-depressant medications as well as anti-psychotic medications.
I finally stumbled upon a new counseling center through the advice of a co-worker. Word of mouth is quite often the best way to find a qualified, experienced counselor for your individual problem. At this particular center there was an in-house psychiatrist who could prescribe medications
and with whom I met with every three months or at any time between scheduled visits should there be a crisis. After
the counselor and the doctor reviewed my very complete description of my physical and mental health history, my family history and the
history of my traumas and domestic violence a diagnosis was quick to follow. Both the counselor and the doctor agreed that I would be able to try
to deal with my symptoms at first with no medications. Unfortunately, that trial was unsuccessful. After one month I began
taking Effexor XR as well as a few other medications as needed.
I never had a "treatment program" with my counselor to keep with in order to eliminate my symptoms or my mental illnesses. I went to the counselor weekly to report what I had been feeling; which in the beginning few months of counseling I wasn't sure of anything that was happening with me or around me. I was sleep deprived and dissociative most of the time.
After taking my prescribed medications, my symptoms began to subside and I was able to report how my depression was beginning
to subside as well as the dissociative states I had been experiencing.
I had felt such relief in receiving an official diagnosis that now
after almost six years of my journey I can say that I felt empowered in just knowing what was wrong with me.
That empowerment allowed me to find the courage and confidence to
make a commitment to myself for the first time in my life. I was thinking clearly enough to know what I was thinking and doing. After years
of my thinking being clouded by abusive relationships, I was on the right track in thinking that I could value myself enough
to attempt to love myself and care for myself. After much reflection, I made the commitment to myself to help others as well as myself by designing a website that would encourage others with helpful information to help themselves as well.
It was within the first year
of my personal growth / recovery journey that I realized some very important truths. I had proven them to be truths through my own trial and error learning style. I had been studying and reading and corresponding
with others who had experienced the same mental illnesses. I was literally obsessed with learning. I studied on the average
of eight hours a day and worked the websites about three or four hours a day. I would report to my counselor in my weekly
counseling sessions what I was learning and where my weaknesses were still plaguing me.
The first important truth I realized was that through education there was understanding.
The more education I gave to myself, the more I understood
about myself, my mental health and what I needed to do to get better. The more I shared my education with others through the website; the more I learned in the invaluable
sense of sharing feelings and emotions with those who had experienced similar problems that I had experienced. The more I educated myself the more empowered I felt
to do more with my confidence and power. The entire time I was making sure that I stayed true to myself and my commitment to myself.
I began to share my new found knowledge with the visitors to my website.
This was truth number two; you can help yourself by helping others. This only increased my understanding
of personal growth. It also increased my understanding of what it would take for me to get
better. I was getting better. I was learning that I had to teach myself many more techniques, topics and share even more with
others to understand what I needed to continue working with. Through awareness and mindfulness I began to understand without
prompting what I needed to delve into for more positive progress!
In educating yourself until
you can thoroughly understand the topic you are studying can take you to another level.
I believe that most people think that this is a very simple direction that can be achieved very swiftly, but educating yourself is
more difficult than learning through a teacher who is already educated in the topic you are learning about.
The reason for the increase
in difficulty is that you must take on "personal responsibility" for finding the information you will need to learn before you begin to learn anything. It is through taking personal responsibility for your own education that you continue to empower yourself in understanding. You also
begin to feel a sense of pride in your accomplishments which again, empowers you enough to offer incentive for further hard work and learning.
The next truth I realized was that through educating yourself to a thorough understanding you could
then be empowered enough to cause changes through taking action. Sure enough, as I studied more and more I found that the one thing that was a constant in life was
"change." In order to be able to change, one must take action. This was even more difficult than studying, understanding and sharing
knowledge. To take action was never possible for me before. I reflected upon my problems with causing change within my lifetime. Finally I realized what my problem had been. I was locked in a paralyzing state of fear.
I began to reason more and become even more curious with what I needed to rid myself of the paralyzing fear that lived within me. Answers came to me much easier than in the beginning of my journey,
but with that wonderful understanding of the progress that I'd made came the responsibility
of owning my problems, such as my fear, and realizing that I was responsible for learning how to get rid of it no matter how
difficult it would be.
It was through this progress that I realized that I must study emotions and feelings to understand how to rid myself of fear. Understanding
emotions and feelings was the open door I needed to truly release myself of the huge pit of pain and hurt that had been buried inside of me. Learning more and more about
emotions took time and discipline, but I pushed myself to learn more and more until I had a complete
understanding about emotions and feelings and how I could take action to resolve my fear issues.
Almost six years from that very precarious beginning I am now taking action.
I never expected myself to progress in any time frame because I taught myself about expectations, emotions, and feelings and how they can get in your way if you become disillusioned or disappointed in yourself. My one website grew
with my education into presently twenty-eight websites of free knowledge. It is possible for others to learn and understand while empowering themselves enough to take action to make changes happen in their lives. This positive progress can happen for anyone who wants to work at it.
It's not easy, but it's worthwhile. Thus, my belief that education leads to understanding. Understanding
leads to the ability to take action and make changes happen. Believe me that it's not easy, but if you learn about the importance of making commitments in your life, you can do it. Once you learn enough to understand what you need to do, you can do it just like I have done. Try it because you will like how it makes you feel!
Surviving Life With An Understanding Heart
By Emil-Paul Dopson
Now is the worst
of times and the best of times. As we optimistically contemplate a new millennium we are also filled with trepidation for the unknown.
As I
write, the media is filled with Nostradamus'imminent end of the world prophecies. So. what are we to do? Well, as Dorothy
Parker counsels: "Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live."
Some of us do
better than others because of the choices made. And this is the core of our being: agency. We have the ability to determine
our mental attitudes and we have the power to be curious, to grow, to change and to choose those foundational and timeless principles which will bring us peace, happiness and even moments of sublime joy.
Our gurus and
sages can only suggest ways forward, but it is for each of us to create those mental, physical and spiritual environments
which will sustain us with peace and not destroy us with addictive behaviors which will only bring remorse and destruction.
Happiness is hard to define. Cynics might see it as merely the absence of negatives rather than having a positive state of mind. For me, happiness comes from having an appropriate attitude toward life and of turning perceived purposelessnes, boredom and even pain into something celebrational. Possessions not
included, happy people have attitudes which set them apart from unhappy people.
In my experience,
much of our suffering is needless and self-inflicted. What is sadder still is that we keep on repeating the downward spiral of destructive desires, thoughts, actions and consequences which destroy us and our relationships. In all of this I have to keep reminding my imperfect self of the following 3 truths:
1) Life comes with non-optional opposition in all things,
plus difficulty. We must mature to the point where we are not unduly crushed by accidents and difficulties. We are not here
to be comfortable, but to grow through experience and the getting of wisdom. Life is the place for gaining experience and some of our most valuable ones are simultaneously the most difficult.
2) Life is uncertain.
If we are to enjoy agency there's no other way! We walk by faith and we can't tell whether we will live or die from moment to moment, or if those whom we love will go or be taken from us. Will the world hurtle from its axis? Will our investments yield a fat return? Who can tell for
sure? Happy people recognize these sorts of facts and go on anyway.
3) Life includes unfairness and injustice. Although we embrace truths, life will not always be fair. Neither should we expect it to always be so in some childish way. We are sometimes controlled by forces we cannot master, such as the wind and the sea, or the domino effect of someone else's volition. Good things happen
to bad people and vice versa.
The honest are defrauded and felons walk free to enjoys their spoils. This is not only the way things are, it is the way things will be. We must grow up and get used to
it while doing the best we can, for this is the source our individual perfection as we serve others and find ourselves in such service, as well as in our quiet moments. Both are critical to our capacity
for joyfulness.
Happy people recognize all this and more. They do not take offense nor self-destuct and other-destruct through rage and the refusal to forgive. In confronting such personal and global realities they still live full lives, plan, work and achieve what is possible, and live powerfully, whatever their sphere of influence.
In developing
an understanding heart we serve and are best served. It will never be otherwise and the
time to start the process is now so that we are prepared and are not needlessly fearful.
END
Author's Bio: Emil-Paul Dopson is a trainer and motivational speaker. His Website is http://autonomyleadership.com
9 Understandings
© 2001-2005
Ron McCray. All rights reserved. - Posted
with the permission of the author.
The Three Jobs of Human Beings
This subject fascinates me a great deal.
What are we supposed to do while we are here on Earth? I mean, what are we really supposed to be in engaged in while playing
the roles that we play. What is there beyond butcher, baker, or candlestick maker?
Our relatively large brains with
their hemispheric differentiation into "left" (predisposed to logical, linear thinking) and "right" (with its creative non-linear, thinking) enabled us to create a vast array or roles to play in the great extemporaneous play that is life.
Is there an overall umbrella or foundation
(depending on one’s point of view) responsibility that we took on prior to popping into life that somehow got lost early in our development as more pressing issues (like survival) needed to be addressed first?
I think so… Consequently, I have uncovered three "jobs" for my lifetime that define what I am really
doing here on Earth. They are "my" jobs, and you are welcome to take on any one or all of them as there are lots of openings.
Job number one (learning self-love) was for me to discover that I am divine, that
God dwells in me, and that my key to truly living a harmonious and fulfilled life is a matter of learning to unconditionally love myself. That involves healing whatever I need to heal that prevents me from loving myself. Once I did that, I found I was able to love God and everything in the Universe. Talk about a turnaround in living!
Job number two (manifesting) was learning how to manifest what I need in life to fully express my passion, my essence for this lifetime. In working job number one (self-love) I discovered that the essence of my life this time around is to inspire others to awaken to who they truly are and reconnect with God. Over time I also learned the mechanics of manifesting, and that becoming a powerful manifester required me to first love myself so that fear was not the basis for manifesting. So job number two was enabled by job number one.
Job number three (supporting others) came about after I essentially accomplished jobs one and two in answer to the question, "What’s next?" From my perspective, what was logically next consisted of
supporting others in taking on jobs one and two. That is why this commentary and this website exist. I realize that I am more proactive in
job number three than are perhaps most other people.
But it is not necessary to
take on job three full-time; we still need butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. In the Teachings
page of http://www.ronmccray.com I write about how we are all teachers regardless of
whether or not we are in front of classrooms. I recommend you to that commentary if you wish to explore how to support others a bit further.
Ron McCray
Getting Started…
"Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler."
Albert Einstein
"He came, he went, nobody blinked"
was going to be the inscription on my gravestone. In December 1991, something happened. That path that I trudged for so many
years made an abrupt turn. It was so abrupt that I almost wandered off into the weeds.
Many other sharp turns would appear
later, but now at least I walked with head up and eyes focused on the path rather down at my feet. I started Spiritually
evolving.
Up to December 1991,
I was a greedy, egotistical, self-centered, lying jerk living in fear of everyday life. That was ten years ago. In the intervening time, I learned to love myself, trust in the Universe, honor the Earth, and to manifest what I truly desired in life. It was simple, really, but not easy. What
transformed my life was a set of tools that I call 9 Understandings.
This book is about how I discovered and learned to use them. You can too.
I am a simple person now.
But I have not always been that way. Much of my life centered on striving for personal and professional achievement in a complex
world. Although I "mastered" that world in terms of most definitions of success, fulfillment eluded me. No matter how much
I had of money, relationship, health, success, it was never enough.
I believed that I was always
near bankruptcy in every aspect of my life. I knew I wanted to transform who I was being, but I did not know how. I went to
seminars and classes, read books, had readings, was counseled, and I learned a lot; nothing really changed until I began to
understand.
This book is about understanding,
about going beyond knowledge, and thereby finding the key to transformation.
For me, a
self-confessed left-brained, linear thinking person, having a definable method or means to achieving a goal is highly desirable.
Spiritual evolution is no exception. In my past life, I would have laid out the task, gotten the tools and resources, and
then started working. That would have been nice to have in my awakening process. It was not to be that way. There is an expression
something to the effect that life gives the test first, then the lesson. My awakening was like that. I got the tests first,
and then the tools to work the test came later.
Anyone reading this book has
already been tested. 9 Understandings provides tools to use for
tests when they reappear – and they will.
9 Understandings
are a different approach to this sticky problem
of how to Spiritually evolve. For they are not about what you should (or should not) do. 9 Understandings are a simple, yet powerful, set of tools that can be applied to any situation, whenever and however you need them.
9 Understandings are so effective they can transform your life in more ways than you can begin
to imagine.
Let me explain. Consider,
for example, the following list of everyday common household tools:
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