I'm putting together a worksheet with a few things on it relating to what I want to do moving forward which is provide some options so simple things about safety like the representation agreement an advance directive and I used a group called nidus or knit asst and ID us to put mine together and then i have my medical ID in my phone and then i'm also considering getting a medical ID bracelet with something on it to the effect that long-term antipsychotics or any psychotics over 14 days gives me a necklace these you have reaction and I don't want to be on any of them so the one thing about that though is I don't know if I want to be walking around with the word antipsychotic or no on my body but at the same time it could be helpful I'm just wondering if there's a way to frame that without having to write that stuff because I talked to the company and they said i can write whatever I want so i could write goes to go stick up your butt if you try to pathologize me something like that but at the same time I'm not against being pathologized if I'm sort of past the point of no return and there's a way that's helpful to me in there's ways that are definitely not helpful and I feel like with different things in place I can possibly step up my level of attempting to thrive and then if I attempt to thrive so much so that at some point it appears that i attempt suicide well then that happens but at least I'll be pulled back to some version of my ego self and then also the SAP strap idea having a zap strap and my PRN so those are some of my safety tools not safety as in oh and now i'm going to protect myself from crisis but safety in that if i venture too far into unknown territory like inner unknown territory then i can keep myself safe and then i also wrote on the spiritual emergence network that's a safety tool for dialogue + emotional cpr training which I'm hoping to bring here and the voice is envisioned study club and the voices and visions support group as I found when I went to the group they were very much not into pathologizing that particular so-called symptom and i even have their group guidelines and i says except that voices and visions are real experience same with anything that i've talked about for me it's real for me sanctions of freedom to interpret experiences in any way i like this one about the facilitators not under any pressure to report back to anyone clinically and the facilitator said that other interpretations are more empowering and meaningful and i was thinking about that this morning i was thinking about if i want to put a positive spin on this diagnosis I've been given right then and there it would be scientifically proven that I would be expected to have better results so even if it is wanting to be called a pathology by some professional people if I put a positive spin on it it's going to help me and not just positive spin as in oh I can recover that's the going positive spin right now it's no I can use some of these strengths and abilities that I've gained I've gained empathy I've gained sensitivity and that makes it difficult to function sometimes but those are actually abilities and those sensitivities I can use actually to interpret and find meaning in my experience so by saying the experience is not meaningful is actually denying some of the main faculties that one gains through this process which is empathy and compassion because the process is so jarring and it's so vast that it definitely expands one's range of one's ability to sense and perceive things we can only really see something that we have the contacts for and by being given this vast array of context now we're more sensitive to so many things and that the thing is that the way society is designed most of the stuff that we would move towards in society naturally when we're programmed we actually will recoil from when we lose that programming because we see that it's dangerous and it's not actually how we're naturally wired as human beings a lot of times when they create groups or something and people that have been isolating for a long time they actually start coming out it's because it's something that is how we're naturally wired as human beings like gardening for example it feels safe it feels natural whereas if you say to someone come out and we're going to give you electric shock treatment they're probably not going to come out and that's the other extreme but it is something that's out there and another guideline is make no assumption of illness so I like that one because if I was to go to this group even though I've been diagnosed with an illness I actually don't feel that I have an illness in my heart and if I did feel like I had an illness and my heart and I took it to heart that would probably become a self-fulfilling prophecy I'd always have the lens and the lookout for anything that could be construed as illness then if I saw something out go to my doctor and then they give me another pill and then like it would just go on like that and which a spiral I actually showed my little niece a picture that I saw an Instagram and both women were 80 years old and one looked like an 80 year old woman with a cane and white hair and the other 80 year old woman had a six-pack had beautiful skin was smiling was just an incredible shape better shape than I min that's for sure and so it's those little choices that gets a person to one extreme or the other and for me having a diagnosis that puts me in a field of choices that could actually quickly lead me to death or morbidity of some kind like if I was to go on medication that made me eat more and then all of a sudden I have diabetes and then I need more pills for that I would look completely different than I look right now and right now I'm not even the healthiest that I've been but I see that because I've been put in this paradigm with this lens where I can be funneled into these choices that I wouldn't choose for myself I have to be even more aware of the choices I do make for myself because if I don't make even better choices I'm going to have less of a choice as time goes on like if I don't eat healthy I'm going to likely end up with diabetes or something because being on medications already would predispose my body to be coming out of balance and things like that and I and I was at one point probably about 30 pounds more than i am now and I started to make choices with the help of one of those apps for tracking food to really see that i was eating way too much so at first I cut my junk back by not eating as much and then I started to put in the healthy foods and that's how I lost 10 pounds and I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to lose anything because I was on this medication that was sort of keeping me at that equilibrium but I was also making poor food choices based on craving those sorts of foods based on being that on that medication so I had to break that cycle so the next part of this sheet about the spiritual emergence network and the groups is that this group is a group that doesn't pathologize so i would say i'm kind of a vision seer extraordinary experience and when I went to the group I was impressed that people actually knew what open dialogue was they knew about these other strategies so just being around people that have other experiences that would commonly be pathologized that choose not to pathologize themselves is empowering and I would like to do that more often and then I did and I did go to California to be trained as a spiritual emergence coach and haven't really utilized that I need to look at it again and see what it is that a person can can do with that it's group based so it would be another group similar to voices and visions and I think maybe after i see the healing voices movie next week i'll have a better idea of what I want to do with that and so after the personal safety measures like safety from the system and safety from self with this app strap the representation agreement then with the dialogue also safety with the spiritual emergence network crisis line and then the support groups of voices and visions and also spiritual emergence coach group it's also really important to have happiness embodied mania or whatever one chooses to call it so that's the thriving element so once one feels safe and connected and supported in a non pathologizing way but also ready to be pathologized if need be because that is the main system of crisis response right now so I'm ready to be pathologized but I'm also protected in that I won't be pathologized in the way that almost ensured chronicity for me I barely managed to us so I'm wondering why I'm trying to put myself back into that stressful poisonous paradigm which would potentiate the probability of me going into a crisis and then needing that kind of thing so the third is happiness and embodied mania and you know that could be creating a meetup group being creatively maladjusted or what I like to say is creatively adjusted because it's society that's maladjusted so when we're when we're doing something different we're actually being adjusted and we're actually adjusting society and there's another one which is options there's a book choices in recovery I think I've mentioned and it has a lot of different evidence-based stuff for people that want to design their own recovery if you want to use that word and i would say design rediscovery and recreation of oneself and it could be good to have a rat plan wellness recovery action plan i have one of those i have app and also tom Wooten's bipolar in order is a really good one for starting to test the whole thrive thing he talks about being in an uncomfortable state but being able to act in order versus being in an uncomfortable state and being in disorder and when you're in disorder that's when you have to enact a plan to bring yourself back to order and then you can try and step into that again which kind of naturally happens anyway but he's all about allowing ourselves to practice being in those uncomfortable States and practice being in order versus just getting freaked out at the first sign of one little anxious thought and i would say i did this two weeks ago when i started to feel quite distressed and i took a week off work and and it totally worked like I went back to being in order and just it took a bit of took a few days but then I felt fine whereas if I would have not done that I don't know what it would have happened I was starting I cried in front of one of my friends and there's nothing wrong with that but if that would became like a daily occurrence and I don't think that friend has ever seen me cry and I generally don't cry very often at all so so it worked and I think for me what I'm wanting to explore for myself is coming off medications and that sort of the last bit is being supported connected safe happy for me I don't think it's a good idea until I have a living environment that is more quiet and peaceful because that adds a lot of stress because when I really think about it I would rather be able to say that I'm not on any and medications and I'm managing or even thriving versus being on meds and working in the system so I might try and work with the EMP people because I have a natural path but he said it's not within a scope of practice to switch me to lithium orotate i think so i can imagine that after i hopefully have the ECP our people come here and do training and I've moved to a quiet place i can get off the lithium i want a pretty i'm on a pretty small dose I don't think there's any point in really risking my stability before our Christmas I've already voted from the psych ward celebrated a birthday in the psych ward I don't need to celebrate Christmas and the psych ward I'm definitely feeling the impulse to be embodied to go ice skating to work on my posture and my structure and everything and those things will have an effect to make it so my body last longer because I've talked about before how I think everything mental is illness in a way or is dis ease if we're mentalizing about staff that were not really at ease with the present moment so I've done a lot of unfolding meaning for myself with these experiences but at the same time they're all mentalize ations away from the present moment or in a way the present moment I had become needed all this mental ization and meaning making in order to get actually to the present moment that I'm meant to be in so it's not really the mental is a shins that have meaning as much they were necessary to get there for example if I have a mental ization that I need to kill myself it's going to get me to a moment where I might think I need to kill myself where nothing really could be happening in the moment to actually justify the fact that that needs to happen besides the words the mentalizing and mentalizing is like mental lies there lies I could be thinking about anything right now but the fact of the matter is I'm just sitting here in my living room and anything moving away from that would be like saying well I don't want to be sitting here in my living room I want to be thinking about something else and I think a lot of the people who critique not thinking have never put the work in to get to that state and to see that it's very similar to the thinking state there's just not all these words going on and we don't necessarily understand that words don't need to be going on in order for us to actually act act based on the intelligence of the body not on the abstractions and conceptualizations of the mind which usually aren't congruent with what is happening with the body so we turn the body into a habit in order to be lost in our abstractions giving us maybe dopamine or something like that when if we're in the moment acting without thought we're getting that perception of that action versus the abstractions and not having the perception of the action it's almost like we don't even feel our body anymore and maybe we don't feel it partly because it's in a lot of pain because we never were able to act in the moment oftentimes when we experience pain we've recorded something that somebody says that Lisi is painful or we record something that's pleasurable and then those are the moments we recall as memories to vacillate between pleasure and pain what I'm saying is if we're just going between pleasure and pain in our own head based on our own abstractions we're not actually in contact with our body and our gestures and when we are in contact with that what's being recorded is nothing it's just all passing through us as us with us as the moment in the moment with the moment and I even made a note of something that kind of rings true it's it seems like supposing mental illness is attaching different meanings to life than the one we've been programmed to attach to life for example education is success getting a good job that pays well is success and then often people that get highly educated and get a suppose a good job they don't feel happy and then that's when all that mental ization is happening in order to allow them to cope with the fact that they're so far away from their innate happiness because they've been tricked into putting all their life energy and money into training and education to get this good job success is always away from the moment and success away from the moment is a thought and if we're always thinking that success is in the future it will always be in the future and if we think that success is a certain thing that's a thought when we get that thing we're going to realize that's not happiness so these other meaning makings that get so extreme that they're seen as hallucinations and delusions are actually a way for us to see different meanings to get us away from our program meanings but those aren't necessarily the meanings of life either it's just sort of a process to see oh there are other meanings and Oh any meaning can be attached to anything and when one sees any meaning can be attached to anything along the way none of it means anything in particular and that's another thing is to have a delusion suppose a delusion that is attaching apparent meaning to something or thinking something or having a certain belief it can just be a passing thing like a cloud like oh that's nice but if say I was to also believe something then it can become problematic because now I start comparing everything to that belief and and then things get really confusing so part of it is that who is the one that believes well usually it has to be some kind of Center or some kind of ego structure so once we attach even like a really high belief to something well now we've recreated that ego center when the believer and the belief are one of the same is the same process it's this trying to attach to something part of what I think has helped me along the way is to not really believe any of it so if I talk about an experience well that was interesting but it's not something to be believed part of this process to this meaning making shows us that we can make infinite meanings and if we don't attach to any of them then it just keeps going and I think at some point when some of those meaning making things that happen start to level off in terms of say like being too high or too low or too odd I think that's when the brains natural learning process is re equilibrate it it's like okay well now it's just learning without accumulating anything because in the same way that a brain can create infinite meanings as it goes along in the day when those meanings actually become learnings they become insights and then they're like oh that's interesting vs. well that's so far out there and and I think that's part of the process is getting to a place where the brain can learn without attaching to things and being taken away by it so when I have insights into things that usually just come up naturally and then sometimes there'll be one that comes out of nowhere that's way beyond what I was even learning about are enquiring about in my brain and then it's kinda like oh that's nice sort of like an outlier but when a person like if I was in an extreme state those outliers would be coming all the time and it gets to be a bit much because if I'm sort of inquiring within a certain range and there's an outlier if it's if it's just sort of dropped instead of clinging on to and then all these other outliers start coming and it's not able to make my brains not able to make any sense of it so I think I think part of the process is just the brain reestablishing learning actual learning how we used to learn and I've talked about this in previous videos about the mine screen and pattern recognition versus binary good bad positive negative pleasure pain I came across this mad in America article by Ron Unger and he says that he's talking about criticism around the biomedical model biochemical imbalance in the brain theory but instead they tried to convince us that scientific consensus exists around a notion of biochemical imbalances which actually lacks evidence and they frame the drugs as handily correcting the problem even though the actual evidence suggests that the drugs create a biologically abnormal state of suppressed dopamine and that this in turn causes the brain to shrink etc and so when I read that I found an interesting because I've been talking quite a bit about dopamine and and and how if these drugs suppress dopamine it's sort of suppressing something with the ego and i'm not sure what and i don't have time to talk about it right now i have to go to a meeting so i'll think about it but it's interesting that those drugs act on dopamine it suggests that something sort of gone wrong with the dopamine and i think what's gone wrong with the dopamine is that the dopamine is just wrong and something else is trying to be established but that could be part of the ego band-aid is it acts on dopamine somehow and and by suppressing this dopamine maybe it's trying to explode and implode on itself but these medications come in and kind of keep this dopamine thing going to some extent this ego self and maybe that's necessary for now um but it's just really interesting that I saw that

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