Schizoaffective

 "To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space." I ended last week's blog post with this sentence. This week, I am going to explain it fully. We'll begin with the notion of "freedom." I was arguing that true freedom has less to do with ego-based choices than is often claimed. Instead, freedom is responding to all that is around me in a given moment in an attuned manner. What are free people attuned to? Paradoxically, they are attuned to fate. I am using the word "fate" in a manner that does allow for some choice. By "fate," I am thinking of all that impinges on a moment: history, current events, biology, biography, climate, and so on. Most all of this is well outside our conscious control, and even outside of our knowledge purview. There is no way to grasp all that goes into the possibility of a momen...

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

 When things are difficult for me, I can tend to get down on myself. I blame myself wholly for my predicament, thinking that I was completely and utterly responsible for it. As this happens, I try to remember what the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen counseled: treat yourself as you would a baby. By this he certainly didn't mean to infantilize yourself and act childish. Instead, he was suggesting we treat ourselves with tenderness, affection, and understanding. We don't judge babies. We respond to them according to the needs of the moment. Ideally, we always do that with tenderness, affection, and understanding. I need to remind myself of this because I, like a lot of people, assume I have more control over my life than I do. I judge and blame myself for feelings and actions that stem from circumstances I never formed. For instance, I could have anxious feelings because of my biology and genetics, my personal history, current events, and even my relation to the natural world. C...

by Jay Paul  While meditating, I, like most meditators, frequently find myself lost in thought, perhaps thinking about an old girlfriend or about all the chores I have to do later in the day or my fear that my mental health symptoms will reappear. As I catch myself thinking like this, I most often simultaneously notice my breath. I feel myself inhale and exhale, all the way in and all the way out. My profound sense when this happens is that breath is much more grounded and connected to experience than is thought. What follows are some observations on breath and thought based on this experience and sense. Breath is wiser than thought. Thought flits and flecks, comes and goes, rarely landing in a solid manner. Even the greatest of thoughts, such as Isaac Newton conceptualizing gravity when the apple hit him on the head, are superficial compared to a single breath. Respiration connects us humans to the rest of nature, to the way bats and rats and lions breathe. It connects us, in its ...

 Psychiatrists are like car mechanics who don't know how to drive—they've never actually used what they give to us people with mental health issues to purportedly "fix" us. They are like car mechanics who never felt their foot depress a gas pedal or allowed a steering wheel to ease back into the straight ahead position after a turn. Such car mechanics may very well know what books say about cars, but they have no idea what it is like to operate one. They don't fix cars from experience, but from what they have been told. Psychiatrists, I have found, are woefully naîve about medications, particularly when it comes to side effects and withdrawal. Sometimes, I think they are willfully naîve. I say this because they dismissed me and refused to listen to me when I tried to tell them about side effects and withdrawal. I guess they believed the books and classes they took more than they believed the evidence of my own body. Their body certainly couldn't tell them anyt...

by Jay Paul Estrangement is neither good nor bad. It is a position I find myself in many times a day. It occurs when I need to step out of my most intimate involvements with people and things, to see as a stranger, one who is not so involved. I do this to understand conceptually what is going on. When I am clear, I go back into the involvements, having reoriented myself. This is the role of conceptualization: to solve estrangement and allow me back into my involvements, to help me be intimate in my world once again.                    When I am driving, I usually do not rely on concepts. Oh, I rely on training and experience, but these have become habituated into my very muscles, well below the level of conceptualization. I don’t  think   when I drive, unless I have to. When driving I make sense of little around me. Other cars are blurs of color, as are pedestrians. Sounds come from them, too. Not thought, but habituation marks...

Meditation is in vogue. Various people representing divergent interests frequently tout its health benefits. I have no doubt that there are benefits to meditation, but that is not why I do it. At this point, I feel I do it for the same reason I breathe: it is part of my make-up and the way I am in the world. I meditate frequently: twice a day, 50 minutes a session. That's 100 minutes a day on my chair. The type of meditation I do is called "shikantaza" and is based in Zen. I simply sit quietly, and when a thought or feeling comes up, I notice it, acknowledge it, and let it go. Sometimes, of course, I get caught in my thoughts and daydream for a while. When I notice I am doing this, again, I acknowledge it and get back to just sitting, noticing thoughts, and letting them go. I have meditated off and on my whole adult life, but I only got truly serious about it in early 2019. Soon, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes a sitting. I became quite devoted to meditation a...