St. Therese of Lisieux...

I recently got the impression that the true patron saint of my soul is not St. Jude Thaddeus or St. Anthony of Padua, both still very important and close to me... but instead, St. Therese of Lisieux.  Here's why:

When I first visited the Carmelite monastery in Niagara Falls years ago, still very much deeply spiritually ill, I felt chills while pulling up to the property in my cab.  As discussed in older posts, this is the home of a shrine to St. Therese that contains artifacts from her life, but also relics, including bone, a piece of her nun's habit, and a vial of her blood.  Wandering the property for the three days I spent there that first time, I kept having visions of her smiling face.  I have also had powerful signs of her in the physical world here and there, everything from oddness with technology after reciting her litany with my girlfriends, to a random friend gifting me a handbag with her printed on it from The Society of the Little Flower, which is associated with the monastery I visited.  Also, a very interesting phenomenon happens whenever I think of her, which is that I always get a very prominent vision of her in my mind's eye.  This doesn't happen to me with any other Catholic saint but her.  It was like she wanted me to pray to her more often.

I think St. Therese might get the way I chose to go about my day to day since I committed to simplifying my life out of surviving diabolical possession and crippling levels of PTSD, she having created the path known as The Little Way.  She would probably also understand my youthfulness, be it an autistic trait of mine or simply just a part of who I am, and she would also understand the horror of dark forces.  I like going to St. Michael's cathedral in Toronto because that cathedral has several statues of prominent saints I felt have answered my prayers: St. Therese, St. Jude, St. Anthony, among them.  (Also, St. Michael is an angel that fights the devil, so it felt like a call to visit a cathedral named after him... it was also simply nearby.) Though it feels like I wasn't meant to convert to Roman Catholicism, there is Catholic spirit to my path, however eclectic I may seem.  I am not sure I would impress many with my way at this point, but what matters is that I am recovering, that it works.

Some musings now on kundalini, which I have been giving more thought to as I contemplate.  Kundalini awakening is often criticized for being an unscientific idea, for the existence of its energy has never been proven (although results in the brain of its alleged activity have been suggested through studies, leading researchers to conclude that something is going on).  Here's my argument - kundalini itself is nothing more than will from the intelligence of the Great Mother, the planet, demanding a perfected human being, it is the process of Her shaping us to be the person She wants to see in us.  So kundalini is not a coiled energy, that's metaphor, and there is no "sacred serpent"(I would argue that's metaphor too, in this case for the human spine and the reptilian portion of the brain) - it is no more an "energy" than a person's independent will to commit to something.  What's physical is associated reactions in the body as the Mother's will is exerted on the individual, demanding a divine connection to the Great Father through a neurological process.  I would argue that St. Theresa of Avila had her own perspective on this process, the context was Catholic in her case, not the Indian school of thought that I studied when I got some sense of what I was going through with my awakening.

Hooray - Hallowe'en approaches in days!  I'm hosting a small get-together, then onward to clubland in costume!

-Saraƒin

Another bizarre medical memory from 2008...

Something else just came to mind that I want to discuss, a haunting memory that worries me.  Since it happened, my brain has just never felt quite the same.  (Lately, I might be in full recovery, but for the longest time, not so much):

I can't remember if it was before or after I had come off the CTO, but I was in my room in Parkdale, smoking a joint, and listening to music through my headphones.  Suddenly, there was the sensation of something bursting in my head, and in horror it felt like blood was pooling inside of my skull.  My speech began to slur, and I felt less able to concentrate or speak.

I called the paramedics, who weren't particularly nice (one was so rude when I couldn't sit still for a needle), and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in an ambulance.  There, I was rolling around on the waiting room floor in agony, while staff screamed at me to get up.  Eventually, I was given a bed, while waiting for a scan of my brain.

I woke the next morning, feeling that God was speaking to me.  Not quite the same as I was the day before, I was then issued the scan.  They found nothing wrong, which surprised me, because it seemed really real.  But ever since then, things just felt slightly off.  I could never convince medicine to run any further scans, I wonder what to make of it.  If it was just a really bad trip, it certainly was scary and convinced me of something far worse at the time.  Later that year, my arrests happened, no one understood what I thought I had endured neurologically, and I guess just wanted to blame "bad behaviour" on some manic trait or something.  It was maddening how tough I had to become once the system decided to punish me over silly metaphysical doorway notes with a Criminal Harassment accusation, and of course with what happened with the stalker.  Jail was how I learned to control my temper.

God is telling me that my brain did suffer something, and that I am making a full recovery.  I am very disappointed in western medicine in Canada for the number of times it has both harmed and mishandled me, I only wish for medical care that made sense.  Aging is frightening when they are careless and don't know what to make of you.

-Saraƒin

Literal lunacy...

After receiving a blessing from St. Dymphna a couple of months ago, I got a random download about how I was under an occult lunar influence from something that went wrong because of what I was dealing with due to the entity.  Praying it away rigorously, it took about two months, but there was a release two nights ago while I was lying in bed, like a thump sensation.  It's come to my attention that this influence might have irritated both my subconscious, along with my ability to channel finer details.  Mild, but annoying, and it might have also just made life slightly more unpleasant than it had to be.  We'll see what the next stage is as I feel things through, but the latest is that I should feel a little bit better still in a couple of days.

Sadly, I did not get accepted into "A Nightmare on Roncesvalles 5", nor did my bestie, who also submitted a painting.  Oh well, we'll find other things to do this month for Hallowe'en.  Unfortunately, events like pop-up bars and even "Code Orange" spooky decorating finds don't seem as interesting as they have in the city in previous years.  There's a candlelit concert at St. James Cathedral of Gabriel Faure's "Requiem" coming up on November 1st.  I will likely go to that, because "Requiem Op 48" is one of my absolute faves of Catholic religious music.

I forgot to mention, traffic jumped exponentially on this blog as of about a year ago.  It's interesting what countries are reading this, because oddly enough, Canada is not high on the list.  I wonder if it means I've been mentioned in periodicals I am not aware of?

-Saraƒin

MAiD for mental illness - my opinion...

It was recently ruled in Canada that MAiD for mental illness alone is not going forward as an option, at least not for now.  I wanted to discuss how I feel about this subject:

I honestly agree with this decision, I think it becomes a slippery slope when the state becomes involved if a person wishes to die for reasons like this.  Considering how terrible my psychological state was many years ago, I probably would have been issued a lobotomy in another decade, so - considering that MAiD has randomly been recommended even to elders who have gone into hospital for non-terminal concerns, such as having a broken leg, it worries me that a doctor or nurse might have recommended MAiD to me at my worst, it's entirely possible that this might have eventually been encouraged for many if this legislation had gone through.  I certainly was encouraged to see myself as forever dependent on medications, perhaps even dependent on long term care, they also insisted that my mother see it that way when they talked to her about my prognosis.  I proved that notion wrong by willing finer states over the years with spiritual self-discipline, alternative medicine, and understanding that the root of my pain with "psychosis" was in fact religious/occult, and not of the brain itself.

In a world that often ignores the soul, I imagine that many of these unwanted psychological states are constructs of a time, suffrage we know not only from a sad state of affairs related to injustice, trauma, a world that has grown too loud and too fast, but often from not leading the lives we were born to live, culturally treating the ecosystem like a prostitute and not like our sacred mother, there are many reasons suffrage might happen to the mind that go beyond just having a sick brain. There is a disclaimer at the front of every DSM edition that states that there are no biomedical markers to definitively diagnose any of these conditions.  Perhaps if there were, it wouldn't be psychiatric illness anymore, it would be a variant of neurological disease.  It is all that, my personal history and recovery and the miracle recoveries of those I have known and more that mean that I simply can't agree with MAiD for mental illness.

What I do want to see is the expansion of alternative medicines for mental health in mainstream hospital settings, particularly in the widespread availability of drugs like ibogaine, a treatment that can solve not only addiction, but also certain forms of mental illness, PTSD included.  This treatment is often too expensive for people who could really benefit from it, and I would love to see it covered.  (Although there is a risk of cardiovascular problems with ibogaine in certain individuals, it would benefit many who are ideal candidates, one must remember that many mainline treatments have difficult side effects, chemotherapy is one example that comes to mind.  I think ibogaine should at least be explored more because of its miracle properties.)  It wasn't doctors who discussed ibogaine with me, it was random people I had talked to.  I am shocked by the tone of those who deem it "progressive" to say things like "if a person is going to kill themselves anyway, why not help them do it with the hand of a medical practitioner?"  It's a statement that reeks of "I don't care about humanity", and with sentiments like that, I imagine we would go into a time where definitely forensic mental health patients might even be encouraged to consider it by medical professionals (and certainly by the public), simply for having crossed a line while sick.  We do not have the death penalty in Canada, but some might go there in their thinking for the chronically mentally ill who are incarcerated, or under the Ontario Review Board, as an example.

I don't consider my opinion difficult, maybe some who suffer from mental illness would disagree, but I know there is so much room for error in even getting a diagnosis right, and such a need for better care overall, that this would just be a crime to me, a failure of the state in taking care of its citizens, if this were to move forward.  

In my darker states, I had mused on this blog about MAiD for myself if it were to go through, I now disagree with these feelings, I would never do such a thing.  My recovery is going well, I am off Latuda, and I will never consider suicide again.

-Saraƒin