Structure and Freedom

September 3rd, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

I’ve written a lot about things I’ve discovered doing yoga recently. It seems to me that yoga is a means to see the inner workings of your mind, which for me, leads to better mental health. I write about it in the hope you might relate.

There is a structure to my mind. This is where I keep my responsibilities, goals, and prohibitions. I generate all these as I live from moment to moment and day to day. For example, when I get up each morning I must walk my dog. This morning, I made the goal to walk him far enough to tire him out a bit, as I wanted him to be low-key while spending the day with my wife at her office later. In the prohibition department, I couldn’t let us walk as far as I wanted, as time was limited.

Structure like this is very important for me–it keeps me organized and guides me through each day. It has been instrumental in keeping me on track throughout my recovery from schizophrenia. But, there is more to me than that. I believe that not realizing this well enough may have contributed directly to my psychotic break 20 years ago.

I still experience the urge to prohibit certain emotions from entering my mind. Throughout my adolescence I feared that evil would take over my mind if I was not vigilant against it. In fact, the chief delusion I had after my break was that another, malignant personality sought to enter my mind and take over my body. As a result, since then I have put up reflexive barriers in my mind to keep out darker emotions.

But it is the free flow of emotion and thought inside my mind that allows me to experience life as it really is, I have discovered. There is a “Me” that experiences all this in some way beyond my understanding, deeper than structure. Learning to relax while doing yoga has enabled me to do this, to be thus. At times, I can feel free now.

Ironically, it is being in touch with this deep self that puts me in touch with the outside world. Here’s a pretty mundane thing that this post-yoga mental state turned into an extraordinary experience: this morning I ate some  strawberries which tasted so intense, so delicious. Have you ever been surprised by something run-of-the-mill like that?

It’s these moments of free-flowing experience in which I am truly alive.

Incidentally, I may not be able to blog next week in that it will be the week leading up to IMHRO’s Music Festival for Mental Health. Preparations have me already running around like a chicken without a head! :) Next Friday at 11:45 AM and noon I will be interviewed along with Glenn Close, spokesperson for BringChange2Mind, on the San Francisco Bay Area’s KGO 7 station. If you can, please tune in. In case you miss it, I plan to embed video of the interviews on this site. Also, check out the story on our festival that ran in our local newspaper today, Napa Valley Register.

Happy Friday!

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News, Some of it Good

August 26th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

Thank you for reading Healing the Mind. IMHRO’s Music Festival for Mental Health is 2 weeks from kickoff.  I am sorry— I would love to write a blog post for you today but I am busily engaged in preparing for the event.

On the good news side, IMHRO has chosen its 3 Rising Star Award winners for 2010! Two of these brilliant scientists will speak about their research proposals at the Music Festival. For a sneak peek at their lines of inquiry, please check out this website’s pages on Dr. Joshua Gordon and Dr. Herman Wolosker.

Have a great week and stay tuned!

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Heroes, Tolerance, and Moving Forward: A Guest Post by Linea Johnson

August 18th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

Linea Johnson

Linea Johnson

Linea Johnson is an advocate, motivational speaker and writer for the cause of mental health awareness. She manages and posts on the BringChange2Mind blog, and writes the bunny years, a blog of her own. This week I’m happy to bring you this guest post from her.

What is a hero?

As someone who has struggled with the ups and downs of bipolar disorder I have often looked for inspirations to help me get through the day. I have searched for heroes to save me from my pains or to make it all disappear, but gradually, as I began to mature and better understand my illness I found a different meaning for the word “hero.”

As Waldo Emerson states, “The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.”

In the last couple years I have discovered that a hero is not always a person who physically saves an individual from imminent death or someone who makes monumental changes in history. To me a hero is someone who through perseverance has the ability to make small changes in minds and hearts that often seem impossible. It is not only their brilliance and strength, but their ability to weather the most devastating storms and come out smiling. It is that enormous ability of taking one step at a time to move forward, no matter how slow they have to go.

Two years ago I was given an amazing opportunity. I was able to attend the Seeds of Compassion conference in which the Dalai Lama and dozens of other heroes, role models, and inspirations came together to talk about peace and compassion. I attended the spirituality discussion where leaders of different faiths came to talk about inter-spiritual dependence. There were many, many amazing speakers at this event, but what impacted me the most was the interaction between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. These two eighty-year-old men acted like five-year-old best friends. They giggled and slapped each other, but unlike five-year-olds, they flowed gracefully between eloquent, serious answers and complete overflowing joy.

It is people like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu that inspire me to go forward everyday.  Both men were put in leadership roles during horrific and painful acts of injustice in which their lives and those of their people were in great danger. As the Dalai Lama was forced into exile, making him leave his people, country, and life behind, Tutu was dealing with the massacre that was South African apartheid. These men were the happiest people I have ever seen. They laughed and giggled and danced. They smiled and joked. They demonstrated that they had survived. They lived through that cruelty. That pain. That fear. And they led their people to peacefully and compassionately show resistance to the prejudices of the world. It is through heroes like these that we are reminded that no matter what happens in life, no matter how bad it gets, you can always move forward. They show us that though you may have overcome one hurdle, there may be many more to come, but through drive, compassion, and persistence you can keep moving and keep pushing.

There is a quote by Nelson Mandela that I love: “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

In my own path, I have not experienced anything even slightly resembling the trauma that these men witnessed. But I don’t think that’s the point. I have been through pain, I know what it feels like to be at the bottom, and now that I am past it, now that I am “free”, I can use my experiences to inspire and help others to climb their own mountains.

Through my heroes I have learned the importance of moving forward. I have also learned that to do so it is crucial to generate and maintain compassion for your darkest demons, whether they are physical, living individuals or merely fragments of your own mind. With this act we not only help ourselves progress, but through inspiration, help others to achieve and create compassion for their selves, their loved ones, and their enemies. To me, this moving forward is a practice of tolerance, and as the 14th Dalai Lama says, “In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”

To read more by Linea Johnson, please visit the BringChange2Mind blog or the bunny years.

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Bye-bye, Mimi

August 10th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin
Shari and DeEtta

Mimi (at right) with my Mom at Christmas 2009

My grandmother “Mimi” passed away this morning. My mother’s mother was a lady who had a difficult life but never lost her capacity to love.

I remember when I was small, she would take care of me when both my parents were busy. I would play with her dogs, Champsie and Chi Chi, cranky old toy poodles, walking them with her and letting them sit on my lap. When I’d visit her I’d spend hours quietly playing, with Legos or Matchbox cars on her deck. When I was seven she sewed me the coolest Halloween costume ever—a silver spaceman outfit. I always felt safe when I was with her. She adored my sister and me and called us “the apples of her eye.”

Then there passed about twenty years when I didn’t want to talk with her. As a young teen, still unfamiliar with bipolar disorder, I had seen her in a few of her manic phases, and couldn’t understand her behavior. It scared me, and I resented the things she would say. I wish I had understood the nature of her mood disorder then, and not taken personally the manifestations of her symptoms.

She moved to Arizona with her husband, my step-grandfather, Burke, for several years. Soon after Burke passed away, my Mom and her sister helped Mimi move to an assisted living community in Napa near us, her family. Although I was still a little scared, I wanted to try to get to know her again.

I regret not having had more time to spend with her during these last years. We did spend some pleasant hours together when I took her to lunch or dinner, and my walls gradually came down. I was able to see again what a genuinely sweet, funny person she was. She was happy for me and my wife in our new marriage, happy we had gotten our puppy Cooper.

Once, at lunch, we had been talking about good times past and I suddenly grew quiet as I remembered that her health was failing. I couldn’t help but think that it wouldn’t be long before we couldn’t have these lunches any more. She would be gone.

“Where are you?” she asked, a twinkle in her eye.

“Oh—” I started. “I was just thinking about the trip Nancy and I took to the mountains this winter…” Struck by how sharp she still was, I was relieved later that she didn’t appear to catch the cover-up.

In one of the last times I visited her, she had been bedridden for a few weeks already, and on hospice. I told her about Cooper’s latest exploits, and her eyes lit up as she listened. When she told me about some of the apparently hallucinatory experiences she had recently had (possibly due to the heavy meds she was on), I found that I was able to listen and respond as if I believed her. I still thank God for my ability to do that then.

Two days ago I said goodbye to her for the last time. I am grateful for the chance to meet her eyes then, tell her I loved her, and see her smile again. But saying goodbye and walking out of that room was the hardest thing I have done in a long time. I didn’t want to let on that I knew I might not see her again. I just wanted to let her go peacefully back to sleep.

Now, that is where she is—at peace. I am smiling right now as I write this. The aches and cares of her earthly life over, she can move on and so can I.

I find in reflecting on the end of her life that I appreciate my ongoing life even better. The world is aglow today.

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Please visit BringChange2Mind’s blog to read my “guest post”

August 6th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

Hi everyone. As promised in my last post, Linea Johnson has been kind enough to post my “guest post,” Why I am an Advocate, on the BringChange2Mind blog. If you’d like, click over and give it a look. Thanks again, Linea.

Stay tuned here for a new post next Wednesday.

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On Keeping an Open Mind

August 4th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

butterflyIn Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, the title character learns much from life, growing on the path to his goal: enlightenment. Each part of his life is fascinating and potentially instructive to read about.

I was working at my office last week, dealing with task after task, when I checked the IMHRO Facebook page. Behold, there was a comment on my blog by a very nice lady, Cinda Johnson. Cinda and her daughter Linea each write their own blogs, among other things they do to advocate for mental health, and I thought to myself then, “Why not check out a post or two.”

I paused for a moment. I had plenty of work to do already. Then I remembered the example Siddhartha demonstrated when, on a business trip, he spontaneously enjoyed an extra week of “free time” in the community his clients lived in. His boss chewed him out when he returned to work, but he explained that one possible consequence of his extended sojourn might be better relations with those clients. I.e., sometimes if you travel with the wind, it might blow you somewhere even better than you could expect.

So, I clicked over to Linea’s latest post in her blog, the bunny years. She wrote movingly about how revisiting her experiences dealing with her bipolar disorder as she wrote a book to chronicle them was very painful. However, she and her extended family had just had a weekend get-together, which she reported she really enjoyed. She felt happy, something she had forgotten, for a time, she could be.

I posted in a comment, “Fantastic! …No question, you deserve some happiness of your own!”

Reading Linea’s post reminded me that even in the midst of a demanding but rewarding life at work in mental health advocacy, there is nothing as valuable as happiness.

That Sunday, when my wife took our dog out on the back patio to watch birds for a while in the sun, I joined her. The chores could wait. It made for the most pleasant weekend we had had in a long time. :)

By the way, Linea has just invited me to write a guest post on the BringChange2Mind blog that she runs. It will be about why I am a mental health advocate. In case you’d like to read it, I’ll post a link here when it’s up.

Linea, thanks. :)

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The Mystery of Faith

July 28th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

In a conversation with a very wise young friend of my sister, I once quoted Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” She responded, “Actually, some things that happen ARE bad.”

A string of troubling events in the lives of people I love has brought me back to this memory. Lately I’ve often felt concerned and anxious, and I’ve seen that my sister’s friend was right.

Brandon on the trailSince I was a child I have lived under the mistaken impression that I can bootstrap my way out of feeling bad by rethinking situations. A few years ago this belief was the basis for a creative writing class memoir I wrote called “Lizard Finds his Feet.” It was a supposed coming of age story about me failing to develop the leadership ability I wanted while a student on an Outward Bound wilderness course, feeling confused and frustrated, and thinking about it until I was satisfied that I could lead by following! When my classmates read it and commented that they pitied my character in the story, it devastated me. I realized that my misplaced faith in my analytical abilities as the answer to all my problems had kept my head in the sand throughout much of my life.

I am pretty sure my self-absorbed focus played some part in me developing schizophrenia. And, I believe that my continued frequent reliance on this faith has been a source of continued symptoms.

The thing is, the issues that cause my anxiety are bigger than me. No wonder I can’t resolve them by internal effort alone.

When I had that epiphany thanks to my classmates, I decided I’d better open my eyes and start learning. In the intervening years, I have, thankfully, learned a lot, including to care about other people and how they feel, and I do feel healthier.

But here’s the strange thing I’ve been getting to. Growing and getting healthier takes external awareness as well as internal. But, one thing I often do to help myself gain perspective might seem at first glance purely internal: prayer.

This morning found a moment to stand quietly, lower my gaze, and, in my mind, thank God for what are the guiding stars in my life: my wife, our dog, our extended family. I let my thoughts and feelings flow from there. A few moments passed as I joyfully reflected. Then, I felt refreshed, and renewed, centered in love. I saw the external world and all its problems with serenity. When I pray, this refreshment almost always comes.

I honestly cannot fathom how this change in perspective works except that it must be more than a purely internal process. I think it works in part because, for me, God and love are bigger than me. Maybe my love and faith are a means to unite what matters most in my internal and external worlds.

It works, even though I don’t fully understand. :)

Can anyone out there relate?

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Patience

July 20th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin
Big Sur River

Big Sur River

It amazes me when I contemplate the insights I gain from quietly doing yoga to music in the mornings.

I have practiced (what I believe is) yoga for years. The qualifier in that statement comes from the fact that I have never taken a lesson. I learned several poses from Wii Fit, an exercise program on the Nintendo Wii, about a year and a half ago and have been doing them a few times a week ever since.

When I started, I viewed the poses as means to tough physical exercise, the kind I was used to. I would focus on how I wanted the pose to feel, where I wanted my limbs to be, and the pace of my breathing. As I tried harder week by week to get these things right I got more and more frustrated. I would end many sessions feeling tired and stressed.

I’m glad I’ve stuck with it.

This morning, for example, I learned patience. When I woke up this morning, I was pretty tired, having done late housework the night before. Instead of striving to feel good by executing a strenuous exercise regimen, as I held my first pose I realized that I could just enjoy what I really wanted to do, which was clearing my mind for a little while with the yoga. Peace was not somewhere in the future. It was right then and there.

It was exactly what I had been seeking for so long. The session flowed naturally, and many invigorating insights came to me.

For example, there is always time to accomplish what is really important. Building an ability, like yoga, for example, to a rewarding level can take years (especially, I would think, because I’ve been figuring it out by myself), and I feel that this realization applies to anything truly important in life.

I like the analogy that one’s life is like a river—no matter what comes up around each bend, it will flow to where it is going in good time.

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Self-acceptance

July 14th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

“Every now and then the things I lean on lose their meaning/And I find myself careening/into places where I should not let me go…”

-James Taylor, Something in the Way She Moves

When you’re feeling agitated, how do you find your center again? Is it possible to accomplish by sheer force of will? These are questions I’ve constantly subconsciously dwelt on.

Brandon and Cooper

Me and Cooper

My wife Nancy and I have a 6-month-old labradoodle puppy named Cooper. He’s an adorable little guy who loves to be chased, to meet people, play with his doggie pals and to sleep under tables. Sometimes the self-doubt that still plagues my mind as a recovering schizophrenic interferes with me enjoying my growing relationship with him. I have heard that eye contact with your dog can reinforce your bond, but I have difficulty with engaging with him that way. When I look into his soulful eyes, I start to feel uncomfortable, and then to try to correct that discomfort by making an effort to hold his gaze, sometimes by trying to smile. Needless to say, he usually looks away when I do this. You can’t put one over on a dog.

I think that the habit I have learned over years of trying to hide flat or “inappropriate” emotions, commonly encountered by people with my condition, is now a nuisance. But I am starting to learn to let it go.

Last weekend as I was doing yoga I fully relaxed  for the first time in as long as I can remember. No self-criticism, no striving to “think differently”—I was fine with myself. What a beautiful, easy morning that went on to be. I wonder if there are people who live in that state. That sounds like ideal sanity to me.

Yesterday evening, I had a wonderful conversation with my wife as we relaxed over dinner. I made it a point to meet her eyes with everything I said (something I tend, as a habit, not to do with people) and the eye contact must have been a plus—we sat and talked long after we finished eating.

I think that me learning some peace with myself is enabling our already great relationship to grow even more pleasing.

I’m looking forward to seeing her, and Cooper, this evening.

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Memories… and Perspective

July 7th, 2010 by Brandon Staglin

Where would we be without our memories?

Today, as I did my morning exercise, I was listening to some old rock music from my collection–classic Sister Hazel and Barenaked Ladies. I was struck by the lighter tone of the music of a decade ago next to the music of today. Of course, the tone jives with the attitudes of the people playing it (and listening to it) and undoubtedly reflects the cultural current they live in. Swimming as I reminisced in my feelings of a decade ago (and even a few years ago), I noticed for the first time pangs of nostalgia.

It’s taken me years to recover as far as I have from the worst of schizophrenia. To some degree, I still bask in the relief of being able to get out of my head and  live in the moment again. But I miss the relative innocence I lived in before I grew aware, through watching and reading news media and experiencing in my life some of the changes in the world they relate, that we are living in a darker time. There is much concern, and I share in it, about global issues that endanger our lives and our humanity: the growing influence of the Taliban in the Middle East, climate change, dwindling fuel reserves, the global economic recession. And on and on. I often wish there were something I could do to fix it all.

NASA rocket launch

photo: NASA

So, here’s my two cents: It is clear to me that idly lamenting about world affairs is a waste of time. I think the root of these issues I have listed is an exploding human population on a limited planet. We humans are beautiful, wonderful creatures, but with almost seven billion of us eating, drinking, building, and burning fossil fuels, the Earth is feeling the strain and so are we. Sustainable living and renewable energy efforts are certainly worthwhile, but to get our species and our planet to a better place we will need to also manage our population growth, and find a way to move beyond the Earth. In the near term, this will mean developing practical technologies to allow people to get to and live on the Moon and Mars. This will be difficult. I think it will be necessary. And it will be an adventure that can invigorate our economy and our culture in many ways.

It’s good to dream and good to talk about it. Thank you for listening.

So, I say, find a few moments of peace in your daily life right now. I find that reveling in memories, and imagining where life might go, for a few minutes a day does wonders to clear the cobwebs from my head and heart. Try it, and see if you too feel inspired.

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