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!
In 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.
Since 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.
