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I came across this little thing that I made a while ago and he can't really see but I wrote all over it oh you can kind of see and I was trying to outline some of the things that I was reading and discovering about the work of dr. Daniel Siegel and he has the book mind sight he has another great book called the pocket book guide to interpersonal neurobiology it's not much of a pocketbook it's quite thick but it's a very good book and I might have mentioned it before but I was noticing as i was coloring over some of it in darker ink as opposed to pencil that i wrote here states become traits and this is what I've been talking about in the in my thoughts about how the manic state can let us know what trades to practice to actually have those traits as opposed to only having those traits in the manic state and that's what i call embodying your mania and the retrospective process is sort of harvesting your mania or hacking your mania and and he actually says it right in what i wrote down states become traits and the example he gave was by putting oneself in a mindful state for say 10 minutes a day eventually a person will actually have the trait of mindfulness so the 10 minute a day practice of mindfulness leads eventually to actually just having that trait without actually having to practice anymore and that is the same equivalent to one having a state of mania where they have all these traits in the state but they're not actual traits that we actually have as real traits their temporary trades and that's why i mentioned practicing the manic traits so even i wonder and I've never really thought of this before if even just practicing a certain trait for 10 minutes a day alone just creating some kind of practice around generosity and and I guess that's why people say practice gratitude some people have a gratitude practice or journaling in a way this video making is a bit of a practice for me to just talk about stuff and make things relational I've talked about making things relational before and I and I actually I got that from dr. Daniel Siegel I have several people who have influenced my thinking and I'm especially fond of the ones that are into neurobiology I have a different video where I talked about the work of Steven Kotler who I called Stephen Coulter in the video oops and Jamie wheel they talk about the flow state and there's neurophysiology in neuro electricity and the brain is very interesting so there's those two dr. Daniel Siegel david bohm dr. david bohm who's no longer with us he pioneered the holographic theory of the brain along with Carl Primbram I think I said that right and I've also been influenced by Krishnamurti J Krishnamurti Alan Watts Eckhart Tolle for sure and there's just some really great minds out there who I resonate with but with dr. Daniel Siegel I don't know if it's seagull or say call or whatever but I've been saying seagull so I think it is dr. Daniel Siegel anyways I was talking about how he talks about the relational mind and he gives the definition of the mind as a process that regulates the flow of energy and information and it's both relational and embodied so embodied is the brain and relational is our relationships so it's like the space between people and our mind exists in that too and he talks about how and I'm not really sure it makes sense to me but I can't really explain it right now maybe later you can always look up his work that's why I talk about making ones mania relational through the traits so the manic traits are very they're quite social a lot of them and by making them relational by relating in that way of the traits as the traits it's practicing it's not only practicing that state to make it an actual trait embodied in the brain actually embedded in the neurophysiology and the neural anatomy and the neuro electricity of the brain and that also it changes the brain by acting a different way and and that's the thing is I feel like that extra energy in mania is actually to be shared and it animates us in these embodied ways as state a temporary state that to me is a spontaneous social behavior that is trying to basically get us to act in harmonious ways to save humanity and the planet and that spontaneous social behavior thing is a I got that from Buckminster Fuller when I heard that I just thought oh my gosh that's just like what mania is it's a spontaneous social behavior so how do we turn that spontaneous social behavior into actually embodied and relational ways of being on a daily basis and mania is like a vision casting State it gives us that vision that perception that we can be that way that we have it within us at any given moment to go into that and it's not because it's some kind of mysterious thing I think it's actually our natural way of being and the programming and the ego programming and the ways we've been educated throughout life which I actually believe that way of educating us stops us from learning so as children young young children were learning learning learning and then also we go to school we're taught to memorize all this stuff that's not learning and that's not how we learned as children so in my mind all that education is like it's like covering the brain with elastic bands and then like yanking on them and until one time until they end up snapping and breaking and when they all snap and break off then the minds clear and it goes back into that natural way of being and learning all the time we don't have to go sit in a classroom to think okay now it's time to learn we could be learning all the time every moment of the day just by looking around just like children would so I feel like there's a bit of a difference there with the state of mania is that it's not about necessarily reflecting on one's limited ego thoughts in the state of mania that's blown entirely apart and then we have access to an entirely different way of being and learning and it's hyper learning its creativity it's play it's embodying those manic traits it's like the adult child version of ourselves we feel free and it's because we're free of that ego programming and dr. Siegel also talks about how the brain is shaped by experience and relationships and I would imagine that's also shaped by how we experience ourselves by how we're being so for being those manic traits that we discovered we were in our manic state and we're now trying to make them traits by practicing them or noticing that we're able to be that way then that way it's going to change our brain it's going to change our relationships and is going to change how we experience our experiences and it's going to make it so we can actually create our experience instead of being like this is how I am walking around like a ping-pong ball and then wondering why certain things happen while we're experiencing things the way our our thoughts are shaping the experience to be and it can be a totally different way if we're practicing our romantic traits we might actually get different responses and then never actually experienced things in those ways that we're wondering why we experience why did that happen when it happened in our mind more so than anything else the things that we take personally so there's a lot to that I just find his work quite congruent with my thinking process along how how it relates oftentimes if I see something that's kind of science e4 I read a book I always am reading it from the perspective of well how does this relate to my experience of altered states of consciousness and usually usually it relates a lot it's like all there it's just the people that are writing it aren't writing it based on an experience of altered states of consciousness or the fact that they've gone through maniac because they haven't most of the time I don't actually read just books on I haven't read a book in a really long time actually but I don't read just books on mania and what it's about and what it's like I like to read stephane like neuroscience and then it's all there is the same you can extrapolate stuff too from childhood learning to mindfulness to the way the brain operates relationally or an embodied way too well how does that relate to mania and psychosis and and altered states of consciousness and you know I use the word mania but it's that's that's just a common term for it I don't even know if that's the best description because there's altered states of consciousness there's extraordinary states of consciousness there's non-ordinary states of consciousness and who wants to just be in an ordinary state of consciousness nobody does that's why people eat chips that's why people do drugs that's why people drink alcohol so for people to go into this extraordinary state of consciousness yet all of us are trying to get away from regular waking ego consciousness we're trying to meditate in a way we're trying to you know jump out of airplanes to make it go away we do everything to make our ego go away and then people in these altered states they actually get there and the coming back process is difficult and I think there's a coming back process because we have to come back to the overall relational mind the overall external nervous system it's like we have our own personal nervous system but then there's the collective nervous system probably the relational mind and so it's like it's like the force of gravity and it's like pulling us back to the collective social fabric and that's why I feel that people that go into these states of mania it's actually part of our sort of duty after we figure it out is to help reality level up a little bit so people that go up and then have to come down it's not quite a ways to come back down into the ego consciousness and as you know not all of us make it back to ego consciousness some of us don't make it back and that's just a fact I saw in that movie the not so secret life of the manic depressive that one in five people with bipolar disorder and their life and so far I haven't but that's nothing's guaranteed so part of my thoughts on this is actually you know this is working towards and moving towards creating a framework that's a bit more gentle for people so so maybe coming back isn't so difficult and there's things out there like peer respite centers they have some in the United States they used to have a Soteria house there's different projects that have RESP it's where people can go where there's actually peers they're people that have gone through it themselves and very little medication and and I went to a workshop with dr. Michael Cornwall and dr. David Luke off called I don't know something about being with extreme states or approaching extreme states with loving receptivity and dr. Michael Cornwall has a document on his website called best being with extreme States training and there's some tips in there on how to orient one's energy when approaching and supporting someone that's going through this kind of process and I feel and it's more of a transformation process and it's like transformation and then having to come back it's almost like a scrambled process it's like getting the ego scrambled and well it's scrambled and suspended a person sort of in this other state of consciousness because they're not in their ego consciousness and then the ego start of reforms and collects itself again and when a person comes back to their ego and it's a bit different and and then a person's usually diagnosed with something but I feel like once one reconnects with their ego self one can still look back at their experience as a vision casting experience and then say well what were my mana traits how can I start practicing them and I think I mentioned before there's a paper a called therapeutic lifestyle design by dr. Roger Walsh and there's a section in there that talks about service and he says that well there's a quote about how some researchers found that basically designing in service to others right away when somebody has a crisis could actually be very healing so maybe somebody had a supposed mental health crisis and just got a diagnosis maybe if they help the homeless people they will feel a bit better and that's what the study showed is that new services need to be designed around actually having this as one of the first steps of they'd probably say intervention I don't like that word but to me it's an alignment with what I've experienced going through mania and psychosis because I actually felt like I really wanted to help homeless people especially so if I would have come into a program that said oh well you're gonna help homeless people now you had this crisis but let's go help some homeless people you're in this little program I would have been like this is what I was trying to do so I feel actually that a person going through a crisis needs to be asked when they're coming back to their ego consciousness which is coming back to reconnecting with the reality which is we are all in ego consciousnesses together unfortunately if reality was designed purely with the manic traits and we're all interacting that way we would all experience reality differently and we'd probably all be in quite a large amount of ecstasy but it's not designed that way for now and what I was saying was that I don't know so yeah I think I was saying that a person they connect again with their ego consciousness and it's unfortunate it's sad it's a comedown it's a hangover it's a buzzkill it's a grieving process to be in that ego suspended state and come back but when I feel can look back at the experience and say okay what was the cause there are certain causes in the world that we're all sort of aware of that need to be fixed like screw ego problems in that suspended ego state we see world's problems we don't see personal problems the personal has been suspended probably so we can see the world's problems and start to maybe take interest so a person in my mind needs to be asshole what was the cause that you really resonated with what was the cause that tugged at your heartstrings when you weren't seeing through your ego mind and you were seeing through your heart and you're reading the electromagnetic fields of others through their heartbeat and pattern recognition and you know all the stuff that the heart math Institute researches they talk about the L energy of the heart and I don't know much about it but it's more powerful than brain waves and I think when the ego mind is suspended we actually see more with our heart and we're reading things with our heart there's seven times the amount of neural pathways going from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart meaning the heart is sending a lot of information to the brain now whether or not the brain is listening and and seeing what the heart is saying I think that depends on how identified one is with one's ego consciousness and one's own personal problems and desires and addictions and all that so all that extra information it's like we get that heart connection and we don't normally listen to it so I also think that this change in state is to allow us to see with our heart and listen to our heart and we're going to go back to our ego consciousness but can we still take the messages from that heart centered state and they might be special message as they just might we're told not to listen to these special messages but I think that that we're supposed to in a way once we come back to our ego mind we go back to thinking there's nothing we can do but there's still is stuff that we can do maybe it just doesn't feel as exhilarating as it did in the initial surge of that state but would we rather embody the dullness of what we've been given as the story of how to interpret our experience this one narrowband story or would we rather embrace our experience and harvest what we've learned from that state and from that journey and put it into play and think about the cause we connected with and actually reconnect with that cause even if we don't quite feel it and start to embody or manic traits even though we find it difficult and a lot of the difficult is in being medicated I feel and I'm no doctor and I'm not advocating for anything along those lines I do know of some things that can help but I won't talk about that here i also have a note here that memory retrieval modifies synaptic linkages and I I'm just thinking now that if I think back to my experiences and my first mania if I retrieve those memories and then I paint them with the story I've been given about how it's just a mental illness and there's no meaning and the special messages were a symptom etc etc etc that's going to change my synaptic linkages differently when I think of those aspects of my experience I'm going to think of them in terms of mental illness whereas if I recall my memories and I think what's the value in that what's the meaning in that do I recall how I felt in that experience do I remember what it was like to connect with that homeless person and even though if I was to try to connect with somebody right now it probably wouldn't feel the same is this about my pleasurable feelings or is it about action was i given the pleasurable feelings associated with that action during the state of mania so I might be motivated to actually go do that as a source of pleasure if you want to call it that or was that just pure joy was that just me being in the state of love the state of love different than my personal programmed pleasures and desires and I feel like asking questions and exploring those experiences in that way they're going to rewire my synaptic connections of that memory retrieval to something else it's going to be wiring them in terms of curiosity and wonder and that state alone was very much a state of curiosity and wonder so to be in curiosity and wonder about that state of curiosity and wonder might be a good thing instead of writing it off as illness even if that's a helpful interpretation for professionals to have of me or you or whoever let that be their business I'm not a professional I don't need to think in terms of the professional story I don't need to take that to heart I don't need to let that paint over all the patterns my heart saw when my ego was suspended when the ego comes back it sort of rights over or blocks out a lot of that experience but I'm not going to use the stories of the professionals to further distance myself from that experience and again i'm not talking about thinking about that experience in terms of I want that pleasure and ecstasy back because that's just more pleasure and desire that's just turning it into a dopamine reflex what I'm talking about is the ways we need to rise to as human beings in order to embody that and be in that naturally joyful state to me that experience in that state is a big clue where that way and we experience that much ecstasy and joy and then we come back to our normal way of being and we think why can't i have that well maybe we need to kind of work towards being that way we could wait for you know the universe to intervene and give it to us again but it's probably going to be just as disorganized and and disruptive as it was the time before when you think about it that energy is so incredibly powerful and we're these little fragile human beings and we managed to sort of wander around in that state for a while and to me practicing the manic traits that we learned about in manic state is about weight training it's building up our[Music]structural and physical and sort of mental and embedded neurological pathways if you can imagine practicing certain gestures and traits and ways of being that's going to be wired in our muscles that's going to be wired in our brains and our neurons so when this energy comes in again and tries to animate us in that way instead of having one little thin wire running on that pathway on that circuit of that behavior that gesture we're going to have a hundred and when that extra energy comes in we will be able to really utilize it will have already programmed ourselves to to operate in that way and I don't think we can completely a hundred percent mimic that but I think we can be a lot closer to that than we are in our default ego consciousness that we've tumbled towards throughout our lives and the people researching flow they have some courses and I haven't taken a course yet but I'm thinking too if I took those courses I would think a lot of the clues are in the state of mania but most people don't experience that state and then taking a flow of course on how to be in flow would be very beneficial but I think for us who have gone through mania we've already been in flow and not flow from being in an extreme sport that we're very talented in but just in daily life it's like being in thrown into the extreme sport of daily life of just being a player in daily life and and we don't understand that state so to me it's important to look back on it afterwards and learn from it and maybe taking a course on flow would help us understand more of how flow works because to me manias like the flow of the universe is trying to get us to flow it's a very flowing state but again society's not designed for us to just flow all day long 24 7 and the people that take this flow course they're probably trying to get in flow for like a few hours or a few minutes or for their workday to to get way more done in a shorter period of time and to me experience in mania as a backwards effect it's well we've already experienced flow we have no idea how it works we don't know how to use it we don't know how to design our lives around if that flow comes in again how can we utilize it that's another thing is that it's one thing to practice ones traits it's also good to say practice writing in your journal and and getting your thoughts together so maybe in mania you wrote a lot and you had a lot of stuff if you look at and you're like what was i even thinking but you might notice over time that it becomes more and more coherent so maybe next time fifty percent of it is clear whereas the first time twenty percent of it was clear so if you sort of build on the clear stuff eventually what you might want to say to people when you are in that state and you've been practicing your traits might come across more clearly than the first time where everything just come came flying out of your mouth whether it was coherent or not now this next time you have a little more practice on what it is you're actually trying to say and then eventually what you're saying is in line with your gestures and your traits that you've been practicing and then the other level of it is make sure that you have when that state comes if it comes again and you want to harvest it make sure you have your notebooks make sure you have one designated spot in your phone where you're going to write stuff make sure you have your Instagram so if you take beautiful photos and you want to share them you can because it's a very sharing state so make sure you have your lines of communication open not just with actual reality but also with technology and that can be iffy too because you don't want to post like YouTube videos of you talking for hours and hours and hours about stuff that you're not sure if you know you're talking about right but but anyways um anyway like you can actually you could make videos of yourself and just make them unlisted to your YouTube and then decide if you want to post it later and the good thing about that too is you can see what you were talking about in that state and go back to it later so for the most part you don't really want to share too much when you're in the state and you'd want to harvest it though so make a video of yourself talking about something you think is important and then so yeah that's part of like the harvesting mania lifestyle design just think about the ways you usually like to share you probably don't want to do that more and then ways you maybe could harvest your mania and look back at it because it might be more valuable than you think you might be you might be telling yourself stuff that you don't remember because you actually don't remember a lot of what happens in that state because the brain isn't in that mode that we're conditioned and programmed to think that learning is which is memory which is not so one day maybe I hope to have maybe a more solid thing created where sigh well these are ideas of ways that you might want to have this set up for when that extra energy comes so then you can harvest it always keeping yourself safe because that's that's one thing is harvesting and then you can harvest in retrospect after the fact but you can also do a bit of harvesting when you're in the state not that you're you're looking back and reflecting on it but it's more you're just collecting a lot of data so you might want to choose to collect your data of what you're learning about and thinking about in a way that you're going to want to go back to it so if you hate reading you might not want to do a lot of writing then you have to read it if you don't like looking at your face you might not want to do video you might want to do audio notes and it also depends on the capacity of your device if you have like a 32 gigs something or other you're not going to want to make videos you're going to get frustrated that's the thing in that state if there's glitches and technology and things it makes things more difficult but that's why you can always go back to good old pen and paper and I have a lot of notebooks full and I don't even want to go back and read them and i don't i don't know if i will but my main thing right now is is more about not as much sharing what i thought of in those states so i can't remember anyway but it's more about sharing that maybe there is a different way to see and utilize that state after the fact when we're safe there's a lot of work in the system of care to manage symptoms to think about relapse prevention and those are all valuable but I also feel it's very important to work at moving towards being our best self and often we had a glimpse of that in mania so why not take some of that information and put it into play in our lives and I feel also that by doing that it could actually act partly as relapse prevention because instead of sitting around scared and like just flinching at everything I'm actually moving towards being a better version of myself that I already am and just moving towards that and to me that would reduce the way if I self stigmatize I'd be less apt to do that if I'm working towards that I can imagine people in society would stigmatize me less and probably notice less that anything was wrong I could even perhaps mitigate some of the dullness that happens from you know what I talked about how when I was in the hospital and I was on a lot of you know what I changed my posture because it was actually making me feel heavy and crouch but i changed my posture and it actually made me feel like I was strong against the you know what I was actually strong it like no you're not going to make me in that posture which that posture makes me feel worse if you'd look at Amy Cuddy's TED talk on the power poses just doing a certain pose and standing a certain way for a few minutes can make us feel better well if we hunched over like this for 10 hours it's going to make us feel worse that's how I was experienced that experiencing that in the hospital so I consciously was like no and I actually most the time i was there i made sure i SAT like posture like i might do if i was in a finishing school in I don't know the early 1900s and it actually helped a lot so there's their small things that we can do to mitigate the effects of some of the things we have no control that are offered us and that's the other thing is getting a representation agreement and ate an advanced directive I have two representatives who have my advanced directive so if I get hospitalized they come in with my advanced directive and say this is the kind of treatment she is consenting to that she decided when she was well and not just and it's not unfounded it's the type of treatment that's got her in and out of this hospital very quickly and she does not consent to the one that made her say three times as long and go through hell and so it beneficials the entire system makes it should make it easier for the doctors should make it easier for the hospital I won't be there as long makes it easier on the system they're not paying taxes to pay for my stay three times as long as needed so it's a good thing to do because I have a crisis plan in my rap my wellness recovery action plan but in the psych ward your crisis plan that there's a section the treatments i can send to and the treatments I don't like well that's a bunch of crap so wrap turns to crap in the psych ward because they don't look at it they don't follow it unless it's actually put in your file somehow they're not going to listen so rap is crap in the psych ward otherwise it's a pretty good program and it's probably better to get a representation agreement and advanced directive and I have not been back to the psych ward since to test it out to see if it works I actually went as far as making a video advanced directive so it's me standing there with my mom and my sister and I'm saying I don't want this crap treatment and in say that so I spelled it out in like two and a half minutes or two minutes so that way sometimes it's more difficult to find a piece of paper nowadays than it is to have a phone and show video I thought it was a lot more powerful the video and so now I feel I feel safe from the system because i have my representation agreement and my advance directive I feel pretty safe from myself because I have my PRN seroquel that I actually have a voice secretary app that every day alerts me and I could press it and would say do you need to drag off seroquel I never listened to it though I just see the alert and I kind of ignore it but and I'm probably habituated to it but I do actually now I'm to the point where if I feel a bit off or a bit weird I really think I actually take note of it I take mental note of it and and I think like am I disconnecting am I going downhill and I because the last thing I want is to go back to the psych ward and before I have not been quite so mindful about it and maybe let myself get to psych ward condition and that could have been avoidable and now I really do want to avoid it because of how I was treated last time and I also feel safe because of my zap strap thing that I talked about I have a zap strap that's just big enough to go around my wrist and the bedpost by my bed and I have one in my bathroom because I could attach myself to the pipe under the sink and I have one in my car because I could attach myself to my car like steering wheel or something which seems weird he'd be driving around attached to the steering wheel but hopefully I wouldn't be driving around and I also have one my purse so it's just and it's good idea for me to have an idea of where I would fasten myself and part of the plan would be to make sure have my phone with me so I can decide if I I want to calm down I'd probably already also want to grab just one or two seroquel I wouldn't want to grab an entire bottle and have it beside me and also if I was going to fasten myself wherever I was I would probably move stuff that I could hurt myself with and I don't think i would but the kind of the point is to be to have nothing of harm within arm's reach from being zapped strapped and just have say like a couple of the seroquel and and a phone and even if I say I forgot my phone and it was across the room I could yell hey Siri and and she would probably dial somebody for me so there's that too I'm thinking next time I if I really disconnect that that's what I might do is just take a couple seroquel zap strap myself and try and calm down and then once I was calm then I would call for somebody to disconnect me from the SAP strap and so that would also require making sure that my dad bolt isn't on so there's some planning around it and I mentioned before how once i was about to fasten myself and after moving stuff around and then grabbing some things like a laptop and a pillow then I realized oh I don't have to I don't feel I felt safe knowing I could and then when I was taking my sweet time and kind of gathering things I realized hey I feel better so then I never had to but then I called my mom after that I know for myself at least whenever I've had the urge to end my life on several occasions I've never actually wanted to I've never I was never thinking I want to it felt like I had to and I was terrified and it felt like I was going to do it and I didn't want to and there it was the most terrifying feeling ever and[Music]and to me I just I really wonder and I'm saddened by I don't know how many people if they feel that if they feel it like that I just hope that people might carry his zap strap and and just it's so terrifying just fasten yourself and wait somebody will come and help you just don't be near anything harmful just throw it away
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