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  #201  
Old 19-07-2020, 12:38 PM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by the_demi
True.
But i feel I am closer to the end than the beginning.
And, as I am entangled not in MY web, I need to be responsible: any selfish, brutal withdrawal will reverberate across that "clan's" web and may damage their already frail relationships as well as external linkages they have.
So, gradually (but so very tired) I will finish the task, carefully, carefully.

Ehh, the webs we weave...
Unfortunately most of Life is like that, unless we're the only one in that isolated beach. Sometimes though, it pays to be cruel to be kind because depencies build up and they're not very healthy.
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  #202  
Old 19-07-2020, 01:35 PM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fatimasque
I agree, and I appreciate your post and level of consideration here.
the one thing I feel the want to respond to is the claim of the efficacy of energy healing, be it reiki or other really.
In my experience, the help possible with these practices is not surface only.
I am not saying that simply energy healing will fix all the problems. not at all. an approach that is holistic and considerate of the extremity of the situation, bringing in varying forms of 'medicine' is best. be it from medication, to therapy, to healing, and all their combinations..

but I have worked quite deeply with individuals with such clinical conditions,
one ought work carefully, very carefully indeed. depending on the condition, severity, etc, there are chakras I won't even go near until much much later.
and therapy and conversation are necessarily complimentary, because an awareness of the patient is also what augments the healing.

in my experience, when all medication, therapy and energy healing were taking place, it was easier for the patient to get off medication sooner, or lower their dosage quite drastically. one patient I speak of specifically now, who is schizophrenic, is off anti-psychotics now. has anti-anxiety pills for when in need, and does regular therapy, and healing.

with energy healing, its not easy, its not always sure, it won't always go deep. but it can. and in my opinion and experience, does have the capacity to heal on a much deeper spiritual level, for deep rooted traumas, than just the surface.

Salam and Love
F
When I was working in mental health, the project I was working on was empowerment for the users of mental health services as a half-way house of sorts, the aim was to provide supportive work environments to people with mental health issues who had been through the system and were returning to 'normal' - using that word very loosely. My job was providing computer training and support in graphics, desktop publishing and web design. At the time we had two other major projects within the organisation with the same aims, both of which my group were involved with in a support and marketing role. One was a shop and the other was an arts and crafts workshop that created goods which were sold in the shop.

One of the things we were looking at - because at the time our projects were 'experimental' and we involved the service users every step of the way - was looking at was, given their individual issues, what would benefit them and what were their issues/experiences in the context of the aims and objectives of the projects.

We were having much the same results as you mention, generally, because we had sometimes groups of people with a range of mental health issues, and we worked very closely with the care services - we had to understand their conditions and how they would manifest in the individual because not only did we have to provide a conducive environment, we had a duty of care to provide that could only come from understanding their individual issues, and how they would relate to external stimulus. People improving through therapy is human nature but the main factor is not the therapy itself but the person receiving the therapy. If the client has the will to be healed then they'll be far more responsive, because there are psychological processes at work there. Being either unwilling or in denial will most likely mean that the person will never be healed no matter how deep the Reiki is.

Holistic healing doesn't always meaning holistic, because many that have used the word in the past - and we did work with Reiki practitioners and the like - had no interest in the clinical aspects. It's only by understanding the clinical aspects that you gain a more comprehensive understanding of mental health. So with respect, unless you're going into the depths of mental health issues, how they are caused and how they can affect an individual then you're still on the surface. I also have schizophrenia/am dissociative myself so I also understand it from that perspective - my personality was 'fractured' by years of physical and mental abuse, which caused trauma that affected me long into adulthood. It's only in the past few years that I've gone through cognitive behaviour therapy that I've actually felt any kind of relief, because for it it tool a 'dismantling' of my cognitive processes so they could be rebuild.

In my experience, unless you're delving into both conscious and unconscious 'subsystems' and cognitive functions then 'deep' is a relative term. My own traumas originated in my Limbic System, which is what is dubbed as the 'lizard brain'. If there is a single factor that is responsible for the animals that came out of the trees reaching the safety of caves before they were munched out of existence, the Limbic System is it. Often that is the origins of trauma because the circumstances that cause trauma - which is an emotional response created by our cognitive processes - can be perceived as a threat to survival.

I've had a very similar conversation with a Reiki practitioner earlier in this thread and I asked them a question that remains unanswered. My mother has sever dementia and is now paranoid that someone is out to get her. My wife had a stroke which caused a brain bleed, that has left her with a change in personality and loss of long-term memory dues to areas of her brain being dead. How can Reiki or any non-clinical healing modality cure those? I had a couple of clients that went into psychotic episodes because of chemical imbalances in the brain, and depending on the individual those imbalances can cause schizophrenia.

This whole subject has always been very polarised in the past, and it seems as though little real progress has been made because the same patterns of discussion simply repeat over and over. So many people are very keen to wax Spiritual about mental health issues, few have any real knowledge or experience of them. The only real way it's going to change is if Spiritual people start delving into psychiatry and psychology, and in this subject in particular mental health issues.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fatimasque
Indeed a great post. thank you for sharing.
heart breaking and beautiful.

thank you
Thank you, very much so.



“Extraordinary magic is woven through ordinary life. Look around!”
― Amy Leigh Mercree
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  #203  
Old 19-07-2020, 01:37 PM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by hazada guess
Good post,greenslade.
Thank you, much appreciated
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  #204  
Old 19-07-2020, 06:55 PM
Fatimasque Fatimasque is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2020
Location: Bahrain
Posts: 101
 
Greenslade!

First I must thank you for this post. very thorough, and you raise great points and questions. I don't pretend to know all answers, so I will address what I can.

First with regards to dementia and your wife's condition too.
(my kind sympathies for both)
My answer is, I don't know! lol

With a degenerative disease like dementia, I've never heard that energy healing reverses this. maybe at best it can either help slow down progression, or help deal with some of the emotional side affects like paranoia.
This may happen with soothing specific chakras that overactive as a result of other chakras weakening with the condition.

So the healing doesn't heal the condition, so much as the patient's experience and responses to it. (I'm speculating, so please don't take me for science)

With damaged brain cells, I also don't know, because frankly I have no reading or experience here.
What I do know, is that the brain has a capacity to re-charge certain functions in other parts not originally responsible for them, as a way of compensating. I'm sure this is a very case by case scenario too.

Energy healing promotes the person's immune system. the battery is theirs, the healing charges it with a stronger voltage. maybe energy healing can help promote this. maybe it can reintroduce life to damaged areas. I honestly don't know.
And like you say. (with any kind of patient) the willingness and cooperation of the person in the healing is necessary, otherwise, you are right, energy healing will not do it.

Now to psychological disorders. because here I have a bit more experience.
again. you are right. I totally agree!

the healer must address and understand the psychiatric and psychological condition, the traumas that trigger, and so forth.
based on this knowledge, then I know which chakras to work with, and more importantly in which order to work on them, how to work on them, and the different entry points which are safe.
1- the order alters, and is very important
2- the how also alters.
I'll explain a bit of each below.

a- order of healing
sometimes, starting at the wrong place can incite an immediate panic attack or other violent reactions, especially if many of the traumas are located or unprocessed within there.

> my experience with conditions is that they almost have a mind of their own, and they are 'self seeking'. schizophrenia is an intelligent disease, that infuses into the personality, uses the person's strengths and weakness to maintain and augment itself.
> so when you approach it with healing, it can reject or respond violently. it wants itself and will protect itself.

> therefore entry point has to be from a place (chakra) where the 'self-sustaining sickness' has not taken over completely, and the healthy person's survival and self preservation natural instinct is still intact, or present enough that it will rise to the knock. this chakra will welcome the energy, and allow it to flow in, no resistance, or minimal and then relenting.

> issues deep rooted in one chakra spill over to other chakras and create 'neurosis'(lets call it that) there too. when we work around the rest of the energy body, we find these 'entanglements and congestions' between one chakra to the next, and cleanse the shape and pathway of the connection between them first. otherwise, no matter how I work at just the chakra, the flow from the traumatized source is the same, and the transferred fears just return because its the same road, still there, same flow and pathway.
> this is only possible if I've become aware of the psychology of their condition. the patient history, etc.
is the trauma family triggered, money, or war, or sexual, etc and then its manifestations > even if the source chakra is the same, the way it affects other chakras will be different. even if it is all the same chakras, they function and connect differently.

the above knowledge will also give me the how:
energy healing has different approaches, and one can go quite deep inside a chakra, if one knows how to.
I accidentally know how to go super deep, because my intuition with healing has been quite strong. (I once stepped into the whole chakra, but this was one of my best friends who just lost her dad and her mourning had additional painful elements other than loss. anyhow. I would advice against this. lol. but yes we can go quite deep- only if the chakra allows us in)
this is more likely when the healed has a trusting relationship with the healer. (I'll come back to this in a bit too)
and when we get deep, we can touch on the 'cracked' and 'soiled' anatomy and work with. (very carefully though)

also,
the how is not only the depth into a chakra that we go, in fact that's less important than technique.
in Pranic they teach two techniques, cleansing and energizing.
and while these represent the two basic functions, I have discovered that you can massage a chakra, slow or speed a rotation, and also that the speed of my own hand while I rotate can have different response. sometimes I move really slow, sometimes I only work the surface... it really is a custom approach.

I've worked with different individuals with psychiatric conditions. the closest range one, where I was able to learn and 'experiment' with the healing was my best friend. I lived with her for some months during a psychosis episode.
First, because I've known her for all our life, I know much of her background story. also, as per our closeness, we have discussed while she was sober her conditions, and I had learnt from her a lot.

so when I was living with her during one of the episodes, I realized that many of the hallucinations, paranoia, fears, the fights and demons she sees, I realized I could relate all of them to her childhood trauma. the nature of hallucinations tell us something. we cannot dismiss them. I even listened to them in a way to enlighten me to which chakras to work with, and emotions to deal with.

I learnt to talk to her chakras. let them see me as the person who she has always trusted. this allowed me in better. and perhaps it was this trust factor that helped facilitate the healing on a deeper level?

I also was in constant contact with her psychiatrist. we discussed medication, among other details, and I would consult him regularly.

sometimes the job of the healing is to reduce the stress and anxiety and fear which aggravates the condition. even if the healer cannot 'go deep' as to access it. they can soothe the side effects, which when soothed, helps the patient deal with the issue.

I wish medicine and spirituality can come together on this.
I do believe in the total approach, and yes, healers need to up to their knowledge with this respect. so do therapists in turn perhaps?
I am still young in my practice, and still not connected to the facilities or bodies where proper research and collaboration is possible.
What I give you above is from my experience, consolidated or rather then explained with the knowledge I gain as I read along.
The question is how can we bring our practice together for the benefit of a community with the power to enlighten us, for how open their crown can be, but are stunted, for how hurt their history is.

I apologize if I went on too much. I do hope this enlightens in a way.
this is a topic I'm very interested in, and a genre of study in energy healing I want to advance and find out more in.
I wonder if the experience had was personal and singular for the unique nature of my friendship, or in fact, the practice can be studied and applied 'clinically'.
Note that during my stay with her, and regular practice, she recovered faster than previous episodes, with a 3rd of the prescribed medication dose.

ok. I stop now. looking forward to what you will make of this.

Thank you again!!!

Fats


Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenslade
When I was working in mental health, the project I was working on was empowerment for the users of mental health services as a half-way house of sorts, the aim was to provide supportive work environments to people with mental health issues who had been through the system and were returning to 'normal' - using that word very loosely. My job was providing computer training and support in graphics, desktop publishing and web design. At the time we had two other major projects within the organisation with the same aims, both of which my group were involved with in a support and marketing role. One was a shop and the other was an arts and crafts workshop that created goods which were sold in the shop.

One of the things we were looking at - because at the time our projects were 'experimental' and we involved the service users every step of the way - was looking at was, given their individual issues, what would benefit them and what were their issues/experiences in the context of the aims and objectives of the projects.

We were having much the same results as you mention, generally, because we had sometimes groups of people with a range of mental health issues, and we worked very closely with the care services - we had to understand their conditions and how they would manifest in the individual because not only did we have to provide a conducive environment, we had a duty of care to provide that could only come from understanding their individual issues, and how they would relate to external stimulus. People improving through therapy is human nature but the main factor is not the therapy itself but the person receiving the therapy. If the client has the will to be healed then they'll be far more responsive, because there are psychological processes at work there. Being either unwilling or in denial will most likely mean that the person will never be healed no matter how deep the Reiki is.

Holistic healing doesn't always meaning holistic, because many that have used the word in the past - and we did work with Reiki practitioners and the like - had no interest in the clinical aspects. It's only by understanding the clinical aspects that you gain a more comprehensive understanding of mental health. So with respect, unless you're going into the depths of mental health issues, how they are caused and how they can affect an individual then you're still on the surface. I also have schizophrenia/am dissociative myself so I also understand it from that perspective - my personality was 'fractured' by years of physical and mental abuse, which caused trauma that affected me long into adulthood. It's only in the past few years that I've gone through cognitive behaviour therapy that I've actually felt any kind of relief, because for it it tool a 'dismantling' of my cognitive processes so they could be rebuild.

In my experience, unless you're delving into both conscious and unconscious 'subsystems' and cognitive functions then 'deep' is a relative term. My own traumas originated in my Limbic System, which is what is dubbed as the 'lizard brain'. If there is a single factor that is responsible for the animals that came out of the trees reaching the safety of caves before they were munched out of existence, the Limbic System is it. Often that is the origins of trauma because the circumstances that cause trauma - which is an emotional response created by our cognitive processes - can be perceived as a threat to survival.

I've had a very similar conversation with a Reiki practitioner earlier in this thread and I asked them a question that remains unanswered. My mother has sever dementia and is now paranoid that someone is out to get her. My wife had a stroke which caused a brain bleed, that has left her with a change in personality and loss of long-term memory dues to areas of her brain being dead. How can Reiki or any non-clinical healing modality cure those? I had a couple of clients that went into psychotic episodes because of chemical imbalances in the brain, and depending on the individual those imbalances can cause schizophrenia.

This whole subject has always been very polarised in the past, and it seems as though little real progress has been made because the same patterns of discussion simply repeat over and over. So many people are very keen to wax Spiritual about mental health issues, few have any real knowledge or experience of them. The only real way it's going to change is if Spiritual people start delving into psychiatry and psychology, and in this subject in particular mental health issues.
Thank you, very much so.



“Extraordinary magic is woven through ordinary life. Look around!”
― Amy Leigh Mercree
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  #205  
Old 27-07-2020, 12:40 PM
Greenslade
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fatimasque
ok. I stop now. looking forward to what you will make of this.

Thank you again!!!
I'm going to say a huge and sincere thank you for your reply, one of the issues I have is that I just don't have the understanding of Reiki to put these two together. My background is in mental health so the opportunity to come at this from a different angle throws much more light on the subject.

My mother's dementia is something we've come to accept and we deal with it on that basis. I was in to see her a few days ago and she didn't even know me, and her memory had gone back to around 1987 or so, and we spent two hours chatting about what had happened since. In some ways that's good because it might leave her with better memories, at least in the meantime. Other than that....

The jury is out on my wife's brain, but then it was always on the losing side anyway. The doctors don't think it's ever going to heal and in small ways it's changed her personality too, but I think that's more of a cognitive response and her mind over-compensating. I guess this is where Spirituality comes in, accepting what we cannot change with grace and dignity. What Nietzsche called "Amor Fati" or 'Love of fate'.

From a more clinical perspective, and by the way I can only use very broad terms..... Traumus are an emotional response but are caused by cognitive disorders initially, the mind simply can't deal with them effectively/efficiently. With a cognitive disorder the mind is unable to process or even accept the trauma has happened and the mind may not be able to accept it never mind come to any reasonable conclusion as to why it happened. Often the mind will try to rationalise it or think of reasons for it happening but if the mind is cognitively dissonant then there is already conflict in their minds - they're using a mind that doesn't want to accept it to try and work out what happened. The mind often wants to find reasons for things happening and if these aren't forthcoming then the mind can be very unsettled, mildly-speaking, and finds blind acceptance difficult. This would be what is known as negative (meaning destructive) cognitive behaviour.

That in itself is usually an indicator that something is amiss even prior to the trauma happening, trauma itself doesn't cause the cognitive disorder but the cognitive disorder causes the trauma - there was a mental health issue prior to the trauma itself. As to the causes, there are probably more psychological/psychiatric reasons than there are biological, because the brain/mind is hugely complex. Often what appears on the surface can be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, and sometimes there is no cure for them other than to medicate. While the brain can re-route - which is called neuroplastricity - regeneration isn't always possible, so with Reiki often you can be trying to cure the incurable. So with respect, unless the healer has an in-depth knowledge of psychiatry or psychology that takes years of learning and experience to gain I'm never going to be convinced that healers can have sufficient understanding.

If a person is receiving healing then it stands to reason that their mental health is compromised, and yes, often the traumas are lying deep within the unconscious - in what Jung called the Shadow Self. Essentially the Shadow Self is a repository of sorts for all the traumas that the person either hasn't or can't deal with, and often it goes back to early childhood. Reiki can be perceived as a threat to someone with a trauma because both Reiki and the emotional response are energetic - and to the traumatised person that's what caused their problems in the first place. Often that can bring their minds straight back to relive the internal circumstances of the trauma - and nobody wants to relive that kind of hurt. Personally I suspect the Limbic System can kick in with what it might perceive as a threat, because if the person hasn't experienced it before then Reiki can trigger the 'flight or fight' mechanism. Often people can treat their psychological wounds in the same way as physical ones, they become very protective of themselves. And yes, trust would be a huge factor in facilitating healing because the person then essentially allowed themselves to be healed.

Schizophrenia is neither intelligent nor a disease, and this is not the first time I have come across this perspective with specifically schizophrenia and often with discussions on the ego. For some reason Spiritual people tend to become experts in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis for some strange reason. Schizophrenia is a term from mental health and unless you understand it from that perspective then I doubt the validity of any healing that can be provided by Reiki. Schizophrenia is certainly not a disease and it is certainly not intelligent, and if this is the perspective you have then you know the reason why Spirituality and science aren't going to come together. Schizophrenia - depending on the nature of it as it presents in the individual - is a personality or cognitive disorder. Most people have it to some extent - it's actually 'normal' according to some mental health practitioners because 'being in two minds' or talking to oneself can be loosely termed as Schizophrenia. My own schizophrenia - and that of others that I've already talked to on this particular thread - is that the schizophrenic has one or more distinct personalities that have been 'fragmented' from the main personality due to trauma of some kind. Often it's a 'snapshot' of the menotional and mental state the person was in at that time. During trauma the mind can sometimes seek escape in various ways, and that can be in Spiritual/religious contexts - sometimes people can believe God is 'in their heads'.

To understand schizophrenia it can help to understand how a child creates an imaginary friend. Sometimes the child can experience trauma, which can happen in the case of divorce or bullying at school. for instance. The mind creates another distinct personality for a time as perhaps companionship or someone to talk to as the child tries to resolve the issues - the mind always seeks some kind of closure or resolution and a distinctly separate 'fragment' of the personality can be a means to that end. In the child's reality they have a friend and an adult telling the child that they don't simply causes conflict in the child's mind - because in their reality there is a friend. One of the reasons a child can hold onto that imaginary friend is because for the mind, it's comfort, understanding and escape from the reality of the trauma. It's the child's last straw that stands between them and 'drowning'.

As to what creates schizophrenia, the jury seems to be out on that one but genetics and epigenetics are also listed as causes, but often it seems to be life-changing or traumatic events that are the most common triggers.

My own schizophrenia has two distinct personality fragments, one is the child that was so badly physically abused and the other is the adolescent who couldn't deal with the emotional and mental traumas that were happening at that time. Both of those personality fragments are 'snapshots' of my mental/emotional state at that particular time. The fragments have gone through an individuation process in much the same way as the child's imaginary friend, although they become personalities in their own right. Just recently I went through cognitive behaviour therapy which essentially 'dismantled' my whole perceptual reality and examined it piece by piece. It was triggered again by a car smash that was no fault of mine but has left me with questions that I'm probably never going to find the answers to. The therapist took me right back to my childhood and what I was going through at the time, so I had to relive what I had suppressed for many years. What the cognitive behaviour therapy did was to enable me to perceive what happened through the eyes of an adult and not as a child, and that changed my whole cognitive reality. Not to mention the Spiritual impact that's had.

Hallucinations, paranoia and demons are the unconscious mind trying to communicate with the conscious mind. They are all avatars of the unconscious in the way what we sometimes experience as dreams as we sleep. In both sleep and mental health disorders the barriers are eroded enough for the unconscious mind to encroach. In mental health one of the common ones are dark figures, which are representative of aspects of the unconscious mind and represent something is wrong deep down. If someone displays emotions at this stage then they are displaying the emotional response their condition, which was caused by other emotions and cognitive dysfunction due to the initial trauma. The person is dealing with the emotions of the result and not the initial root cause, so they have another layer below what is visible.

My mother's paranoia is just such an attempt by the unconscious mind to express and make sense of what's happening to her. Her dementia is 'out to get her' but what's causing it is buried so deep in the 'shadows' that she knows something is there but she can't see it.

Emotions are a 'by-product' of cognitive functions/disorders and while emotions and Reiki are energetic, cognitive functions/disorders are not. The disorders themselves suggest that there are deeper underlying issues that need to be addressed, so there you have another layer. Often these things stem from a symbiosis of the person's sense of 'I am' or the Jungian (as opposed to the made-up Spiritual one) ego, their environment (which includes external stimuli) and their cognitive functions that create their perceptual reality.

The mental health landscape is changing but it still has a way to come, and I think those not involved in mental health need to be aware of certain fundamentals. The general misconception is that mental health in can be cured but that is not always the case, and often it's not something that can be dealt with in the way a cold or a flu is. You can't cure a disorder that's caused by genetics or a physical abnormality of the brain, if the brain is 'deformed' there is no cure. Similarly soothing the side effects doesn't provide a long-term solution either because cognitive processes that can cause mental health issues remain untouched by Reiki or Spirituality. This is where Spirituality falls down in this regard, 'deep' can be in relation to the depth of knowledge a healer has, but issues and emotions can have layers far deeper than the healer is aware of. And sometimes Spirituality is just the 'wrong tool for the job'.

I don't know how the processes can be applied clinically, because you can be dealing with a physically malformed brain, skewed cognitive processes, genetic end epigenetic disorders or who knows what else that can be buried so far down in the unconscious or the brain's physical structure that it is impossible to deal with. This is what I mean about healers only dealing with the surface layers, because if they're dealing with emotional responses they're only dealing with the results of a process that goes far deeper than most people want to acknowledge. It's my own belief that Reiki can have a very definite therapeutic benefit to mental health as you have demonstrated but at the same time it has to be put into context. It is a therapy and often it can be more effective at managing mental health issues, but as a cure................
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  #206  
Old 29-07-2020, 10:53 AM
Fatimasque Fatimasque is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2020
Location: Bahrain
Posts: 101
 
Hey

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer me.
Wow... so much... and not to blame you, its a vast discussion.

ok. I never said energy healing was going to cure mental disorders.
But neither does psychiatry, and neither does psychology. specially when all are practiced exclusive of the other. you've mentioned the complexity of the disorder- sorry if I called it a disease, its a matter of semantics for me. and for all the details you mentioned on how the disorder is formed and then moves, for me, thats why I called it intelligent. its a defense system that builds itself and then defends itself.
but again, its a matter of perspective here.
we can see the exact same mechanism (which we do), and have a different opinion or point of view of it.

I believe that the sciences dealing with the mind or psyche are as premature as ever. yes they have come a long way... but they are premature.
for as simple as how many patients get different diagnosis or misdiagnosed.
or how detrimental the treatment can be on other aspects of the same patients health.
I believe the medication, while yes to an extent helpful and necessary, still a poison that can be improved upon. and a poison that in some cases while assuages or reduces the side effects of the disorder, it stalls true possible healing, which is through CBT as you experienced, among other active therapeutic practices. (Vs. lets shut down that side of your brain and drain the chemicals here or there).

one of the reasons the medicine is premature, is because it will look at one part of the whole picture. medicine is now caught up to the fact that emotions can trigger physical reactions and dis-ease in the body. if anything, this is an understanding integral in energy healing science.

that we have interlaced 'bodies'. from physical that is the most dense, to spiritual that is the most etheric, and then emotional and intellectual bodies in between with their density, size, function, etc.
think of it as Russian doll, but without barriers between the bodies, and recognized singleness.
even you mentioned that most common cause/trigger is trauma.
and I know that the most common factor for those who 'healed' or managed better, was the ones who had love and support around them, vs the best doctor or medication.
so one cannot overlook the role of our emotional self/world/process in the nature of the condition, or its healing requirements. And if psychiatry's deep understanding is an understanding that concerns itself with the chemicals of the brain, then no matter how deep, they are missing parts of the picture..

you have also mentioned that Reiki may in fact be 'harmless' lets say to some. in a sense that it will trigger emotions they can't deal with, or that surface up and are painful. (but that is the same as you reliving your childhood, and facing the emotions created then, from the stand of your adult-- the idea is that these emotions had to be surfaced and re-narrated).
so if reiki can have an efficacy to "trigger" deep rooted traumas/ emotions.
this simply is proof or at least an indicator of how 'deep' it can travel into the body, psyche, etc to help it.
again, not saying it is there to cure... but it has a role that it can play, and a bigger one than assumed.
in the same that medication has a role to play, but doesn't actually cure.
even the medication is there to manage symptoms as opposed to heal.
and medication too, has had adverse effects, in the same way a healing might.

I think you have focused on the healers lack of knowledge in psychiatry, and I can tell you that the psychiatrist also lacks knowledge which is available with the healer's practice, of the anatomy of our spiritual and emotional bodies.
I don't disagree with you, in fact I agree completely. but I'm adding to that, that the reversal is equally true.
it took years for psychology to regard a patients personality as part of coming to diagnosis (freud and his chair lets say), and it was Jung in modern psychology who brought forth the role of dreams too. (which is one whole school of study in spiritual science)
before that patients were shocked and medicated and locked up...

so maybe its just a few decades or so, before more diagnostic components are discovered and acknowledged or investigated by the science.

As to Energy Healing Practices:
There are different types of schools. and Reiki is only one of them. (I don't know nor have I studied all)
maybe its all tomatoes to you. but they would have similar cross overs and variances as you would find in medicine science.
for example, if I would compare, Id say Reiki is more topical and Pranic is more surgical.

we don't need to know each others sciences in depth in the way of experts.(as you say years of study)
but enough to pool and collaborate our knowledge.

When I practiced healing with mental disorders, like schizophrenia,
I was communicating with the patients psychiatrist regularly, specially
that I was also providing update to her condition, so I learnt to read symptoms
among others. further, listening to her psychosis, as I said, additionally gave me insight as to which chakras to access that would not cause the spiritual defense system to erupt. (like you mentioned, we become protective)

I don't have the knowledge or experience of the experts in the field.
but what I learnt so far has supplemented to how I approach the healing a 100% and I continue reading and consulting where I can.
I have a good collection of friends in the field (plus I end up be-friending my own therapists and varying practitioners that I've sought, so they're happy when I call with questions... perhaps because also I am in their similar path, if not similar field)

and even my psychiatrist at one point, when I explained to him how I experienced, & 'energetically' diagnosed the condition, he acquiesced at least to gaining an insight which he had never considered in his years of practice. simply because that side of the 'science' never presented itself as viable knowledge and approach.

when we assume something cannot help us, we miss out on the ways it could or might.
like psychiatrists think energy healing is maybe bogus, so do some energy healers disregard the medical science. both are wrong.

the condition presents itself as a fractured psyche, a chemical imbalance, and emotional ailment, and so forth.... so why should the practice of healing, focus on one aspect only?
I'm not delusional as to think that I'll put my hand on someone and heal them of their childhood trauma.
no. I've even been presented with a psychosis patient recently, (because the family didn't want to admit him for various reasons),
and after I did a scan and 'communicated with the chakras' (its something I've learnt to do, but I don't know how I learnt it, so lets leave it at that)
, I knew I couldn't help, so I told them their only way is psychiatry, and maybe maybe after his symptoms and psychosis is subsided, via medication, maybe I could rescan then, and I'm only committing to a rescan for now.

to know our limitations as practitioners on any end, is wise.
and even to know our capabilities, we still have to be careful and realistic.

thank you again.
happy to hear more of your thoughts, if any...

Happy summer days!
Fats




Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenslade
I'm going to say a huge and sincere thank you for your reply, one of the issues I have is that I just don't have the understanding of Reiki to put these two together. My background is in mental health so the opportunity to come at this from a different angle throws much more light on the subject.

My mother's dementia is something we've come to accept and we deal with it on that basis. I was in to see her a few days ago and she didn't even know me, and her memory had gone back to around 1987 or so, and we spent two hours chatting about what had happened since. In some ways that's good because it might leave her with better memories, at least in the meantime. Other than that....

The jury is out on my wife's brain, but then it was always on the losing side anyway. The doctors don't think it's ever going to heal and in small ways it's changed her personality too, but I think that's more of a cognitive response and her mind over-compensating. I guess this is where Spirituality comes in, accepting what we cannot change with grace and dignity. What Nietzsche called "Amor Fati" or 'Love of fate'.

From a more clinical perspective, and by the way I can only use very broad terms..... Traumus are an emotional response but are caused by cognitive disorders initially, the mind simply can't deal with them effectively/efficiently. With a cognitive disorder the mind is unable to process or even accept the trauma has happened and the mind may not be able to accept it never mind come to any reasonable conclusion as to why it happened. Often the mind will try to rationalise it or think of reasons for it happening but if the mind is cognitively dissonant then there is already conflict in their minds - they're using a mind that doesn't want to accept it to try and work out what happened. The mind often wants to find reasons for things happening and if these aren't forthcoming then the mind can be very unsettled, mildly-speaking, and finds blind acceptance difficult. This would be what is known as negative (meaning destructive) cognitive behaviour.

That in itself is usually an indicator that something is amiss even prior to the trauma happening, trauma itself doesn't cause the cognitive disorder but the cognitive disorder causes the trauma - there was a mental health issue prior to the trauma itself. As to the causes, there are probably more psychological/psychiatric reasons than there are biological, because the brain/mind is hugely complex. Often what appears on the surface can be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, and sometimes there is no cure for them other than to medicate. While the brain can re-route - which is called neuroplastricity - regeneration isn't always possible, so with Reiki often you can be trying to cure the incurable. So with respect, unless the healer has an in-depth knowledge of psychiatry or psychology that takes years of learning and experience to gain I'm never going to be convinced that healers can have sufficient understanding.

If a person is receiving healing then it stands to reason that their mental health is compromised, and yes, often the traumas are lying deep within the unconscious - in what Jung called the Shadow Self. Essentially the Shadow Self is a repository of sorts for all the traumas that the person either hasn't or can't deal with, and often it goes back to early childhood. Reiki can be perceived as a threat to someone with a trauma because both Reiki and the emotional response are energetic - and to the traumatised person that's what caused their problems in the first place. Often that can bring their minds straight back to relive the internal circumstances of the trauma - and nobody wants to relive that kind of hurt. Personally I suspect the Limbic System can kick in with what it might perceive as a threat, because if the person hasn't experienced it before then Reiki can trigger the 'flight or fight' mechanism. Often people can treat their psychological wounds in the same way as physical ones, they become very protective of themselves. And yes, trust would be a huge factor in facilitating healing because the person then essentially allowed themselves to be healed.

Schizophrenia is neither intelligent nor a disease, and this is not the first time I have come across this perspective with specifically schizophrenia and often with discussions on the ego. For some reason Spiritual people tend to become experts in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis for some strange reason. Schizophrenia is a term from mental health and unless you understand it from that perspective then I doubt the validity of any healing that can be provided by Reiki. Schizophrenia is certainly not a disease and it is certainly not intelligent, and if this is the perspective you have then you know the reason why Spirituality and science aren't going to come together. Schizophrenia - depending on the nature of it as it presents in the individual - is a personality or cognitive disorder. Most people have it to some extent - it's actually 'normal' according to some mental health practitioners because 'being in two minds' or talking to oneself can be loosely termed as Schizophrenia. My own schizophrenia - and that of others that I've already talked to on this particular thread - is that the schizophrenic has one or more distinct personalities that have been 'fragmented' from the main personality due to trauma of some kind. Often it's a 'snapshot' of the menotional and mental state the person was in at that time. During trauma the mind can sometimes seek escape in various ways, and that can be in Spiritual/religious contexts - sometimes people can believe God is 'in their heads'.

To understand schizophrenia it can help to understand how a child creates an imaginary friend. Sometimes the child can experience trauma, which can happen in the case of divorce or bullying at school. for instance. The mind creates another distinct personality for a time as perhaps companionship or someone to talk to as the child tries to resolve the issues - the mind always seeks some kind of closure or resolution and a distinctly separate 'fragment' of the personality can be a means to that end. In the child's reality they have a friend and an adult telling the child that they don't simply causes conflict in the child's mind - because in their reality there is a friend. One of the reasons a child can hold onto that imaginary friend is because for the mind, it's comfort, understanding and escape from the reality of the trauma. It's the child's last straw that stands between them and 'drowning'.

As to what creates schizophrenia, the jury seems to be out on that one but genetics and epigenetics are also listed as causes, but often it seems to be life-changing or traumatic events that are the most common triggers.

My own schizophrenia has two distinct personality fragments, one is the child that was so badly physically abused and the other is the adolescent who couldn't deal with the emotional and mental traumas that were happening at that time. Both of those personality fragments are 'snapshots' of my mental/emotional state at that particular time. The fragments have gone through an individuation process in much the same way as the child's imaginary friend, although they become personalities in their own right. Just recently I went through cognitive behaviour therapy which essentially 'dismantled' my whole perceptual reality and examined it piece by piece. It was triggered again by a car smash that was no fault of mine but has left me with questions that I'm probably never going to find the answers to. The therapist took me right back to my childhood and what I was going through at the time, so I had to relive what I had suppressed for many years. What the cognitive behaviour therapy did was to enable me to perceive what happened through the eyes of an adult and not as a child, and that changed my whole cognitive reality. Not to mention the Spiritual impact that's had.

Hallucinations, paranoia and demons are the unconscious mind trying to communicate with the conscious mind. They are all avatars of the unconscious in the way what we sometimes experience as dreams as we sleep. In both sleep and mental health disorders the barriers are eroded enough for the unconscious mind to encroach. In mental health one of the common ones are dark figures, which are representative of aspects of the unconscious mind and represent something is wrong deep down. If someone displays emotions at this stage then they are displaying the emotional response their condition, which was caused by other emotions and cognitive dysfunction due to the initial trauma. The person is dealing with the emotions of the result and not the initial root cause, so they have another layer below what is visible.

My mother's paranoia is just such an attempt by the unconscious mind to express and make sense of what's happening to her. Her dementia is 'out to get her' but what's causing it is buried so deep in the 'shadows' that she knows something is there but she can't see it.

Emotions are a 'by-product' of cognitive functions/disorders and while emotions and Reiki are energetic, cognitive functions/disorders are not. The disorders themselves suggest that there are deeper underlying issues that need to be addressed, so there you have another layer. Often these things stem from a symbiosis of the person's sense of 'I am' or the Jungian (as opposed to the made-up Spiritual one) ego, their environment (which includes external stimuli) and their cognitive functions that create their perceptual reality.

The mental health landscape is changing but it still has a way to come, and I think those not involved in mental health need to be aware of certain fundamentals. The general misconception is that mental health in can be cured but that is not always the case, and often it's not something that can be dealt with in the way a cold or a flu is. You can't cure a disorder that's caused by genetics or a physical abnormality of the brain, if the brain is 'deformed' there is no cure. Similarly soothing the side effects doesn't provide a long-term solution either because cognitive processes that can cause mental health issues remain untouched by Reiki or Spirituality. This is where Spirituality falls down in this regard, 'deep' can be in relation to the depth of knowledge a healer has, but issues and emotions can have layers far deeper than the healer is aware of. And sometimes Spirituality is just the 'wrong tool for the job'.

I don't know how the processes can be applied clinically, because you can be dealing with a physically malformed brain, skewed cognitive processes, genetic end epigenetic disorders or who knows what else that can be buried so far down in the unconscious or the brain's physical structure that it is impossible to deal with. This is what I mean about healers only dealing with the surface layers, because if they're dealing with emotional responses they're only dealing with the results of a process that goes far deeper than most people want to acknowledge. It's my own belief that Reiki can have a very definite therapeutic benefit to mental health as you have demonstrated but at the same time it has to be put into context. It is a therapy and often it can be more effective at managing mental health issues, but as a cure................
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