All resources can be employed to help the person in his/her process.
The Significant Role of Spirituality
When we attend the deepest levels of soul first and foremost, we create more encouragement and support for individuals to contact the soul within. As that connection is made, and strengthened, there is the potential for spontaneous remission of all symptoms and a giant step in personal growth or an accelerated process of healing. The connection is made through a variety of means, e.g. contemplation, meditation, study of books, guided meditation led by a facilitator, yoga, and/or visiting our church or practicing with our spiritual group of choice.
Marsha Linehan is a psychologist who is well-known as an expert in treating people with borderline personality disorder. These people have been known to cut on themselves, and often hover close to suicide or thoughts of suicide. In July of 2011, in the New York Times in a brief video, Marsha exposed the scars she has on her arms from cutting herself and told her own personal story of having been deeply depressed, having contemplated suicide, having been hospitalized as a young adult and what effected a transformation. Paraphrasing her: the most important part started when she went to her church and sat alone in despair one day. Suddenly, she saw Light all around her in the Church that seemingly came from another realm. That night, when she went home, she could sincerely say to herself for the first time, “I love myself”. From that point on, her life changed dramatically. She was no longer absorbed in negative thoughts, she went back to school, got a PhD in psychology, and went on to work effectively relieving the pain of people who suffer as she had suffered. She has worked for years at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution that functions also as a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School and is considered one of the best mental hospitals in the country. Her therapeutic style is to bring in spirituality as an important element in psychotherapy. Her story is a dramatic illustration of the powerful impact that spirituality can have on the course of treatment.
Concluding Thoughts
I like the way the term ‘spiritual emergency’ has expanded. What it used to represent in the 1980s was appropriate for that time, and what it is becoming today is appropriate for this time. In both cases, we recognize that the spirit of an individual is hungry to grow…in fact, the contents of the unconscious is bursting to the surface revealing its positive potentials and fragments that need to find their places as we become more knit together as a whole…and that growth will lead to a re-evaluation and change in relationships, lifestyle, thinking and perceiving. Like a caterpillar, the person needs to go into a chrysalis before he or she can become the butterfly. It’s a natural step in its evolution. It is very possible for individuals to extract learning from their experiences of extreme states and go on to be of great service to others, as the stories of Marsha and Jon illustrate.
I think more of us in the coming years will see that the bar on growth has been raised. It is now more obvious that recovery of wellbeing, being fully awake, or illuminated, is possible. More of us are now hearing and responding to that wakeup call; and more support services are in place to facilitate a positive outcome when we need special care on the journey.
For those looking for information for treatment facilities in the USA: please contact the Spiritual Emergence Network in California (reconfirm current contact information on the WWW as the office will be moving soon). Other referral networks in other countries can be located through “Resources” at the back of this book. Those in extreme states of mental disturbance or their family members looking for current resources for help might read, “Resources for Extraordinary Healing: Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Other Serious Mental Illnesses”. The back matter in that book has an extensive list of organizations, residences and treatment facilities in the USA and Europe that offer longer residential treatment that uses medication only cautiously and is oriented to recovery. Health professionals and students of psychology and psychiatry: I encourage you to follow my newsletter for information about courses being given to support newer more effective ways of creating mental health and recovering from mental disturbances. Those with mild to moderate mental problems will also find references to courses that offer integrative models of self-care and only cautious use of psychiatric medication in my newsletter. As this ebook goes to distribution, I am in the midst of creating a wellness center that will offer more resources. Current updates will be posted in the newsletter.
I wish you success on your journeys! May the stories and perspectives that make up this book be interesting as well as a source of support and inspiration for you.
Emma Bragdon, PhD.
Contact: http://www.EmmaBragdon.com
Free quarterly newsletter: http://www.enewsbuilder.net/emmabragdon
Vermont, USA. October 2012
Chapter 1
The Sword-Bridge
Spiritual emergence is a natural process of human development in which an individual goes beyond normal personal feelings and desires—ego—into the transpersonal, increasing relatedness to Higher Power, or God. There are usually critical points in that process when a person feels disoriented and for a time is unable to function as usual in ordinary life, relationships, work, chores, etc., while he becomes acclimated to more subtle levels of consciousness. The end result is positive transformation, observable in increased compassion, creativity, and a desire to be of service to all of life. Like crossing a sword-bridge, this transition time demands more focused inner attention and special care, so as to see things as they really are. The stress of the situation may make things appear more threatening than they actually are. As the story of Lancelot suggests, it may seem that one is walking toward two hostile lions when actually there is only a small, shy lizard on the other side of the sword-bridge.
When spiritual emergence is punctuated by profound emotions, visions, psychosomatic illness, and compelling desires to behave in unusual ways, including suicidal thoughts, the spiritual emergence becomes a crisis, a spiritual emergency. Although the course of growth toward higher levels of functioning and perceiving life follows a predictable progression; spiritual emergency is generally unpredictable, erupting chaotically and spewing forth contents of the psyche that demand attention.
Spiritual emergencies happen in a number of ways. Both spiritual study and inner psychological exploration can precipitate intense spiritual experiences. Resuscitation technology and many types of drugs, including anesthetics, can trigger intense spiritual phenomena. Other catalysts to spiritual emergency are emotional or physical distress, time of life, and extraordinary sexual experiences. How and when spiritual emergency happens is discussed in depth in subsequent chapters. A synopsis of techniques for helping someone in spiritual emergency is in the concluding chapter. The intention of this book is to build a bridge for positive communication between those people going through the experience and the people who care for them—both personal friends and professionals.
In order to address a broad spectrum of people, I have attempted to find simple terms and relatively simple instructions for managing a spiritual awakening. The path into transpersonal levels of consciousness is tricky, and tests us at every turn. People must seek the help they need relevant to their level of understanding of spiritual emergence.
Historical Perspective on Spiritual Emergency
The term spiritual emergency was coined by Christina and Stanislav Grof,
