Don’t miss signing up for the next ‘Recovering Our Families’ course

I’ve taken two modules of this course. Believe me, there is nothing like it out there. To get the best flavor of what it’s about, read the testimonials from mothers who have taken the course.

“Recovering our Families” introduces families to key recovery principles, leaders, research and resources that are person- and family-centered, trauma-informed and strengths based. This interactive, facilitated online class combines emailed lessons with recovery exercises, videos, online resources and a password-protected website with private facilitated group discussions and peer support. The “Recovering Our Families” course was written by and is facilitated by Krista MacKinnon with the help and support of Family Outreach and Response Program in Toronto Canada, and The Foundation For Excellence in Mental Health in Oregon, USA.”

To learn more about this innovative course click here

The next course begins Monday, March 15th.

 

Interview with author Stephanie Marohn

Episode Description

Trying to pick up the pieces of shattered minds, those with schizophrenia are a source of mystery and misery. Schizophrenia is a devastating disease affecting 51 million people world wide, and an often misunderstood condition. It is a multi-causal disorder with a wide variety of factors that need to be addressed. Stephanie Marohn will discuss natural medicine treatments such as nutritional protocols, anti-viral protocols, heavy metal detoxification, allergy elimination, cranial osteopathy, constitutional homeopathy, family system therapy, psychosomatic medicine and shamanic healing to address psychospiritual factors. Stephanie Marohn compiled interviews with brilliant doctors about their approach and care of society’s forgotten patients.

Mar_2016_Ecard_schizophrenia-solutions-for-shattered-minds

 

Stephanie Marohn is the author of 10 books, including What the Animals Taught Me: Stories of Love and Healing from a Farm Animal Sanctuary, seven books on natural medicine, and the anthologies Audacious Aging and Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change. Her writing has also appeared in magazines, newspapers, and poetry, prayer, and travel-writing anthologies.
Stephanie runs the Animal Messenger Sanctuary, a safe haven for farm animals, and has an energy medicine practice for animals of all species. Since 1993, she has operated Angel Editing Services, specializing in books on mind-body-spirit topics.

Natural medicine books by Stephanie Marohn:
The Natural Medicine Guide to Addiction
The Natural Medicine Guide to Anxiety Disorders
The Natural Medicine Guide to Autism
The Natural Medicine Guide to Bipolar Disorder
The Natural Medicine Guide to Depression
The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia
Natural Medicine First Aid Remedies

REAL LIFE starts with a dream (guest post)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see himself as he is, infinite.” Aldous Huxley, written in my yearbook 2002

“Met him what? he asked. -Here, she said. What does that mean? He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail. -Metempsychosis? -Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home? -Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. -O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.” James Joyce, Ulysses p. 64, The Modern Library

I’m to tell you about a dream I had, a bad dream, but one that leads me to acceptance, not, in so many words, giving in. In itself, it has no meaning for anyone, and I expect the following is not of general interest, except something has to put an end to this story.

I still loathe myself often, loathe all of my circumstances and it doesn’t matter how many people I ask for their point of view. That is, I feel evil. I don’t want to convince you of this at all, and I was hoping distracting myself with James Joyce might, I don’t know, put a rosy hue on things. There is one alternative.

(There was a retired teacher whom I would meet from time to time on the corner, I mention now that she was a teacher of English, and when I told her my name, she straightaway nodded ‘Dedalus’, Stephen, my namesake of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.) When sometimes I find life so very ordinary, I tell myself that must be because I’m something like the Wizard of Oz behind it all. This cannot be explained, I reckon, it must be experienced, much like Joyce’s books, and I find I tell others I’m ‘away with the fairies’ thereby placing myself as an odd relative, out of reach. Who is deceiving whom?

In my dream, I awake from a deep sleep (called so softly but I’m waiting expectantly) and in a flash, I’m running ahead, there’s so much to do, my recording session, my family will be here tomorrow, wow! I’m really achieving something, being somebody! And then….

Is it raining? I pause to try to read the weather, then I see my body blocking every point of view, any feeling, and I disbelieve in myself. Any observation or attempt at thought pulls me toward the ground, a beast of prey. I can’t see my clothes, then my body dies part by part. I’m urged to forget everything, and as I wake, I challenge myself to let go.

The disapointment concretely set in, that just as I could visualise my own life, boldly independent, but it’s just a story, and what’s more, I identify my dreamself as Stephen Hawking, and so I tell my mother later that morning, and next my psychiatrist. Imitating Hawking, I try to think through the drama. It’s impossible. Still fresh in my memory, I know then I believe Stephen Hawking to be a true hero, his inward world matched his outward reality, his thinking so peerless, singularly screaming I AM WHO I AM to the whole universe, but unable to find and name God. I want to see things from his eyes, paralysed, like Abraham Lincoln at his memorial sitting, that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. could stand there and proclaim, I have a dream, a word, a thought, and I hope, realize his relationship with God was just once, mutual.

I tell myself this, but it’s a rationalization. Why shouldn’t I be able to just collapse, and truly it will mean nothing? I don’t feel like I’m achieving anything, except something to do tomorrow. “Curse your God and die,” said Job’s wife, but I am not Job. I remember being sad for the writer Douglas Adams when he died, just collapsing on his treadmill. Now, I think, that must have been some relief. I didn’t know Douglas Adams, and if he collapsed in my arms, I wouldn’t have tried to resucitate him but stupidly, called for help.

If I acknowledge that the alternative to fear and loathing is action, and I’m drawing again on my English classes with Shakespeare, and that I don’t have the genius of Stephen Hawking, well, then, I think the letting go of life will be continual, that whenever I act in favour of change, I also release my desire for change, and that I may be getting in my own way by being so stubborn. I don’t want to justify myself continually, it is very hard on my own sense of self. The thing is, if I’m really stuck, like quicksand, I can only let go, and how then can I be afraid of death? I can’t lie to you about how afraid I feel, I’m deceiving myself, and getting deeper into the sand.

Then I guess I’ll really have to write my own account of my life where somehow it doesn’t end where all the details have been revealed but somehow create a story I can love where the end is only the beginning.