I have always known intuitively, since been a young child, but there was something more about life I wasn’t being told, that society was missing something in some way. I battled to understand and over time this resulted in years of feeling inadequate, depression and a heavy sense that I had to pretend to be someone to fit the material, secular, mechanical world that we see today. Discovering my ‘self’ as a spiritual being has felt like coming home, I can now live true to who I know I am deep down inside, and the effect of that has been better than any antidepressants known to man!
It is hard to believe that having worked in the mental health field for over 14 years I had never heard the term spiritual emergency until it happened to me! My mum had struggled with her own mental wellbeing since I was born, being diagnosed as having schizo- affective disorder 20 years ago when she tried to say she believed she was a ‘healer’. Her beliefs completely disregarded she was sectioned, medicated and given brutal electro convulsive treatment, rendering her an almost robotic existence. My mum was told she was mad, and so that is what she was forced to believe.
In 2008 I experienced my own mental crisis. Various traumatic life events took their toll on my already fragile sense of self and I made a serious attempt to take my life. Thankfully I was not living in the UK at the time and therefore avoided falling foul of the mental health system and being lumbered for life with a derogatory label. Nothing made sense and life seemed futile.
Then early in 2012, after summoning a new strength to make some sense of it all, my whole belief framework about myself and the world changed in an instant. Various synchronicities had led me to read ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle, and before I’d even finished reading the book I instinctively knew all of the contents! I had gone into a meditation asking the Universe what on earth mental illness was all about, and, as I cleared my mind of all thought, to my amazement my question was answered so clearly and without any doubt that everything I had questioned about my existence in the world made complete sense. My level of consciousness expanded and I was able to channel a theory about spiritual emergency – a concept I had known nothing about only an hour earlier! I came out of the meditation and existed for the next three days in a heightened sense of awareness, I knew I was completely connected to the world and every being in it, and that all there is, all that matters, is love.
For the last year I have been researching the phenomenon of spiritual emergency and it is thanks to the information I discovered and the contacts I have made that have prevented me from going into crisis. I can now see how easy it is for people to believe that they are the only one to experience psychic phenomena as that is what I believed at first too. It was only due to me working within the mental health system I knew not to talk openly about my euphoria, as all that it would have achieved at the time would have to have got me sectioned! It is vital that this experience is normalised to help other people who are ‘awakening’ to understand what on earth is happening.
I now know how to manage my new found ESP and stay grounded, whilst acknowledging the wonderful miracles that occur around me every day. I feel so blessed to have gone through the traumas I experienced now as I know this is what led to my expansion of consciousness and wonderful insights I have into how easy it is to create our desired reality.
Being brought up in the materialistic, technological society that we are currently in it is easy to forget that we are spiritual beings at our core. Some people shy away from the word ‘spiritual’; it’s just language, most people have used the term ‘soul’ at some point in their lives, it is the same thing and has no religious connotation. We are taught to strive externally for wealth and happiness, but without searching within this search is futile, you’ll never find externally what has been inside all along. The first vital step to achieving is to believe.
I am now very proud to be part of the UK Spiritual Crisis Network which strives to normalize and validate unusual and sometimes extreme human experiences. We believe that there is no distinction between mental illness and spiritual emergency, the only distinction is in whether the experience renders the experiencer unable to function in their everyday life.
I know that purely by validating someone’s beliefs about their experience whilst helping them to remain grounded in our ‘shared reality’ it can help avoid unnecessary diagnosis or event assist someone back into recovery. I know this to be true because due to me speaking openly about my own experiences, validating hers and helping her to ground herself back in the here and now, my wonderful mum is no longer a robot – her life and soul have returned! And that is the only evidence I need to know this is the work in which I want to put my heart and soul!
For more information on the Spiritual Crisis Network; http://www.spiritualcrisisnetwork.org.uk
