“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”
-Joseph Campbell
In the West, the approach to ‘mental health’ has become big business: professionals tell us what is wrong with us, pharmaceuticals take away our pain, and various therapies try to help us wrap our minds around what it means to be “normal”, so we too can achieve this apparently desirable goal of being like everyone else. This approach may work for some, but it doesn’t work for me. I have observed the medical model approach to mental health for many years in my professional life, even dipped my foot in it firsthand, and decided that my life cannot be placed into a neat little box, with a label (and a pill), and bow on top – it doesn’t work that way. I am a free spirit, a child of the Universe, with the capacity to, as the Bhagavad Gita says, elevate myself by my own mind. The fact is, if I am not going to lift myself up by my own mind who is going to do it for me? I abide by the saying that we must ‘heal ourselves one person at a time, starting with ourselves’. By taking responsibility for our own mental health, we can start coming to terms with who we are and confronting the real issues that we face in our life. We take the metaphorical mental health bull by the horns and start to understand what it is we are dealing with; we stop beating around the bush and ignoring the elephant in the room. Once we start to understand who we are and what makes us tick, we can stop the blaming, excuses and shame that comes with mental health labels. There is freedom when we enter the cave of our fear and look around our mind, because the truth is that we cannot start healing until we are brave enough to see what is bothering us.
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Many people are so afraid of admitting that they have a mental health issue that they wait until whatever problem they are having explodes. At that point, what was being avoided becomes unavoidable and leads to bigger problems: further mental deterioration, relationship breakdowns, physical problems, financial collapse, or a plethora of other real-life problems. This said, sometimes it takes a bit of a push, or a bonk on the head, before we can understand what is happening to us because life can be so demanding that we are just trying to survive. But, ultimately, at some point in life, whether we are pushed or pulled, the day will come when we get fed up enough to want to heal that which needs our attention. Life does not allow us to run away from our problems; there is no escaping ourselves.
Have you ever heard the saying that the only ‘normal’ person is the one you don’t know. I have worked in mental health for well over two decades, met hundreds of people, and can attest to this truth. We are each, in our own way, struggling – there is no shame in the struggle – but what I would challenge you to think about is how we handle that struggle. Do we flail our arms, scream, cry, run away, hide, take false refuge in food or drugs, look for someone to save us, or can we stand strong and align with the higher consciousness within ourselves as we soldier on. We don’t have to enter into the journey of healing alone, but we do have to learn to steer the ship or else we may end up on some other shore we don’t want to be on.
So, take a chance and bet on yourself. When you get up tomorrow morning, look in the mirror and say, “You are alright. You got this. I love you.” Don’t be afraid of yourself – give yourself room to be different than other people by remembering that everyone goes through life in their own way. There is a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken” and, really, why would you ever want to be anyone else. If you don’t think that being you is a blessing, then you haven’t got to know yourself very well…yet.
