Julia thank you for a first hand, well written and engaging story of your experience. I would think such a candid recounting would take a lot of honesty, courage, reflection and work at organizing such a panoramic view of your psychology, spirit, experience(s), struggles and outcomes into such a condensed but expansive essay.
I found myself saddened but also unwilling to simplistically point a finger as to why a facility like the one you participated in does not exist in the United States. We spend a lot more on healthcare than any other country in the world, we consume anxiety and antidepressants by the train load and yet our mental health and suicide/addiction results are statistically abysmal. In the spirit of nonjudgmental appeal I’d suggest we use your work as a non-stigmatizing springboard. As Americans we have economic interests (by way of example the pharmaceutical, alcohol and medical industries to name a few). We have traditional ideological resistance (such as our mainstream religious organizations and sociological convictions about things like “will power”). There is a mountain of mostly unconscious cultural prejudices and ingrained biases toward materialism and outward appearances with resistance to deep reflective practices or meditation. Take my last three sentences and they would be the start of a list that would fill pages of a pattern that is figuratively and literally killing us.
Maybe your effort can “help more than one person”. Pain works. What we are doing in the United States in regards to mental and emotional health is not working very well. In my opinion I’d give us at best a “D” grade if not an “F” — in spite of throwing trillions of dollars and no small amount of human carnage into the jaws of the problem. Maybe if enough of us will step forward like you have we can accelerate open minded and truly unbiased clinical experimentation into whole areas of human consciousness and alternative treatments.
What more evidence or encouragement do we need? What we are doing now is filling our history with tragedy and suffering, let’s try some new approaches.
