Emma Bragdon, acclaimed author, reivews 'In Case of Spiritual Emergency' in the current issue of Caduceus.

It’s hard to cope with the news of the crises we are facing on every front--environmental, political, financial, and social.  Epidemic numbers of people are turning to psychiatric medications to stop feeling anxious and/or depressed.  We need more heroes, people of vision, who are not afraid to go into the wild and scary places, confront the powerful issues that are threatening us, and bring back the wisdom we need to rebuild our world on a foundation that sustains life.

Catherine G Lucas, author of “In Case of Spiritual Emergency,” (Findhorn Press, 2011) believes we are in a global spiritual emergency, similar to a dark night of the soul.  She says more individuals are being called to face inner demons, and align with the Higher Self in a different kind of life.   Those that complete the journey have a greater connection to their soul purpose, and greater ability to live a life motivated by compassionate action.

Lucas’ book describes her own and others spiritual crises, and how each first wondered if he/she was crazy and then came through it.  The bulk of the book revolves around the concept of “spiritual emergency,” an evolutionary crisis that can appear similar to symptoms of mental illness: with disorientation, dramatic mood swings, inability to concentrate, identification with perceptions that are not apparent to others.  However, in spiritual emergency, the individual is following the trail through the dark underworld that leads to the Higher Self.  They need encouragement and support.

Between 1994 and 2003 there was a 4000% increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder for people under age 21.  Are we perhaps using the diagnosis too loosely—maybe applying it to those who are trying to make the hero’s journey?  Are we putting them on a lifelong course of debilitating drug therapy that numbs feelings instead of providing more appropriate support?  Lucas reflects on such questions.

Since Dr. Stan and Christina Grof’s seminal work describing spiritual emergency in the 1970s, others have followed with further research that Lucas documents.  She also advises the experiencers how to care for themselves and whom to trust to give appropriate support. Lucas suggests learning and practicing mindfulness training and techniques for grounding, finding creative expression, and allowing caring people to create a safe environment, as needed.

It could be that ‘mental illness’ occurs when someone resists doing the inner work of facing his/her feelings,  inner demons and aligning with the Higher Self.   Lucas’ book is for those who are willing and able to do that work with some guidance.  The message of this book will not be of use to those unable to commit to increasing self-awareness.

If you give the book to someone who is lost in a ‘dark night’ and looking for reference points this read could make the difference between that person being “mentally ill” or completing the most significant journey of life, the hero’s journey. 

Fortunately, Lucas, based in the UK, has joined with others who are creating networks of support for those on the journey.  Her book offers up to date references for further reading, websites, DVDs and CDs –all tools that shed light on the path, including contact information for support people in every English-speaking country. 

Bio of reviewer: Emma Bragdon, PhD (psychology) is based in the USA.  She is the author of two previous books on Spiritual Emergency as well as 4 books that bridge spirituality and health, following models developed in Brazil.  www.EmmaBragdon.com

Something is afoot. Something is stirring and shifting. It shouldn’t be a surprise, yet somehow it is. Spiritual emergency, which is all about rebirth, is going through a rebirth of its own. A term first coined back in the 1980s, interest in the phenomenon had waned; awareness and understanding of this transpersonal approach to psychospiritual crisis had fallen away.

Now, as we hurtle towards the 2012 Winter Solstice, people are waking up and realising that we need this understanding, this information, more than ever.

What am I going by? What are the signs? First, there’s the recently launched work of The Wakeup: New Earth Alliance for Addiction Recovery. The team approaches addiction from the perspective of spiritual emergency, which makes so much sense. You can find out more about their wonderful work at http://www.the-wakeup.com/. You can join their Ning community at http://thewakeup.ning.com/

Then there’s the initiative to launch a new Spiritual Crisis Network in Holland. I’ll be speaking at the conference to mark this exciting new development at the University of Leiden on 15 & 16 September. www.parapsy.nl May there be many more such national networks to join the existing ones!

Emma Bragdon, who wrote a classic spiritual emergency text back in the 1980s, has two new books out: Resources for Extraordinary Healing: Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Other Serious Mental Illnesses (Lightening Up Press) and Spiritism and Mental Health: Practices from Spiritist Centers and Spiritist Psychiatric Hospitals (Singing Dragon, a Jessica Kingsley Publishers imprint). Her work today is still very much about helping to shift to the new paradigm of mental health.

To cap it all, George Noory on the American radio show Coast to Coast discussed this very subject recently with his guests Dr Seth Farber, dissident psychologist and co-founder of the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry and Paul Levy. Farber’s point is that many forms of ‘mental illness’ are actually spiritual and supernatural experiences. Check out Paul Levy’s website: http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/

Finally, the Beyond Meds blog is covering many angles of spiritual emergency these days: http://beyondmeds.com/

All I can say about these initiatives is ‘thank goodness’! Thank you to all these dedicated people for what they are bringing to the collective consciousness right now. When I heard recently of yet another tragedy caused by mental health staff dismissing the spiritual dimension, I was reminded of how desperately needed this awareness and understanding is. But then I never really forget.

Guest Blog by Swithin Fry.



I am about to meet a convicted killer. A gunman murderer. One-to-one, face-to-face on death row in Ohio State, USA.   

I've been through three security checks, including an electronic scan, and I'm now walking through bleak, polish-aroma’d corridors of this ‘Correctional Institution’ to reach the final ID check.

Two officers wait at a tall, untidy desk. They are friendly and jokey. One gives my papers and Passport a cursory glance, “Right, sir.” The other twists around and casually taps his keys against a small, thick-paned window at eye level behind him.

“This way, sir,” and I am shown through what I first took to be the door into the visiting room but is only into a shunting lobby, like you get on cattle pens. The door into the top security area is opened only when the door from the corridor is shut and locked. These doors are heavy, metal-clad and slam. Big old-fashioned keys grate in the locks. There is nothing hi-tech American here.

For a moment, hardly a minute probably, I am alone while one door clangs shut and the other is heaved open. A mere moment. But the claustrophobia  is immediate and I find myself gasping for breath. And then just as quickly, there is the officer on visitors’ duty smiling at me and I’m shown through.

I’m in this huge, duff-yellow painted rectangular room. I look up and see that it’s actually an old prison unit with levels and tiers of balconies and cells going up and up. At the far end, at the last of several basic, round tables with attached seats, sits a large, muscular Black man grinning at me. He seems to be wearing pyjamas. The metal doors, the Dickensian keys, the film-set cells, and here, the man I’ve come to spend the day with who is under order of execution; there is a whiff of farce here, my mind struggles with the reality, like being introduced to a millionaire – a what!

Sadly, nothing about here is farce.

Tim. My HumanWrites’ penpal for the last six months who in the cosy comfort of my log-fire sitting room in the green-pastured UK I never imagined I’d ever meet. And there he is. Grinning. Grinning at me. I raise my hand and spontaneously wave.

I was expecting a glass partition between prisoner and visitor, like in the movies, so I say to the officer, “Is it alright to shake hands with Tim?”

“You can hug him, sir, if you want. Give him a kiss, I don’t mind!” and he laughs.

So I do. Hug him. l leave the officer at his desk and walk the length of this high, draughty building getting closer and closer and as Tim stands up to greet me, he extends this great paw of a hand and our handshakes melt into that permitted hug. It’s so good to meet this man; in six months of writing we’ve become real friends and this spontaneous hug is an expression, a symbol, of that kinship.

The pyjamas are, of course, his loose-fitting prison uniform. His legs are manacled together and chained to a hoop on the table.

Tim. My friend. A convicted murderer: murder would have given him a life sentence but Tim was found guilty of murdering a prosecution witness to an earlier charge. In Ohio that’s death row. That’s execution.

And in the first hour of the eight I spent with him that day, Tim insistently, like a train with no brakes, detailed what I had been avoiding in our letters: his case and his maintained innocence.

As I walked back out, back to the outside world, this thought came to me: in my naivety I had assumed that Tim must be guilty. For a 21st century American High Court to have reached this awful verdict, it must be so. Now I wasn’t so sure, no, not at all.

So what has this to do with Spiritual Emergency? For most people who I know of who have gone through Spiritual Emergency, the cause is internalised, created by discrepancies, incongruities, mismatches between what ‘I’ know intuitively to be the truth about life and the lie which our present society presents to this truth. The emergence starts as ‘I’ begin to comprehend this, to mould my reactions to life into thoughtful responses. There is hope.

Tim’s whole existence is in emergency. Internally he is lucid, intelligently thoughtful and steady. The mismatch for his life is external. Too many ‘if’s control his world. There seems little hope.

I don't know whether Tim is innocent or not. He said he will post me his case brief to read, then I can make up my own mind. I so want this very likeable man to be innocent, to be freed, to have an emergence from this nightmarish ordeal, to as Catherine would say, ‘return with the elixir’.

Synchronicity? Back in the UK some three weeks later, I hear of the case of Linda Carty, the British grandmother facing execution on a death row in Texas. The legal organisation Reprieve believes a massive miscarriage of justice has occurred; that she is innocent.

A quote I heard many years ago nags me: All it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing.

http://www.humanwrites.org/

http://www.reprieve.org.uk/events/savelindacarty/