Venom Treatment for a Snakebite, but Mental Illness

How mental illness has benefited from a deepening spiritual practice, similar to the symptoms during peak psychosis.

Years of questioning my own sanity related to mental illness led me to digging a near-eternal pit of existential dread. I found solace in mindfulness, but this wasn’t enough to provide a foundational framework for stability.

Much like a snake bite is treated with snake venom, the stability for a mental illness plagued by hyper-religious ideals and spiritual practices was a spiritual practice itself. How could I relate to my entire self, even when the experiences I had and have are labeled as “wrong” by people wearing white jackets?

I began with a very basic practice of mindfulness, noticing what was arising and passing in my experience. This was an amazing three-year period where I grounded, stabilized, and learned to name what was happening inside my mind and body. Thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations.

Eventually I found portions of my experience that wasn’t explained in a mindfulness setting. This included observing pendulums, spirals, and other energetic movements occurring during practice.

The transition for me was to a spiritually integrated meditation practice, focusing on the ability for this underlying “energy” to be the primary agent of change for any internal state. After practicing for around four years, I can no longer deny the effects of seeing, feeling, hearing, and knowing beyond the physical senses.

I still find myself questioning everything, but now it’s based in the need to not cling to anything untrue. The ego within my mentally ill mind likes to hyper-fixate, but what if I can question these fixations within the energetic space too? Effectiveness within this realm allows thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories to cohere in whatever way they need to.

I have worked through many layers of trauma within this spiritual landscape, and it’s exhausting holding both versions of myself apart. Me, someone who is deeply spiritual and has a diagnosed mental illness.