The Entity Is: Neither existence nor non-existence; Neither cause nor circumstances; (nor) itself for others; Neither square nor round; Neither short not long; Neither rising nor falling; Neither birth nor death; Neither creation nor appearance, nor artificiality; Neither sitting nor lying; Neither going nor staying; Neither moving, nor rolling, nor still; Neither advancing nor retreating; Neither safe nor unsafe; Neither reasoning nor unreasonable; Neither gain nor loss; Neither this nor that; Neither past nor future; Neither blue nor yellow; Nor red nor white; Neither scarlet nor purple, nor any other color.
For the Entity is LIFE itself. In other words, the Buddha (the Entity) is life.
These are the negatives that Mr. Josei Toda (2nd Soka Gakkai president) contemplated while in prison where he became enlightened or awakened to the truth of all phenomena. Mr. Toda was jailed for his refusal to adopt the “official” (i.e.: the religion of Shintoism that was being enforced by the military in post-World War II Japan). He held steadfast to his faith in the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin (a 13th century Buddhist monk, and the Lotus Sutra, the supreme teaching of the Buddha that has the capacity to lead everyone to their own awakening and spiritual revolution). Nichiren Daishonin’s school of Buddhism is now practiced in 192 countries by millions of people. Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo ~ Jennifer
From confusion comes opportunity. (Photo credit: wasabicube)
So, I am not feeling particularly bad about divorcing my ex-husband right now. In fact, we belong to the same Buddhist community and he introduced to this form of Buddhism. Our community is divided across the city into smaller groups or Districts. I am now and have been the Women’s District leader for the group he had practiced with since moving here about 8 years ago. Upon the divorce, he made the choice (thank the powers that be) to move to another District because I sure was not going to give up my group because of him, although I did try for other reasons. But, I was shot down. So, at any rate, for the past month or so, I have been in and out of a fairly intense mixed episode. I cry at the drop of a pin, I am manic as all hell with the motivation of a seriously depressed person. It’s cool. Fucking rocks (pardon my French)……the problem is I still have to do shit.
Actually, sitting here listening to Pearl Jam’s “Ten”, the song “Alive” is playing. Always one of my favorites, ever since it was a new song (yes, I am an aging Gen-Xer, and was around to see the very beginning of alternative rock and Grunge.I am getting old…er). Anyway, this particular lyric has always gotten to me, probably because I have been Bipolar for 20+ years and did not know it. At any rate, here’s the lyric: “…..Is there something wrong, she said. Well, of course there is. You’re still alive, she said. Oh, and do I deserve to be? Is that the question? And, if so….if so… who answers…who answers….” (Pearl Jam, Ten “Alive”) For some reason, this lyric has always touched a nerve. Maybe because I don’t feel worthy of life, worthy of happiness (my marriage certainly validated that feeling), worthy of a happy life. Somewhere along the path of my growing up, I decided that psychological torture (both by self and by others) seemed to define the “norm” of my life. This is how confusion has been reached. Confusion is not a state I find my self in often. At least not about emotions. I just choose to not have them if I can possibly avoid them.
However, confusion and complete discombobulation is where I find my self. I do not like it. I do not enjoy this. I choose not to feel for a reason. Feeling has caused me nothing but pain over my lifetime. I do not hold much hope for the same reason. Every time I have dared to hope, it has gone dramatically and catastrophically awry. I seem to find my self in a position where I am actually feeling bad that I divorced my ex. Neither of us put much into marriage counseling (it, I believe was too far gone by then), and as a consequence we paid co-payments for psychologists that couldn’t help by that point. Initially, I thought, he was falling asleep on the couch because he was staying up too late, and then, it gradually dawned. He didn’t want to sleep in the same bed as me. I have these questions that goes around and around and around in my mind: was it his porn addiction or my having Manic Depression that caused the rift? Was it a combination of both? Was it my reaction to what he saw as normal and healthy? He blamed the whole thing on me, always telling me that I was all talk and no action (I had actually been thinking of divorce for a year or so).
Then, the “deal-breaker” fight happened and he threatened me with bodily harm. Lethal bodily harm. I have PTSD. I have an intense fight or flight mechanism; it depends on the situation which one steps up. I also have a fairly “distinctive” career as a substance abuser (see post: “Self-Medication” in the archives). When he said that I was lucky there were no lethal weapons in the house, he was clearly thinking about guns. Idiot. I felt this really scary calm come over me. I have only felt it a few times, and it always involved a threat to me of some sort. I just looked at him, and found him pathetic. I, mean, how dare he threaten my life? As if I was going to let him hurt me? So, I looked at him much like you look at a specimen of algae in Biology class. He had become a non-entity; something to be disposed of. I looked around the room from my position on the sofa, and I could clearly see at least 10 lethal objects not to mention the knives in the kitchen. I asked very calmly what did he mean there were no lethal weapons in the house, that I could see about 10 from where I sat. He was clearly out of his element. I had been a fairly violent child, and it got even worse as my substance use led me further and further down a very dangerous path littered with human land mines. I told him the conversation was over, and I was going to bed. It was 2:00 am. I spent an hour trying to fall asleep, and in that hour decided that I was leaving. He really fucked up when he threatened me because a vital part of my self shut down, and part of that part was my love for him.
Which gets me to where I am now. Confused. And emotional. I feel bad for divorcing him because I know he thought I would put up with his shit forever. No, sorry, even my self esteem has a point at which I say no more. I mean, he clearly was hiding from me. He would spend all day locked away with his computer and his porn. Didn’t leave much room for me. So, I filed the first of the paperwork 4 days before my birthday and one month after our anniversary. I have always had a great sense of timing. I think what is bothering me now is that I just don’t feel that bad about it. In my eyes, I was protecting my self from further damage. I isolate the word “self” for a reason. It was the “self” that was being attacked and damaged. I have spent far too much time in therapy, in the hospital, getting medically “stable” to watch it all go down in flames. Maybe that makes me a cold person, but I do not think so. It makes me a survivor, and it makes me someone who wants a life. I feel bad for him, but, at the same time, I do not feel anything. That’s new; I have never just not felt anything. Maybe its because it is the Holidays, and I feel so much that it feels like numbness.
This is the Sine Wave. When it looks like this with equal frequency and amplitude, everything is ducky. It is like being on a gently rocking ocean.
So, my divorce is official, and has been for about 2 months. You would think I would feel relief at being out of a situation so negative and hurtful that I barely survived at times. I do feel relief that I am not being disrespected and degraded by some one who “claimed” he loved me and that he could handle the Bipolar part; he had dated two other women with Bipolar in the past, and in fact, his most recent breakup was with one of those women, they both walked out on him, not the other way around. I find that interesting. All of his longish term relationships have ended with the woman leaving the relationship. Hmmm.
At any rate, I am finding that I am slowly almost imperceptibly becoming very depressed. I am still at the point where I can hide from people who do not know me well. I am on a fucking roller coaster. One minute I am crying like I lost the last pet on the earth, the next I am thinking ‘hmmm, the kitchen needs cleaning,’ and no more crying for a while. I know that I am still on the okay side of this mood swing because I still care about what I look like, engage in personal hygiene, that sort of thing. The very fact that I do not out the kitchen off until tomorrow tells me I have not fallen………yet. I may still be on the okay side of this particular piece of the sine wave, but that doesn’t mean I won’t slip off.
I know there are many ways that people with manic-depression have devised for themselves when they feel an episode coming on. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, and hooray for them, but what do you do when it blindsides you and cold-cocks you in the face? What are you supposed to do when you both belong to the same religious organization, and you see each other at community events? How the hell are you supposed to heal from everything he put you through and everything you did to him? It’s not like you can decide to be a Zen Buddhist (I am a Buddhist, as an aside), and go climb a mountain and empty your life of all desires both material and those that are more fleeting, and come back enlightened. I mean, hello, most people have some sort of life including myself as unhappy as it has been for a time now. We don’t have time to climb mountains seeking the “way.”
Besides the only thing I can see coming out of that is a lot more money in the savings account due to one’s lack of desire for earthly things. (Sorry to the Zen Buddhists, no offense meant). Then I stop and think about one of the key concepts of my sect of Buddhism, and that is to make a plan then take action on it. Making a plan is great, but what will it accomplish, what will it get you if you do not take action? Nothing.
So, my ex-husband and I had the mother of all of our fights about first week in June. It was one of those fights where you are yelling but then get quiet because you have become so angry, you are afraid to speak. I sat there and let him yell, and I yelled back, until he said “You’re lucky there are no lethal weapons in this house.” I got quiet real fast and kept my butt glued to the couch because within my immediate sight I could see about 5 lethal objects. The next words out of my mouth were calm and modulated. I stated that I had enough of this discussion, and I was going to bed, and he could do whatever he wanted.
That night I curled up around my teddy bear (yes, I still have one), and I thought very hard about something I had mentioned before in passing fits of temper: Divorce. This time he had not just crossed the line, he jumped over it like he was an Olympic athlete. You do not threaten people with bodily harm. Especially those of us who have PTSD and a very strong fight mechanism. So, that night at about 3 am, I decided that come hell or high water, I was filing by Friday of that week. And, that’s what I told when he woke up the next day, and that is exactly what I did by that Friday.
I said all of that to say this: one can never be prepared for what is going to come unhinged in your mind that will set you up to break. I had been so unhappy in that marriage for two years, and I honestly thought I had worked through all the emotions. I was so wrong. I have been awful. I have been up for a few days then crashing out of the sky for a few more. I feel like the boy, Icarus, in the Greek legend who flew too close to the sun with wings of wax. I feel like I am hanging on to my sanity by the most light and gossamer of threads. I have become the dark side of the moon.
I am also a Buddhist as well as many other things, and although this explanation is particular to Tibetan Buddhist chant and prayer (I am a believer in the Nichiren sect of Buddhism), The Dalai Lama explains the main precepts of Buddhism quite well. So, I thought I would post it for anyone interested in Buddhism, in general. Buddhism is very peaceful and, for me, calming.
Tripitaka Koreana stored at Haeinsa (해인사, Temple of Reflection on a Smooth Sea) is one of the foremost Chogye Buddhist temples in South Korea. It is most notable for being the home of the Tripitaka Koreana, the whole of the Buddhist Scriptures carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks, which it has housed since 1398. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Clinical research shows Buddhist mindfulness techniques can help alleviate anxiety , stress , and depression (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I figured since yesterday’s post was a long look at the role of psychobiology in Anxiety in Bipolar patients, I figured I would follow up with a common definition of stress and it’s psychiatric equivalent, and the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale for anyone interested in where they stand in terms of life stressors. As most people with Bipolar know, we all handle stress in different and sometimes more positive ways than other people with the same condition. I scored 314 which is really high, and makes me more likely to get sick both physically and mentally. Thank the powers that be for being a practicing Buddhist! This is copied from mindtools.com.
Definition #1: People use the word “stress” to describe a wide variety of situations – from your cell phone ringing while you’re talking on another phone – to the feelings associated with intense work overload, or the death of a loved-one.
Definition #2: perhaps the most useful and widely accepted definition of stress (mainly attributed to Richard S. Lazarus) is this: Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.” In less formal terms, we feel stressed when we feel that “things are out of control.”
The question is: how much does it take to “push you over the edge?” For example, losing a spouse or partner is rated # 1 on the stress scale while changes in responsibilities at work is much lower on the stress scale. Of course, a lot of how we experience different stressors has a lot to do with how stable our lives are generally, how strong our support networks are, etc. It is an interesting exercise to undertake because many people who are mentally “interesting” will find their scores to be higher than others. I think this is because we are already expending so much energy trying to get well, or we are expending energy to stay well. Because of these differences, it is good to have a way to examine your stress level, just like some people with mood disorders track their moods on a daily basis.
“The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), more commonly known as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, was created to do just that. This tool helps us measure the stress load we carry, and think about what we should do about it.”
“In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe decided to study whether or not stress contributes to illness. They surveyed more than 5,000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experience any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years.
Each event, called a Life Change Unit (LCU), had a different “weight” for stress. The more events the patient added up, the higher the score. The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill.”
So, here is the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale:
Life Event
Value
Check if this applies
1
Death of spouse
100
2
Divorce
73
3
Marital separation
65
4
Jail term
63
5
Death of close family member
63
6
Personal injury or illness
53
7
Marriage
50
8
Fired at work
47
9
Marital reconciliation
45
10
Retirement
45
11
Change in health of family member
44
12
Pregnancy
40
13
Sex difficulties
39
14
Gain of new family member
39
15
Business readjustment
39
16
Change in financial state
38
17
Death of close friend
37
18
Change to a different line of work
36
19
Change in number of arguments with spouse
35
20
A large mortgage or loan
31
21
Foreclosure of mortgage or loan
30
22
Change in responsibilities at work
29
23
Son or daughter leaving home
29
24
Trouble with in-laws
29
25
Outstanding personal achievement
28
26
Spouse begins or stops work
26
27
Begin or end school/college
26
28
Change in living conditions
25
29
Revision of personal habits
24
30
Trouble with boss
23
31
Change in work hours or conditions
20
32
Change in residence
20
33
Change in school/college
20
34
Change in recreation
19
35
Change in church activities
19
36
Change in social activities
18
37
A moderate loan or mortgage
17
38
Change in sleeping habits
16
39
Change in number of family get-togethers
15
40
Change in eating habits
15
41
Vacation
13
42
Christmas
12
43
Minor violations of the law
11
Your Total
Score Interpretation
Score
Comment
300+
You have a high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future.
150-299
You have a moderate to high chance of becoming ill in the near future.
<150
You have only a low to moderate chance of becoming ill in the near future.
Note 1: Keep cultural differences in mind when taking the survey
Note 2: Don’t dwell on it, and don’t let this knowledge affect your mood. Think positively !
Note 3: You should take the advice of a suitably qualified health professional if you have any concerns over stress-related illnesses, or if stress is causing you significant or persistent unhappiness.
Like I said, it is an interesting exercise to find out where you fall on the life stressor scale. Be aware that you may already have coping mechanisms in place to manage stress.
I have been inspired today by several other blog posts I have read to think about the nature of spirituality and it’s healing and restorative properties. While I think it is important for anyone to have some sort of spiritual faith be it Christian, Catholic, Buddhist or Wiccan, I have no prejudices concerning people’s choice of spirituality; whatever works is what you should do.
I happen to follow a sect of Buddhism (there are literally thousands of sects) known as Nichiren Buddhism which emphasizes that you and you alone are the source of the struggle or hurdle that you are facing, and only you can come up with a solution through chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” which loosely translated means Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Universe and the simultaneity of cause and effect (“Renge” means lotus blossom which seeds and blooms at the same time) through the vibration of sound. It tends to become very meditative if you chant for a while which is not dissimilar to Zen Buddhism that teaches that one must clear one’s mind and life of earthly desires to achieve enlightenment although Nichiren Buddhism does not state that you must give up earthly desires in order to reach enlightenment.
The whole goal of Nichiren Buddhism is to reach a state of “Buddhahood” in which one understands the nature of all things, and is indestructibly happy no matter what gets thrown your way. In fact, if you are practicing correctly and are following the correct path, then obstacles will get in your way to test your faith. Nichiren Buddhism views these trial and tribulations as a means of growing spiritually, and are to be greeted with joy as opposed to sadness or despair.
Nichiren Buddhism is an inherently humanistic “life philosophy.” It teaches that you practice for yourself and for others (others being the rest of the world), and that everyone regardless of their station in life is worthy, and deserve respect and compassion. When you put these ideas into practice, your environment changes around you. As you become closer to being “enlightened” and you develop a character that cannot be brought down, your reaction to the things that occur just because you are a human become less severe, and more understanding of other people’s inherent rights to be treated with dignity. You become less judgmental, and more accepting of people in general. It is hard to explain. But, it works for me, and about 200 million people practicing in 192 countries. Another idea that is very important and is essential is known as “Dependent Origination.” In other words, we are all interconnected in one way or another with other people and the Universe that nourishes us. It is really hard to explain why this philosophy works for me, but I know I have become happier, more resilient and the episodes of mania and depression have lessened.
It does not matter what faith you follow. It is the act of engaging in spiritual activities on a regular basis is what I believe is important. Being a member of a spiritual group be it Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, Judaic, or Taoist can provide you with a sense of feeling grounded, it also provides social contact, it can provide a social support network (if you feel that you can trust people to not judge you for your struggles); some of my best friends are members of the SGI (Soka Gakkai International ~ means “Value Creating”.)
People of faith tend to be supportive of one another, and if they practice true to the values of their chosen faith, they are respectful and compassionate towards all people. The only real difference between the “People of the Book” and Buddhism is that Buddhists are taught to follow the teachings not the teacher, and that Buddhahood is within you, you just have to find it, whereas the “People of the Book” have an external sense of the divine. Buddhism is all you, your causes and your effects, your obstacles and your method of overcoming them, and Christians have God and Jesus’ teachings to follow, but believe in an external higher being. In Buddhism, you are the “higher power,” you just have to find it. No matter what works for you, I have found that many people with mental issues who are also deeply spiritual seem to have better outcomes, and a more positive way of managing whatever their life or their mental issue throws their way.
Buddhism is part of my three pronged attack on my mental health problems: Buddhist practice, a psychiatrist who is extremely good with medication and is not heavy handed with it, and a therapist who has become a lifeline. These three things keep me relatively sane. They also keep others around me relatively sane as well.
So, I highly recommend that people who suffer with mental issues find a spiritual belief system that works for them. It will keep you grounded, enable you to weather the storms when they happen, provide social contact, and provide a network of people you trust to help support you when things aren’t quite kosher. But, that is only my experience and perspective. It is not written in stone or any medical journal that I know of 🙂
Sōka Gakkai International (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is important for each person to embark on a journey in search of the truth. The truth, however, actually lies in compassionate actions to assist the weak or those enduring hardship and suffering. It is not to be found in highbrow, intellectual knowledge. ~ Daisaku Ikeda (President Soka Gakkai International)
The only way to fulfill the potential of thehuman race is to live just, kind, benevolent and compassionate lives. ~ Daisaku Ikeda (President of Soka Gakkai International and Humanist)
I have been inspired today by several other blog posts I have read to think about the nature of spirituality and it’s healing and restorative properties. While I think it is important for anyone to have some sort of spiritual faith be it Christian, Catholic, Buddhist or Wiccan, I have no prejudices concerning people’s choice of spirituality; whatever works is what you should do. 
A Bipolar Journey Through The Rabbit Hole 