Slowly, awareness of the need for mental health in the modern world is emerging.
We see and hear more about mental health, but we are rarely taught how to create a well-functioning psyche.
This is a complex topic.
So many humans are currently struggling with anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and more.
Many of these people are very young too.
There are so many reasons for mental illness. A few are:
Lack of education around mental wellness
Unhealthy work hours
Unstable and chaotic environments
Lack of connection to others
Lack of purpose
Lack of connection to oneself
Inability to focus on what is meaningful and healthy
Distraction, forms of mindless entertainment, and numbing
Our species is great at adapting to new survival challenges.
The modern-day challenge is creating a clear, healthy, focused, and sharp mind that is loving, understanding, wise, flexible, open, and able to cope with the challenges life throws at it.
There are many ways to go about creating a healthy mind. No one solution is "the best".
We are all different, and some practices will work better than others for us, but there are many patterns and trends when it comes to creating a healthy mind.
A few of these patterns include raising consciousness and self-actualization, getting your needs met, getting in touch with your body, self-awareness, creating meaning, and transcending the separate self.
Raising consciousness involves actively getting in touch with the present moment, yourself, and increasing what you are aware of in the present moment.
Getting your needs met includes eating a well-balanced diet, exercising, feeling connected to others, having a sense of personal accomplishment, having strong boundaries, and feeling safe in your own skin.
Getting in touch with your body includes contacting your sensations, feeling them, and remaining with them on a moment-to-moment basis.
We often dissociate from our bodies, repress our feelings, and ignore what our bodies tell us.
Self-awareness is about knowing yourself.
This involves journaling, active and intentional self-observation, knowing your psychology, and learning more about yourself.
Creating meaning has a lot to do with creating purpose.
You can create a purpose by solving the basic problems in your life. This means:
Clean up your diet
Create a meditation practice
Create an exercise routine
Build meaningful relationships
Build clarity around your career
Value self-actualization
Transcending the separate self is about questioning the "you" that you believe you are.
This involves going beyond the illusion of separation, realizing Unity Consciousness, and living in alignment with the truth about the nature of your own existence.
I can add more, but these topics are the major components of creating a healthy and energized body and mind.
The body is not separate from the mind. They are One.
The body is a complex system that is able to continuously pick up nuanced information about the present moment and report it to us through sensation.
It guides us if we let it.
It lets us know what direction to move in.
As we move into our body, we will notice that it is a very "unstable" place.
There is no certainty. There is only change.
Our sensations change, our thoughts change, our emotions change, and our entire self constantly changes.
Nothing remains fixed. Only fluidity exists in us.
We tend to block out this natural flow by numbing ourselves, distracting ourselves, escaping into our beliefs, repressing sensations, and ignoring our senses.
Our senses are a powerful tool for realizing the divine.
Our senses are gateways to unfiltered reality.
Our mind is conditioned towards self-preservation and perpetuating itself.
This means it desires (on an instinctual level) to maintain itself, its points of view, beliefs, perceptions, sense of self, and more.
There is nothing wrong with self-preservation. This mechanism keeps us alive.
It becomes problematic when the next phase of humanity is about aligning towards the raising of consciousness and psychological development, but we are stuck in our old habits and systems.
Raising consciousness seems like death because it is change and transformation.
Our survival mechanisms instinctually pick this up and interpret it as "threatening" due to the possibility of our conditioning dying off and being replaced with something else.
Our selves are constantly seeking to maintain themselves in physical, mental, and emotional forms.
We have a center of gravity in all of those categories.
Any change to one of those is automatically interpreted as a threat.
This causes unconscious reactions, dismissal of new information and experience, tension and stress, and a sense of contraction and closure.
Like I said, there is nothing wrong with self-preservation.
It just becomes problematic when we are trying to make effective changes to our experience of who we are and our old conditioning has us in its grip.
We kick, scream, resist, cry, blame, and act like children when we are met with the need to change.
We cling on to our beliefs, habits, routines, systems, and ways of being.
They helped us survive up until this point, but everything changes.
We all have to let go of everything at some point.
We will all die and lose everything.
We continuously watch how everything changes throughout our lives.
The game of "hanging on" is a fool’s game. You cannot win.
A wise man realizes he must surrender himself to the natural flow of the universe and trust in its wisdom.
This doesn’t mean you can’t change something about yourself or your life.
This simply means you remain in contact with the natural flux and flow of experience and don’t fight against it.
You stop resisting it.
You stop dissociating from it.
You stop ignoring it.
You fully allow it to move through you.
You realize you are One with the natural forces of existence.
This is to be directly experienced.
This movement is what is occurring now.
There is only this flow to reality.
Even when everything is rough and full of resistance, there is only this flow to reality.
Nothing else exists other than this natural and spontaneous movement to reality.
You can call it God, Consciousness, Awareness, Energy, Brahman, The Self, Spirit, or anything you like.
This is a matter of contacting this present moment as deeply as humanly possible and surrendering yourself to it.
It will take care of you. As strange as that may sound.
The only options are surrender and trust, or resist and fight.
You get to choose what to do.
The natural forces of existence are the only things that can exist.
So why bother to struggle against them?
This natural flow is essential to well-being and wholeness.
Without it, we simply project our inner sense of isolation, separateness, and fragmentation onto reality.
Our personal trauma and wounds obscure our perception of reality, and it appears as we are.
Full of isolated and seemingly separate parts that are completely disconnected from one another.
As we increase our sense of wholeness, harmony, and inner unity, our external reality appears the same way.
Our perception shifts to a more truthful way of looking at the world.
The world is not as we think it is. In fact, it is far from it.
For centuries, humanity has believed it had reality figured out, only to be proven wrong in the future.
The Earth is flat, then we found out it’s round.
Spacetime is absolute, then we found out it’s relative.
The observer doesn’t affect what is observed, but then we find out he or she does.
The brain creates consciousness, and then we find out we have no idea how consciousness originates.
All of these are examples of how ignorant we were and still are and how our beliefs create a sense of security within our personal and collective bubbles of delusion.
There is no one philosophy to explain reality.
Thought can never contain the whole of reality.
Thought is only a part of reality.
No conceptual scheme will ever explain reality simply because reality is not a thought.
The map is not the territory.
The models are useful, but not the real thing.
I’d like to end this with a beautiful quote by Albert Einstein.
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
- Lucas