When life throws us the lemon of mental illness, our journey becomes one of traversing stigma, attempts to understand how our mind work, and attempts to remain stable while pursuing recovery. We each have our own path with medication, therapy, and whatever other coping skills we’ve benefitted from, so what else is there other than pursuing a path of healing the mind?
Shifting Perspective on Mental Health
Here at Return Home we see mental health as only one portion of the whole. If we offer the opportunity for mental illness to be integrated with emotional health and spirituality, there’s potential for healing and integration in ways we didn’t expect. The mind and body want to work together, but the experience of illness require different psychological tools than we see possible with simple coping skills.
If we see our experience with mental health from the perspective of our own mind and body, it would then become our goal to deeply understand how the mind and body work and interact together. The process of healing with mental illness includes a deep dive of how we perceive our reality, the thoughts and beliefs impacting our lives, and all of the emotions entangled too.
When we begin to work with spirituality in relation to mental health, there’s a sense of relief because we realize it’s not our job to be in control of healing. The process of becoming aware of these beliefs, emotions, and thoughts is a natural unfolding. We can reframe our perspective from being an active participant to that of an active observer and begin to witness the ways in which judgement have impacted our life.
The Process of Integrating Mental Illness
Seeing that Mental Illness is a natural way of being can provide some space for us to do deep healing work. Integration with spirituality provides a sense of ease for this process to occur. If we allow spirit to guide our healing process, it becomes less about "doing it right" and more "allowing it to happen".
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Your Personal Path to Integration
This journey isn’t about anyone other than you! Your relation to yourself and your perception of others is the primary focus. We want to empower you with the Spiritual Mental Health Education necessary to have a personal experiment and experience with spirituality. By actively engaging with spiritual practices and surrendering beliefs, emotions, and other factors limiting your experience within mental health, we begin to see that the factors holding us in old patterns are outdated and can be let go.
Worked Through & Can Help Others
- Integrating Medication – Exploring how to integrate medication into my spiritual journey in a way that empowers rather than controls.
- Reframing Psychiatric Beliefs – Learning to trust my thoughts and emotions in a grounded way, embracing both psychological and spiritual aspects of myself.
- Destigmatizing Mental Health – Understanding my mind (thoughts) and body (emotions and feelings) so I can communicate openly and without shame.
- Overcoming Fear of Speaking Out – Finding my voice on topics that truly matter to me—mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Trusting that my past fears of the mental health system were here to teach me, not hold me back.
- Trusting My Lived Experience – Believing in my own path enough to transform my experiences with mental illness and the mental health system into a business that helps others on similar journeys.
Current Growth Areas
- Navigating Symptoms While Titrating Off Medication – Gradually, over the course of years, reducing the amount of medication I take while closely observing my symptoms. One challenge I’m currently working through is how I tend to isolate myself when experiencing heightened symptoms, relying less on others.
- Unmasking & Embracing My True Self – Letting go of expectations around how I’m “supposed to” behave in public spaces. Instead of forcing myself to fit social norms, I’m embracing the spectrum side of bipolar disorder and working through fears of hospitalization due to being perceived as “outside the norm.”
- Transforming Mental & Emotional Energy Into Creativity – Learning how to shift from meditation to energetic processing and, eventually, creation. By freeing up the energy that was once spent on controlling my mind and emotions, I can now channel it into creative endeavors—fueling my work with Return Home.