Catherine Auman, MFT

I got a call earlier this week from a couple trying to get help for a beloved friend who was unable to get off the couch due to experiencing visions, flashes of color and light, sensations of energy coming out of her body, and ecstatic trance states. She also believes that the Messiah has returned, and it is she.

The couple had found me through Google as a ‘transpersonal’ therapist, or one who has had training in assessing and treating what is called “spiritual emergency.” For although their friend has a history of severe mental illness, many of her symptoms are the same or similar as those of spiritual awakening.

She was also experiencing evidence of a broader spiritual understanding, of increased compassion, of expansiveness, of the knowledge that everything is made of swirling energy, and that she has an important role to play on earth. Unfortunately, since this was mixed up with her psychotic symptoms, her friends weren’t sure what to do.

They didn’t want her to be just medicated and thrown into the hospital again. Conventionally trained mental health professionals are not taught how to distinguish between mental illness and spiritual awakening, which can at times resemble a psychotic break. Since Freud, there has been a bias against spirituality in mainstream psychology, and so, many people are understandably reluctant to seek the treatment they need.

Their friend was long ago diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mother had suffered from schizophrenia. The friend had been hospitalized for her illness in the past, got on medication, and improved significantly. Like many people, she went off the meds that were helping her so much due to the side effects, and because she believed she didn’t need them anymore. But something else of great import was happening also.

One of the things I learned in graduate school that has been a useful rule of thumb is that the mentally ill person is drowning in the sea while the mystic is treading water. They are both in the same sea, however. One of the ways we distinguish between the two states is to assess how stable the person has been able to be in their life – have they been able to care for their activities of daily living, provide shelter and food for themselves, for example.

As I said to the concerned couple on the phone, we need to first do a full assessment, then treat the mental illness and support the spiritual awakening.

It is important to find a therapist with special training in Spiritual Emergency. If you are not in the LA area, you can find one through the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) website at http://atpweb.org/Professional/ProfDir.asp

© 2009 Catherine Auman

I visited my sister and her family during the year in London her husband pursued graduate work in play directing. My nephews hated British school, their American ways considered freakish and weird by the other kids. It was hard to eat well there as the produce offered in the grocery stores was at least a week old, but I loved visiting the places I’d dreamed of: Big Ben, the Tate Modern, wherever it was the Bloomsbury crowd hung out, and Carnaby Street, the center of ‘60’s fashion. I cried at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey seeing the memorials of Chaucer, Blake, Keats, and other great literary figures, comparing the reverence paid to that of American popular culture which considers poets just above the level of dirt.

We took the Underground everywhere, also known as the Tube, London’s clean and efficient rapid transit system. The Tube was great for people watching – nearly everyone looked puffy and as if they didn’t eat many fresh vegetables. There were signs posted all over that said Mind the Gap — a safety reminder for people to watch their step as they traversed from the platform to the train.

It seemed a bit more metaphysical to me.

Buddhists practice a meditation of watching the breath. It can be quite powerful to sit and observe the long inhale as it draws in, chest and lungs expanding, hopefully the abdomen and belly, too. Then to watch the long exhale, with its calming effect. When you sit with the breath long enough, you may experience an eerie sensation that you are not breathing at all — something is breathing you. In fact, it seems more accurate to say we are being “breathed.”

Osho, the great Tantra Master, however, said it’s really about watching for the gap between the outgoing and ingoing breath. It takes a little awareness but you can locate it if you slow way down, and if you look closely, you’ll notice a space between each inhale and exhale where nothing is happening. There’s a gap, a silence, a doorway to another reality. It’s like the silence between words, the white space on the page, the background murmur rather than the foreground conversation. That’s the gap, Osho said, where who you are really exists.

Another of my favorite memories of London was touring the Globe Theater, and our guide whose raucous stories split our sides with laughter. But the thing I loved most about London was these spiritual reminders appearing everywhere, all over underneath the town. Mind the Gap. Remember to find out who you really are.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

I first started thinking about oxygen back when I started a running program (it was a milestone birthday and I realized, “damn, I’ve got to get in shape!”). I’d been walking about an hour a day for years after hearing that exercise was the most effective treatment for depression. Walking had helped, but when I began running, my mood spiked up in a way that made me realize it hadn’t been enough. I ran my one and only 5K at the completion of the program and then promptly went back to walking. The running since then is sporadic, but the times when I do, my mood seems to match the level of oxygen consumed. (The endorphins don’t hurt either.)

When we breathe, we can feel our feelings, both pleasurable and difficult. In this culture, however, we are taught to do whatever we can to avoid feeling bad. Anything unpleasant, and we are expected to will it away, or dispense of it through alcohol, food, or positive thinking. Holding one’s breath is quite effective at stopping feelings. It works.

People often hold their breath when faced with something uncomfortable. It can be as simple as encountering a driver with road rage, to as complex as trauma from childhood abuse. But habitually stopping one’s feelings can become chronic patterns of which a person is entirely unaware. Chronic holding means that some of us never take a full, deep breath anymore. Tension is locked in the body anywhere that breath will not go.

Leonard Orr’s Rebirthing and Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork are two techniques that involve having the client relax in the presence of a coach or partner and begin to take full deep breaths. This can induce all kinds of effects: recall of traumatic events, muscle tetany, crying and screaming, streaming bliss states. Orr believed that a basic series of ten sessions would be enough to “unlock” the breath and create profound and lasting change. When emotions are released that were previously stopped with the breath, there is often a corresponding release of vitality. It takes a lot of energy to keep those emotions repressed in the body.

The yogis have given us many breathing techniques for optimum health and wellbeing. Tantrikas, bodyworkers, and energy healers use the breath to process out old stuck emotions and induce higher states of consciousness. In my practice, I often teach my patients how an anxious, unhappy breath is shallow and rapid, filling only the top part of the lungs. Together we will practice a relaxed breath, deep and slow and full into the belly.

So go ahead, take a nice deep slow inhale, bringing the breath all the way down to your tailbone. Now, let it out slowly, slower still. Who knew feeling blissful was this easy? Or that it is available at every moment, every day of your life.

© 2009 Catherine Auman

Recommended to be done in the morning, this hour-long method is a powerful way to kick-start your day. It provides an outlet for tension and withheld emotions as well as being a great energy-booster!

I love it! Dynamic Meditation is the best way to let go of old stuff, renew myself, enter into stillness and get fit, all at the same time. – Lokita Carter

Dynamic is like having Nuclear Energy for breakfast! – Abhi-Irena

Osho created the active meditations because he said the Western mind is too active to go directly into silence. This meditation is not only fun and ecstatic, it clears plenty out plenty of psychological rubbish.

I usually park in the parking structure on 2nd Street between SM and Broadway, opposite what used to be Exhale, because its free for 2 hrs and I don’t have to bother about coins or tickets etc. and it’s not that long a walk to the beach because there is a foot overbridge right between Santa Monica and Broadway on Ocean Park that takes you straight to the beach and to the spot where we are meeting.

Bring something to share for a potluck breakfast afterwards.

This is a FREE event.

Time: Sunday mornings, 7:00am

Location: 3rd lifeguard post north of Santa Monica Pier

Questions? 310-460-9399

1) At the end of his life, Timothy Leary apologized for having written so many books. The book, he said, is out of date, old technology, and therefore only adds to the pollution of the world.

2) Writing as a Spiritual Practice was the name of a workshop I once attended. The leader was a Zen nun with a severe grey crewcut and three-hour-a-day habit which she executed whether she felt like it or not, unlike me. When you write about painful material from the past, she taught us, the psychological issue will be fully resolved when the piece is complete.

3) “The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man,” Patti Smith rants on Easter.

4) Another seminar I attended, this one called River Stories, co-led by Kirsten Linklater, originator of the famed voice method, and Carol Gilligan, the distinguished Harvard psychologist, was attended by forty female actors and me. As one of the exercises, we wrote a song, a poem, a dialog, and a scene for four poignant moments of our lives. After I performed for the group my vignettes that had been transformed into ‘art,’ I felt better about my life than ever before. By that time I’d acquired a long resume I could’ve been proud of, but it meant nothing to me because I’d never planned on a corporate career nor did I value it. Creating stories, transforming the garbage into something worth sharing; I acknowledged for the first time the bravery of one little life.

5) “I don’t know why to finish my book,” I struggled. “Metaphysically it makes no difference if I finish it or not.” Andy Couturier, writing midwife and decent person extraordinaire, raised his hands to his heart in the namaste gesture, then widened his arms, palms up, out into the world, bringing tears to my eyes.

6) After eight years, I’ve finished my book. I apologize in advance if it adds to the pollution of the world. Personally I found that working with life events and turning them into fiction, fiction with its arc and mythic aspiration, liberated me from the quiet cell those emotions had entrapped me in for years. When the book was finished I could move on, and not a day before. Suddenly, the past no longer owned the best days of my life; now it was now; the best days are the present. Freedom, it spelled freedom. So I have learned: do your art; create your thing; write your book. It’s some of the best therapy in the world. Then widen your arms and let it spread out, offering a tear to the worldwide heart.

© 2009 Catherine Auman