Spirituality

Long time Icarus Project organizer, open source computer software architect, and graduate doctoral student Jeffrey Goins discusses his psychiatric experiences and insights from the world of technology applied to the world of madness.

Topics include the Eli Lilly Zyprexa memos scandal and intellectual property rights; freedom in a surveillance society; prophecy and ancient wisdom, and the “end of forgetting.”

UK video activist and writer Mel Gunasena on her mystical experiences and forced psychiatric hospitalization. Mel is the director of Evolving Minds, a documentary film about spiritual experiences and what gets labeled “psychosis” by the mental health system. She also discusses the art therapy project in Sri Lanka she helped found to assist traumatized tsunami-affected children.

See a trailer for the film at http://www.undercurrents.org/minds and check out the Sri Lanka project at http://www.art-2-art.org

Recovery leader and survivor Ed Knight talks about Zen, Insight, and Christian meditation and “schizophrenia,” including discrimination against people with psychiatric labels at meditation retreats, the link between spiritual awakening and madness, and living beyond “managing symptoms.”

http://www.professored.com
http://www.recoverycircles.org

Counselor and researcher Joe Goodbread discusses his more than 25 years experience working with madness and extreme states using Process Oriented Psychology, an innovative approach based in the work of Carl Jung and developed by Arnold Mindell.

Joe describes listening to the meaning in experience, helping people unfold their states, taoism, dreams, rank differences, and working with the body. Joe is a senior faculty at the Process Work Institute and author of The Dreambody Toolkit and Radical Intercourse.

http://www.aamindell.net
http://www.processwork.org

Paul Levy, who went through psych hospitalizations as part of a spiritual emergence process and became a Buddhist teacher, discusses his book The Madness Of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis.

http://www.awakeninthedream.com

Long time Freedom Center organizer Chaya Grossberg talks about her experiences with madness, medications, her explorations of spirituality, being a client at Windhorse Associates, and how her healing path has brought her to be a teacher of local yoga and writing classes.

http://www.chayagrossberg.com

Psychiatric survivor Krista MacKinnon talks about her experiences with extreme states and spirituality, and her current work as a family advocate with Toronto, Canada’s Family Outreach and Response Program, an innovative way of helping families from beyond the limits of the medical approach.

http://www.familymentalhealthrecovery.org

Urban Shamanism with Julie Spooner, licensed psychologist from Brooklyn New York. Julie discusses a spiritual healing approach to madness and psychosis, including journeying through visionary states into alternate dimensions and interacting with illness and imbalance in their energetic and mystical forms.

Are people labeled ‘psychotic’ journeying to other dimensions like shamans do, but without realizing it? How can people learn to control these experiences as gifts rather than curses?

Julie can be reached at (718) 773-3338.

Paul Levy, counselor, teacher, and coordinator of the Padmasambhava Buddhist Center in Portland, Oregon, speaking on his spiritual emergence from psychosis to mystical awakening.

Also check out Paul’s website and writing at http://www.awakeninthedream.com