anxiety – Where Spirit Stops

With mental health issues becoming more and more common and concerning, how the mind functions requires our fullest attention.

Just as your heart beats without you and your lungs pull air on their own, though you can take control of your breathing as you wish, your brain is always producing thought whether you are consciously thinking or not.

Your dreams don’t feel like you thought them up because you didn’t — your brain was thinking on its own. Your brain is a shark, swimming for a living; in sensory deprivation the brain quickly creates hallucinations in order to continue to experience stimulation where none exists. Your brain is always thinking in the background, even if you cannot perceive those thoughts.

What your brain thinks all on its own is undoubtedly crucial to understanding one’s mental health. But how do we learn to hear our brain’s automatic thoughts, or at least shift them in the right direction?

Dysautonomia, a physical condition affecting the things your body is supposed to do on its own, such as breathing, digesting, and maintaining blood pressure, has been found to be linked to several mental health conditions, such as autism and ADHD. I myself happen to have dysautonomia and ADHD with suspected autism. It occurs to me that perhaps some symptoms of mental health problems are in fact a kind of dysautonomia of the mind. When you are depressed or anxious, your brain appears to be producing negative thoughts on its own, without being caused by outside circumstances. Could this model of thought and mental health be the key to finding new modalities of healing? I think it’s worth looking into.

It can be so difficult to connect with spirit when you’re not well. This past week, I was visited by severe anxiety and some sadness, feelings which did not seem my own. When your world has gone dark and frightening, and your cries to spirit seem unheard, how can you care for your faith?

One thing to remember is that your core beliefs don’t change even when you can’t feel a connection with them. You may have lost that spark of inspiration and meaning, but it doesn’t mean these things have ceased to exist for you. Still, it may be best to wait rather than to push — desperately trying to connect with spirit when you are in this state could be terribly frustrating and even devastating. So put your faith symbolically into hibernation. Consider burying something to this effect, or planting a seed. Trust that your faith will emerge in its proper season and make some small efforts to care for it while you wait; as small as listening to a particular song that used to move your spirit. Try not to mourn, but trust instead that a season of renewal will come.