Sacred

Confronting existential anxiety through “Basal Exposure Therapy” shows promising results in people withdrawing from psychotropic drugs.

US News interviews people who've been touched by tragedies, and then found ways to "embrace pain" and experience revelations about their lives followed...

A spiritual emergency is a crisis during which experiences are so intense that they temporarily disrupt the sense of self. Mislabeling them as pathological symptoms may be damaging to further spiritual development as well as to the individual's psychological and physiological well-being.

While a great deal of the excitement about advances in psychological treatments comes from the potential for research in neuroscience to unlock the secrets of the brain, many mental health experts would like to temper this enthusiasm. A special issue of the Behavior Therapist released this month calls into question the predominant conception of mental illnesses as brain disorders.

In this interview for The New Inquiry, two co-editors and three writers of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements discuss prison abolition and...

From YES! Magazine: Lament singing, an ancient tradition once observed for spiritual purposes during funerals, weddings, and times of war, is now seeing a revival in...

In this piece for Nautilus, Veronique Greenwood discusses the legacy of Julian Jaynes, a psychologist best known for theorizing that consciousness was a cultural development resulting...

From The Atlantic: While solitude is often stigmatized and even viewed as dangerous to our health, spending time alone can actually prove to be valuable...

I details what happened to Jeffrey Fidel when he quit psychiatric drugs and embraced an alternative, non-medical healing approach — a set of philosophical and spiritual teachings known as the Tao Te Ching and Hua Hu Ching.

Study reports on the less-examined findings of difficult and painful meditation-related experiences.

Ayahuasca found to be effective in treating moderate to severe depression in low-income population.

In recent years, American scholars and thinkers have increasingly argued for the secularization and modernization of Buddhism, proposing meditation as a fully secular form...

From Rolling Stone Magazine: Both the underground practice of and aboveground research on the use of psychedelic drugs to heal PTSD, as well as depression, anxiety,...

From Big Think: In Robert Wright's new book Why Buddhism is True, he illustrates how contemporary science has confirmed some of the core tenets and beliefs...

Psychiatric meds can shut down the emotions and consciousness enough to make it possible to tolerate dynamics that would inspire rage or surges of empowered activity without the meds. It can be helpful to look closely at these blocks and start to create a map to freedom, understanding that it is a complex process that involves not only the physiology of the body of the individual taking meds, but the architecture of the social system around that person.

In this piece for The New York Times, John Williams praises the work of philosopher William James, who played an important role in studying and...

I am humbled to share with you my life’s journey, and more importantly to convey a recent experience that has transmuted everything, opening up a new frontier of being more fully alive. I am beginning to see the invisible; or should I say I am beginning to feel it, because it is an inner experience.

From Healio: Preliminary research results presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in San Diego, California suggested that integrating spirituality into mental heath services...

From TIME: A recent study suggests a neurological explanation for why deep breathing can be so effective in reducing stress and anxiety. Article →­

-When we "re-narrate" our own stories and identities, it may be an opportunity for either liberation or re-oppression.

You can’t go back to mundane ways of seeing the world after very dark things happen. Trauma cracks open a hole in our lives and in our minds, throwing us into the zone where we face the big spiritual questions. Bad ideas can get in when things open up like that. But it’s also possible that something new and positive can get in.

From The New York Times: In his new book The Mind of God, neurologist Jay Lombard uses his experience studying neuroscience to discuss philosophical and spiritual...

In this piece for Aeon, Sam Haselby explores the parallels and intersections between Freudian psychoanalysis and Islamic mysticism. "The affinities between mystical Islam and Freudian thought...

Much of what we term “madness” is, in fact, the awakening of the "Self" to its own Wholeness/Divinity. We are born totally pure. Throughout our lives we are subject to projections, flung at us from a multitude of directions: from Mom and Dad, from schools, religious institutions, the media, and the medical model. We are all buried, to some degree, under projections, and interesting symptoms emerge: nightmares, stress and anxiety, fear, flashbacks, and so on. These are not "Madness," but symptoms of health; of a "Self" attempting to break free from lies.

What are some tactics used by voices, and what can you do about it? I hope the suggestions in this piece can help desperate voice-hearers become more understanding of the forces behind their agony, and perhaps bring a more enlightened perspective to the chemically-lobotomizing tendencies of their psychiatrists who treat voices with more medication.