Things to Read

Asylum: The Magazine for Democratic Society, Vol 18 No 3 Autumn 2011.Special Issue: Spiritual Crisis

Contents include:
THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS NETWORK Catherine G Lucas,
STRANGE CHANGES: A PSYCHOTHERAPIST’S APPROACH TO SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY Courtenay Young
REDISCOVERY WHOLENESS: ANNABEL’S STORY Annabel Hollis
A JOURNEY OF SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY Frances Goodall
OPENNESS TO UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES: PSYCHOSIS AND SPIRITUALITY REORGANISED Isabel Clarke
BEYOND SPIRITUAL CRISIS: WHAT’S NEXT?  Janice Hartley
SUPPORTING A PERSON IN CRISIS Annabel Hollis

In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine Lucas

Catherine G Lucas is the Founder of the UK Spiritual Crisis Network, set up following her own spiritual emergency. Her Mindfulness practice helped her through and she is now an accredited Breathworks Mindfulness Trainer, delivering courses for groups such as National Health Service therapists and soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Between 2004 and 2007, Catherine designed and delivered three international conferences on spiritual emergency and she has also featured on a BBC Radio 4 program on the subject. She has written for UK publications 'Positive News', 'Caduceus' and 'Yoga Magazine', amongst others, and regularly speaks at conferences.

Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be by Robert Forman

What if you spent years of your life seeking spiritual enlightenment, but were looking in the wrong place over a long time? It's happening right now to millions of seekers around the world. That's why Dr. Robert Forman has written his revolutionary book. Told in often poetic prose, it offers new direction for people looking for a sane and healthy spiritual pathway in our increasingly confusing world. Traditional spiritual models are giving seekers a wrong and frustrating impression about spiritual enlightenment. By exploring his own 39 year experience of spiritual enlightenment, Dr. Forman offers a remedy to folks who are: * Convinced they don't have the right stuff to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime - * Disillusioned by spiritual teachers who don't live up to their lofty self-portraits - * Worried that choosing a spiritual life means leaving their everyday life behind - * Hungry for a different way to be, but unable to express it - Through metaphor, humor, vulnerability and achingly beautiful prose, Dr. Forman's book offers new found hope to spiritual seekers everywhere.

Mend The Gap by Katie Mottram

Katie grew up with her mum having been pathologised by the psychiatric system after experiencing post natal depression after her birth. This led Katie to want to gain a better understanding of mental distress and she consequently worked within the mental health field for fifteen years. In early 2012, after a period of intense personal crisis, Katie experienced a spiritual awakening, which shook all of the foundations of her conventional understanding. This has presented a dichotomy for maintaining a foot in both the Western psychiatric and spiritual worlds. She hopes that through providing education that these worlds may become more harmonious in the future, which will help to alleviate the distress experienced by so many in our society today.

Breaking Down Is Waking Up by Russell Razzaque

Razzaque explores an entirely new way of understanding psychological and mental distress based on clinical case studies from a mental hospital. His extraordinary conclusion: mental illness can be a form of spiritual awakening. The book describes new forms of treatment for mental illness inspired by Eastern approaches and centering, in particular, around practices such as mindfulness and meditation. These therapies offer both patients and their families the inspiring idea that the approach to their psychological difficulties should go beyond just "treating" episodes of mental illness but also, where possible, help the individual to complete the process of spiritual growth they have begun. Dr Razzaque argues passionately that our society as a whole could benefit from developing an awareness of the spiritual power of this process of transformation.

Helping People with Spiritual Problems by Emma Bragdon

People in spiritual crisis-e.g. disoriented by psychic experiences, or direct communication with disembodied spirits, or re-evaluating their religious beliefs-have been perceived as mentally ill by healthcare professionals who are not knowledgeable about spiritual evolution. This Sourcebook gives comfort and direction to both people struggling to understand powerful inner experiences, and those who care for them. Since 1990, the text has also been used in graduate schools of Transpersonal Psychology, to increase the spiritual competency of psychologists. It is one of the first books to articulate the difference between symptoms of mental illness and signposts of spiritual or religious problems.

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