The community leaders at the mental health sites for HealthCentral will focus on mindfulness and awareness for Mental Illness Awareness Week, October 2-8, 2011.
It is clear to me that awareness is the precursor to insight and first we must become aware of how the illness plays out in our lives. Our recovery can be thought to run along a curve from awareness to insight to acceptance.
Focusing your awareness, or practicing mindfulness, is a key technique to use in recovery from schizophrenia. I've said often here that what you resist, persists.
The first order of the day is to accept you have this illness, yet to know it is not who you are. The author Jodi Picoult in an interview describing her characters, said, "People are not the sum total of their disability."
You are a person first, you are not a schizophrenic.
Practicing mindfulness can be as simple as using dialectic thinking to describe what you are feeling, sensing, or thinking, by connecting two opposing things with the word "and." This could be: "I'm awake and exhausted." "It is hot and dark in here."
Mindfulness is simply a fancy word for a devoted awareness to what's going on.
We need to be aware and realize what we're thinking and how it affects how we feel about something. This is the tenet of the rational-emotive philosophy.
Awareness can take the form of simply observing the world around you and taking in what's happening. I gained a ton of insight over the course of the two days I was holed up in my apartment because of Hurricane Irene. I typed up a list of reasons why I felt it was okay that opposing forces were at work in my life.
Seeing in print why this was a good thing enabled me to reconcile how I felt about it.
As a person with SZ, you need to be aware of your surroundings too, and of what other people are doing, say, in a crowded train station.
I will focus on mindfulness in another way now: to be in tune with yourself, to understand what makes you tick or tock.
My goal is to live a simple, authentic life unencumbered by the pursuit of material goods. I know a woman who craves the things money can buy like a $700 watch and endless expensive vacations. To that I say: "To each his own."
Only I treasure what I have and I do not want what I don't have. I'm mindful of not lacking for anything. I'm grateful I'm alive because I'm aware it could be even worse.
In one way awareness helps you manage your illness better: when you develop insight into what goes on, you can feel better. The situation might not change, yet changing your perception of it gives you peace.
In this regard I recommend the Karen Casey self-help guide Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow. It is a short book you can read in a day or two and refer to again and again.
In my life: the cognitive therapist told me what happens might not ever go away. I'm better able to accept this fate because I changed my perception of the severity of the problem. I no longer get upset when it happens, so I can live through it when it does, whereas before it greatly upset me.
