In my last video, I talked about how in order to heal bipolar disorder, the battle between the soul and the ego needed to come to its proper end. And the first thing we need to do is provide supportive environments so that when people go into psychosis, we allow them to embrace and engage their experience instead of blocking it fearfully. And one of the things that happens when we allow the psychosis to process is that we go through a period of purification of the soul. And during this period, we have the opportunity to rid ourselves of much of the emotional pain that we carry with us in our daily lives. So in this video, I want to provide a type of inventory of all of the different experiences that can happen to you within psychosis that allow this soul purification to take place. Before I begin, I think it's interesting to mention that all the experiences I'm going to talk about can also happen during periods of meditation, during mystic states, and they can also be induced by taking psychedelic drugs. And the reason for that is that certain meditations, mystic practices, and drugs can lead to a collapse of the ego, which I've already explained in my video, The Real Cause of Bipolar Disorder. Very often, one of the first things to happen when people enter into a psychosis is that they have a release of their biological repressions, and with that, sexual repression is usually at the top of the list. Each one of us carries some level of sexual repression with us, if we didn't, we'd all be in jail. So with our inhibitions out of the way, we may find ourselves excessively sexual or flirtatious with people. We may be what is considered to be inappropriately affectionate with people, maybe people we don't even know. Or in deep psychosis, we may even start spontaneously masturbating. We may also recognize that at almost every moment of the day, we're holding in our bladders or intestines, and we may decide to just let all that go, pissing or shitting, anytime, anywhere. Another thing that can happen, especially because your senses have come alive, is that we may have a particular fascination with these materials as well. Even in my own situation, I felt the need to pee on the carpet of a hotel ballroom, and then lay right down in the urine afterwards. And probably one of the most common symptoms of manic episodes is our loss of shame. We just immediately feel the desire to get naked and do everything we can without our clothes on. Now Mania is a state that is famous for being quite high and sometimes extremely positive, and in other videos I've made, I've talked about the spiritual potential of these states, and in fact that they can be quite sacred experiences. But what happens usually is as the Mania continues and you get through the oneness and connection to everything, what usually follows are regressions into experiences in your life, which were emotionally painful for you, things that you probably still haven't gotten over yet, at least on an emotional level. And as a support person, being there next to somebody who is re-experiencing a trauma from their life can be very strange. Because while some people in psychosis may simply remember the experiences, others relive it. And so what will happen is when the person regresses into a painful trauma from their childhood, when you look at their face you will see child's eyes and they may talk to you in the child's voice. And this occurs because the consciousness of the person is in another time and in another place. Now it should be no surprise that many of these traumatic experiences revolve around physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sex abuse, especially among the most acute cases. And back in the 1960s Dr. Arty Lang was really the first psychiatrist to highlight the role of the dysfunctional family among people with mental disorders. In fact, one study I've come across recently showed that people suffering from schizophrenia were more than twice as likely to have divorced parents. So while trauma experienced in childhood plays a critical role in many mental disorders, trauma during adulthood can also play a role as well. And I'm not only talking about emotional issues, but physical accidents can also be a big part of the trauma which we need to heal. Death of a parent, child, or spouse is also enough to trigger a manic episode especially among women. But in truth, the traumas which can heal during psychosis really come from any repressed memory or emotion that was too painful for us to deal with at the time that it happened. The fact that life traumas play a huge role in mental disorders should hardly be surprising. However, what will be surprising is that many people regress into the trauma they experienced at the time of their birth. In the holotropic mind, Stan Groff discusses in detail the different stages of our birth process and how the traumas from each stage of birth can have implications for the rest of our lives. For example, in his clinical experience, Groff has found that there is a very strong connection between the sensation of having your life being controlled by other people and being a caesarian baby. Other birth traumas which can be relived during psychosis are the use of forceps when on your skull when you were a baby. The sensation that you are an unwanted pregnancy by your mother. The various sensations and emotions connected to a long and difficult delivery like the feeling that you are being strangled or suffocated, these can be experienced as well. And even the use of alcohol drugs or smoking during pregnancy is something that you may re-gress into in order to heal. Now the next set of regressions I am going to talk about completely defy the mechanics of mainstream science and are completely rejected by psychiatry and mainstream psychology today. According to Groff, Perry and many of the people who write me on my YouTube channel, there is a return to biological and organic origins that many people seem to go through as well. Myself included. It's not uncommon for people to feel strong connections with their ancestors or other tribal peoples as they regress. They may have the sensation that they have experienced to pass live or that they lived in another time or another place. It's very common for people to take on lower life forms, particularly animal personalities especially apes. And in one particular case, a guy wrote me and he just told me he had the need to go down in his basement and just move around like a lizard. There can also be the sensation of having strong connections with plants or even all of life in all of creation. And along with the more earthly or planetary regressions to our origins, we also have regressions to our cosmic origins as well. People have the sensation that they've gone back to the beginning of time and space with the big bang. Or like I did that they're somehow traveling through the cosmos. Other people just have this grand or connection of cosmic consciousness. And then on the other end we have people who seem to have the sensation that they're being encountered or even possessed by aliens, which isn't always a pleasant experience. Perhaps the most spiritual aspect of an acute psychosis is the actual encounter of spirits themselves. Many people have the apparent hallucination of seeing angels or seeing devils or demons of some kind. Other people feel that the spirits are near them and often they have some sort of message for the person related to their life purpose or vision of some type. Others feel that they're actually channeling spirits when they're at a state. And then finally, and we've seen this a few times, people have the feeling that particularly that the devil is inside them and trying to get out. To the outside are watching someone in psychosis working with a support person. It could seem like the whole process is a whole lot more like an exorcism than it is like therapy. Now along with releasing the repressions and traumas that we've already talked about, there's also the release of the physical energy that's associated with these traumas. And these energies are released by simply allowing the person in psychosis to do what they intuitively want to do, provided that they're not hurting themselves or other people. And as most episodes start with people in a high energy level, they may want to do some physical exercise or get them running, something like that. But then there's other deeper energies, things like physical tremors or vibrations that are just happening within the body itself. And these tremors and vibrations can be accompanied by cathartic screaming or singing or even vocalizing of particular sounds that for some reason you just feel motivated to make. You just want to make that noise. Even vomiting can occasionally occur as the person releases the biochemicals that are associated with their traumas. And a person has a volcanic eruption of physical energy coming out of them. Sometimes afterwards there's a blackout period where they just go away. And whereas in that situation, families or doctors may panic and try and revive the person, Dr. Grough recognizes the blackout as the period of healing in itself and that's the person come back on their own. Another way that the body spontaneously releases traumatic energy while you're in psychosis is that it accelerates your heartbeat. And when that happens spontaneously for no other reason, you immediately start to breathe quick, you start to hyperventilate and that hyperventilation increases the oxygen which releases trauma. The release of Kundalini energies can also be part of this process. I'm going to talk about my Kundalini experience in another video, but for now just know that they feel like very strong energies of heat or even cold that are moving through your body in a very powerful way. Along with the physical energy, we also need the release of the mental or creative energy that's within us. As we all know, people in Mania have lots of ideas and when a person's in a psychosis, the deep flow of psychosis, it's important to share these ideas and express them no matter how crazy they are and the people supporting us need to be patient and listen instead of trying to shut us up. In order to give your supporters a break, maybe express yourself in your writing, doing writing or artistic expression, I find my Dallas very good for allowing people to express themselves or even dancing or singing, you know, basically anything creative that can help you express what you're going through as you heal. So is that it? Well not quite, but I'm at a time, I'm 10 minutes or up and you're probably exhausted by now. So while you take a break, I'll get started on part 2 in this series in how we heal our souls during psychosis. And there I'm going to talk about subjects like family secrets and perhaps most controversial of all, how we deal with the violence and aggression that's associated with bipolar disorder. So that's up next.