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0 By Andrew Low
Sahaja Yoga meditation, which is free, is definitely something that could be promoted more in mental healthcare, and which psychiatrists and General Practitioners and others like mental health nurses and psychologists could embrace.
You can see the article “Sahaja Yoga meditation” on this website.
At the moment we are squandering our talents and opportunities.
People, even in Sahaja Yoga,seem to me to have no urgency.
They seem to think that there is no mental health crisis. Okay, admittedly, I am not the one to give you a normal answer. When I had a breakdown in a pharmacy in East Sussex in May 1997, I ended up in a psychiatric ward and was running up and down in a complete panic shouting that the world was going to end if something was not done by psychiatry to say that the sound of coughing and traffic could hurt, that there are telepathic voices in our heads ,and that we need to take to Sahaja Yoga. I was not in a “rage of fury”, but I was very scared.I broke the finger of a mental health nurse and I am ashamed of that,and ashamed of being violent when I was “sectioned” in January 1998.
No-one at Graylingwell mental hospital in Chichester did anything to address the problems,and on release from the hospital in mid 1998,after a period of being a “revolving door patient”,the psychiatrist and mental health nurse who did my cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in Bognor Regis at the Bedale centre did not go into the symptoms.I definitely talked openly and asked.It became an embarrassing thing because the staff just did not talk about it.There are words like “taboo” and “reserve” that come to mind.Are NHS staff just “chicken”?
They are just invisible things.One does not hear of the significance of coughing or the noise of traffic or car horns in mental health generally.It’s as though they were not there.I began to feel like an invisible man who did not count.There is a silence.In Sahaja Yoga Shree Mataji has really stressed the importance of our guilty feelings,the “left vishuddhi”.That is a real start,but it needed to go further in my case.Is this some sort of “symptom ice-berg” that we are hitting like the Titanic.It’s time to lower the life-boats.
There are things in literature like the “repressive cough” of the bully in The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat,and a “most malicious cough” in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.James Joyce addresses questions of sexuality and tries to brush away some Victorian cobwebs.He deserves the literary equivalent of a Victoria Cross for that.
Three years after that breakdown in May 1997,so this was mid 2000 when I was working hard as a pharmacy locum,I sort of “woke up” again,one day I could just feel a sort of sap rising in me and bringing back some of the old feelings.I felt like I was being called back by someone in my past,and that something brutal like a rape had happened that left a mark to that day,a legacy of a former time,like the repression of the Scottish Highlands in history.I felt that I should actually pay some attention to the symptoms and to Sahaja Yoga,and not brush them under the carpet and pretend they were not there.Was this a spiritual re-awakening,or was it the return of precarious symptoms that should be hammered by hard anti-psychotic medicines?
Changing my pattern of work,I began to settle down into a more regular lifestyle that allowed me time to do Sahaja Yoga and I started to write.I believe the Divine instructed,told me to write.That’s not easy.Where does one look to publish what one has to say?I looked around and there were places and I had some success.For example there was the magazine of the Schizophrenia Association of Great Britain,based in Bangor in north Wales,and there was Perceptions Forum,attached to the charity Rethink Mental Illness.In 2003 I was “highly commended” in the category of courage by the Beacon Fellowship Trust for writing about my schizophrenia and for spreading Sahaja Yoga.It was a tremendous relief to have the symptoms published,and the award was very sweet.I really am grateful that there are places that will publish these views.
Over the years since then,working in pharmacy until 2014,I began to feel that actually we are barking up the wrong tree,we are looking in the wrong place (which is an expression Shree Mataji uses to say we are looking for the cure for cancer in the wrong place when we explore the rain forest for medicines from exotic plants).There is an 80:20 rule that applies in business,saying that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers.I just feel that our minds are full of the pain of the “painful birth of collective consciousness” as I have seen written in Sahaja Yoga books,and maybe occupied or pre-occupied (to use an expression that appears in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro).Start following the right path,do not be an appeaser.These are serious symptoms or considerations,and we need to front up to them and be brave.80% of our problems might,I say might,have this cause.We definitely are not being particularly brave at the moment as a country.
Customers came to the counter in pharmacy and I could see that they are hacked off,weary and tired and irritable.I had a hard time being coughed on,but you might say that is imaginary and anyway all people in pharmacy face that particular problem.”Teachers crucified by coughing pupils” runs an article you can find on the Internet.There is a similar situation there.With a white coat on you can practically be a victim of contemptuous spitting.
What are we doing?You have to consider our “dear time’s waste” as Shakespeare has it in a sonnet.We need to come to our senses as Shree Mataji said.We are wasting our time being “medicines eaters”.What about the money angle,the cost?
One pharmacist said to me that we are “failed GPs”.It is true that we are not in the position that the family doctor is in,we don’t have the recognition as such a pillar of society.”Doctors are the bricks and mortar of society” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson.Pharmacists do not have that standing generally,but they can be popular.One lady pharmacist said people waited 40 minutes to speak to her,and she wasn’t boasting,just saying that is what it is like for her.
In a way it is a crucifying position for the pharmacist,and perhaps the GP if these problems have occurred to them.That does not mean that the pharmacist can call themselves brave for what they do,and they will boast if you let them,they will say they are courageous for facing patients.Actually,are pharmacists guilty of moral cowardice for not being more honest about what is going on in their heads?Instead we hide behind a facade,the walls of the dispensary lined with powerful,expensive medicines.Yes,those medicines if dispensed in error can cause distress and even death,but a machine could do that task.There are literally robots which dispense medicines although at the moment this is more likely to be a hospital pharmacy thing.Is the doctor really much different.A GP said he did not think I was doing much in pharmacy to help patients,which I felt was unfair considering his role is so different and what has medicine ever really done to help me in my symptoms.The GPs are equally guilty of “missing a trick”.The doctors can help with bones and backache and cardiovascular cripples but what do they do for the mind.The NHS is in crisis,it is buckling,”the doctor will flee you now”,the NHS is set up to “delay,deny,defend” comes out in the newspapers.This definitely strikes a chord with me,it chimes with my condition,and there may be resonances with many,many others who need to crawl out of the woodwork.We as patients ourselves need to be kind and honest,brave respectable people.
We need a revolution in medicine.We need to take to Sahaja Yoga.It needs to be treated like the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.Sahaja Yoga could unblock the world’s “left vishuddhi” and soothe the Sahasrara chakra (the top of the head) with knowledge of collective consciousness and lines like in James Joyce,”God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear”,derived from an old sermon.Our hearts might enlarge and be more joyful.
I should “steady the buffs” like Wellington said at the battle of Waterloo.One gentleman,a rugby player paying a visit to the pharmacy with a friend,said “Don’t overcook it” when I told him that I had received replies to fan mail to famous rugby players telling them of Sahaja Yoga and these problems.I was going to go into more detail for him,and his friend,but his point I suppose was that this is special knowledge and we as a collective are not at that stage.Not all customers would be so noble I would guess.There seems to be a lot of irritability,which I can actually understand.On the other hand,many customers are “formal,steady people” as Shree Mataji said of the British.They are temperate,balanced,moderate people with dignity.Health care,particularly mental health care,owes them a lot more than it currently gives.We could promote the health benefits of Sahaja Yoga.We could support people who want to learn more.We could sign-post appropriate patients towards Sahaja Yoga.These are the token words of pharmacy:health promotion,support for self-care and sign-posting to appropriate services.It would be good if we could direct people to Sahaja Yoga.The wisdom and the discretion and indeed the courage need to be there to start going in the right direction.
Even in June 2017 at a psychiatric consultation I had a psychiatrist say I was deluded and needed my medicine changed.I put in a complaint but he was let off the hook,went unpunished and uncorrected.I was told the psychiatrist was within the normal range of opinions when he said that coughing did not hurt emotionally.This complaint was investigated over the course of two years.This summer (2019) was the last time I tried to raise the issue with the authorities.Other doctors let me remain on my usual anti-psychotic,sulpiride,but it was a nasty appointment,a tricky moment.I’m telling you:doctors are just letting these symptoms go unaddressed.It’s a sort of silent massacre of feelings,a cruel silence,a blight,a famine.
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