DO I HAVE A SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY OR A PSYCHOSIS?
Have I been misdiagnosed? These are questions I have often heard over the course of 40 years in my capacity as a Clinical and Jungian psychologist and shamanic teacher. Spiritual Emergencies can look like psychotic or other serious mental disorders because the individual suffering the experience is typically experiencing altered states involving a deep disruption of normal ways of perceiving things in terms of cultural and social expectations.
To conventional medicine and psychiatry, and to our friends and family, even to ourselves it may seem like madness pure and simple. But what can be happening, and seems to be occurring with increasing frequency today, is that for many of these individuals these are signs of a deeply sourced effort at breakthrough of a creative psycho-spiritual process of individual evolution. A spiritual emergency is a crisis of transformation, a dramatic breakthrough more than a simple breakdown. You might think of it as a process of unplugging from the Matrix, and discovering a very different and significant reality.
Typical for individuals undergoing spiritual emergencies are a variety of signs such as seeing visions, hearing voices, experiencing odd synchronicities. The individual may feel overwhelmed, inflated, or fear they are going mad. These signs look to conventional psychiatry and psychology like hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre ideation. But we find historical and cross-cultural evidence in the stories of shamans, mystics, yogis, and saints that these can be signs of a life-transformation organized around a center of meaning, leading to a life of creative and vital energy, infused with desire, joy, and dedication to being of service.
Triggers of Spiritual Emergencies include such things as disease, surgery, death, fired from a job, divorce, grief, intensive meditative practices, psychedelic experiences without proper support and integration, child birth, a love affair, -and the list goes on.
What these individuals need is a careful assessment and a framework for understanding their experience, and a safe context that offers support and reliable guidance, not psychological or pharmacological suppression. With proper support and guidance, solutions to important problems dissolve. Spiritual emergencies can become profoundly healing of emotional pain and psychosomatic symptoms, and lead to long term positive changes in the personality. A new life-energy arises as individuals experience a calling to a deeper or higher way of life, filled with purpose, or a creative mission.
If you feel resonance with my words, and feel that you or someone you care about may be in a Spiritual Emergency process, you may want to join me for two 90 minute On Line Seminars July 21st and July 28th. In this seminar we will be exploring the nuances of Spiritual Emergency, and what to do if you feel you or a loved one are undergoing such an experience. We’ll sort through the diagnostic issues and the creative approaches to such problems, including how work with the spiritual core of virtually any mental disorder as well as spiritual emergency.
C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. (aka Mikkal) is a clinical psychologist, a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, and is author of JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE, and PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED. He has specialized in working with Spiritual Emergencies for more than 40 years and is founder of Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies in the USA, France, Belgium, and South Africa, where he is led public clinics and intensive workshops in assessing for spiritual emergencies, and in providing therapeutic and community support and individual mentoring for individuals undergoing spiritual emergencies. He has appeared on the Shift Network, Sounds True Power of Shamanism Summit, and delivered the Keynote Lectures in Clinical and Humanistic Psychology at Saybrook University in 2019. Mikkal is a teaching member of Le Collège de Chamanisme Ancestral in Paris since 2014, and a teaching member of the Cercle de Sagesse de L’Union des Ancestrales, also based in Paris, France.
Class Schedule:
Part I: Spiritual Emergency & The Creative Illness Model
Sunday, July 14th, 7:00pm-8:30pm EST
Part II: Assessment, Support, Guidance
Sunday, July 21st, 7:00pm-8:15pm EST
Registration Details:
After registration/payment is complete, you’ll be added to the class roster. You’ll receive an email the week of July 7th inviting you to join the private Facebook group where we’ll be meeting for lthe live classes. Both parts will be available for viewing through Sunday, July 28th @ 9pm EST
Series Tuition: $99 (Total for both parts)
Register through Facebook event at: https://www.facebook.com/events/335488674022222/