Your bipolar disorder need not hold you back from accomplishing your goals and doing what you care about. Throughout the ages and into the present, many have suffered from bipolar disorder. And yet, a percentage of those who receive this diagnosis manage to accomplish great things and lead productive, happy lives. So can you!
Typically, people have a pessimistic view of bipolar disorder. You may have been told that bipolar disorder is a lifelong medical problem with a strong effect on the brain. As a result, you might be thinking there’s not much you can do. But we invite you to join those who are successfully managing their bipolar disorder, by opening yourself to the idea that you can help yourself. If you catch a cold, you might believe that all you can do is endure it. But going out in the rain, missing sleep, or exposing yourself to other illnesses will certainly make things worse, whereas getting plenty of rest and drinking liquids will probably help. Most medical conditions, including bipolar disorder, can be improved when the patient takes an active role.
If you view a house only from the outside, you will never know what’s inside. But after you enter the building, you can walk to all the different rooms within. Similarly, you may be thinking about bipolarity from an external perspective, based on the negative things people have told you. These pessimistic perspectives might keep you from trying to do anything to alter your condition. Meditation lights the lamp of your inner experience, thereby allowing you to guide your actions from an illuminated source within, whereby you will discover new potential and options for improving your life.
This book offers you an optimistic view of bipolar disorder drawn from the ancient wisdom of the East and combined with the latest findings on bipolar disorder from neuroscience, psychology, and Western medicine. You will look at your mood problems through a different lens. Taoism is an ancient philosophical tradition that focuses on the principle of harmony and balance known as the Tao, which can be found through meditation. By viewing your mood problems through the lens of the Tao, you add another perspective and many practical methods for improving your bipolar disorder. This time-honored perspective, with its meditation techniques, will bring you feelings of well-being, balance, and happiness. Your life will be enhanced as you live with greater awareness, and this book shows you how to do it.
Without your feelings and experiences, who are you? Emotions are like music, lending harmony or discord to experience. You can find examples all around you: When a good friend you rarely get to see visits, you spontaneously feel happy, even elated! Then, having shared some wonderful time together, you feel sad when that person has to leave. Eating your favorite food, you feel enjoyment, whereas when you take a sip of sour milk, you feel disgust. Each of these emotions occurs naturally in relation to what you are doing and experiencing, and all of them elicit your sense of meaning about the events in your life. Whether your feelings are positive or negative, they add information that deepens your understanding of yourself and the world. The emotional center of the brain, known as the limbic system, is highly interconnected with many different regions all around the nervous system. These extensive links help to explain why your feelings are so much a part of what you think and do.
When an emotion endures, it becomes a mood. Moods are also a way of knowing what’s happening. For example, when people find themselves continually feeling irritable, it often reflects a problem in their lives. Then when the problem is solved, the irritable mood goes away. Emotions and moods are normal, built-in reactions of the mind-brain-body system. They come into being and then leave again as an integral part of everyday life. Through this process of experiencing continually changing emotions, we weave the cloth of our lives.
But when you have bipolar disorder, your emotions and moods don’t always accurately reflect what’s happening in your life. In fact, your moods may mislead you, creating problems for you. Your moods can be extreme, leading you into tangled knots in the fabric of your life experience and, at other times, tearing the fabric apart. If you suffer from the chronic moodiness found in bipolar disorder, your mood can take you on a roller-coaster ride from low to high and back again. You may become engulfed in a vortex of emotions that push and pull you away from any sense of calm and stability. As you work through this book, you will learn how to get off the roller coaster and return to more balanced emotions that can become a resource for you rather than a problem.
Modern neuroscience has found that the brain continues to develop and change throughout adulthood, and that we can influence this development with our actions. Bipolar disorder has a strong brain component associated with mood swings. Research reveals that people with bipolar disorder have structural abnormalities in neural pathways that are involved in regulating moods (Strakowski et al. 1999). The mental training that comes from practicing meditation increases activation in the parts of the brain that manage emotions and moods. Regular meditation can make these important structures and connections even denser (Tang et al. 2009). These exciting findings and others that we will discuss in this book offer compelling evidence that meditation can change your brain and stabilize your moods.
Meditation also has many general benefits. You know that the symptoms of bipolar disorder can be extremely stressful for you and your family. Many different studies have found that meditators feel less stressed and anxious (Kabat-Zinn 2003), so you will be able to address your problems with more calm and comfort. Meditating also balances your autonomic nervous system (Grossman et al. 2004), which can lessen your tendency to swing from high to low and back again. And meditation is well known for inducing an overall experience of well-being (Lutz et al. 2009).
We encourage you to use meditation along with your drug therapy. The two treatments enhance each other. With all of these positive effects on your brain, mind, and body, you can find happiness and discover your own unique stability.
This book offers hope. It helps you to restore your faith in yourself. It gives you a clear path to follow. And it helps you develop your talents and express them realistically and effectively in the world. Using meditation allows your experience to become your teacher. You will be able to notice what’s really going on. Through this awareness, you can learn more about what you need to do to live the life you want to live. You will develop tools for either activating or calming your mind, brain, and body to restore balance. When you are attuned to the moment, alert, aware, and at ease with yourself, you can express your best potential for living fully.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 presents a new perspective for understanding bipolarity, based on the Tao’s ever-changing movement of flowing energy. From this perspective, you can use a set of meditative tools to alter this flow in order to bring about real mind-brain changes. You will learn the latest scientific knowledge about bipolar disorder and how meditation changes your brain. Part 2 teaches three forms of meditation step-by-step. Focus meditations train you to keep your attention deliberately focused on something, such as breathing, which helps you gain some control over your thought processes. Open-focus meditations, such as mindfulness, have an ever-changing object of focus that teaches you how to keep your attention flexible and aware. And no-focus meditations free your mind so that you can have clear, aware consciousness. Part 3 guides you in applying these skills to reduce your stress, manage your moods, improve your interpersonal relationships, and develop your talents and abilities. We often tell our clients that their problems are the seeds of their potential, and this part of the book helps you transform troubling symptoms into creative capabilities. We draw on well-researched methods and include stories of clients who used these techniques successfully.
Meditation began long ago and has its roots in the ancient traditions from the East: yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. Thousands of intelligent people from all around the world have contributed to the evolution of meditation through time. Today we have the fruits of more than two thousand years of sincere exploration, study, writings, and analysis in a rich and varied set of meditation practices.
Meditation is a time for sitting quietly, seemingly doing nothing. In the empty moment, you can discover meditation. You might think that sitting quietly and doing nothing is a waste of time. How can anything significant be accomplished by doing nothing? The answer requires a shift in how you look at things. Then, what at first seemed to be a nonactivity is its own kind of action.
To understand what meditation is in general, you can get to know it better in terms of opposites. Meditation empties the mind of thoughts or fills it with chosen thoughts. Some meditations direct attention deliberately to an inner or outer object of focus, while others are indirect, objectless, and open ended. Meditation can withdraw attention from the outer world and focus it inwardly, or it can direct attention outward for alertness and awareness in every moment. This book guides you through the process.
This book is for anyone who is dealing with bipolar disorder or mood problems. You can use it as a self-help adjunct if you are in treatment and on medication. If you have not sought medical care but simply feel bothered by moodiness, you will also find this book helpful. Many of the meditations in this book will also assist you with the stress and disturbance that you may be feeling. You may want to share things you learn in this book with your parents, siblings, or spouse. Their support and positive attitude can help you to help yourself. With everyone working together, new potential opens up for all involved.
The meditation methods presented in this book offer powerful tools for change. As you gain mental skills and become mindful of what you are experiencing, you will be better able to take an active part in your own treatment. So these methods can work well with medical and psychological care.
We encourage you to seek a doctor or therapist and to use these methods in conjunction with medication when needed, along with a good diet, regular exercise, and adequate sleep. If you are having trouble maintaining these healthy habits, this book may help you to discover how to be healthy and in balance. And although meditation is something everyone usually can do, we recommend consulting a psychotherapist or physician who is familiar with this kind of approach before you begin, to ensure that you have no psychological or physical conditions that might preclude meditating. If you do have a history of severe anxiety, depression, or trauma, always use these methods under the guidance of a well-trained professional. When you work in conjunction with an expert, a better and happier life will open up for you!
This book offers things to read and think about, as well as exercises to practice. We encourage you to actually do the exercises. Although there are concepts, theories, and research findings, change takes place through your experience. By doing the exercises, you give yourself the opportunity to feel something new. Through the process of actively engaging in the exercises, change happens. You can skip around, especially in part 3, working with the sections that seem most relevant to your situation and needs.
When you do an exercise, read it through a few times. Then, set the book down and try the exercise. Begin with a short amount of time and gradually increase it. Even devoting a minute or two to meditation will help you feel better and start a change process. And as you become more skilled at meditating, you will be able to increase the amount of time you devote to it. Start where you are, with what’s comfortable for you to do. Accept whatever you do without judging it as good or bad. Learning to accept things as they are is a primary quality of meditation. You will discover ways to stop being so hard on yourself as you engage in the meditative experience.
We have been writing about meditation for decades and have written numerous books on these rich and beautiful practices. We also teach meditation to the public and to other professionals to help them integrate this useful tool into their work. Over the years, we have come to respect the unique talents and creativity in our clients who have suffered from bipolar disorder. We have developed meditative treatments to help them stop dissipating their energy so that they can focus it on developing their potential. It is our sincere hope that you will cultivate your best qualities as you work with this book.