May is Mental Health Awareness Month. While the West tends to categorize mental illnesses as limiting disorders, shamans believe people dealing with such issues are, in fact, special on a consciousness level— they are the healers of our time.
They can sense, think, and act in ways in which others don’t.
Their role as part of the larger collective is to challenge others to see the world differently, and to shake things up so that we aren’t continually repeating the same doldrum and lessons of everyday life/lifetimes.
Souls who persevere through life with depression, for example, are perhaps old empathetic souls, our world-watchers, who feel helpless over the planet being in the state that it's in and hopeless about the people inhabiting it possibly never reaching their full spiritual potential.
Souls who persevere through life being bipolar teach us the immense beauty of feeling, and how amazingly messy and intense it is to feel things so deeply.
Souls with schizophrenia, described by famous West African Shaman, Dr. Somé, have the “receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled.” Ideally, this means a person with schizophrenia is more open, having a higher consciousness than others operating at a baseline level of functioning.
Souls with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder could perhaps be indigo and crystal children, old and intuitively gifted souls deemed with the mission of upgrading humanity’s blueprint, with their Attention Dialed into Higher Dimensions.
Mental illnesses are, in fact, extraordinary senses - they can be seen as strengths - as superpowers.
I, myself, was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) when I was a teenager. I took medication every day for almost a decade, until one day I had enough of conforming and weaned myself off my medication. (While this was right for me, it doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. I do not suggest anyone else follow in my footsteps until consulting with their doctor, and doing their own self-reflection and soul work.)
Upon doing so, I realized that my ADD wasn’t a disorder at all, but a blessing; my daydreaming wasn’t a distracter, but an asset; my sensitivity didn’t make me weak, but instead made me a warrior; my perceptions weren’t unrealistic, but were just unseen by the masses.
My disorder did not make me different and was not what set me apart from people labeled as "normal," but a universally earned and given gift to draw me closer to them.
The world is shaped by the mentally ill. We are the artists, the dreamers, the movers, the shakers, the seers, the feelers, the healers, the teachers. We challenge the conditional belief system. We break the rules simply by existing. We form a new dwelling space for all of us— one of safety, acceptance, compassion, and freedom. We are living examples of the evolution of consciousness taking place in our dimension.
Our society now is in quite an unstable state, so naturally, many of us feel the worldly weight of our surroundings. So many of us are persevering through life with shaky mental health. We smile on the outside, for selfies, to strangers, while we in fact feel numb, overwhelmed, or isolated in an inner world of turmoil.
Pretending is no longer an option. Living through our egos instead of our highest selves is no longer an option. Just living to get by and pay our dues is no longer an option. We now know that there is more to this life. We now know that we are worthy and deserving of aligning with it.
We are dying— physically and spiritually. Suicide is at an all-time high, specifically for men, who have been brainwashed into being silent about their emotions and feelings. Social media conditions us to have our lives perfectly portrayed through our screens, when realistically, no one’s life is as perfect as they make it seem.
We all are dealing with mental health in some form. If you yourself are not, someone you know and love is. There’s no face to what depression, BPD, anxiety, AD(H)D, drug addiction, OCD, eating disorders, PTSD, bipolar, etc., looks like. We are stuck in illusion, in separation, but we all can do more— we can do something.
Communication and connection are good places to start. Let’s start prioritizing our mental health as much as we do things that may not actually matter as much. Let’s start discussing things that are real, like ourselves and the states we are really in, not just keeping up with our facades. We’re all doing this life thing together anyway; we’re all trying our best.
Let’s meet others, who are just reflections of ourselves, with loving kindness, compassion, and understanding, and treat ourselves more gently.
Let’s take the shame out of being genuine and transparent, and shatter the stigma.
Let’s heal ourselves. Let’s heal each other. Let’s heal the world.
