Healing The Mind

By Janice L. Mcdermott

Healing the Mind describes a way of organizing your thinking with the intention of awakening you to your complete self. Because our conscious and unconscious thinking creates our life story, the power of our thoughts affects us in profound ways-contentment and health or illness and turmoil. In these pages, you become your own therapist. Using pr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janice L. Mcdermott
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958895986

Book preview

Healing

the

Mind

Pathway Through the Heart, Portal to the Soul

Janice McDermott, M.Ed., MSW

HEALING THE MIND

Copyright © 2023 Janice McDermott, M.Ed., MSW.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Disclaimer: This publication by design provides accurate and personal experience information concerning the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author, contributors, or publishers are not engaged in rendering counseling or other professional services. If counseling advice or other expert assistance is required, seek the services of a competent professional person. The examples used throughout this text are comprised of fictitious identifying information such as names, places, events and dates. Any similarity to persons living or deceased is coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-958895-97-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-958895-98-6 (Ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

THE BEGINNING

BECOMING OUR OWN THERAPIST

SPIRITUAL MOTIVATION

MENTOR

CRITIC

NURTURER

DIVINE CHILD

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Margery Williams’ classic tale, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real, written in 1922 when she was in her forties, captures the concept of becoming real in a simple wonderful story of which only a small portion is included here.

THANK YOU

A Thank you. goes to the many participants who over time proved this model to be the best format for managing our internal dialogue for healing our inner child; the perfect process for becoming emotionally mature and spiritually enlightened.

THE BEGINNING

Uncomfortable things happen to all of us on our journey to becoming real. The first time I knowingly set becoming real as a goal was at the Esalen institute in Big Sur, California in 1983, ten years after my father’s death at age fifty-nine.

My anxiety peaked in anticipation of my turn on the hot seat. Each participant of the three sessions a-day, week-long workshop, randomly took a turn sitting on a pillow called the hot seat located in the center of the circle. The one in the hot seat listened as each member in turn commented about their experience of the one in the center. I was the last one. No one know me.

I had revealed that in the past ten years since my father’s death, I was divorced, married again and was in the process of my second divorce. Having participated in relating anxiety-laden stories in group, taking hot spring baths, and getting massages, I had not revealed anything.

Who am I? All that I knew was that I was afraid and that I had been hiding in the role of a good participant, which had not turned out very well. I began intense work to discover what lay beneath my fears. How do I express my inner being? Finding the answer became for me a Spirit-directed journey.

At six, I was very much aware of the spiritual forms of life around me, the world of things unseen. Having no other living ancestors, other than a few aunts and uncles that lived too far to visit more than once every few years, I identified with my father’s deceased Native American grandmother, as I imagined her. Her spirit seemed to dwell just over my left shoulder, and was a constant companion due to the isolation of rural life that forced me inward to an imaginary world of others.

My connection with the spirit world, though I never discussed it, seemed normal. I thought everyone had my experience. I found comfort in the silence of my mind through nature and my grandmother’s spiritual presence. She remained with me until I was fifty-two, departing at my mother’s funeral.

One memory stands out from that time on the farm. A red and white baby calf died two days after birth, and remained stretched out for a whole day behind our barn looking perfect in every way. M agical thinking served me well as a child. I believed that with enough concentration and faith, I would be able to perform miracles like Jesus.

Unaware of the finality of death, I sat beside the dead calf for half a day, wishing and praying, Dear Jesus please let the baby calf breath and stand up. I expected that at any moment the calf would rise to its feet, alive. I could see myself clapping my hands, overjoyed, a hero. Time passed, the day grew warmer, and heat waves began to rise from the corps of the calf. Magic was happening and I was present to it. I could feel the glory of it inside me. Awesome!

After a while, my young perception began to understand that the waves were the calf’s life leaving his body. I thought, This calf decided to go back to heaven and so can I. I don’t have to stay here. I can leave any time. After that, I imagined many times in the silence of the forest and in the dark of the night that my spirit was rising like heat waves to soar with the angels and dance among the stars.

By the time I was nine, my parents expected my brother and me to employ our learned survival skills, to achieve a level of independent living. We worked in the garden, picked strawberries to earn money, did farm chores, and worked, and worked, and worked…from sun up until sun down. Play was the work we liked: feeding the cats, planting peanuts, and gathering eggs.

Attending church, Vacation Bible School and an occasional week’s visit to my aunt’s (my mother’s sister) every year or so was our entertainment. My sister was born when I was nine, and another sister eighteen months later. While my parents focused on my younger siblings, my brother and I were on our own.

I remember visiting with my aunt for a week at her sister-in-law’s home. For the first time in my life, I had a large bedroom to myself. I stood in front of a tall, freestanding full-length mirror to admire myself in my first pink silky-feeling nightgown.

Sewn to the right side was a round cord tie-belt. I tied it around my waist and could see in the mirror that one end of the cord was a lot longer than the other one. I contemplated cutting it off, but decided to wait until morning to ask for scissors. My mother’s voice in my mind was saying, Don’t make trouble. I went to bed thinking about how I was going to make the ends of the cord match when I tied them in front. Cutting the wrong one or cutting off too much would be a disaster.

The following morning, I awoke, immediately having the solution. I had solved the problem in my dream. The long side of the tie went the long way around the backside of my waist then when I tied them, they were even. More importantly, I was thrilled to discover my ability to solve problems in my sleep. Wow!

With each of these milestones in awareness, my excitement would rush from me with a need to share my new insights. Although my mother experienced intuitive dreams, she never put any value on her experiences or mine. Usually, she said, Go take care of your sister or Would you hurry up and finish that. My mother’s response was the same when I reported an unusual experience at the age of twelve.

I walked a mile to participate in the weeklong church revival services held each summer at the Baptist church that we attended.

During the mile walk back home, I pondered the words of the daily messages.

During one particular week in July, I felt disturbed by the alter call that occurred at the end of every service pressing many of my young friends into a fear and guilt releasing walk the aisle response. However, I was determined not to let intimidation push me into doing something that seemed contrived. I just was not going to do that! There had to be more to a conversion experience than walking the aisle. I wanted it but it was not happening for me.

Dishwashing became a meditative action as well, a time for listening for insight from the spirit world. I liked looking out the open window above the double sink. The green pasture with red and white cows pulled me out of myself into the world beyond where birds seemed to carry the message of love.

On Thursday of the weeklong revival, while washing the lunch dishes and thinking about nothing, I suddenly became overwhelmed by a brilliant light coming through the kitchen window flooding my body, my heart and spilling out through every pore of my skin. It was so bright that nothing else was visible. It filled me with great joy, and a clear knowing that Love is the message that must be shared, and then it was gone.

I quickly dried my hands, ran outside to give my mother the message, We must tell the world about God’s love. We can buy Bible storybooks for every child we know. (For some reason, I did not tell her about the light. I think it was too much to explain. I only delivered the message.) Her response was the usual, Have you lost your mind? Finish washing the dishes. Quit wasting time.

The structure of our religion became the framework for my family’s behavior even when my parents disagreed with it. For instance, when we saw the preacher turn in the long driveway, we would run to change our shorts into jeans. We could play cards and go to movies, but not on Sunday. I could dance if it was at the Methodist church but not at the Baptist church.

No one ever bothered to explain the discrepancy between our actions and beliefs. My interpretation became When in Rome do as the Romans and It’s okay if no one you know knows about it. However, belonging to a family with secrets bothered me.

By the time I was twenty, I had attended nursing school, joined the Air Force, was married, and had two children eleven months apart. At thirty, I began teaching high school Speech and Drama classes. I was living my life in an active trance, a trance induced as a teenager to assist in my survival in the physical world. However, a spiritual life does not stay asleep indefinitely.

I began reawakening when I was thirty-two with my father’s death. However, it took another seven years of which included another marriage and divorce to wake me up and get me moving. It was the reason for my being at Esalen Institute sitting in the middle of the group and asking the question, Who am I apart from my parents, children, husbands, and careers? My life no longer made sense. I felt as though I had died and left my body still living.

I sought psychotherapy, went back to graduate school in Social work, and walked alone in the woods several miles a day for a year. My education in social work practice and my religious education did not mesh. I valued both equally. What and who was right? How could they meet?

The words from the Bible, memorized as a teenager, rang in my ears as I walked. Words like once saved always saved, salvation is an ongoing process, and Jesus’ words: I am the way, the truth and the light. How did these precepts fit into the theories of mental health and character development? How could the secular world and the spiritual world merge within me?

A new life, a different I began to occupy my body. My answers came over the next three years during my walking meditations and as a result of bible study, and my practice as a therapist leading a hospital recovery groups for alcohol addiction.

As I walked, I learned. I began to experience what it means to be a conscientious living organism (Shealy) with the ability and responsibility to make choices with love. We all have in common this process of becoming.

Change is unavoidable. We can be passive and a victim of our own fate or we can be responsible in creating the direction of our changing. I was willing to go the journey. However, I questioned,

The process of becoming—of becoming what?

"The process of becoming as little children so that we can enter the kingdom of heaven where love