zenrenovator-blog

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Psychedelic Corner: Hello from the Other Side

Hhg

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Meditation: On Overthinking

Thinking is something that happens to you – it is a function of your brain (like a function of your stomach is to release digestive acid). You are not your thoughts – they are like the white clouds passing through the blue sky – you are the sky, and just as the blue sky does not hinder the white clouds from flying, you do not hinder your thoughts from arising. Do not oppose your thoughts, don’t…

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Trial by Fire - Yesterday, I vomited: a positive experience

Trial by Fire – Yesterday, I vomited: a positive experience

This was originally published under the title, “A Theory of Emetophobia, Interlude: Yesterday I vomited.” ****Warning: the following contains graphic details of a vomiting experience – its intention is not to scare but to help – but it may frighten and panic some – if you feel you would be put off by a detailed, play-by-play account of the vomiting experience (one that was not that bad as far as…

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Meditation: How Anxiety Distracts Us From Resolving Nausea

Too often, emets see nausea as something they cannot control – and this is what drives the anxiety around it.  In reality, nausea can be controlled relatively easily – there are dozens of effective remedies.  But once the panic starts, we go around in circles in our head – we feel trapped in our own bodies – trapped on a runaway trail hurtling towards something we misrepresent to ourselves as an…

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Meditation: Yin and Yang - The Water, Wind and Rock

Meditation: Yin and Yang – The Water, Wind and Rock

This is not an article, per se – rather a musing I had yesterday relating Zen practice to overcoming emetophobia. As water is to rock, so is the soft and the flexible to the rigid and immovable.  Look at the American Southwest – those deserts were carved by torrents of rushing water, relentlessly assaulting the hard stone, tearing away the sedimentary, filling every nook and cranny in the stone,…

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Understanding the roles of anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants in treating emetophobia

Understanding the roles of anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants in treating emetophobia

If you choose to pursue the pharmaceutical road to help with your emetophobia, it is important to understand the medications used and how they can affect you.  First of all, if you go to your family doctor and tell them about your phobia, they are likely to prescribe what is known as an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) antidepressant.  Now, why are they prescribing antidepressants to…

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The Neurochemistry of Vomiting

The Neurochemistry of Vomiting

A Theory of Emetophobia, Part 3(A): The Neurochemistry of Vomiting (Emesis) *Warning: the purpose of this post is to familiarize my fellow emetophobes with the complex physiological processes that lead to nausea and vomiting – like everything else I write in this vein, it is intended to be helpful – however, triggers words are present throughout. *Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. The…

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What does "the Zen Approach to the fear of vomiting" mean?

What does “the Zen Approach to the fear of vomiting” mean?

When I was 13 years old, my phobia first manifested itself.  After years without vomiting, I was sick one ill-fated night in Cuba after eating some bad lobster.  The experience traumatized me – and during the following months, I came to know the horror of the emetophobic panic attack – anxiety about being sick that makes one feel sicker the more anxious one gets.  By a most improbable stroke of…

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On Beginning “The Last Day of a Condemned Man” by Victor Hugo

“Condemned to death! “These five weeks have I dwelt with this idea,--always alone with it, always frozen by its presence, always bent under its weight. “Formerly (for it seems to me rather years than weeks since I was free) I was a being like any other; every day, every hour, every minute had its idea.  My mind, youthful and rich, was full of fancies, which it developed successively, without order or aim, but weaving inexhaustible arabesques on the poor and coarse web of life.  Sometimes it was of youthful beauties, sometimes of unbounded possessions, then of battles gained, next of theatres full of sound and light, and then again the young beauties, and shadowy walks at night beneath spreading chestnut-trees.  There was a perpetual revel in my imagination:  I might think on what I chose,--I was free. “But now,--I am a Captive!  Bodily in irons in a dungeon, and mentally imprisoned in one idea,-- one horrible, one hideous, one unconquerable idea!  I have only one thought, one conviction, one certitude,-- “Condemned to death! “Whatever I do, that frightful thought is always here, like a spectre, beside me,-- solitary and jealous, banishing all else, haunting me for ever, and shaking me with its two icy hands whenever I wish to turn my head away or to close my eyes.  It glides into all forms in which my mind seeks to shun it; mixes itself, like a horrible chant, with all the words which are addressed to me; presses against me even to the odious gratings of my prison.  It haunts me while awake, spies on my convulsive slumbers, and re-appears, a vivid incubus, in my dreams! “I have just started from a troubled sleep in which I was pursued by this thought, and I made an effort to say to myself, ‘Oh, it was but a dream!’ “Well, even before my heavy eyes could read the fatal truth in the dreadful reality which surrounds me,--on the damp and reeking dungeon walls, in the pale rays of my night-lamp, in the rough material of my prison garb, on the sombre visage of the sentry, whose cap gleams through the grating of the door,-- it seems to me that already a voice has murmured in my ear, --

“Condemned to death!” So begins Victor Hugo’s novel and polemic against the death penalty, “The Last Day of a Condemned Man.”  A powerful opening - no surprise - this is a novel that I come to while also reading Dostoevsky, who had an extraordinarily high opinion of this work (and, given that Dostoevsky was himself subjected to a mock execution before being sentenced to hard labour, his praise is no small thing).   I’ve never read Hugo before, but he seems right up my alley - dark, deep, philosophical, with a deep enthusiasm and compassion that overcomes all awkwardness.   In the introduction (written only after the publication of the novel - Hugo wanted to see it stand on its own merits first), Hugo argues against the barbarity of the guillotine, of capital punishment in general, saying that the weeks, months, or even years spent under sentence of death, awaiting one’s unnatural end, are tantamount to psychological torture.  Hugo’s narrator, whose crime is not specified and whose name is not given, is condemned to die in three weeks.  He is an educated man of the upper classes, and decides to write his experiences: “I said to myself, ‘As I have the means of writing, why should I not do it?  But of what shall I write?  Placed between four walls of cold and bare stone, without freedom for my steps, without horizon for my eyes, my sole occupation mechanically to watch the progress of that square of light which the grating of my door marks on the sombre wall opposite, and, as I said before, ever alone with one idea, --an idea of crime, punishment, death,--can I have anything to say, I who have nothing more to do in this world; and what shall I find in this dry and empty brain which is worthy the trouble of being written? “’Why not?  If all around me is monotonous and hueless, is there not within me a tempest, a struggle, a tragedy?  This fixed idea which possesses me, does it not take every hour, every minute a new form, becoming more hideous as the time approaches?  Why should I not try to describe for myself all the violent and unknown feelings I experience in my outcast situation?  Certainly the material is plentiful; and, however shortened my life may be, there will still be sufficient in the anguish, the terrors, the tortures, which will fill it from this hour until my last, to exhaust my pen and ink!  Besides, the only means to decrease my suffering in this anguish will be to observe it closely; and to describe it will give me an occupation.  And then, what I write may not be without its use.  This journal of my sufferings, hour by hour, minute by minute, torment after torment, if I have strength to carry it on to the moment when it will be physically impossible for me to continue,-- this history necessarily unfinished, yet as complete as possible of my sensations, may it not give a grand and deep lesson?  Will not there be in this process of agonizing thought, in this ever increasing storm of pain, in this intellectual dissection of a condemned man, more than one lesson for those who condemned?  Perhaps the perusal may render them less heedless, when throwing a human life into what they call ‘the scale of justice.’  Perhaps they have never reflected on the slow succession of tortures conveyed in the expeditious formula of a sentence of death.  Have they ever paused on the important idea, that in the man whose days they shorten there is an immortal spirit which had calculated on life, a soul which is not prepared for death?  No! they see nothing but the execution, and doubtless think that for the condemned there is nothing anterior or subsequent!’

“These sheets shall undeceive them.  Published, perchance, some day, they will call their attention a few moments to the suffering of the mind; for it is this which they do not consider.  They triumph in the power of being able to destroy the body, almost without making it suffer.  What an inferior consolation is this!  What is mere physical pain compared to that of the mind?  A day will come, and perhaps these memoirs, the last revelations of a solitary wretch, will have contributed-- “That is, unless after my death the wind carries away these sheets of paper into the muddy court, or unless they melt with rain when pasted to the broken window of a turnkey.” Powerful stuff.  Very interested to see where this goes.