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Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency
Editor : Jules Evans, Editor : Tim Read
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Publisher : Aeon Books
Published : April 2020
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 232
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The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul’s natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence?
"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.'
Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science
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About the Editor(s)
Jules Evans is an author, broadcaster and academic philosopher. He is a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, where he researches the history and philosophy of flourishing. He was a BBC New Generation Thinker and a Times book of the year author. He is the author of 'Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations' (2012) and 'The Art of Losing Control' (2017). He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org
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Tim Read is a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in London. He was Consultant Psychiatrist at the Royal London Hospital for 20 years leading the Emergency Liaison service and the Crisis Intervention Service. He has trained in psychoanalytic therapy (IGA) and in transpersonal therapy (GTT). He is a certified facilitator of Holotropic Breathwork and has a special interest in working with expanded states of consciousness. His book 'Walking Shadows: Archetype and Psyche in Crisis and Growth' was published in 2015.
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Spiritual emergencies are moments of messy awakening, crises of ego dissolution and rebirth that are often misunderstood and unskillfully managed by materialist psychiatry. As more Westerners meditate and are drawn to psychedelics to foster their psycho-spiritual growth, mystical experiences are becoming more common--yet some of them will be disturbing and difficult. There is an urgent need for our culture to upgrade its understanding of what these experiences are like and what helps people through the turbulence. Breaking Open is the first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. The contributors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight, and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. These people have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence?
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Top reviews from other countries
Topher
3.0 out of 5 stars could be called how the other half suffer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 February 2021
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An interesting book about how very well resourced people manage suffering - let me tell you its nothing like the shocking, pathalogising, dangerous nonsense encapsulated in the medical model that most have little choice in let alone any informed consent.
In fact these well resourced people are able to float above the ordinary barbarism of modern services and consider themselves to be having a 'spiritual emergency' none of your pseudo medical sounding 'disorders' or 'treatment' for 'symptoms' here.
Here people have resources of relative wealth, good relationships, travel, meaning, purpose, an ability to explore an expansive melting pot of possible solutions - not the five minutes with the stressed out GP labelled depressed and handed a prescription for the brain damaging but highly profitable drugs marketed as 'anti depressants' or being referred to IAPT - a relative production line of nonsense where 'recovery' means how you score on a tick box questionnaire. And god forbid you ever end up in secondary care - there the medical model is completely out of control.
Taken together our mental health systems for 'normal' people are casing more harm to both the people they are tasked to work with and to the people that work within them - with massive and relentless stress - such a happy state of affairs but great for maintaining power and internalising suffering - nothing to see in the culture - move along now - no cultural disorders here its all about you and your dysfunctional thoughts, behaviours, beliefs and attitudes - just keep taking the drugs and make sure you do your homework.
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Alastair McIntosh
5.0 out of 5 stars Such an important topic, such well written first-person experience chapters
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 September 2020
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So far I've read 3 of the contributors' chapters and the editors' material. This covers such an important topic, building on the Stanislav & Christina Groff "Spiritual Emergency" classic. What this adds, is case studies written up by folks who have been through spiritual emergencies, with harrowing honesty about the often psychotic stages these took them through. It is common to find short accounts of such experience in anthologies, or accounts written up third party. What this book adds is it gives percipients the space to expand and reflect on their experiences at their own pace and in their own words.
Whether you consider that spiritual experience constitutes evidence for the spiritual or not - (or whether you believe material experience constitutes evidence for the material or not) - this book is an important and original contribution to the contemporary literature on transpersonal psychology and applied religious studies.
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Catherine I
5.0 out of 5 stars Brave and rich in anecdote.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 March 2021
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"Breaking Open" is a collection of the accounts of fourteen individuals' Spiritual Emergencies. It is topped and tailed by a sensitive and intelligent commentary by editors the philosopher Jules Evans and psychiatrist Tim Read. Despite describing their own sample pool as being restricted by their white, middle-class and culturally-literate backgrounds there is a tremendous amount of variety in the subjects' experiences. This is not an especially privileged grouping and to dismiss it is as such is a knee-jerk criticism [Disclaimer - I do not personally know any of them.]
Just as it would be meeting a crowd of new people, there are some characters who are more appealing to one than others. I particularly liked the accounts of nightclub-visionary Deborah Martin and the mysterious Rob Charles who movingly describes a childhood locked in fears over how he smelt. It is brave of Jules Evans to add his own account to the fray; he strikes just the right chord of solidarity. Evans' description of the aftermath of an Ayahuasca trip is mercifully less disturbed than others (which can be hair-raising) but contributes to the impression that, despite what the cheerleaders would have us believe, psychedelics fracture the ego in ways which are broadly unhelpful.
However, rather than individual accounts it is the general impression of the collective voice which matters. The phenomenon of the nervous breakdown inflected by spiritual overtones, or conversely the religious experience with a traumatic dimension, is glimpsed as though from many perspectives ranged around a craggy peak. The book is an extremely useful contribution to the steadily-swelling intellectual literature (as opposed to that which sets off on a superstitious footing) which examines this fascinating topic. It is a topic which demands our urgent attention.
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Elise Wardle MA, Jungian Psychotherapist
5.0 out of 5 stars Losing mind, finding soul
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 May 2021
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My sincere thanks to Tim Read and Jules Evans together with those who shared their most powerful transformative experiences through the journey of awakening. This book is much needed at a time when millions are personally and collectively experiencing spiritual crisis in a variety of different forms. For those who need to know they are not alone, not becoming insane but travelling a journey into losing their 'mind' and finding their soul, it offers guidance and resources whereby we may continue our journeys towards wholeness with insight, the right support and understanding from others who have been where we are, 'worn the t-shirt' and have 'come out the other end'!
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GLC
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2020
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This book is life affirming and even life changing, especially to the reader who has been through a spiritual emergency themselves. Jules himself has a poetic yet warm and open style, and I am now addicted to his weekly newsletters (which you can sign up for on his website). But each of the stories has a resonance that transcends normal literature on this topic and opens your mind to the great vastness of consciousness in all its various manifestations. I would recommend this book to anyone, even if new to the topic. I believe you will come away enlightened and also moved by what you read.
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