How Important Is Our Mental Health?
Changing our thoughts and our relationship with them
Q: How Important Is Our Mental Health?
A: Spending a significant period of my life with Tibetan Monks taught me a lot about life, purpose, the efficiency of time, finances, illusions of spiritual grandeur, commitment, power, and simplicity to name a few. One thing they would often share is that to be able to live a strong spiritual path, one needs these three things: money (or resources to live), time (to practice), and most importantly our health (without which we have a very compromised reality).
Our mental health exists within a full spectrum ranging from liberated, self-actualized human all the way to debilitated invalid. Each of us lives somewhere in between depending upon our personal karma, past inner work, our current level of conscious awareness, and as the monks suggest-- how resourced we are, the time we have to work on ourselves, and how vital we are.
Through the lens of mental health, we function in the world, make decisions, speak, eat, live, relate, lead or be led, create, plan, impact, etc. Truly no area of life is untouched or without it. Generally speaking, we are born, grow, and live into a human that has been incredibly vulnerable during these formative years to our environment and those within it, especially our core family unit or lack thereof.
What is Transmutation?
At some point, if we are willing, we arrive at a moment of inquiry where we begin to investigate from the present moment back through time. We are taken memory by memory to retrace our steps and experience these aforementioned vulnerable moments of our life with objectivity. We may begin to see and understand that our current state of mental health is a culmination of these moments and that now we have the chance to transmute the resulting pain into something useful. This is transmutation.
What I have described here can happen in therapy and it can also occur through inner work. I am a fan of both and recognize that each plays a powerful role in the theme of mental health. Not everyone needs therapy, however, in my opinion, everyone under the Sun needs inner work.
So how important is our mental health? Perhaps it is one if not the most important elements of life. Any other current crisis ie environmental, financial, humanitarian, etc. are all consequences of human actions from those with compromised mental health. If we go to the origin of the problem and do the work required, we can perhaps create a ripple effect touching each realm of crisis with innovative solutions. As Albert Einstein so directly stated, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” In solidarity to his words, we have to not only change our thoughts but also our relationships with them and this is inner work.
You don’t have to be a Tibetan Monk to advance on the path, yet we do have to create the time, resource our life, and maintain our health to do so.
We cannot change the world until we accept we are the world. This is the new conversation.
