This is a blog about my journey with bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed spring of 2011 and was admitted into a mental health hospital a month before my wedding. I struggled greatly for the next year and a half going on and off meds, experimenting with different forms of therapy and was readmitted to the hospital at the end of 2012. Since then I have been learning how to re-live my life. Seeing a wise, supportive, kind therapist once a week and emerging myself into Dialectical Behavioural Therapy are 2 of many ways that are helping me recover. I have found deep comfort and much strength in mindfulness practices, taught to me from DBT.

This blog is my way of allowing you to see into the life of someone who suffers from bipolar, depression and extreme anxiety. I want to own my story, and help defeat the stigma. I hope you find some comfort in knowing you are not alone, or learn more about mental illness through the writings of my blog.

Friday, 30 November 2012

Mary


If you've been reading my blog, you will remember this post, about how I've been drawn to Mary the mother of Jesus lately. Until this past week, I have never even THOUGHT about Mary much. I just always knew her as Jesus' mother, and that was all. 
During our listening prayer time on Wednesday, Darlene saw a picture of Mary when we started praying. And at the end of our prayer time I was getting a lot of visions of gifts, and that these gifts were not for me, but for me to give away. God was telling me that despite my struggles, I still have something to offer...
I get daily meditations sent to my e mail by Richard Rohr and the following was today's meditation:
"Jesus is the Icon of the Gift itself and how the Gift is given. Mary is the Icon of how the Gift is received. In her great “Magnificat” (Luke 1:46-55), Mary is not afraid to first of all boast openly of her own beauty and greatness, because she knows it is all a gift. It is not a statement about her; it is a statement about God!
She is the perfect yes to God, precisely because her yes is spoken out of her accepted “nothingness” (Luke 1:48). We instead demand some kind of “somethingness” from ourselves, and foolishly avoid the God-given emptiness that we are. Our somethingness is only revealed from a previous admission of our littleness (Buddhists might call it emptiness). Or as Simone Weil puts it, “God creates the vacuum that God alone can fill.”
Mary will always be the most orthodox Biblical image of how grace works in humanity, how God is received, and how love itself is received. It is our daily emptiness that allows us to need and to receive God’s utter fullness, and Mary does not hesitate to admit three times that she also lives under the divine mercy (Luke 1:50, 54-55) and like all of us is a “lowly” one, which she says two times (Luke 1:47, 52). Ironically, people who know they are chosen or beloved do not need any form of self-promotion. They are already permanently promoted."
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1 comment:

  1. Candice30 November 2012 at 16:00

    I got this RR Meditation this morning too, Richelle, and you came to mind right away! I was drawn especially to the words "She is the perfect yes to God, precisely because her yes is spoken out of her accepted nothingness." What a beautiful picture of surrender.

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