What is Mental Health?

I am lying on the floor, knees held gently against my chest. My heart hurts. Thoughts flail and screech in ear-splitting rings around my head. Why did she say that? Doesn’t she understand? Who does she think I am? Why can’t she see me?

The pain sticks under my ribs, sucking vital energy in and down. I don’t want to move. I can’t. My stomach is locked shut. I just want to curl up in the palm of this gripping pain and dissolve into nothingness.

I breathe again (I can’t help it) and exhale sharply. I cling to my knees, drawing them in tight. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to open my body, my self. I don’t want to be this vulnerable. I want to be safe, protected, enclosed like a small hard ball.
*
What is mental health?

I take my cue from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. “Great health” is an ability to digest our experiences. To digest or metabolize experiences is to take whatever is given in any moment—any thought, feeling, or sensation, any cruel word, kind act, or humiliating fall—and transform it—by chewing, mashing, churning, breaking it down—into a sweet stream of energy capable of nourishing our ongoing bodily becoming.

We humans are essentially creative at a sensory level. Our bodily selves are always sensing, always moving, always creating the patterns of sensation and response that make us who we are. Some of that bodily movement—firing and wiring—gives rise to a thinking mind as an inward extension of our bodily self. Our minds are tools that our bodily selves create in order to help us live well. Minds look forward and back. They predict what will happen on the basis of what has been. They calculate options and risks, and all in the service of keeping our bodily selves moving, creating, thriving, becoming who we are.

A healthy mind, then, is one that helps us embrace our experiences as occasions to discover the range and reach of what our bodies know. A healthy mind is one that finds in whatever fear, anger, sadness, despair, irritation, confusion, or frustration we feel, a potential for pleasure that has yet to unfold—an energy and guidance impelling us to move in relation to ourselves and others in ways that align our well-being with the challenge at hand. A healthy mind helps us move in life-enabling, experience-metabolizing ways.

Sometimes, however, our minds get sick: they can’t help us move. Nearly half of all adults, at some point in our lives, will endure times of acute mental, physical, and emotional suffering, and find ourselves unable to work, play, eat, sleep, or open deeply to others—times when we are arrested by anxiety or depression, anger or fear, compulsions or addictions, and unable to digest our experiences.

Why sick? Why stuck? We live in a culture that teaches us to ignore the movement of our bodily selves. From the earliest age, we learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. We learn to identify our “self” with our mental power; we learn to perceive our “body” as material thing for which “we” are responsible. Then, when faced with the stress of a life-altering change, a critical decision, or draining fatigue, we tend to mobilize the resource we think is best: mind over body. We try to control our bodies: we impose diets, schedules, and plans, or rely on drugs and surgery to exact a will we lack. We distract and numb, starve and indulge our sensory selves. We rehearse a separation from our bodily selves that prevents us from feeling what we are feeling. Our emotions remain lodged in our throats and bellies and hearts and limbs, undigested, causing so much depression and despair.
*
As I breathe again, unable to help it, I feel it. In spite of myself, I feel something new—a sensation of the earth pushing up from below me. I am not falling into a black hole. I am resting on a presence that is larger than me that is pressing up through me and holding me up.

Instinctively, I let go. I can’t help it. I breathe again and drop into the earth, holding on to nothing. Emptying my mind. The plug in my heart releases and sensations of disappointment and despair run through me, along me, out of me, into the earth.

In spite of myself, impulses to move arise within me—I feel them—expressions of the irrepressible, undeniable flow of life that will not stop beating and breathing, growing and healing, searching for new ways to move through me. My mind resists, holding on to fear, but my bodily self knows more.
*
Our hungers are prophetic. The scope and kinds of mental illnesses that we as individuals and as a culture are suffering are calling us to reconnect the activity of our minds with the movement of our bodily selves. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of the movements that are making us.

The truth is that at the heart of any and every pain is a desire—a desire to move, to love, to heal, to give, to receive. We would not even feel the pain of not caring if we did not care. And within every desire is in turn an impulse to connect—an impulse to create the relationships with whatever and whomever we need to support us in becoming who we are, and giving what we have to give.

When we move, we breathe. When we breathe, we feel. When we feel we open the floodgates to all of our searing sensations, past, present and future. But we also open ourselves to the possibility of sensing what is always true: that our bodily selves, in every moment of our lives, are providing us with vital information about how to move in ways that will not recreate the pain.

When we breathe to move and move to breathe we open to the possibility of sensing the wisdom in our desires. Whether we are wrestling with issues of food, intimacy, and purpose (see What a Body Knows) or with our parents, partners, and progeny (see Family Planting), how we move matters.
*
I breathe down again, along the stream of my spine, feeling the bed of earth cupping its flow. My experience shifts and I am suddenly aware of the desire at the heart of my pain.

I hurt. I hurt because I want. I want because I am alive. This desire, this life, is a power in me that is stronger than the fear. Stronger than the hurt. It is the point of the pain—to wake me up to the power of this desire. To my need to move.

A resolve appears. I take a small step. I can act out of my love and not my fear or anger. I can meet her where she too is hurt and coming toward me—in the heart of her desire for more. The knot of pain softens and unfolds in affirmation. I am OK. Healing happens.

Spinoza and the Steers

I spent last week reading Spinoza, rounding up steers, and reveling in the early spring.

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) was a Dutch philosopher whose masterwork, Ethics, presents arguments for the nature of God and human using the form of geometric proofs—axioms, propositions, definitions, explanations, and all. I decided to spend some time with him after coming upon his name, yet again, in another work of environmental philosophy. Contemporary writers, like Jane Bennett and David Abram, are appealing to Spinoza for help in anchoring concepts of the natural, material world that will encourage human compassion for the earth as a whole.

Two of Spinoza’s claims in particular are in constant rotation. For one, he uses the phrase “God, or Nature,” maintaining that God and Nature share one, infinite "substance." Second, he insists that every body, human and otherwise, insofar as it exists in God/Nature, is animated by its own “striving to persevere.” Every body, animal, vegetable or mineral, at every scope and scale, acts so as to increase its power of action.

Citing these two ideas, philosophers conclude that humans ought to honor other earth bodies as having agency and intelligence, and so desist from acting as if only humans matter.

As I am pondering Spinoza’s proofs, Bright and Blaze, the two-year-old Milking Shorthorn steers that my son is training, decide that they are tired of their pen. They have plentiful hay and cool water, in a sun-filled shelter ringed by seemingly redundant ropes of barbed wire—all of which they ignore. Slipping into the barnyard, the 1500-pound, red-brown and speckled pair make their way to the front door of our house. They tip over the wooden bucket in which we crank ice cream, and begin licking the briny dregs.

Coming into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I see a huge head through the window. Then another. Rather than return to Spinoza, I pull on boots, coat, gloves, and hat, and begrudgingly blink my way into the sunshine. I approach Bright, the largest of the two, with halter in hand. He cavorts away, kicking his heels in the air like a newborn lamb. With large horns. I have to laugh. Is he the intelligent, animate, striving to persevere that Spinoza has in mind?
*
Spinoza’s Ethics is different than I imagined. Rather than the environmental treatise that its contemporary uses imply, the Ethics is an extended apology for “a life of the mind.” God and Nature, mind and body, are what they are such that humans find their greatest happiness when reading and writing, preferably in the company of like-minded friends. According to Spinoza, it is knowledge of God—not chasing steers—that yields the highest human joy. As he writes, “In life… it is especially useful to perfect, as far as we can, our intellect, or reason. In this one thing consists man’s highest happiness, or blessedness.”

Why? The argument goes like this. God is infinite substance, the cause of itself, freely operating according to the laws of its nature—which, for Spinoza, are the eternal laws of nature. God is a thinking being, whose substance also appears in the mode of extension. God’s intellect is thus the immanent cause of every finite and fleeting thing.

Given this scene, humans too exist in God as a part of nature, as one kind of body among many others, constantly affecting and being affected by other bodies. However, humans are the part of nature that is capable of understanding all bodies, including their own, as equally modes of God, that is, “under the species of the eternal.” And understanding bodies in this way, according to Spinoza, yields utmost joy.

Why? For two reasons. First, even though mind and body share in one substance (God, or Nature), Spinoza insists that the knowledge our minds receive about the world through our bodily senses is “mutilated and confused.” It is distorted by our bodily location and our sensory limits. Second, for Spinoza, all of the so-called pleasures associated with the material world are not. Sensory pleasures come and go, leaving in their wake a sadness that confuses and dulls the mind.

Reason, however, can address both sources of discomfort. Using reason, we can “purify” and “heal” our sensory knowledge by forming “adequate ideas.” Using reason, we can also cultivate an ability not to be affected by external, material, or natural causes that might distract us from such understanding. In both cases, then, using our reason answers our own striving to persevere, and thus yields the promised joy.

Not exactly what the environmentalists are after. Where is the care and compassion for the welfare of the natural world?

I contemplate the issue while contemplating my next move with the steers. They are truly huge. Standing beside them, I feel small and weak. I know that they would not intentionally hurt me—my son has trained them well—but there is simply no reason that they need to do what I want them to do. They could overpower me with a twist of the head. They don’t.

I watch as they tussle with one another, roam among the spare bales stacked in the barnyard, and trot away each time I approach. The steers want to be out. It is as if they smell spring. They sense something new and want to participate in it by making new moves of their own. They want to let loose the capacities for cavorting that lie dormant beneath their winter shag. I don’t blame them.

I decide to ditch the halters and try a thin stick. Gently tapping from behind, I steer the steers towards their pen. At the gate, they veer away and go back across the road to the spare hay bales. I move with them and tap them back towards the pen. Back and forth we go. I move with them some more, until finally, they move with me, back into their pen, where they circle their own waiting bale.

I return to Spinoza, and the steers pull my thoughts in a direction that is both new and familiar. Spinoza too could make another move. When confronting the selectivity of our senses and the short-lived duration of sensory pleasures, Spinoza doesn’t have to yoke his reason to an intellectual love of an eternal God.

What if, instead of seeking refuge in an idea of eternal truth, we chose to cultivate a capacity to move with the rhythms of the material world? And with the rhythms of our own desires?

As Spinoza admits, human bodies are acutely impressionable, affected at all levels in myriad ways by a vast array of human, nonhuman, and elemental others. This sensitivity, I would add, is not simply passive. As our bodies are moved by people, places, and things, we learn how to move for ourselves. We learn about the power of our own bodily movement to connect us with other bodies and forces that sustain our ongoing life. That power consists of an ability to create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that align our well being with the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

What if our distinctive humanity lies in this ability to learn from other earth bodies, from the rhythms, cycles, and seasons of bodily nature, about our own capacity for making the movements that make us who we are--able to connect, able to love?

Humans do need an idea of Nature as divine, whole, and worthy of devotion, but we need more as well. We need to submit ourselves to forces and movements larger than ourselves, to which we must respond, and so catalyze a sensory awareness of our own bodily movement and how it is making us able to think and feel and act as we do.

When we do, we will have what we need to recreate our relationship with the "more than human" world (Abram). We will have the capacity to feel the pain and sadness of the natural world as a call to move differently—to find ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that connect us in mutually-enabling ways with the body of earth and bodies of earth, including our own.

It is what a body knows.

It is what my time with Spinoza and the steers is teaching me.
*
Later in the day I walk into the kitchen, and find Blaze peering at me through the window. Again?!

This time, the steers do not let me close enough to tap. Kyra volunteers to help. She is nine, all of four feet tall and seventy pounds. She approaches Blaze gently, the halter behind her back. She scratches him under the chin, and while I blink, slips the halter over his hooked horns. She does the same with Bright. Mesmerized, I help her lead them into their pen. I follow. They follow. This time, we tie them up.

It will be best for them, I reason. They will be safe from passing cars, in easy reach of food and water. They depend on me to take care of them. Yet, my heart quails. They are tied up, against their will. I feel their pain. So moved, the thought forms. I vow to build a new fence as soon as the ground thaws—a solid wooden fence that will be strong enough to keep them in and large enough to give them room to frolic.

I need it.