Notes from the Path : Suicide

Misunderstandings, Champions & Mystics.

TLDR; adopting the frame that the suicidal impulse is a signal that my ego needed to die and be reborn vs. killing my actual body saved my life and allowed me to transcend the diagnosis / experience of depression.

What follows is a DEscription, not a PREscription, of my journey and observations and what has worked for me and my clients.

I spent a decade plus of my life in and out of so called suicidal depression and manic psychosis.

My Google search history from that time period included joyful things like “best way to kill myself” and “where to buy cyanide”.

I recall living in San Francisco’s Presidio and running toward the Golden Gate Bridge giving myself a motivational pep talk encouraging myself to jump off.

I broke down crying and my dad happened to call me. It felt like God talking to me directly. I knew I needed some kind of help but didn’t know what, we decided to give psychiatry a try.

Western medicine wanted to hand me a pill with the implied message that “you will never be understood”.

I gave it a shot for a couple months but I felt like I had a pillow wrapped around my head as I was looking out from inside a Nirvana album.

My intuition offered me a symbol of a Mt. Everest and an understanding that there was a potential path out of this. A path that wasn’t gaurnetee, and that others had died trying to navigate.

I chose that Impossible Path. My Stanford psychiatrist girlfriend left me, my family was pissed, and I lost contact with many friends.

I read every research paper I could find, every book on Bipolar / depression / schizophrenia, every first person account of people who had made it through.

I learned that western psychiatry had admittedly no idea what caused so called mental illness, that the idea of an “chemical imbalance” was in accurate and nothing more than a marketing tool, that medications often made things worse and increased chances of suicide, that interventions like writing gratitude letters were more effective than Prozac and yet never discussed, and that in other cultures what I was experiencing was seen as a valuable experience worthy of shamanic mentorship not a chemical lobotomy.

I had visions and insights that kept me moving forward. I met mentors and found obscure resources that helped me form a more accurate map of what was actually going on. I learned and developed tools to not just cope but to transform.

One of the perspectives that was most helpful was an insight that leap across from high performance sport psychology.

You see, before competition top tier athletes and second tier athletes will report the same physical sensations - sweaty palms, flushed face, increased heart rate and breathing, etc.

But they label the experience differently. A champion athlete will code that experience as “excitement” while a second tier athlete will code it as “fear”.

I’d heard Joseph Campbell say “The psychotic swims in the same waters that the mystic swims with delight.”

Could “suicide” simply be a result of how I was labeling my experience?

I had the insight that the “desire to die” was actually a healthy one when it was seen a signal that my ego, my map of reality, was in need of an update.

Like the OS needing to be updated. It doesn’t destroy the phone or even wipe the data. But it takes intention, and a little time, and things (generally) work better when your done. It’s also not without some risk.

My ego, I came to understand, is my default mode network. It’s an internal set of connections and pathways that maps to my experience of reality.

But overtime as life changes or as my role within it changes, that internal map needs updating.

Often updates can be made on the fly, but sometimes, especially in the case of trauma responses (personal or inherited) a bigger update is needed.

This is why psychedelics can be useful in the right setting, they can provide a window for an ego death and rebirth to happen — like a lobster molting and taking on a larger exoskeleton, proving more room for movement.

Western Medicine hasn’t embraced this and so when people arrive in a developmental crisis of transformation, they are often medicated back into their old self, when it’s a new self that is looking to emerge.

Imagine a culture in which every time a caterpillar tried to spin a cocoon a team of “doctors” ran over to remove the silk. This doesn’t fair well for the caterpillar, nor for the species as a whole - eventually the entire species dies.

In many ways this is why you see the most visionary people suffering in our society. The most creative are 2-10x more likely to suffer from a so called mental illness, including death from suicide.

So for me, once I had this insight around what suicide was, a misunderstanding of a deeper signal (largely due to existing in a culture without the awareness of the value of the experience) I quickly learned to use things like psychedelics, Breathwork and somatic inquiry to go deeper into my experience and give my ego the space to die and be reborn.

The goal wasn’t to eliminate the ego, just to have a more robust, more flexible one.

A decade ago I was sleeping in vacant houses, heart broken, regularly spending my last money on a meal. In many ways it was a magical and interesting time, one I’m deeply grateful for.

But today, I’m deeply in love with the woman of my dreams, running a six figure coaching business, which requires 4 hours a week of delivery, adventuring around and working with the highest leverage clients on the planet.

I love and trust in life deeply, and my relationship to death is one of a friend or lover.

I’ll welcome her with deep gratitude when she arrives, am grateful for all she has given and continues to give me, and I will not demand her presence any sooner than she comes.