Introduction

     People experience mental distress, sometimes more, sometimes less. It is obvious that this has a function. It alerts us that significant needs of ours are not being met. The natural and adaptive outcome would be that we would mobilize all our resources to remedy this deprivation. This is observed regularly in animals, but in people the response to mental distress is much more complicated and often seems to be much less adaptive. 

 

     People's needs are more complicated than those of animals. Partly it is because our understanding of our needs is much more complicated. Animals do not appear to have any understanding of their needs at all. They just experience them and respond, usually appropriately. Our thinking complicates life for us. 

     Some of our mental distress is as simple as animals'. We also get hungry. Fleas bite us too. There is no mystery about it. For distress that is more complicated, we need to work our way out of it, work for satisfaction. But how? 

     Since we think, and since our mental distress and satisfaction are very important to us, we construct rationales for why we experience distress and how we need to work to be happy. I call these rationales, and the work that they motivate and justify, "practices". People need practices, because we do experience mental distress and we do think, and people do have practices. The crucial question is, how are your practices working for you?

     For many people the answer is, "not so well". For others, their practices are so inadequate for them that they have become "dead in the water", sinking in their distress, inactive although activity is obviously essential. Such people may become involved with the so-called "mental health" system. "Mental illness" system, I often call it. This putative "system" encourages people to put their hopes in experts and medication, rather than in their own work. It is too passive. What we need is meaningful activity.

     I have been involved with a certain practice for more than 40 years. It has advantages, particularly in complicated cases like mine. At the same time it can coexist with other practices that are working for a person. Don't give up what works! But if your practices are not giving you enough satisfaction, I suggest that you explore the practice of awareness of reality with me.