#Depersonalization disorder art how to#

The careful consideration of set and setting in research on psychedelics, and the resulting infrequency of bad trips, suggests that similar considerations could protect against negative experiences with contemplative practices. It may be impossible to isolate the factors that determine the ultimate outcome-the profound or profound loss-but research, as well as history, points to two key, interdependent players: set and setting. By examining how depersonalization unfolds in the brains of meditators, during psychedelic experiences, and through psychosis, we can better understand why depersonalization can be a vector for both the profound and for profound loss, and perhaps learn how such an experience can be better integrated into one’s life. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the ‘neural correlates’ of the sense of self and spiritual experience.” A similar mental mapping has occurred in research around both meditation and psychosis.

#Depersonalization disorder art how to#

In How to Change Your Mind, author Michael Pollan explains that while participants are undergoing drug-induced mystical experiences in a lab setting, “imaging tools can observe changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Conversely, just as contemplative practice can lead to radical understanding, so too can mental illness or psychedelics.Ī recent revival of scientific research on psychedelics, which was barred from the halls of academia in the late seventies, has allowed researchers to study the brains of people undergoing experiences of ego deconstruction. Contemplative practice can lead there, too. As the case of Sharon Stern and others have shown, mental illness or psychedelics aren’t the only gateway to destabilization. The deconstruction of the ego can lead to the type of transcendent oneness that is a hallmark of a profound spiritual experience, or to the type of destabilizing freefall that is a hallmark of severe mental illness or a bad psychedelic trip. It’s a question that has both inspired and haunted seekers for millennia. She began writing emails in the third person, and as Rachel Aviv detailed in The New Yorker, in one of Stern’s last emails to her teacher, she asked, “So the question arises what happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?” As Stern’s devotion to Butoh grew, so did her inability to identify as an individual with a history, personality, or future.

Prior to her suicide Stern was exhibiting mental instability, including worrisome signs of depersonalization, a condition marked by a sense of detachment from one’s body and thoughts.

Stern was deeply committed to the Buddhist-influenced Japanese dance form of Butoh, in which mastery involves surrendering parts of the self. In April 2012 a dancer named Sharon Stern committed suicide.