Sugar and Salt - Thompson, Jane

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Résumé :
Sugar and Salt: My Life with Bipolar Disorder is the story of an ordinary person who lived with and ultimately overcame bipolar disorder (manic-depression.). She was not diagnosed until she was 32. She describes what it is like to be raised in a family overshadowed by the illness, and to try to fit in in school and to function at work with the undiagnosed disorder. The failure of a marriage and relationships are detailed, and she struggles to understand why her life is so different and so difficult, until she has a sudden revelation that something is wrong with her and that she needs help. Then comes the long fight to get treatment as she tries medication after medication after being misdiagnosed as psychotic. For five years she seeks knowledge and understanding of the disorder that makes her suffer. In a dramatic turn, Jane realizes she must enter a mental hospital to get the treatment she needs. She describes life in a locked ward, and how her doctor finally finds the medication her disorder responds to. She feels she has been given the key that lets her out of the hell the mood disorder has kept her in all her life, and for the first time, she feels normal. After the hospital, Jane has to face the world again and start a new life. She is able to work for years without her employers discovering her secret. However, after ten years, she develops an allergy to the medication that has served her so well and must start the process over again. During this process, she loses her dream job and falls back into depression. A story of ultimate triumph over bipolar disorder...

Biographie:
About Jane Thompson (Sri Devi)
Jane Thompson is an avid yoga and meditation teacher, reflexologist, numerologist, volunteer supporting women's rights against violence, mental health advocate, hospice worker, and world traveler.
Jane was born to travel. After a cross-Canada/U.S. tour in her early teens, and several European vacations as a teenager, Jane's passion for life, her inquisitive mind, and her courageous spirit led her on a two-year, round-the-world adventure at the age of 20. During her eight-year marriage, she and her husband toured Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean. A yoga enthusiast from her early thirties, Jane realized a long held dream when she explored India-the Motherland of religion and yoga-during a three-month spiritual pilgrimage more recently.
Jane attributes her travels, a difficult upbringing, and a turbulent marriage, to her spiritual thirst for the deeper meaning of life. Having overcome a mental illness herself, Jane has developed an innate understanding of the effects of trauma on the human psyche; this healing journey has enabled her to transcend the powers of darkness with the grace so befitting of her birth name, Jane (meaning God's grace).
When Jane studied World Religions at Concordia University in Montreal in the early eighties, she marveled at truths found in the Hindu scriptures, and their parallels with her own Christian faith. She then discovered the teachings of her beloved guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, and awakened to the transcendent truth that lies at the heart of life's mysteries. At 36, upon completing yoga teacher training at the Sivananda Ashram in Val Morin, Quebec, Swami Vishnudevananda conferred on her the spiritual title, Sri Devi. Twelve years later, at the age of 48, she embarked in earnest on the Kriya Yoga path as taught by Yoganada.
Sri Devi believes that time, forgiveness, unconditional love, faith, prayer, and meditation are our healers-forever leading us toward the eternal goal of Self-realization. In her eyes, times of joy, sorrow, failure, success, work, rest, birth, and death are all fundamental components of the law of relativity that comprise our spiritual struggle to evolve, to improve, to transform, and ultimately, to seek and to know one's Maker. She is convinced that when we love God, and when we are in tune with His will, the dreams that we dare to dream really do come true. In this anthology of lyrical poems, Sri Devi urges us to attune to Divine Will and to its subsequent blessings.
Sri Devi is a proud, devoted mother and grandmother to her two grown children and grandson. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Montreal, Quebec, she is a nature lover at heart, and feels blessed by the natural beauty and peaceful surroundings of her home in Port Alberni, British Columbia, on the West Coast of Canada....

Sommaire:
find out how she did it and how you, too, can manage the disorder through medication and therapy....