Mindsets For Mindfulness: Awakening From Crisis To Higher Consciousness is your trusted companion for spiritual growth and personal development. I know the path is lonely at times, and searching for worthwhile guidance is confusing, with lots of conflicting information, quick fixes, and false promises.
Non-ordinary states of consciousness and experiences outside of rational “sanity” are difficult to understand or explain. This book draws upon lessons I’ve learned throughout my awakening — the years of depression, anxiety, and psychosis, to higher states of consciousness. The result is a framework of understanding with practical tools to use these experiences for growth.
A significant contribution to the field.
David Lorimer, Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network
This book combines modern guidance and ancient knowledge, all filtered through the prism of my direct experience. I know what works, because it worked for me. The result is a practical guide to transforming crisis into a profound awakening.
Mindsets for Mindfulness is split into two parts. First, I explain the Enchanted Worldview, a map of reality much greater in scope than the mainstream view most of us agree too without questioning or exploring further. Then I provide 10 Mindsets, each rich with insight, which support every stage of growth, and can be referred back to.
With 71-pages informed by over 15 years of direct experience and obsessive study, it’s an invaluable guide to accompany you, each step of the way. And guess what? You can get your copy, for free, when you sign-up to MindThatEgo. Once on the list you’ll receive emails roughly once per-week, including the new content, mindful reminders, and journal prompts.
Part One: The Enchanted Worldview (Pages 3-31)
I define enchantment as a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity towards the underlying mystery of existence. Merriam Webster defines enchanted as placed under or as if under a magic spell and having or seeming to have a magical quality. The state of enchantment, then, is the feeling of being spellbound by life’s magic — not from a place of naivety, but a place of wisdom.
Enchantment is that unmistakable feeling, the knowing that there’s something more to life.
A universal law says that everything must have its opposite. I know the power of enchantment because I spent many years disenchanted: blind to life’s magic, beauty, meaning, overcome by ego and disconnected from my intuition, my senses, my emotions, my own inner-wisdom.
My spiritual awakening was a process of rediscovering life’s magic by learning to reconnect with the fullness of my being, by rediscovering my capacity to experience reality beyond the limitations of the ego and intellect. This process of re-enchantment is, I believe, the biggest antidote to depression, anxiety, and psychological and spiritual crisis.
A clearly and concisely written guide to much of the wisdom that helps one understand and navigate these very challenging yet potentially enlightening and transformative experiences.
Phil Borges, Director, Crazywise
As my experiences became more and more unconventional and mindblowing, and the “something more” became something greater, I searched for possible explanations. In discovering alternative stories about reality, the impact of worldview on mental wellbeing became apparent.
If your context has no explanation, you will doubt, minimise and dismiss your experience. If your view of reality is limited in some way, so is your potential for growth. But how does the readily agreed reality in Western culture limit us?
I call the Western view the Disenchanted Worldview. It idolises rationality, reason and intellect (all “egoic” functions) and has no space or respect for the spirit or the divine. In this reality, the material world and “matter” is all there is, consciousness is confined to living things, and the universe is a mechanical machine.
However, the Enchanted Worldview is a map which better fits the fullness of human experience. It balances all human functions: mind, body, heart, and soul. It respects the spiritual and the divine as “realer than real,” the fabric of existence. In this reality, the material world is one dimension of many, consciousness is cosmic and universal, and the universe is intelligent and benevolent.
Mindsets for Mindfulness will inspire you to consider the profound transformation a change in worldview has on removing limitations, while providing tools to experience this new reality. The Enchanted Worldview isn’t a description of “the way things are,” but an invitation to explore new terrain, in your own time, at your own pace. Chapters from this section:
- What if…
- The Years Of Disenchantment
- Why Mindfulness?
- Defining Mindfulness
- The Map Is Not The Territory
- Who Are You?
Part Two: The Mindsets (Pages 33-71)
The Mindsets are inner-resources or archetypes that combine a wide range of spiritual practices, psychological techniques, and philosophies. This book is about awakening to the fullness of human spirit, beyond the mind and the ego. However, I chose the term mindset as it’s relatable to the Western perspective and has extra relevance: the ego is the biggest barrier to spiritual awakening.
As a result, these mindsets draw together a host of instruction, guidance, wisdom, and personal experience to navigated these complexities, saving you, I hope, time and effort on the journey of growth. These mindsets can be resources to turn to when needed — I find myself referring back to them consistently, every time I forget, or slip up, or go through spells of disenchantment.
Each chapter explains the qualities and practices of the 10 Mindsets, listed below:
- The Middle Way Mindset
- The Beginner’s Mind…set
- The Learner’s Mindset
- The Sincere Scientist
- The Warrior of Acceptance
- The Triple ‘H’ Mindset
- The Compassionate Disciplinarian
- The Divine Nonconformist
- The Loving Kindness Mindset
- The Modest Champion
This is the crux of the issue: most of us want something more in life. In dreaming that something more, we limit our own imagination. We are limited by ideas of what’s possible and conditioned from the day we are born to believe what we really want is actually inherited from someone else’s story.
It begins by unlearning the old, experiencing the new, daring to imagine something greater. The Mindsets for Mindfulness are the practices to bridge the gap from the dream and your current reality — to follow the path of re-enchantment, to connect to the wholeness of your being.
Praise for Mindsets for Mindfulness
“Mindsets For Mindfulness is an engaging and well-written overview, written from both a personal and wider spiritual perspective. It shows how the existing materialistic worldview can be related to depression and how normality and conformity limit of our imagination by focusing on externals.
“Ricky describes a number of important mindsets in the second half of the book, with valuable insights drawn from his own experience that readers can readily apply. I particularly liked his notions of ‘skilled solitude’ and ‘post-experience knowledge’ as well as his three h’s: humour, honesty and humility. A significant contribution to the field.”
David Lorimer is a writer, lecturer and editor. He is the Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network and Chair of the Galileo Commission, which aims to expand the scope of science beyond the material worldview. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Prophet For Our Times and Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality.
“In a very down to earth account, Ricky Derisz takes us on his journey through a psychological crisis that opened his mind and heart to a new and expanded reality. He clearly describes how his crisis woke him up from a reality that many of us consider ‘normal‘ into a non-ordinary state of consciousness bursting with life and experiences that defied his previous limiting beliefs.
“After 25 years meeting and interviewing healers and visionaries in tribal and indigenous communities (often called shaman) I was surprised to learn that many were identified in their youth by having such a crisis. Later while making the documentary film CRAZYWISE, I met countless individuals in our western culture who have experienced a psychological crisis. I have been fascinated by the similarity in the stories I’ve heard from individuals, like Ricky, who have managed to successfully navigate their crisis.
“His experience like so many wasn’t an easy one. As Ricky puts it ‘I was on an obsessive journey to understand myself.’ Thankfully for the one in five of us who will experience a psychological crisis in our lifetime, his extensive search has given us a clearly and concisely written guide to much of the wisdom, both ancient and modern, that helps one understand and navigate these very challenging yet potentially enlightening and transformative experiences.”
Phil Borges is the director of CRAZYWISE, a documentary exploring how psychological crisis can be transformed into awakening. He is an award-winning photographer, having spent over 25 years documenting indigenous and tribal cultures across the world, where he became fascinated by the non-ordinary experiences of healers and visionaries.