Emerging Proud - Coming Out Of The Spiritual Closet

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Wednesday April 25th, 2018 – In this episode of Conscious Living Radio, we speak with Dan Burkett about the campaign and upcoming film “Emerging Proud”.

Emerging Proud is a Campaign that invites people who have gone through breakdowns and crises to “come out of the spiritual closet” and share their stories and experiences. A large number of people who have received mental health diagnoses, feel that their out of the ordinary perceptions and experiences hold mystical or shamanic value. However, under the current paradigm of the mental health system, people are trained to be “in the closet” about their experiences, because often the spiritual aspects to people’s experience are dismissed as “delusions”. Trans-personal Psychologists such as Stanislav Grof and John Weir Perry have explored the idea that “psychosis” itself may be a kind of psychological renewal process, rather than being simply a destructive pathology. These ideas have been around for some time now, but they are still treated by many to be taboo. The Emerging Proud campaign seeks to overcome the taboo around these subjects by providing people an avenue to tell their stories.

About Dan

Dan Burkett is a young man whose life was disrupted in 2011 by an intense experience of altered states and hallucinations. Like many others, this kind of experience wound him up in the mental health system, grappling with potential labels like bipolar disorder or schizo-affective disorder. Not satisfied with this framework for understanding his experiences, he became involved in online groups like The Icarus Project and later Shades of Awakening, and found that the concept of “Spiritual Emergency” made more sense as a way to understand the process he was going through. With assistance from Spiritual Practitioners outside the mental health system he was able to develop spiritual practices to help navigate his experiences without needing to fall back on psychiatric medication.