Mission

I wanted to help my nieces. That’s why I started making videos - to hear from other people with bipolar disorder about their experiences. I needed to understand why my hospitalization had been such a breakthrough for me, while for so many others it led to a lifetime of medication. Then I wanted to help the people I met online - so many people suffering.

 

But, if I’m really honest, I think the only thing that has kept me going on this mission since 2007 is that I am doing this for me. Even back in university, while I was majoring in economics to puff up my resume, my other major was sociology. There, I spent every opportunity I could studying religion. This was before I’d ever heard of a non-religious spirituality.

 

Then, even when my career was taking off in advertising, I would still find myself wandering over to the local new-age bookstore at lunch hour. The calling to something deeper, something more substantial, was relentless.

 

Here is 2020, I can say that we`ve made incredible progress, conducting over 50 private healing retreats at this point without having to hospitalize a single client. My new techniques, DSB and BERT have the potential of bringing the healing process of our private retreats to a much broader group of people in need.

 

I’m still not satisfied. There’s a long way to go. But at least now I think we’ve found a path.

 

My wife, Ligia Splendore, has played a huge role in the discovery of that path. Although she has preferred to stay out of the public eye in my bipolarORwakingUP video series, she has had a very influential role in what I’ve posted online. I’ve asked her for feedback on every video I’ve ever made, and often ended up starting all over again after hearing what she had to say. Although Ligia is a transpersonal psychologist here in Sao Paulo, she is also the best advertising executive I’ve ever met. She just knows what works!

 

Together for twenty years, it hasn’t always been easy. At the beginning of this work together, I was pushing for a more independent, radical approach, while Ligia stressed the importance of building relationships within the mental health community. While we were both fighting passionately for the same cause, sometimes it felt like we were heading in opposite directions.

 

However, with each setback we both became a little wiser and a little softer; gradually moving towards the approach we share here at Bipolar Awakenings – an approach that incorporates the beneficial aspects of psychiatry, psychology, the peer support movement and shamanism into a program that has the potential to help many people.

 

So…who’s next?

 

Sean Blackwell