The Foreword to "Recovering Sanity": Excerpts & Updates

I am honored to introduce my friend, colleague, and mentor Edward Podvoll, and this second edition of his remarkable classic, now retitled Recovering Sanity. I first met Dr. Podvoll in 1977 at a winter meditation retreat for psychotherapists held in rural New York. One morning he and I went out for firewood in the snowy forest. Uncovering a fallen tree, we took turns struggling to saw through the stubborn trunk. Our frustration mounted to a key moment when we both realized that the damp wood was frozen rock-hard, and that trying to force our way through was futile. We looked at each other with a spark of recognition, smiled, and relaxed. Our life-paths had crossed, and as the years since have unfolded, we have come to know that we have a long way to go together.

This first experience together has lived on for us as a metaphor: the mind in psychosis can seem hardened beyond reach in fear, loneliness, and confusion, yet a persistent and gentle attention will eventually get through. Recovery from extreme states is revealed as a gradual process of growth, rather than a forced cure. For the past twenty-two years, the Windhorse Project has grown around this central idea. Our basic method has been to create a healing environment with the troubled person in his or her natural home and community. A group of caring and attentive people, personally grounded in contemplative practice, form a team committed to the client’s—and each other’s—welfare. Truthful communication and precise attention to detail guide the process. Yet for compassion to be truly effective, the attendant needs a way to understand clearly the psychotic experience and how to relate sanely with it. If the person in psychosis does not come to recognize the root mental functions that propagate his or her madness then it tends to recycle. And here is the real value of Dr. Podvoll’s book: he clearly explains the nature of psychotic states, through compelling first-person narratives, and the means for recovering sanity. In this way, Windhorse and this book further the evolution of the current medical model of mental illness toward a more holistic mind-body-environment paradigm.

Recovering Sanity can serve several purposes for the reader. It gives specific instructions for how to attend skillfully to a suffering person and the surrounding environment. It serves as a handbook for making an ordinary home into a therapeutic household that benefits each member. It provides key insights on how to break the pattern of becoming repeatedly enmeshed in psychosis. It is a field guide in the apparently trackless wilderness of psychotic experience. It provides a map for fearless exploration of one’s own potential for madness.

Like working with a person lost in extremes, reading this book is a very human exercise. You and they are worth such gentle and persistent attention. So, I invite you to settle down with this reading as you would with a troubled person and to listen to your own experience emerging in relation to the challenges you meet here. Rouse your presence, observe closely, and bring a strong heart to the encounter. But know that “There is no going back: Once you take a bite of the center of the earth, it cannot be undone, you are stuck with it” (Recovering Sanity, p. 134). As Dr. Podvoll has shown me, he will show you how psychosis and islands clarity work together, and I believe your view will shift and open. “If ever there is an antidote to madness, it is here, in an opening out” (p. 170).

I have had the good fortune to live, work, and teach in Windhorse communities since their beginning, and I have assumed a leadership role. In December 2002, Dr. Podvoll completed a twelve-year Buddhist meditation retreat and rejoined his beloved Windhorse community in Boulder. He suffered this next year with a terminal illness and died in December 2003, just as this book was republished. This was a very proud and fulfilling final moment for him. Dr. Podvoll bequeathed copyright ownership of Recovering Sanity to me, and I carry on as steward-protector of the book. It is my aspiration that this edition achieve a wide reading, that there be future editions as the times indicate, and that this book outlive us all. May Dr. Podvoll’s legacy continue to ease the varieties of madness in our world. We still have a long way to go.