Storied Mind

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This is an edited and shortened version of a post on meditation I did some time ago. The prayer at the end remains important to me, so I thought I’d put it up again. I hope it makes some sense to you.

Here are a few journal excerpts from many years ago about early experience with meditation. From these first attempts I found a method that has helped blunt the deep stress and anxiety that accompany depression. Sometimes it can even bring me out of a deep downswing.

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Today I tried meditating while getting one of my periodic bone scans, follow-up to the cancer diagnosis. This is the second one, and the first only showed the widespread spots of arthritis that one day will give me a lot more pain than they do now. To do the scan I have to lie down on a narrow gurney and be absolutely still while this big machine moves slowly over my whole body, just an inch or so above me.

Meditating during the scan helped the time pass more quickly. It also distracted me from the fear of the machine’s humming invasion that recorded every inch of my body’s deepest structure. I couldn’t help but think of death while this was happening, and even the narrow gurney reminded me of how small a body gets when the life is gone. I strained to hold still since there was nothing to rest my arms on, but I finally figured out that I could keep my hands from slipping off the cold side bars by tucking the thumbs just under my hips.

I closed my eyes and meditated on the things I was worried about and feared. As I looked them over in this way, those fears felt more distant and lost their urgency. They were more like brief flashes than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be. Read the rest of this entry »

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My new post at Health Central talks about picking up on the early warning signs of depression. Since I tend to need a big picture to figure out what to do, I found it when forced by desperation to look closely at my own self-defeating behavior. That was a key recognition that helped me spot the emergence of depression.

It may seem hard to miss, but it took a long time to wake up to what I was doing. Undermining myself at work could happen at either extreme of depression – when I was filled with shame and wanting to disappear or when I was angry and clumsily aggressive. At home, I’d jeopardize the closeness of family life by dropping out emotionally or by angrily blaming my wife and children for causing the misery.

I felt trapped in a cycle of building up a good life and then tearing it down. As I wrote recently in this post about trying to save my marriage, my wife and I couldn’t wait until depression ended to restore our relationship. The same was true at work. I had to find the early steps that would at least help me recognize when I was spinning downward. That recognition was vital to get any perspective at all on the way depression was distorting my behavior and my perception of what I was doing.

The Health Central post looks at these struggles and the first few steps in getting past them. I hope you’ll take a look at it and have a go at answering the question I pose at the end. How have you been able to pick up on the early signs? Have you found good ways to head off the main event before getting lost in a downward spiral?

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Here’s a post I wrote at Health Central about a year ago. There are a couple of China Beach stories I keep coming back to, and I hope this one is as helpful to you as it has been to me.

Quite a while back, there was a TV series about a group of nurses in the Vietnam War. It was called China Beach. In one episode of this powerful drama, a soldier who had lost a leg from the knee down is back home, feeling lost and depressed about his life. Desperate for a loving human bond, he drives a great distance to find the home of one of the nurses who’d taken care of him “in country.”

He finds her and talks stumblingly about his hopes to be with her, and it’s clear he feels like an ugly reject whom no one will have anything to do with. She sees at once that what he’s looking for is an emotional crutch, not a real relationship and gently explains that she can’t be with him. Then she does something amazing. Understanding what he feels about himself, she wants to give him the one message above all that he needs to hear and believe.

Taking him into a room with a full-length mirror, she tells him to stand in front of it and to take off all his clothes. He does that numbly, mechanically, revealing what’s left of his leg, and she tells him to really look at himself, not just the leg. Then she says, in so heartfelt a way:

“You are beautiful.”

Whenever lost in deep depression, I could never even hear, let alone accept a statement like that. I felt ugly inside and out, certain that everyone could see that obvious fact. I winced if anyone pointed a camera at me, especially if they asked me to do the impossible and smile. What I wanted to do was disappear. I couldn’t bear to look at a picture of myself – if I did, I just saw this ugly, overweight mess and wanted to rip it up. Read the rest of this entry »

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The hardest thing about recovery can be the first step. It’s an alluring thought to be done with depression, but recovery can seem as overwhelming as the illness you’re trying to end. Since you may not have any energy at all, how can you begin to follow all this advice: get active, go running, start meditating, eat all that nourishing food, change your thinking, find your purpose in life, starts months of therapy, try a bunch of meds. And be determined to get through the long, tough grind.

Even the thought of all that is exhausting. The reality is quite different.

Perhaps you’re trying to think about recovery while lying in bed in a dark room, your mind drifting. There could be sunlight streaming through the windows, but it’s still a dark room. Everything around you fades into the background, loses its color, even its shape. You can feel the weight of all that stuff cluttering up the room – and your life. You forget where it all came from, the reasons you arranged them just so. What does it all matter?

You can’t do anything. Simple things feel impossible – getting up, throwing water on your face, dressing, eating something – all are work, and you’re not moving. Where there used to be energy, intention, will, action, there is now lead. It’s like being on a high mountain, the oxygen levels get lower, you tire too quickly, your legs are leaden weights that can only be lifted with a strength that’s deserted you – and a determination you just can’t muster. So you sit, all energy gone. But resting, slow breathing don’t restore you because the air’s too thin. All you can do is sit, overwhelmed with weakness.

How on earth can you begin to change? How can you even think about starting recovery, or doing anything at all? Read the rest of this entry »

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In thinking about how I managed to rid myself of depression, I’ve realized the importance of getting ready to recover. This idea never occurred to me during many failed attempts to find a way out of the underworld of living. I had hoped there would be a quick, linear pathway to feeling fully alive again, but there was never going to be such a simple solution.

I mentioned in a post on patterns of recovery that I really could have used the sort of roadmap that writers on PTSD have developed. Having a sense of what lies ahead and what to expect would have been great, but even more basic would have been an understanding of the inner skills I would need to keep going.

In saying that, I don’t want to suggest that it’s possible to approach recovery in a linear way. You can’t say to yourself: Well, I’m depressed, and I want to recover. So I need to learn these skills first, then create a master plan covering all the bases and then get started. That doesn’t happen – except in books about the latest sure-fire way to cure yourself of depression.

Learning to Observe, Becoming Aware

I can illustrate what I mean about learning skills by backing up to that first idea: I’m depressed. The ability to recognize that I had a condition called depression was my first breakthrough. As obvious as it seems, it takes a lot of mental muscle power to get to this basic awareness. Read the rest of this entry »