Posted by JohnD
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:10:00 GMT
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WARNING: IDEAS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Thanks to a series of compelling posts on creativity by Isabella Mori at changetherapy (part of an exchange with Psyblog), I’ve been trying to understand more clearly what happens when creative work takes place. I haven’t gotten there yet (can’t say I expect to solve this puzzle since more learned and insightful people than I have been trying for a long time). But I would like to throw out a few ideas I’ve picked up in my reading, and then ask you to share your thoughts.
Now why should I get into this in the first place? Simply because I know that when I’m working creatively I’m in a different state where depression doesn’t exist. Just like the spiritual encounters I’ve been trying to describe that stop time and this despairing condition, there is something about creating, even at my modest level, that draws out a force within me that dissolves depression. What is that? Can I package some and pull it off the shelf when I need it? Here are a few of the insights that gifted thinkers have offered. They make sense to me, but this is just a starting point. I hope we can build a dialogue to go further into creativity and its ability to make depression disappear, at least for a short time.
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Posted in Explanations, Creativity, Spirituality and Depression | Tags creativity, David Bohm, depression, intuition, Isabella Mori, Jacques Maritain, Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, mind, peace, perception, recovery, soul, spirituality, T.S. Eliot | 8 comments
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 26 May 2008 04:15:00 GMT
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In the midst of writing about moments of spiritual insight, I realized I had to draw the other half of that picture. The lost side of spirit is emptiness. I don’t mean the emptying that can be a stage in recovery and spiritual growth. That kind of emptiness is a good thing. It means the stopping of daily noise, the frenetic pace or the addictions that keep me riding on the surface of things and avoiding whatever I can’t face. The good emptiness drains all that out of my system. Once rid of the mind-buzz and the anxiety that goes with it, I can participate in an active silence, and things become clearer.
No, I’m talking about the opposite of that rich experience. It is the empty feeling that leads to panic and what I’d have to call dread. It comes in a flash of perverse insight when I feel again at one with the world around me, but everything in that world, including me, seems false, an empty shell about to crack open, revealing a void. And I’m going to drop in a free fall as the ground cracks under me. That used to be a regular part of my life before I could grasp that it was one face of depression.
When the panic used to strike, I’d have to react fast and leap into any activity that filled the emptiness with crowds, or, better yet, helped me believe for a time that I had never been empty to begin with. I had to hold onto a structure, a purpose, a job, something that sealed the cracking world up again and filled my days with action that was useful and important. That took me completely out of my inner self and whatever I may have really wanted and put me securely in a role or function that had value in the eyes of the world. That is how in the past I ran from the dread of emptiness and the fear of breaking and falling like part of an earthquake-stricken city.
The remarkable TV series, Mad Men
begins with an animation that captures just that sense of living in a world that could at any time break apart and drop you into free fall.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags breaking, dread, emptiness, esteem, Fear, healing, i, Mad, men, Panic, purpose, recovery, self, spirituality | 5 comments
Posted by JohnD
Fri, 23 May 2008 22:15:00 GMT
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Are you ever able to get away from time in the sense of measuring what you do, day in, day out? I can’t seem to escape it very often, but I’m convinced that doing so is one of the ways I get myself out of depression. Of course, the clock is omnipresent, and almost all activities in the daily world are measured against it. Most people, with their usual ups and downs, adapt to schedules for everything. But psychologically, in a depressive mind, time is another weapon. It is the constant reminder, as it keeps on going, that I am not doing enough, that I am not getting things done, that I can’t do the job, that I’m not measuring up, and on and on. I feel time as relentless pressure, nonstop stress, an overlay on reality full of warning reminders wherever I look. And as writers like Richard O’Connor and Robert Sapolsky keep telling us, living in a state of constant stress brings on the mood disorders as brain chemistry goes on overload.
There are times, though, when stress stops, time stops, inner voices meet their match and shut down. It happens to me not by changing a negative pattern of thinking but by listening to something other than thought. Today, I’ve been recalling and reliving one of those moments, the first one I was really conscious of, when by chance I seemed to step right out of time.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anxiety, depression, fulfillment, healing, memory, renewal, resilience, spiritual, stress, time, wellness, writing | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 17 May 2008 22:16:00 GMT
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In writing about heightened states of mind I’ve experienced, I keep wondering about what they mean, what they are. Are they signs of a spiritual reality pushing into the midst of the everyday world? Or are they artifacts of mental disorder? The first time I had such an experience, as a college student, I thought I was going crazy and even wrote a poem about this episode of “madness.” It was only six years later when I had a similar experience – which I accepted without doubt as spiritual – that the earlier one took on new meaning as having that same quality. I was no longer afraid of it and didn’t have to push it off as a bizarre and crazy moment. Instead I came to focus on such experiences as part of a way to find healing in the midst of depression as well as deeper insight into life. Spiritual experiences could be one more way to struggle through a chronic condition. But could the experience of depression be another force like spirituality that can terrify but also push me to new awareness? Could the sheer suffering of mental illness be experienced in a spiritual way?
That’s the question behind the quietly intense German film, Requiem
. It tells the story of a young woman who experiences seizures and hears strange voices. These have long terrified and confused her, but eventually she comes to interpret the suffering in purely religious terms.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags belief, Catholic Church, culture, depression, exorcism, mental illness, religion, Requiem, society, spirituality, treatment | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 10 May 2008 17:42:00 GMT
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I’ve found that there is a longing for spiritual closeness just as there is a longing for an emotional bonding to another human being. But it is a form of longing, of human need, that I spent years ignoring. I’ve written here about longings arising from depression and inner devastation, emptiness and loss. Those longings tend to break up relationships, work life, family, but I’ve experienced spiritual longing as a draw toward a sense of closeness to a different dimension of life, a spirituality that is transforming when I can handle it and so remote from credibility when I’m shutting down.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags Catholic, contemplation, depression, enlightenmnet, God, peacefulness, prayer, religion, self, spirituality, Thomas Merton, vision, wholeness | 10 comments
