Storied Mind

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Understanding what work means for my sense of personal identity, for a basic acceptance of who I am, has been a central issue in making progress in recovery over this past year. Yet it seems strange that both my identity and feelings of self-worth should so depend on what [...]

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Medication is a hot subject on the internet, so I need to say up front that I’m not opposed to the use of medications to treat long-term depression. I have a live-and-let-live attitude about treatment. Finding anything that works for each person is the key, with or without drugs [...]

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I’ve written a lot about the form of depression in which men look outside themselves to find the cause for an inner pain that simply can’t be faced. They may feel anger, rage, a longing to act out fantasies, or a compulsion to blame and abuse those closest to [...]

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George Eliot wrote these lines in Middlemarch about 135 years ago:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side [...]

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Here are more journal excerpts from many years ago about my first experiences working with meditation to deal with depression. Unlike Revellian, as he explains so well in a recent comment here, I have not so far cultivated meditation as a long-term practice and discipline. Nevertheless, from these first [...]

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These are journal excerpts about my fitful beginning work with meditation as a guide through depression.

After a day of feeling the chaos of panic, immobilized at work, I went to see JL, first therapist in years. This guy is real. He wasted no time, quickly running through some patterns [...]