Posted by JohnD
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:27:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Stygiangloom at Flickr.
Thinking about recovery from depression often makes me dizzy. I’m trying to follow at once all the brief streaks of light from this roman candle mind. Each one’s gone before I can see where it’s headed, and I wind up chasing nothing. I have even asked myself, why get well?
There is so much talk of journeys or paths or steps leading from here, the place of pain, to an often hazy there, a place where the pain no longer dominates, or where a new life awaits you. There are journeys toward the fulfillment of my Jungian self, toward bliss through magnetized neurons, toward positive thinking, toward inner chemical balance, toward stress-free living, toward fit, lean and sweaty health, toward self-esteem, toward nurturing of my lost inner child, toward mindfulness, toward freedom, toward God. I’m reeling and drunk on a hundred paths, starting and stopping, striking out then retracing steps or, worse still, striding with confidence down a path that disappears in dark woods.
I suppose that at some time everyone has heard a certain voice within. In my case, it speaks my name, calling with total authority, as if to demand I come back from confusion. JOHN! It never says anything else and does not have to. Its tone resonates through every bone, its command instantly snaps on every sleeping nerve circuit in my brain. There is no resisting it.
Read more...
Posted in Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags choice, confusion, crisis, depression, faith, God, Henri Nouwen, journey, mind, recovery, self, spirituality, struggle, will | 11 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:02:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by paintedmonkey at Flickr
Reading Catatonic Kid’s post, full of poetry as all of hers are, about how she experiences the disparate parts of her mind, I started thinking once more about what it is that holds me together when so much within seems to be breaking apart.
I work every day to keep myself in a mindset of recovery. Change, as Revellian often says, comes from the inner strength of the individual, not from a government, not from any source of professional benevolence. I agree that the struggle for a changed life out of mental anguish depends on the individual taking charge instead of waiting for doctors, medications, implants or electric convulsing of the brain to cure what’s wrong. I run into a problem, though, when I reach inside for that strong individual because I experience the illness as a self-estrangement, a losing sight of the core of who I am. Suddenly, when depression is breaking into my mind and feelings, I am looking at many faces, all of them mine. I’m no longer sure which is the self that knows the skills of survival. Which is the one among so many?
Read more...
Posted in Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags catatonickid, center, depression, God, individual, mind, recovery, Revellian, Rilke, self, soul, stable, strength | 9 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:04:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by kevindooley at Flickr
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 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.
Today I tried meditating while getting one of my periodic bone scans – one grisly aftermath of a cancer exam. Has it metastasized to the bones? If so, likely an agonizing death ahead – but fortunately that’s not probable. 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 away.
So I worked at meditating during the scan and that made the time pass very 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. Still I couldn’t get a restful position for my elbows. So I closed my eyes and meditated on loving kindness and tried enumerating the things I was worried about and afraid of. Those fears felt more distant then, not as urgent – more like empty shapes or brief flashes rather than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be. Once again, I was clear of any sign of cancer in those aging bones.
Read more...
Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags breath, cancer, death, depression, God, grace, kindness, Lakota, life, love, meditation, prayer, recovery, spirit | 17 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:09:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Juria at Flickr
Have you ever wondered what the sound of hundreds, no thousands of blogs on depression and mental health is like? I was looking over these sites at one of the blog rating communities the other day and was struck by the differing tones of so many voices sampled in clipped excerpts and thumbnail images which I could quickly scan in page after endless page. Though they differed in many ways, all were calling out in a chorus of pain. Some recounted the daily accumulation of misery, some seized on signs of hope that they had at last turned a corner because of the latest medication or alternative treatment, some campaigned for the cure that had worked for them or shouted out against the treatments that had nearly killed them. So much hurt, so much determination flipped before my eyes in deceptive ease.
I thought of the opening scene of the movie, Contact
– based on Carl Sagan’s book
. It begins with swift camera sweeps across ordinary life, people gossiping into phones, radios crackling the news, families arguing, couples pouring out earnest wordstreams while passing in the street. Then the camera starts to pull away from eye level, to ascending aerial views in which the voices and broadcast sounds begin to merge into an indistinguishable mix, then finally, as the view orbits into space and gives us a look at the entire globe, we hear all those voices as one signal broadcast into the universe.
I thought of the thousands of blogs of anguish and the surging efforts to find relief projecting their own part of that signal from the soul-depths of millions whose lives are represented in these communities of written, muted screams. Is that a sound of purgatory, hell close behind, the promise of paradise off in a spiritual vastness we are trying to reach with this sharp chorus? Or is it a sound of hope, a hard-edged song of all trying to exorcise the most powerful demons they will ever know?
It was overwhelming but also in a strange way comforting to be one whisper in that huge, surging flow of sound.
Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | 15 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:44:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by ...Zeyneeep! at Flickr
Recently,
Melinda wrote a post about the role of forgiveness in her recovery and the difficulty she has had in forgiving her unrepentant father for abusing her in childhood. Reading this made me aware that I wasn't very clear in my own mind about the meaning of forgiveness. It is always mentioned as an obligatory part of recovery, and yet there has always been something elusive about the idea for me. How was it different from understanding past trauma, dealing thoroughly with its impact and letting go of the feelings of anger or hate? For I did learn to stop the constant blaming of present problems on those who harmed me when I was so young and unable to stand up for myself. Is that forgiveness, or is there something more.
I started thinking and reading to stop the confusion about the ideas and feelings I have about forgiveness. I quickly found that I was not the only one who had a hard time getting at the deeper meaning of this concept. It has different meanings in different religions and cultures, but there are a few major approaches I've found that helped me grasp more deeply the connection between what I had experienced and forgiveness.
Read more...
Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anger, blame, change, childhood, depression, forgiveness, harm, recovery, soul, spirituality, vengeance, victim, violence | 13 comments
