Posted by JohnD
Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:40:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by anna_pearson at Flickr
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 he observed (explaining that he was hurrying things up because I had been through therapy) and then hit on something that caught me off guard completely. He said he knew how much I loved my brother, he could hear it in what I said, he could feel it in his body. At that, realizing it was true, I wanted to cry, almost did, but covered it with a forced jerky laugh, fooling no one. I was right there, ready to let loose with the feeling I have been sitting on for so long. He explained that he had methods, he did not shoot from the hip. He realized he could have pushed harder about my brother and gotten somewhere, but he prefers to work carefully, using the models he knows from Buddhist psychology. The guy wanted me to know he’d been around, as he says, raised in different cultures and countries. This should be good. I like his attitude: We can break that cycling, that pattern, we can break that, I guarantee it. Who talks like that these days? I sense in him that he’s witnessed, probably experienced, conversion or at least deep insight within the light of a powerful soul. But he’s not trying to become my guru – at least I hope that’s true.
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Posted in Explanations, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags anxiety, breathing, Buddhist, depression, kindness, loving, meditation, monster, Panic, peace, psyche, rage, relaxation, stress, therapy | 13 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Fri, 23 May 2008 22:15:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by jurvetson at Flickr
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
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:28:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by denis collette at Flickr.
In sorting through boxes of old papers today, I came upon part of a meditation and some journal notes from the period in my life when I was recovering from a cancer operation. I was dealing with depression at the same time and searching for new approaches to healing beyond the physical treatments and medications that comprised the aftermath of major surgery. I was trying to deal more with depression than cancer since the surgery had been successful.
What I found was a part of the Loving Kindness Meditation, as that had been taught to me:
May I be healed
May I feel love
May I experience myself for what I am
May I accept myself
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Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anxiety, belief, buddhism, cancer, depression, healing, Jon Kabat-Zinn, meditation, Rachel Naomi Remen, shame, wholeness | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:05:00 GMT
Photo Credit – stewart charles – Fotolia.com
I’ve fallen back into a prolonged dark period after a few weeks of energy, buzz and a bright outlook. That’s the way it goes, riding one wave after another through it highs and crashing lows. I need (and I mean need) to write what I’m doing to counteract this latest drop as the full weight of a huge surf comes pounding down on me.
So what can I do when it’s closing in?
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags aggression, anxiety, blame, CBT, fighting depression, marriage, meditation, men and depression, rage, recovery, writing | 4 comments
Posted by JohnD
Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:09:00 GMT
Photo Credit – JesterArts – Stockxpert
One of my wake-up moments arrived decades ago when I read a New York Review of Books essay on a government practice known as “channeling.” This was during the Vietnam draft era, and the term referred to the decisions that young men were forced to make about their lives because of the prospect of compulsory military service. There was plenty of stress to go around as I and every guy I knew tried to figure this one out. You could defer service if you went to college, then on to grad school (until they took that option away) or divinity school (a number of surprising conversions there) or became a conscientious objector or even leave the country. And there were many who wanted to serve, to let the draft take them or get a jump on the system and enlist – and they had the prospect of hot combat before them. The draft was always there to keep the pressure on.
The point of the article was that the draft had been designed to do more than just fill up slots in the army. Its unrelenting pressure and your personal stress were instruments of national policy to “channel” the better-off kids into college and graduate education or into training as military officers, while the working-class kids, with fewer options, would become the rank and file of the armed forces. That way, everybody would conform to the prevailing ideas of how society ought to work. That knowledge radicalized me on the spot. Government was getting its hands inside my mind and my deepest feelings! The hell with that, I thought, we’ve got to change this rotten system!
As it turned out, I was at that same time having my first adventures with psychotherapy. What I didn’t know until recently, however, was that psychiatrists of that period had their own policy about the treatment of depression that was to have even more long-lasting effects on my inner life than the temporary problem of dealing with military service.
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Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags anxiety, depression, Freud, Panic, PeterKramer, policy, psychotherapy, treatment, Vietnam | 3 comments
