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For a long time, I found it hard to relate to the idea of living in the present moment as a method of recovery from depression. The present never seemed all that attractive when I felt smothered by its darkness. That’s the way it had been in the past, and it seemed there would be a lot more present moments like those in the future.

Letting go, living only in the moment, opening to the timeless present, finding that the eternal truth was already in me – it sounded so effortless, requiring just a change of perspective, a choice to live differently. And that’s the way it was too often portrayed in the mass marketing of New Age culture. So I resisted looking into it more deeply.

Not so long ago, I decided to fight off my resistance and take a serious look. I started reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and once I got past my mental battles with it, I found a lot that resonated with my own experience.

Like many, I’d had a few important healing experiences that had drawn me into a different consciousness, one free of a sense of time as well as depression. Some of these had occurred suddenly and unexpectedly, as I tried to describe in posts like this one, but others had come more intentionally while I was immersed in the act of writing.

When I could bring all my energy to it – putting aside the innumerable distractions – I experienced a different state of mind and feeling, a sort of alternate wavelength of living. My concentration was so complete that mental chatter stopped. The words became transparent as they brought out ideas I hadn’t thought about before.

It’s still like that. There’s no awareness of time, no judging and no depression fighting me every step of the way. As I’ve written here before, there is only a richness of that moment of living, a feeling of oneness with a larger self, free of the usual constraints that narrow my experience. It’s not like a high to meet an uncontrollable craving or ease an inner pain. It simply is.

Those were the moments that most resembled Tolle’s sense of the Now, but he goes far beyond isolated moments of insight to a sustained being in a present that has no measurement in time. It’s a state of oneness with all life, without the boundaries that cut us off from each other. Such a state is part of many traditions – Buddhist, Hindu as well as mystical forms of Christianity and Islam.

That’s well beyond my experience, and, as Tolle and every other writer says, it’s impossible to put that state of being into words. I’m much more concerned with Tolle’s method for cutting through the resistance that blocks out such a level of consciousness. That’s what hit home for me because it’s similar to the way I’ve freed myself from depression.

The method consists of detachment from thinking that narrows the sense of who we are. Depression was a powerful force in my life because I identified myself so completely with it. I believed it defined me accurately; there was no healthier self apart from it. Whenever I felt better, I still believed in my own inadequacies. Depression wasn’t the problem. I was.

Until I could detach from that identification and see that I had all the symptoms of a condition known as depression, I couldn’t begin to heal. But when I could separate myself, I could observe what it was doing and work on ways to stop it.

Tolle applies a similar approach much more broadly to get at basic ways of thinking about life that conceal its spiritual reality. What I find most relevant to dealing with depression is his discussion of breaking the hold of time. What he means by this is psychological time.

Living within the boundaries of psychological time means preoccupation with memory and anticipation.

As it concerns depression, it’s the constant obsessing on all the failures and disappointments of the past, recreating old patterns of behavior and becoming consumed by anxiety about what will happen in the future. When I’m locked into that frame of thinking, all I can see in the present is what my depressed mind wants to see – reflections of the same worthless life I feel I’ve always lived.

As Tolle emphasizes, when detached from the patterns of psychological time, it’s possible to accept them – not to be swept under again – but to see them as an observer and find out more about the way they’ve shaped and limited life. Then it becomes easier to experience the present without projecting pain, without pulling it into the past. For Tolle that leads to the spiritual state of being he calls eternal.

For me, detachment has led to freedom from depression and the ability to experience the vitality of living. That’s nowhere near the eternal, but it’s plenty for now.

What has this concept of the Now and living in the present moment meant to you? Has it helped undo some of depression’s damage?

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In a couple of excellent posts, Susan at the Wellness Writer has written about ecotherapy, a form of treatment that seeks to restore the lost connections with the natural world that are essential to health. (She cites a new book of, the same name as a good introduction.) Of course, reconnecting is an important part of wellness, but it drove home the fact that we’ve so lost the natural connection that it’s now a treatment rather than a part of everyday life.

Of course, lack of connection to people, places, emotions – pretty much anything – is a hallmark of severe depression, and multiple therapies are usually necessary to help get a depressed person out of a world of gray sameness. Awakening the feelings and senses by participating in the natural world, in whatever form it might be available, can be a powerful way to begin this process. It’s also true, though, that people without depression need that same restorative connection to sustaining wellness.

No matter how many places I’ve lived in or traveled to, I’ve always felt a strong response to the natural setting. It’s a need to reach into those spaces to feel their influence and to let them work on me. Susan’s post reminded me of that dimension of my experience. It’s all too possible to lose touch with it, not only when depressed but also when overly absorbed by work.

The book,Ecotherapy, is especially interesting because it brings together essays on psychological, spiritual, social and political dimensions of restoring the human relationship to nature. (In this post, I’m talking about the personal dimension related to healing, and will look at other contexts in future posts.)

The “nature” discussed here and in many recent books and articles is not a single thing, but includes the flows of life and earth even in lands changed drastically by human cultivation. Entering wildland, rural areas of farm and range, or gardens covers many forms of healing experience. Before there can be healing, though, there has to be an openness to the sensations of each place, a relaxing of mind, a different awareness of one’s own physical presence. As Jim Nollman puts it in Why We Garden, this is not something we are born with.

… A sense of place evolves as we live, experience, grow, touch and perhaps taste soil, learn to predict weather, garden. … It begins to evolve only after a person starts to perceive himself or herself participating … with the natural processes of place.

…[A] sense emanates from every part of the body. In other words, a sense of place includes attitudes. And perceptions. And a touch of spirituality: a sensitivity to dreams, perceptions and visions. And gut feelings – like the gut feeling that is currently prompting so many of us to put down roots … .

He also describes a sense of place as including the relationship to place. As he says above, it’s not just about the thoughts and responses but also about participating, getting close to the natural processes of growth and change wherever they may be found. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast of experience than that between remote wildlands of vast extent and the backyard garden. Yet both in their own ways can awaken mind, feeling, body and soul to the sense, relationship and sustaining power of the natural world.

The experience of wilderness is that of participating in and responding to a power of nature far greater than anything in our normal scale of living. It is a reminder of a vaster order in life in which we have a place but which we do not control completely. For me, at least, part of the experience is the hard work of getting there, hiking with a backpack for miles. That’s a sort boot camp to purge and sweat out the stress and preoccupations of a more mind-centered self, full of tension, worry and depression. That purging relaxes me and brings back the ability to be surprised. It opens the senses to awareness and awe in the presence of forces so much greater than the plans of human minds. Then the awareness, the sense of what’s important, the experience of time, all begin to change. Healing, for me, is almost incidental to such deep changes of perception, feeling and thought.

Experience of nature at the small scale of the garden is all about participating in a different way, through the daily, hands-into-the dirt work of digging, planting, weeding, watering, composting and a dozen other jobs. It’s about watching closely the daily changes of weather, the influence of heat and cold, rain and drought, the content of the soil and what it can grow. The sense of time turns to seasons and cycles of growth, fruit and flower-bearing and decay. All around are the presences of living, growing things that instill a close responsiveness to their needs. Gardening adds to who we are as we concentrate thought, touch and all our senses on working with the natural processes unfolding before us.

Of course, it’s possible to heal in the presence of nature without quite so much labor. Walking into a garden or seeing mountains and canyons at a distance evoke two kinds of responses in me. One is the feeling of beauty and balance I get in the presence of great art, a restorative harmony that fills my being. Allied with that is a kind of blending into what I see in a way I think of as spiritual. I can’t get it very well into words because the experience gets into some part of me that precedes words and thinking. It is the stuff that words and ideas try to capture but never succeed at expressing. Words like transcendence, transformation, vision come to mind. Whatever the experience should be called, it’s often overwhelming, and it’s always healing.

These experiences are shared by everyone to some degree. What are some of the restorative places and moments that stand out in your memory?

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1.

I walk around with a crowd inside – so many selves wanting to go in different directions. Too many voices are talking all at once, and it’s hard to pick out the one I need to listen to right now. Here’s the intuitive talker, waking up with the big picture and the ideas for what I’ll get done on my blogs today – he’s the one I want. Then that anxious kid, unready for the day, prickly at every detail, tries to noise the others out with TV static.

But here’s my writing, creative buddy, who pours peacefulness into a cleared space he holds open for me. But that physical guy is pushing me out the door to stretch all those muscles and finish the undone, hard work in gardens and fields. Always, of course, the damn depressive self, is trying to get back on top and sit with invisible weight on all the others, telling me I’ll never get anything done – so why try?

I am struggling to push aside the intruders shouldering into this moment and sit with the intuitive, creative me in my study. Right now they’re pushing me to get this blog post into shape, and it’s getting easier to hear what they’re saying. Of course, a worrying, list-maker keeps dragging my thoughts to the other 25 things I need to start doing. I tear up the latest scrap of paper he’s pushing in front of the computer screen.

However unruly and full of fight these competing selves may be, they have to stay together, and a gathering mind, always insisting that I’m just one man after all, manages to keep them in the right formation. They’re like flights of birds in migration – either they fly together behind this binding me, or, one by one, they fall by the wayside and are lost.

2.

Paul Bloom, a psychologist, wrote in a recent Atlantic article about research that reinforces the idea that we consist of different selves. This could be much more than a metaphor for inner conflict. Instead of a single self that tries to fight desires pulling in different directions, he sees something closer to what I feel goes on within me: multiple selves in tension with each other:

The view I’m interested in … is conservative in that it accepts that brains give rise to selves that last over time, plan for the future, and so on. But it is radical in that it gives up the idea that there is just one self per head. The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.

These selves aren’t really popping in and out of existence. They’re all familiar companions who compete for my attention, but I’ve known them well for a long time. I’m always working to keep the positive ones foremost and push the negative ones aside. That’s one way I’ve come to think of recovery – I’ve learned how to deny power to a depressive or anxious or addictive me and fill with energy the creative, spiritual and loving beings.

This may sound like a dissociative personality disorder, but it’s not. These different selves are not compartmentalized and out of touch with each other. They’re interacting all the time. They tell stories, some grim, some hopeful and become parts of the living narrative I put together to form the single sense of who I am. It may not be the most consistent narrative, since, as the lead character, I’ve often changed direction and spoken with many voices. But I learn how to live – and find meaning in what I go through – by working hard to put each self into the order that will keep me sane and functioning.

When I’m well, this happens without much thinking, almost effortlessly. Even when I’m well, though, the dialogue, the arguments, the pushing and shoving for control among them still go on, however muted they might become. I have to remain mindful at all times, especially about the quiet moves that depression is making. He’s the most artful one of all, as well as the most dangerous.

Mindfulness for this purpose has a special meaning. It is not so much the detached observation of thoughts racing through my awareness until they are all still and a different consciousness is achieved.

More commonly, the flow I’m listening to consists of coherent voices pushing me in one direction or another. The peace and harmony I achieve comes when I can listen calmly to them all and detach myself from their tension. Then suddenly they are in the places where they need to be, their struggle is a sideshow, and I am filled with a sense of life and openness that is more than the sum of all those parts.

You could say I’m in the lead again, working hard in this endless flight, heading toward a home that’s still out of view.

Have you thought of an inner battle in this way? How does the struggle feel to you?

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catatonickid recently published a post about facing your double, reaching a place where nothing can be explained, a place where no choice could possibly be right. She calls that the “ideal argument for healing,” or, in the quoted words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “the beginning of the process of individuation” – the joining of the separate parts of the self to form an integrated person.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about experiencing a kind of double life, I’ve been drawn to the theme of meeting one’s own mirror image as a separate being for as long as I can remember. I never understood why that should be, but every story or film I found about such an encounter simply transfixed me. The idea touched a part of me beneath awareness that felt like it was rolling in sea-like motion. For so long, I was afraid that this moving force could overwhelm me.

In dreams, meeting my double was the culmination of nightmares.
I was usually searching through locked rooms in mansions and castles until finding the one where he was sitting. He was always alone in the middle of a darkened space with his back to the door as I entered. When he started turning toward me – even before I could see most of his face – I knew he was my double and that I had to get out. The deepest fear and panic surged through me as I realized I couldn’t escape and in the next moment would be killed. In the midst of that terror I always woke up and had to wait for my breathing and heartbeat to slow down to normal.

Why was this encounter so terrifying and why was my double a Mr. Jekyll ready to savage his Dr. Hyde? Was that what awaited me if I should try to go beyond what my awareness told me who I was? Would it mean the unleashing of a monster or the beginning of healing?

I searched for possible answers, but none felt right – until I started rereading a number of essays by Carl Rogers. Here’s a passage that seemed to deal with what I felt, though not directly with the idea of the double.

Carl Rogers wrote:

An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the world. … I meet [this view] in almost every client. “If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance should live in those feelings, then this would be catastrophe.” This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly every client as he moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of himself.

Sometimes people express this concern by saying that if an individual were to be what he truly is, he would be releasing the beast in himself. … [W]hen one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet.
- On Becoming a Person – “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is”

That sounded right – learning gradually how to release, to live, those feelings could help to diminish the fear of what might happen if I set them free. If I could set aside that terrible fear and step into the other me, instead of trying to escape, perhaps I would begin to see these separated selves not as enemies but as parts of a whole. I had spent so many years hiding powerful feelings even from myself that I did come to believe I concealed a monster that must be kept locked up at all costs. He was like the madman in the attic room that must never be opened by anyone, least of all by his keeper.

Kierkegaard wrote: “Dread is the possibility of freedom.” It is the sign that an opening into life can occur if that feeling is recognized as a step toward accepting everything you are.

And it’s true that the work I have done to get through recovery has diminished the intensity of fear about releasing the feelings I had hidden away. The dark part of me – the monster – really seems now more shadow than substance.

But as wonderful as that change has been, there is still a power about the idea of my own double that I do not understand. There is much to learn that even goes beyond recovery from depression, as critical and life-saving as that has been. So I keep searching – and I don’t know where this might take me.

I have no idea if the powerful draw that I feel to this concept is widely shared or not. Is it something that pulls at you? What have you made of it?