Recovery from depression meant a lot of change in the way I lived, and cutting out the stress of a tension-filled job was at the top of the list. Once I had ended that life of constant pressure, I could feel the relief at the start of each day.

A freedom and energy filled me, and I could step at once into the work of writing that I had long wanted to do. That sounds like a happy ending, but things are not so simple.

Depression was not overwhelming me anymore, but the illness is generous with the legacies it leaves behind. Over the last year, I’ve had to deal with many of those. As I’ve often written here, there was no getting away from depression by going to a new place, finding a new job or trying different relationships. The same proved true of trying to leave stress behind by changing the kind of work I did.

I’ve kept stress with me almost every hour of every day. Instead of chasing the unattainable goals of someone else’s rules, I’ve set up plenty of my own. And not just rules about work. I’m too inventive to stop there. I have rules to follow about almost everything. At any moment, I should be following a rule or condemning myself for breaking one. Nothing is too trivial to merit its guidelines for measurement.

The rules are remnants of battered self-esteem – or rather the weapons of choice to do the battering. I would never have been able to push depression aside if I had not changed my belief about myself. Out went the assumption that I was worthless, bad, inadequate, doomed to fail (and on and on), but it’s taken awhile to dismantle the structure of rules that I had created to bind up that bad person.

Under the rules of depression, I wasn’t allowed to trust myself simply to take life as it came. No, rules had to confine me in narrow hallways allowing movement to certain rooms and not others. If I followed the rules, I could open another door – break them and doors shut in my face, just as I deserved. A judge was always present with a verdict of guilty, whenever I broke a rule by trying to do something too dangerous to be allowed. Writing drew on inner feelings that couldn’t be trusted out in the open, so the rules didn’t allow that. Judgment was swift for an infraction. My mind shut down – don’t go there, strictly off limits.

Without the force of depression, most of those rules disappeared, and I was free to do what I really wanted to do. But I immediately set about creating a new set of rules, most of them shaped by timing and deadlines. To start binding myself up with time might seem strange, but it’s a good route to the sort of self-judgment depression encourages. It’s an old habit, one that dies hard.

Here’s how it happens:

I was all set up to work full-time at online writing, but first I needed to set my goals and deadlines. Write many blogs on several different subjects, build a big readership, start to earn an income and do it all in one year. Having determined that I must meet those grand expectations, I needed projects with tasks, lots of them, each with its own duration and deadline, each having the highest priority. After that I created a daily schedule with pastel-colored blocks of time devoted to each major type of activity or project. It looked so impressive in my online calendar.

Of course, it’s the perfect set-up for disaster. With a long history of depression, I’ve had trouble meeting deadlines and finishing anything, and the old sequence begins again. Set high goals, fail to meet them, feel worthless, set more, try harder, still fall short – or, get everything done three times more slowly than I’d planned and feel hopeless about getting anywhere.

I can’t possibly meet all the goals with all those deadlines. I can see that clearly, but each time I try to drop something, I feel I can’t because it’s so important. If I don’t meet all these goals, I will have failed to…do what? Meet the arbitrary goals I have set for myself, of course. I know they’re arbitrary, but I can’t seem to let go of them.

Finally I have to face the reality that my work rhythm doesn’t match the schedule and need to make adjustments. I decide to give myself much more time – I move the task lines in the calendar days. Now those colorful blocks are bigger, more generous – but I still keep the schedule. There’s an underlying fear of erasing the whole thing. How can I face the day with a blank calendar staring at me – where’s the structure, where are the goals and tasks, the deadlines. No, they have to be there, just better suited to my style of working. Of course, it’s all still far more than I can get done.

On and on it can go. There’s no end to rules, to shoulds, to don’ts and dos. I’ve accomplished a great deal in the last year, but I haven’t met all my self-imposed goals, so it doesn’t feel like enough. If I don’t get out of the stress-by-rules trap, it will never be enough.

…….

I may not be depressed, but I haven’t fully shaken the habit of ruling myself into a kind of captivity. It’s self-willed rather than compelled by depression, but it’s still hard to manage. Fortunately, I know full well that it’s a legacy. The only purpose of the rules is to bring back the sense of worthlessness I’ve struggled to overcome.

So I’ve added the rule habit to the cognitive therapy list. Just as I learned to shut up the voice that kept condemning me as no good, I’m learning now the skill of undoing self-defeating rules.

Part of the problem is the perverse comfort of familiar misery tempting me back from the risks of a new and more fulfilling life. The deadly skills of living with depression were refined over decades, and I mastered them completely. I’m well on my way to kicking the old habits and learning the skills that support a richer life. But it’s taking more time than I’d hoped. ……

Taking more what? Time?? So who set a deadline on healing, John? It’s happening – amazingly, truly happening. So drop the deadline!

…….

Have you had a talk with yourself lately about rules and deadlines, time and stress?

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.

• I am trying to meditate and observe my feelings and thoughts and judgments and just note them. They’re they are. That is a wonderful part of this practice – in a way it helps internalize the therapist who is getting an objective view of you and so able to help identify what you are doing. I can observe what flows in and flows out and, while I’m doing it, enter into the peaceful but alert state I achieved during the bone scan. I only wish I could sustain this – perhaps I will internalize the discipline after a time. I wonder if the practice could help root out the deepest depression, for that strikes at a level far below thought or feeling within a deep hard structure of the brain. After decades of residence there, it just won’t move.

• These last two days I have been meditating for forty-five minutes at a time. As my therapist says, that sounds like a lot of minutes, but it’s nothing – and he says it is work, with a capital W. You can’t play it like ping pong. You have to do it. He himself plans to spend a year in a monastery before too long. I see better now that following an emotion with detachment brings you into its midst – you can even move around inside it, so to speak, taking its measure, observing what it is about but without being dominated by it. The key is that distance, that stance. I am not sure I can or even want to maintain that as the norm, but it is helping me see how I put my life and reactions together. I am always amazed at how much time I spend tearing myself down, and in meditating I can see myself doing this more objectively. That alone helps me to stop the torment of that inner ripping. This practice isn’t yet helping get to the depression in a sustainable way, but achieving that would take much longer. I just wonder if it is possible to go that far.

• Lately I have been meditating irregularly even though it has become a crucial centering activity. I’m not cultivating much of a discipline about it or having a sense of developing skill in exploration of consciousness. This is the trouble with depression – when it takes over, all the defenses I have don’t just fail. I forget all about them, as if I had never known what they were. Except in those worst times, there are mantras, and a prayer I have developed over time, that help bring balance into my life. Concentrating on breath gets me deeply into that different space.

The guidance for meditation to calm nervousness and fears is this:

Mindfulness of fears and nervousness

Number them

Focus on breath

Note them in turn, return to breath

Awareness of breathing – acknowledge breath by saying: in/out
Focus on center of chest – go way inside – explore the feeling.

And the simple lines I go over and over as part of the meditation on loving kindness are these:

May I be healed

May I feel love

May I experience myself for what I am

May I accept myself

This next is a meditative prayer that formed gradually while I was trotting up and down arroyos in the foothills near our old home in northern New Mexico. It is influenced by Lakota practice, but out of respect for those traditions, which are not mine, I do not use them directly.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world

for I am a part of all life

now, through the past and into future time.

I pray for the earth, surrounded by the great directions,

the eastern white light of the new day

the yellow warmth of the south

the west’s returning red

the sacred night of the north

and the rooted earth below me

the flowing sky above

and here the center of the world,

all embraced by the greatest spirit of God.

I pray for all life and living spirit

I pray for the creatures of the earth,

for the winged beings and the sea swimmers

for the crawling creatures and for those that run

and for the beings that stand upright on the land

I pray for the flowing waters, the surging mountains

for the open plains and bounded valleys,

for the seas and the oceans of air we breathe.

I pray for my family and the love flowing through us

I pray for the friends I have known,

for all the communities I am a part of

and for the nations of the world,

that peace may become their way of life.

I pray for humankind.

I pray for forgiveness from those I have hurt

and pray I may forgive those who have caused me pain.

I pray that a growing love may fill me to overflowing

through the enduring grace of God.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world,

for I am a part of all life

now, through the past and into future time.