Storied Mind

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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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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 [...]

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I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness?
What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of [...]

I have a hard time being a patient or thinking of myself in that role. In one sense, to be a patient means to be sick, to be under treatment by a medical professional, to be undergoing all sorts of tests and therapies. See the trend there – the intolerable passive voice says it all. [...]

Photo Credit: Ann Triling

As I came to accept and believe that depression wasn't the result of my failings or weaknesses, but a major illness, a malignant condition, then I needed to deal with treatment more consciously. Up to that point, I had been through a lot of talking therapies and the newer medications, but while [...]