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When I think of recovery from a terrible illness, I think of Reynolds Price. His beautiful memoir, A Whole New Life, records the powerful experience of his mental and spiritual healing from the excruciating pain of a crippling illness. However, there could never be recovery from the physical impact of mostly inoperable spinal cancer. It left him a paraplegic for life.

Most of the memoir records his painful struggles of the disease’s crippling progress. After surgery to relieve the tumor’s pressure on the major nerves emanating from the spine, he gradually lapsed into paralysis. He also endured a brutal course of intense radiation treatment that burned and scarred a great deal of tissue. Eventually, he lost all use of his lower body and became dependent on full-time attendants. His muscles began the unpredictable spastic leaps that have continued from that time on.

But the worst and most unrelenting problem was a scalding pain that became his constant companion.

There were … hours in which I dwelt on the steep and constant rise in a pain that had many times seemed as high as I could bear. Whatever the cause … the searing burn down the length of my spine and across my shoulders and the jolting static in both my legs only soared in intensity. Like most real agony, the pain afflicted more senses than one; it often shined and roared as it burned. More than once I panicked in the glare and noise.

The initial treatment for his pain consisted entirely of drugs, from morphine through a series of antidepressants, steroids and the often addictive methadone, regularly used at that time as an alternate to heroin in treating drug addicts. Not one of these helped his pain, but as often happens, he continued taking many of them anyway. He also tried the visualization techniques originated by Carl Simonton, a pioneer in the mind-body connection approach to the treatment of cancer. His Getting Well Again is a classic description of self-help techniques based on this method. Isolating visualization from the other dimensions of that approach, however, didn’t work for Price.

It was only after three years of constant pain that Price began working with the Duke research program on pain prevention and management. He started with biofeedback training that helped him develop abilities to concentrate his thought on specific parts of his body to eliminate tension and pain. After mastering those skills, he worked with a psychiatrist who was an expert in the use of deep hypnosis. That was the answer. As someone susceptible to hypnotic trances, Price found these experiences completely successful in relieving all his pain. He mastered the techniques well enough to be able to counter recurrences – largely because he had a completely different mental and emotional response to what he felt as pain.

He is quick to point out that these treatments would not necessarily work for everyone as well as they did for him. That is partly due to his own receptivity to biofeedback and hypnosis, which is not the same for everyone, but also partly to the particular nature of his pain. And that factor gives me a sense of the possible relevance of Price’s experience to the treatment of long-depression.

His pain did not have any immediate physical cause.

The ultimate cause, of course, was the cancer that broke the connection between his brain and his lower body. The now useless nerve endings then died and with them went any possibility of transmitting those signals that the mind interprets as pain. The agony that he experienced resulted entirely from the mind’s attempt to compensate for the loss of information from the lower body. It produced the same phantom pain that amputees often experience as coming from a missing limb.

What enabled him to make this breakthrough? Here is a brief excerpt from his interpretation.

With all its powers, my mind can make no significant physical amends to me for the permanent wreckage done to my spine … . The causes [of pain] are past yet the panicked alarm continues to blare. The mind’s only hope for sanity then is to shut down the useless but frantic circuits and look elsewhere for ease and continuance. In the summer of ’87, my mind was finally ready for that action. … It had desperately needed to hear and believe that the unending stream of neural alarm meant nothing now. The need had been filled. Now my mind understood that The harm is done. It cannot be repaired; pain signifies nothing. Begin to ignore it.

Few of us who’ve lived with chronic and severe depression can imagine achieving a degree of mental control that would lead to the end of that dark dominance over both thinking and feeling. And with the current emphasis on the neurobiological causes of depression, the possibility seems remote. Yet deep meditation and many non-western traditions are based on the mind’s power to effect just such healing.

I think of it this way. Depression, similar to pain, is not a physical phenomenon in itself but a psychological response that corresponds somehow to changes in the brain’s neurobiology and circuitry. Let’s set aside all the controversy over the physical dimension and what causes what. Whatever might be going on in the brain is shaped by the mind into experiences of despair, worthlessness, fear, obsessiveness and the rest. It seems reasonable to me that the mind could train itself to come up with different experiences, to distance itself from the overwhelming nature of this psychic pain and find a degree of peace in that way.

These thoughts occur to me as I read Price’s account of his healing partly because I’m trying to figure out my own experience of recovery – which has gone far beyond the effects of any medication I’ve ever taken. Even though I never found a single method to follow in an intensive way, my mind has, in fact, come up with a completely different approach to the experience of depression. The question I ask myself is the same one Price asked. Why now? – especially since I’ve been doing more or less the same things for years. I’ll keep you posted as I try to work out that puzzle.

In the meantime, read this beautiful book. If you’re like many of my friends, Reynolds Price may be – unfortunately – the finest and most prolific writer you’re never heard of.

What do you think about changing the mind’s orientation toward depression, as Price changed his toward pain?

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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 of silence.

In the midst of severe anxiety or panic I have heard something like that roar and found there is a price to pay for such a heightened sense of ordinary life. I suppose the only way we can navigate a world of massive sensations is by screening out everything that distracts us from the single goal we have in mind at any moment. There are times when I am stopped completely by a roar that shakes me deeply, but I can’t be sure where it’s coming from. Is it only inside my mind or is it, as Eliot suggests, sounds of ordinary life we can’t bear to hear for long? I’ve written about one terrifying incident when a shrieking chorus of everyday sounds overwhelmed me. It was clear then that my mind had been consumed by a level of anxiety and panic more intense than any I had known to that time. It was all inside me, and I could even imagine ending my life just to stop that inner roar.

There was another incident, though, when I felt the impact of sound and even emotion that seemed to come from people and actions around me. I say “seemed” because it is so hard to understand what was happening. Something sharpened my nerves and perceptions, but I didn’t just hear the detail of the sounds. I sensed keenly what other people were feeling but not talking about. I’m not claiming any special powers here. It happened when I was recovering from a cancer operation. Everything was electric.

The impact of cancer changed everything and was decisive for me in many ways. I’ve written before about a breakthrough I achieved at that time. But there was, of course, a terrifying side to it. Knowing that I had this mess growing inside me and threatening my life threw me initially into a panic. Suddenly there was nothing normal left. My nerves boiled day and night, and all I could think about was the progress of cancer in my body. I studied everything I could find, as if that intense concentration could dissolve away the tumor. Gradually, though, I managed to blunt the worst anxiety and fear after some force in me rebelled at the thought of dying. I refused to think about that and became determined to survive. From then on, I had a surging energy to do the operation and have done with disease.

In the midst of all that, it isn’t surprising that strange things happened to my perception and feelings, but at the time I focused only on the drugs administered during the 5-hour surgery. That, I thought, was the cause.

It started when I was in the recovery room, slowly coming out of the effect of the anesthesia. The surgeon was telling me about the success of the operation. I know he was standing right next to me, but I couldn’t see him or anything but gray, indistinct shapes. Every noise was magnified, however, almost like a bus station or a factory. Despite that background clatter, his words and the tone of his voice were completely clear – “It went just about as well as it could possibly go.” I felt his voice coming out of a depth of sincerity and belief in the accuracy of what he was saying. “The margins were clean.” There was the magic phrase, clean margins. The edges of the tumor showed no sign of cancer cells. It hadn’t yet spread elsewhere. That was great news – but I was most aware of a kind of flow of that doctor’s feeling into me. The words were an accompaniment but not the main theme. I was in the most vulnerable and open state imaginable, and it seemed natural to be taking everything in with such intensity.

One night after coming home from the hospital, I suddenly had a total sensory recall of the operation. That seems so unlikely since I had been under anesthesia the whole time. But the recall hit me all at once – I was suddenly back there under benign knives cutting into me for my own good. The noise and the onrush of strange sensations almost starting me shaking. I was surrounded by a din of metallic sounds and flashes of feeling from the surgical team on all sides. There was a constant noise around us, things clattering, my mind confused by drugs and not able to focus well. It was almost like feeling hands reaching inside me, not the physical sensation of touching but the sharp impact of a suppressed tension, rivalry or some kind of conflict. The operation might have been cleanly, brilliantly done, but I felt immersed in an air of clashing wills. I would never know what that was about. Perhaps I was just tying into all the feelings this precise and dispassionate team had to keep in check, at least outwardly. In carrying out their carefully designed surgical strategy, they were, after all, doing something quietly violent, the way a pilot controls the forces that would ordinarily crash a plane into the ground. They could not let feelings interrupt them. I can’t be sure if all this was real or a dream, but the memory of those sounds and feelings have stayed with me ever since and become as real as anything else I know.

it didn’t end there. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t walk into a room of people without this sense of being turned inside out – getting hit hard by the tension or anxiety of whoever was there, or by the excitement and good feeling that flowed out of them. It’s certainly not unusual to pick up the feelings of those around you in a room. It was the intensity of the experience that set this apart – like a fierce wave rushing through me. I was filled with these sensations to a point of losing track of who I was. It was too strange, soaking up all that feeling that did not seem to be my own. What usually happens in the midst of my own anxiety is that I project harsh judgments into others and feel them coming back at me. But this was so different. Those feelings I picked up weren’t aimed at me necessarily – they belonged to someone else and just filled the air. The experience had the effect of confusing me deeply, and I gradually realized that the energy and determination that had helped me through the operation were spent. My own focus was gone. The wild anxiety and fear I had managed to put aside for a time was coming back and with them the bouts of depression I thought I had gotten past.

Anxiety, with its shapeless energy flying in all directions without aim, and depression, with its dimming of all feeling and thought, seem like such opposites. Yet they sweep toward me together – two phases of a single storm. Whatever I was going through in that strange state after the operation, it ended with a hard fall. Having gotten through a physical recovery, I now had to get back to the long term problem of recovering from depression.

I have never figured out for sure if the fire of those perceptions were burning in me or if I was just standing too close to someone else’s flame. Does this experience of intensified perception resemble anything you’ve been through?

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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 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.

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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 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

As I have written in an earlier post, I felt my ability to deal with cancer directly and with a strong spirit came from a sudden and powerful burst of basic life force when the voice of depression was trying to lull me into using cancer as a way of ending my life. I just refused to let myself die. That resurgence of spirit carried me through the operation and its immediate aftermath, but as more normal life returned the underlying depression reasserted itself. It wasn’t long before I was searching for help again. I found it with a therapist who made extensive use of meditation. I was open to that approach since I had been reading about buddhism and healing approaches based on meditation, such as that described in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living. His description of mindfulness and healing was more accessible than others I had read.

He distinguishes between healing and curing. Healing captures for Kabat-Zinn the ability to see things differently, to experience wholeness. Meditation is the method to attain an inner stillness in which you can grasp the fullness of your being and transcend fears and boundaries of both mind and body. As he puts it:

Moments of experiencing wholeness, moments when you connect with the domain
of your own being, often include a palpable sense of being larger than your illness or
your problems and in a much better position to come to terms with them.
… We are not meditating to make anything go away.

I meditated every day, often on long walks into the foothills near our New Mexico home. Those hours helped me first quiet the intense anxiety I was feeling (for me that’s a common part of what I go through in long depressive periods). Here is some of the guidance the therapist gave me for dealing with nervousness – an essential step before I could hope to reach an experience of the wholeness of my own being. My being was constantly zapped with electricity from all directions – the anxiety was like a dense and turbulent cover for whatever I was feeling.

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 here is what I wrote one day in the midst of this work with meditation:

Crying so much in the last twelve hours, it feels like the beginning of healing. To know that I have finally hit my deepest feelings breathes relief right through me. It is all right to feel overwhelmed, to feel grief, to let it sink in that this is not an adventure or diversion, but it is really all of me. I know that I can be helpless and sad in the face of this reality. The self hate seems so rooted in the what the buddhists called the eight worldly concerns (I wanted to call them griefs) – attachment to getting material things, aversion to blame, attachment to praise, etc. Perhaps now I can feel myself touching bottom and can begin to see where I really am – what my hunger and hurt are all about. What I learn. What I die for and live for.

Finally feeling/ knowing I am sick is the beginning of healing.

Ultimately, meditation helped me see clearly the forces of anxiety, shame, self-hatred, fear darting about in me like wild birds suddenly caught in the confines of a room. Lightening-like breaks for escape, flying bodies crashed into every barrier, shot-like bursts away from a strange human waving them toward windows, caws and shrieks of panic filling the air. In meditative walks, I could finally see them as separate from me and sweep them for a time from my soul. But only for a time.

Even though the fears and anxieties and the depressed feelings of self-hate would come back again and again, something changed within me. I lost the belief that I consisted solely of those maddening furies. I could believe that I was more than the sum of those parts of depression, and this new belief was the most powerful change that meditation helped me to achieve.

The force of belief is everything in trying to overcome depression. Until I could stop believing that what I thought of myself when depressed was true, I could not begin to turn things around and heal, or experience the wholeness of my own being. Rachel Naomi Remen captures the power of belief well in her quietly remarkable book, Kitchen Table Wisdom.

What we believe about ourselves can hold us hostage. Over the years I have come to respect the power of people’s beliefs. The thing that has amazed me is that a belief is more than just an idea – it seems to shift the way in which we actually experience ourselves and our lives. According to Talmudic teaching, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” … Sometimes because of our beliefs we may have never seen ourselves or life whole before. No matter. We can recognize life anyway. Our life force may not require us to strengthen it. We often just need to free it where it has gotten trapped in beliefs, attitudes, judgment, and shame.

What role has meditation played in your efforts to overcome the effects of depression and its related disorders?