Written by john on August 10th, 2009
Some Rights Reserved by pictoscribe at Flickr
I’m finding that healing the effects of depression has a lot to do with understanding the need for roots and what the experience of being uprooted is all about. The metaphor of roots growing into a nourishing soil kept me focused for a long time on just one aspect [...]
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Written by john on August 16th, 2008
Some Rights Reserved by woodleywonderworks at Flickr
Have you heard it, felt it? In the sound of a human voice there may come a wave of healing. Of course, it could also be a scarring knife edge or shriek of pain that can hurt or terrify, but here I want to talk about the power of [...]
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Written by john on July 12th, 2008
Some Rights Reserved by wili_hybrid at Flickr
Reading old journals reminds me how full of twists and turns a recovery road can be. Along the way, I have encountered strong presences that restore a sense of balance – when I have let them. For years, though, I could not let them work within me for more [...]
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Written by john on May 17th, 2008
Some Rights Reserved by Zenera at Flickr
In writing about heightened states of mind I’ve experienced, I keep wondering about what they mean, what they are. Are they signs of a spiritual reality pushing into the midst of the everyday world? Or are they artifacts of mental disorder? The first time I had such an experience, [...]
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Written by john on February 10th, 2008
Some Rights Reserved by DerrickT at Flickr
Patrick has written a comment packed with ideas about his responses to depression. I’m especially interested in three points he makes about creativity and imagination. First, he notes that his years of experience of therapy led him to see it as a “misguided enterprise, that of creating and recreating [...]
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Written by john on September 16th, 2007
I’d like to think of the search for the causes and treatments of depression as the tracking down of a killer, a good yarn like the fascinating medical mystery stories The New Yorker publishes from time to time. But we’re a long way from the end of such a story, and those tales can only [...]
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