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This is an edited and shortened version of a post on meditation I did some time ago. The prayer at the end remains important to me, so I thought I’d put it up again. I hope it makes some sense to you.

Here are a few journal excerpts from many years ago about early experience with meditation. 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, follow-up to the cancer diagnosis. 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 above me.

Meditating during the scan helped the time pass more 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.

I closed my eyes and meditated on the things I was worried about and feared. As I looked them over in this way, those fears felt more distant and lost their urgency. They were more like brief flashes than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be.

…………..

It’s hard to imagine, but I’ve been feeling emotion with detachment. How can you feel something and be separate from the feeling at the same time? Meditation seems to bring me into the midst of the experience, the emotion, but in a strange way. I’m moving around inside it, taking its measure, observing rather than feeling overwhelmed. Even when surrounded by a powerful force of fear or anger, the experience is contained – I’m with it rather than engulfed by it.

I am not sure I can or even want to maintain that detachment as the norm, but for brief periods 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 watch myself doing this, seeing how I lie down under fear, for example, as if under a blanket. So far, I haven’t been able to keep meditating in the midst of severe depression, much less use it as a remedy. I wonder if it will be possible one day to meditate during the lowest of lows.

………….

Lately I have been meditating irregularly even though it has become a crucial centering activity. I can usually get into it by counting breaths, feeling each inhalation, counting on the outflow of air. To start with, I often get distracted and lose count, but eventually I can clear my mind to keep my attention on the breathing. Even that starting exercise, though, becomes impossible to do when I’m deeply depressed – that’s the trouble with depression. When it really takes over, all the defenses I have disappear. I forget all about them, as if I had never known what they were.

………….

When we lived in northern New Mexico, I’d go out jogging through the arroyos and sometimes up into the foothills. As I ran, I often repeated a prayer that helped me meditate. It developed over time, starting with a few lines I’d learned from Lakota ceremonies. Out of respect for those traditions, which are not mine, I stopped using those phrases and adapted the ideas to my own experience and beliefs. I finally wrote it down in this form:

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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My new post at Health Central talks about picking up on the early warning signs of depression. Since I tend to need a big picture to figure out what to do, I found it when forced by desperation to look closely at my own self-defeating behavior. That was a key recognition that helped me spot the emergence of depression.

It may seem hard to miss, but it took a long time to wake up to what I was doing. Undermining myself at work could happen at either extreme of depression – when I was filled with shame and wanting to disappear or when I was angry and clumsily aggressive. At home, I’d jeopardize the closeness of family life by dropping out emotionally or by angrily blaming my wife and children for causing the misery.

I felt trapped in a cycle of building up a good life and then tearing it down. As I wrote recently in this post about trying to save my marriage, my wife and I couldn’t wait until depression ended to restore our relationship. The same was true at work. I had to find the early steps that would at least help me recognize when I was spinning downward. That recognition was vital to get any perspective at all on the way depression was distorting my behavior and my perception of what I was doing.

The Health Central post looks at these struggles and the first few steps in getting past them. I hope you’ll take a look at it and have a go at answering the question I pose at the end. How have you been able to pick up on the early signs? Have you found good ways to head off the main event before getting lost in a downward spiral?

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Here’s a post I wrote at Health Central about a year ago. There are a couple of China Beach stories I keep coming back to, and I hope this one is as helpful to you as it has been to me.

Quite a while back, there was a TV series about a group of nurses in the Vietnam War. It was called China Beach. In one episode of this powerful drama, a soldier who had lost a leg from the knee down is back home, feeling lost and depressed about his life. Desperate for a loving human bond, he drives a great distance to find the home of one of the nurses who’d taken care of him “in country.”

He finds her and talks stumblingly about his hopes to be with her, and it’s clear he feels like an ugly reject whom no one will have anything to do with. She sees at once that what he’s looking for is an emotional crutch, not a real relationship and gently explains that she can’t be with him. Then she does something amazing. Understanding what he feels about himself, she wants to give him the one message above all that he needs to hear and believe.

Taking him into a room with a full-length mirror, she tells him to stand in front of it and to take off all his clothes. He does that numbly, mechanically, revealing what’s left of his leg, and she tells him to really look at himself, not just the leg. Then she says, in so heartfelt a way:

“You are beautiful.”

Whenever lost in deep depression, I could never even hear, let alone accept a statement like that. I felt ugly inside and out, certain that everyone could see that obvious fact. I winced if anyone pointed a camera at me, especially if they asked me to do the impossible and smile. What I wanted to do was disappear. I couldn’t bear to look at a picture of myself – if I did, I just saw this ugly, overweight mess and wanted to rip it up.

I remember the story of another depressed Vietnam veteran whose struggle with PTSD was featured in a documentary film. In one scene, he was showing the interviewer around his small apartment and stopped by his bed. He said that he often needed to get into it during the day (acting this out as he spoke), reach down for the blanket, and “pull it up – over – my – head. Now, I’m invisible.” That was exactly what I felt so often, and here I could see how terrible it was – to hide your spirit away when you need it most.

It gets that bad when the voice of depression seems like your own, and the beliefs it puts into you are as real as anything in life. I never limited that conviction just to me, but I projected the ugliness onto the physical things I owned – especially around my home. I could only see the shortcomings, the disorder, the mess, and I had to clean it up, improve it with a furious energy to keep it all – and myself – from complete disintegration.

Once in a group therapy session, sitting in a circle of people, all of us in different ways ashamed of who we were, someone mentioned in passing, quite matter-of-factly, that I was handsome. I literally turned around to see who he could be talking about. Then I asked him, “Are you talking about me?” – as if to say, “Man, you really and truly need an eye exam.” Others tried to reassure me, and it was clear that they weren’t just talking about looks – it was about an inner quality they could see that I could never imagine – a kind of beauty. I just thought – OK, this is a group and everyone affirms everyone else so we’ll all feel better. New Age BS! Nevertheless, I felt close to tears and couldn’t get another word out.

Looking back, I think that was the first time I started to question all those depressed beliefs about being a mess, inside and out – doing everything wrong, judged by all the people around me, and on and on. Gradually, I started thinking – Well, maybe all that stuff I keep repeating about how bad I am in every conceivable way is partly depressive thinking – at least a little bit of it.

It took many years for me to see how pervasive depressed thinking was and how convincingly it twisted my mental self-portrait. A lot more of those years went by before a recovery I could hardly imagine finally happened – though I can’t say exactly why or how

These days, I can go outside in the sun and see how beautiful everything around me is. And I can think, I am a part of all this, and I don’t have to listen to what depression is saying. That voice used to be the loudest sound in my mind, but now it’s an occasional nuisance that I know how to get rid of.

Getting better started with that glimmer of doubt about all the negative beliefs and a reminder that there was something still there that others could see, even if I couldn’t.

So I’ll say it to you, even if you can’t believe it, because it’s true, really true.

You are so beautiful.

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The hardest thing about recovery can be the first step. It’s an alluring thought to be done with depression, but recovery can seem as overwhelming as the illness you’re trying to end. Since you may not have any energy at all, how can you begin to follow all this advice: get active, go running, start meditating, eat all that nourishing food, change your thinking, find your purpose in life, starts months of therapy, try a bunch of meds. And be determined to get through the long, tough grind.

Even the thought of all that is exhausting. The reality is quite different.

Perhaps you’re trying to think about recovery while lying in bed in a dark room, your mind drifting. There could be sunlight streaming through the windows, but it’s still a dark room. Everything around you fades into the background, loses its color, even its shape. You can feel the weight of all that stuff cluttering up the room – and your life. You forget where it all came from, the reasons you arranged them just so. What does it all matter?

You can’t do anything. Simple things feel impossible – getting up, throwing water on your face, dressing, eating something – all are work, and you’re not moving. Where there used to be energy, intention, will, action, there is now lead. It’s like being on a high mountain, the oxygen levels get lower, you tire too quickly, your legs are leaden weights that can only be lifted with a strength that’s deserted you – and a determination you just can’t muster. So you sit, all energy gone. But resting, slow breathing don’t restore you because the air’s too thin. All you can do is sit, overwhelmed with weakness.

How on earth can you begin to change? How can you even think about starting recovery, or doing anything at all?

Reach over to the lamp by your bed, twist the little knob, pull the short chain, press the button – however it works, just turn on the light. You’re so used to darkness, the brightness shocks your eyes, and your mind for an instant goes blank. But then a flood of impressions hits. In the dark you’ve only been seeing what’s in your mind. Of course, it’s all bleak, like looking at the night sky with all your failures the only bright points across a vast black emptiness. With light, colors emerge, the shapes of things stand out, your mind is busy sorting through it all.

It’s a flashing moment when your mind stops in surprise as you remember what each thing is – what it really is behind the screen you’ve put over it. These are simple things, pictures, clothes, CDs, shelves full of the odd things you’ve tossed there. But you brought each one into this room, and your mind links it to some use or purpose you’ve pushed aside into mental shadows. For just a moment they stand out again. It’s a small step of reconnection to a life you’ve led outside the limits of depression. A tiny step, but a start.

Once I felt that sudden shock, and it helped wake me up – in a couple of ways. Here’s how I described it in a post I wrote three years ago (with a couple of minor edits).

I awoke in the middle of one night, or rather I gave up trying to sleep. Thoughts of an incident at work were stinging me – I had failed to do X, or Y was upset with me or a clever strategy had backfired. Whatever it was, I couldn’t stop going over it and had made myself weary with the fears of what would follow from what felt like the greatest blunder of my life. After hours of tossing, I saw it was getting toward dawn. I decided to get up but my mind had become foggy – I felt drugged and run down after pouring all my mental energy into the bleakest interpretation of what I had done, who I was. Not wanting to wake my wife that early, I walked in the dark toward the bathroom, feeling my way around obstacles, but still sunk in the misery of those obsessive thoughts. I knew very well this thickness of mind and lingering anxiety could lead to a day of depression in which I would be able to do nothing useful. Then, stepping into the bathroom, I pushed the door closed behind me, reached to the right and flipped the light switch.

And the room came alive with light, shapes, color. Suddenly, my senses and mind were flooded, as each object, tiled pattern, clothing dropped on the floor, magazines, open bottles, everything called up worlds of associations. The brightness of the everyday was dazzling, each thing a link to the simple world of being alive. There were the deep blue and bright white tiles L put in when she redesigned the bathroom, a copy of English Gardens on the floor showing an add for intricate glass greenhouses, that special red hair blower Cathy loves , the dozens of tiny bottles of lotions, sunscreen, hair treatments, a rack of glistening ear rings, the quieting thick towels hanging from racks, the tangling weaves of long bright runners leading me eye across the room to the wall-width mirror and the image of tousled me taking it all in. Colors pull the mind in many directions, a blaze of lightening-fast connections that help assemble the external world as something real, something that you can’t ignore. I felt comfort and relief at this rich sight of a hundred tiny things. All the associations they called to mind crisscrossed in the familiar jumble of a shared life that reassured me. They were part of a reality too complicated to be submerged by inner bleakness. A light switch took me out of myself for that moment to mingle with this population of ordinary things that my wife and I had placed here for a hundred little purposes.

Has there been a moment in any setting that shocked your mind and feelings out of depression, even for a brief time? Perhaps you could let us know what it was like.