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For a long time, I found it hard to relate to the idea of living in the present moment as a method of recovery from depression. The present never seemed all that attractive when I felt smothered by its darkness. That’s the way it had been in the past, and it seemed there would be a lot more present moments like those in the future.

Letting go, living only in the moment, opening to the timeless present, finding that the eternal truth was already in me – it sounded so effortless, requiring just a change of perspective, a choice to live differently. And that’s the way it was too often portrayed in the mass marketing of New Age culture. So I resisted looking into it more deeply.

Not so long ago, I decided to fight off my resistance and take a serious look. I started reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and once I got past my mental battles with it, I found a lot that resonated with my own experience.

Like many, I’d had a few important healing experiences that had drawn me into a different consciousness, one free of a sense of time as well as depression. Some of these had occurred suddenly and unexpectedly, as I tried to describe in posts like this one, but others had come more intentionally while I was immersed in the act of writing.

When I could bring all my energy to it – putting aside the innumerable distractions – I experienced a different state of mind and feeling, a sort of alternate wavelength of living. My concentration was so complete that mental chatter stopped. The words became transparent as they brought out ideas I hadn’t thought about before.

It’s still like that. There’s no awareness of time, no judging and no depression fighting me every step of the way. As I’ve written here before, there is only a richness of that moment of living, a feeling of oneness with a larger self, free of the usual constraints that narrow my experience. It’s not like a high to meet an uncontrollable craving or ease an inner pain. It simply is.

Those were the moments that most resembled Tolle’s sense of the Now, but he goes far beyond isolated moments of insight to a sustained being in a present that has no measurement in time. It’s a state of oneness with all life, without the boundaries that cut us off from each other. Such a state is part of many traditions – Buddhist, Hindu as well as mystical forms of Christianity and Islam.

That’s well beyond my experience, and, as Tolle and every other writer says, it’s impossible to put that state of being into words. I’m much more concerned with Tolle’s method for cutting through the resistance that blocks out such a level of consciousness. That’s what hit home for me because it’s similar to the way I’ve freed myself from depression.

The method consists of detachment from thinking that narrows the sense of who we are. Depression was a powerful force in my life because I identified myself so completely with it. I believed it defined me accurately; there was no healthier self apart from it. Whenever I felt better, I still believed in my own inadequacies. Depression wasn’t the problem. I was.

Until I could detach from that identification and see that I had all the symptoms of a condition known as depression, I couldn’t begin to heal. But when I could separate myself, I could observe what it was doing and work on ways to stop it.

Tolle applies a similar approach much more broadly to get at basic ways of thinking about life that conceal its spiritual reality. What I find most relevant to dealing with depression is his discussion of breaking the hold of time. What he means by this is psychological time.

Living within the boundaries of psychological time means preoccupation with memory and anticipation.

As it concerns depression, it’s the constant obsessing on all the failures and disappointments of the past, recreating old patterns of behavior and becoming consumed by anxiety about what will happen in the future. When I’m locked into that frame of thinking, all I can see in the present is what my depressed mind wants to see – reflections of the same worthless life I feel I’ve always lived.

As Tolle emphasizes, when detached from the patterns of psychological time, it’s possible to accept them – not to be swept under again – but to see them as an observer and find out more about the way they’ve shaped and limited life. Then it becomes easier to experience the present without projecting pain, without pulling it into the past. For Tolle that leads to the spiritual state of being he calls eternal.

For me, detachment has led to freedom from depression and the ability to experience the vitality of living. That’s nowhere near the eternal, but it’s plenty for now.

What has this concept of the Now and living in the present moment meant to you? Has it helped undo some of depression’s damage?

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I’ve always wondered why the stories of veterans with PTSD, like those I’ve been reading for the recent posts here and at Health Central, have always resonated so deeply. I have nothing close to the unimaginable violence of war in my experience, or any of the other overwhelming traumas associated with PTSD. The aftereffects, though, feel closer to what I know.

Depression, after all, is depression, no matter the cause. When I heard, for example, the yearning of one veteran to pull a blanket over his head and disappear, I knew exactly what he was talking about. Endlessly reliving the worst moments of the past – scaled down mightily from combat to home life – was an obsession of mine that lasted for decades. My memory doesn’t like to let go. I’ve written about some of moments it has held onto (like this one and this). As veterans in treatment are now urged to do, telling their stories over and over again until they are routine and safely defused is a method that’s worked for me.

Even though I’ve come a long way in accepting what happened, unexpected memories still bring back childhood years of tension and fear, the start time of depression.

• As a boy, I watched the next-door neighbor, a tired-looking man, as he put up a high wooden fence of narrow, straight juniper poles, amazingly close-packed, to serve as a good barrier to – what? The shouts and raging fights from our house.

• Going out with my high school girlfriend for a walk in the neighborhood, embarrassed, ashamed as the shouts of my parents followed us along the street – each word reaching so clearly through the summer evening. She took my hand warmly in hers.

• Sitting in my room upstairs so anxious that I couldn’t do the homework I’d been staring at. My mind wouldn’t focus because I was waiting to hear our massive front door open and shut with its sound of finality. That would mean Dad was home, and it would be just a matter of time before I caught the first murmurs of his clash with Mom and my brother. In a moment, voices would be pounding through the house, I’d hear the knock of a chair kicked aside, then shouts of hurt as the fight got physical.

I stood apart from it as much as I could in the partial safety of my room . But as the fighting got more intense, I’d have to get down those quiet, carpeted stairs as my mother yelled for me to join the fight, help kick out the enemy – Dad.

I couldn’t take sides – I was the only cool-headed one there. If I did step in, pour my feelings and shouting voice into that room, that would be it, the house wouldn’t stand, the family would blast apart, I would lose my home, my room, the only security I knew. So as a kid, I took the burden on myself. I was convinced that my restraint was holding these people together and that I had the power to break them apart. I was afraid to move or show a feeling.

It was never clear how or why this split between my parents began, but once it took root, Dad was gone most of the time, and Mom was vastly depressed. Of course, I had no notion of depression or mood disorders, but I didn’t need the concept to know what living with it was like. It was a quieter violence that did its work slowly over many years and gradually drew me into its shadow.

These days, we’re told by researchers that looking to the past to heal from depression doesn’t work very well. The focus has shifted from exploring childhood and formative relationships to the mood cycles, distorted thinking, and destructive behavior of the present. Medication hits the moods. Cognitive therapies and mindfulness retrain depressive thinking and attitudes. Interpersonal and family therapies probe the dysfunctions of relationships. Other therapies focus on what you do as well as you think and feel.

For someone like me, depression has been a condition with few boundaries of time or symptom. It has recurred in cycles over a lifetime, starting in childhood, and the patterns and distortions that took hold then lasted for decades. True enough, understanding them hasn’t cured depression, but it’s been one essential component in helping me see more clearly what needs changing in the present. It has given me a fuller picture of what my version of depression is all about so that I can find the most effective strategies to uproot it completely.

Has searching the past been at the center of your work on recovery? What balance have you found between that form of psychotherapy and the methods that focus on improving your immediate mood and way of thinking?

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Thanks again to isabella at moritherapy and her post about Mental Health Camp, I’ve been reading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. She discusses at length not only the healing power of the writing process but also the need for a writer to care for the creative self.

Her own breakthrough in becoming a professional writer started when she discovered a demanding form of Japanese painting that grows out of the Zen tradition. It requires that the painter prepare by achieving an inner balance and “emptiness” that allows total concentration on the creative act. The painting itself is achieved with a series of strokes in one sitting that permits no changes. This is an art requiring an inner harmony cultivated through spiritual practice and a balance in all aspects of life.

There’s a similar tradition in the Chinese art of calligraphy, as explained in a beautiful book – The Way of Chinese Painting by Mai Mai Sze. The tradition is also described in Wen Fong’s Images of the Mind, which includes dozens of excellent reproductions of calligraphy, poetry and paintings. According to the Chinese “way,” the artist not only achieves spiritual, mental, emotional and physical wholeness but also captures the essential spirit and energy of external reality. There is a connecting energy that relates the individual to the larger world. The artist expresses that unity not only in the finished work but also in the act of creating it. During those creative moments, the calligrapher/painter stands apart from the tumble of thoughts and emotions and works in a state similar to meditation.

What DeSalvo drew from studying this tradition was that writing was not separate from life but an integral part of it. She felt a healing power through the detachment she achieved during the creative process that allowed her to observe difficult and destructive thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them. Instead she could write about those feelings and explore in detail the most wrenching experiences of her life. The detachment she achieved helped her come to terms with the issues that had long troubled her and interfered with her writing. She found that this healing effect, repeated on a daily basis, strengthened the resilience needed to survive emotional shock.

To help others get past their fears, she developed many practical suggestions – which she calls her yoga of writing – about how to structure time, set realistic goals, remove fear about completing a long project by consistently doing small parts of it each day. The basic idea she conveys is that writing is an achievable practice, an integral part of living, rather than a separate reality requiring inspiration or special talent that one must be born with.

She mentions Janet Frame, the New Zealand fiction writer, who provides, I think, the most amazing example of someone who used the healing power of writing to end her mental and emotional turmoil. After years of breakdown, therapy and voluntary hospitalizations, she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. She was also scheduled for a lobotomy, which would certainly have destroyed her creative powers, but avoided that procedure because of the great critical acclaim that greeted her first book of stories. She went on to write a series of novels, stories and autobiographies that helped her resolve the emotional legacy of her most difficult life experiences.

DeSalvo’s description of what happens during the writing process brought to mind two books by Anthony Storr, which I mentioned in an earlier post – The Dynamics of Creation and Solitude: A Return to the Self.

Storr compares the creative state to one of Carl Jung’s key therapeutic methods – active imagination. Jung urged his patients with mood and personality problems to spend time writing, painting, modeling clay or other form of creative expression. He observed that this brought them to a mental and emotional state where they stood apart from thoughts and feelings and could avoid being overwhelmed by them. This “active imagination” also induced a kind of free association that permitted new insight. Conscious and unconscious thoughts and symbols came closer together, and links could be made between areas of experience never previously related to each other.

For some of his patients, this led to dramatic breakthroughs in which they could achieve complete relief from disorders, such as depression, and help the mind and body return to what Jung thought of as a self-regulating condition. The organism as a whole, he believed, normally achieved a balance between extremes through a self-regulatory process, just as the biochemistry of the body returned to the optimum point – such as the system for maintaining a fixed body temperature or the appropriate level of oxygen in the blood. The breakthroughs achieved seemed not to have external causes but to come about through a deep inner change of attitude.

Observations like these led Abraham Maslow to believe that the creative state and the condition of being a healthy self-actualizing or fulfilled human being were likely identical. In that state, one is “lost in the present,” achieves a detachment from time and space and a form of transcendence of the normal limitations of self-awareness. He describes a fusion between the creative person and external reality that resembles DeSalvo’s sense of what the artist experiences in the Japanese tradition.

Jung and Maslow were concerned with the creative state itself as a mental activity that contributed to human fulfillment. They were not looking beyond that to the completion of a particular work of art. For Louise DeSalvo, however, experiencing the full healing power of creative expression involves not just the act of writing itself but also the ordering and support of daily living that leads to the finished work. That achievement brings creative expression into the larger context of life as a whole. She emphasizes that the healing practice of writing can be shared by many, not just the most accomplished artists. It is a way of life that can be learned.

That leads me to ask this question: To what extent have you been able to integrate writing or other imaginative work into a “yoga” of daily practice? What I have found so difficult over the years is integrating the practice of writing with all the other needs of work and family. What’s your experience of finding that balance?

There are days that begin in difficult moods, and I start writing down what I’m going through to see if I can shake myself loose. Here’s what I wrote one morning last week.

…….

I keep sinking away into a deep pool of stillness. Looking outside this morning, I see that the season’s first rain showers came before dawn. After so much dryness, the slick sheen of water seems strange. Everything is damp and chilly, the sky is dark with the rain-weighted clouds, and I keep staring out the window at the garden, the bare yard beyond that, and across the street to an old barn in an open field. It’s a good thing I don’t have to rush to work this morning because my body doesn’t want to move at all. I’ll stay here, connecting remotely, trying to get things done, then go to my meeting late this afternoon. But I’m feeling this stillness getting into me, a kind of comfortable, let’s-sit-and-stare into-the-fathomless-world feeling. A rich depth opens in my chest. I wish it were the warmth preceding a good writing spell, but really it’s more like falling into emptiness, a state where I will do nothing if I don’t activate soon. Writing these lines is a mechanism to turn my mind from emptiness to the beginnings of movement. Work feels miles away and alien – I guess I’m really drifting off. I’ll stop now, get cleaned up and dressed for the day, then come back later. This drugged state of floating seems to lift me easily onto a smoothly flowing cloud that will take me somewhere intensely pleasant. But I know it’s nothing but sleep, a lazy turning round and round, dreamlike days – I’m unconnected to anything. At least there is no fear and panic, everything is muted, distant, like living in the midst of a soft warm fog.

Two Hands (Rights Reserved)

…….

OK, that helped. I got myself organized, read through some emails and responded to those. That got my brain functional and focused on specific tasks. I’ve been working moderately well since then. I have to keep writing about this problem of how to get going when illness is starting to take hold. It helps to remind myself of the basic things I need to keep doing just to survive a working day when I’m starting to succumb to one or another of the disease’s different guises.

Recognition is critical. If I don’t catch the onset of each state, I’m at risk of falling into a twisted mindset and accepting it as my full reality, rather than seeing it as another form of illness. It’s like the beginning of a migraine – you have more options if you act at the first sign.

There are at least five different mind-states that occur at work:

- Total detachment, indifference, loss of motivation, paralysis of will

- Anxiety, wild fear and borderline panic

- Paranoia and obsession with a person or event

- Bleakness, sadness, shame, an all-pervasive sense of worthlessness

- Mental confusion, inability to focus, lapsing memory, loss of attention

Each of these is hard to deal with but each comes on with clear warning signs. If I’m lucky, I can catch them right away. Today, it’s detachment and wandering. Fortunately, I am alert to this while I’m still at home, and I’m lucky to have the option of working from here. A virtual private network line to the office system is a wonderful thing – it’s just like being there as far as access goes. And, of course, I can call everyone I need to talk to from anywhere.

That’s the easy part. So often, I’m already at work when something hits, or I go there on auto-pilot without paying attention to what I ‘m feeling, or, most commonly, I just have to be somewhere as part of the job. Then I’m facing a group of demanding professionals with my scrambled mind and feelings pulling me far away from the efficient self I’m expected to present.

I don’t have all the answers on what to do under these conditions, but I’ll keep writing about what I’m finding out. Writing itself is part of the discovery process – somehow the words pull new ideas out of my head while they’re getting onto the page.