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There are no more beautiful and moving stories of healing than those told by Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom is one of those books I come back to again and again. Each of its brief stories renders a moment of discovery that reveals a life’s meaning to someone lost in pain or rigid routine. As moving as these stories are, I had never thought much about the relevance of such experiences to my own life. It didn’t seem possible that the sudden revelation of meaning – and the strength it provides – could possibly result from my own severe depression. Not making the connection probably means that I glossed over such thoughts as these:

The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows. Revisiting such stories over the years, one wonders how one could not have seen their present meaning all along. … .

Knowing your own story requires having a personal response to life, an inner experience of life. It is possible to live a life without experiencing it.

She tells many stories that capture the awareness of purpose through such re-readings.

• A young athlete, embittered by the loss of a leg, emerges from depression when he finds he can help other young people going through the same kind of pain that he has suffered. His loss and depression themselves became the means by which he could help heal others, rather than the pure loss he had felt them to be.

• An emergency physician, after delivering hundreds of babies, stares into the face of one newborn as she opens her eyes for the first time, and he suddenly understands the meaning of the work he had done more as a technician than a human being. This time “he felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere, and tears came to his eyes.”

• An elderly man overcomes his fear of a risky cancer operation by recalling in a daydream his bonds of love with his wife, his best friend, his brother. They all appeared to him, their eyes expressing the love they felt for him in return – and more came. “[I]n the end there were more than fifty or sixty of them, crowding into the living room and even into the hall. In this way he had known that his life has been of value to many others and found that it was of value still.”

But how could such revelations come out of the depression I had experienced for decades? For a long time, I could only look back in anger, bitterness or grief at having lost so much of my life to this illness. It all seemed like such a waste. All I could think of was what I had not done, what I had missed doing, never believing that there was any other side to that story.

Somehow all that changed, as I realized that I had shifted at a fundamental level of belief. I was able to look back at depression as a long period of desperate searching to understand what it meant to be human. Of course, everyone doesn’t need to go through prolonged suffering of this sort to find meaning in their lives. But in my case, the only way to stop feeling less than human was to understand what it meant to be fully alive and to believe that I was capable of a “real” life. Depression continually presented one side of that coin. All I really had to do was turn it over.

But for a long time I put tight boundaries around the search for a way out of depression. I kept running rings around my inner self, trying to revive the belief that I could do so much more and escape the paralysis of will. How is it possible, I thought, to keep plodding through this cycle from brief energy to long depression to energy to depression over and over again, like the endless succession of seasons through the years?

I was always trying to heal so that I could write from my deepest self, be happy with my family, feel alive with hope about mastering whatever might come my way. It was mostly about becoming the star of the Me Show, and I was looking at the world as an audience. I could never get free of depression to find that sort of fulfillment.

In another re-reading, I found a passage in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning that complemented Remen’s stories.

…[T]he true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. … [B]eing human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is … . In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

Stepping away from the circular pursuit of my inner self was hard to do consciously, but it seemed to happen on its own. I gradually realized, for example, that the purpose of this blog was not limited to my initial idea: self-discovery and, to be honest, praise and recognition – the applause of an audience for an actor. It was also a reaching out to people with stories that might be helpful to them. There was a very different sense of fulfillment in that.

Frankl refers to transcendence of self, but that’s such an ethereal word. I can’t live transcendence, but I can respond to the calls for help I hear so often in the world of blogging – and I can learn much more from others’ stories than I can from journaling my thoughts in solitude. In that exchange of depression’s stories I’ve found meaning I had never grasped before. I’m still at work catching up with Rachel Naomi Remen’s idea of learning what such stories have really been about all along:

We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing.

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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?

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About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted I should ever come back.”

When I faced a choice of two roads to my own future, I believed I could follow both and be one traveler. Why were there two roads? I imagined there were two sides of myself – one creative, artistic – the other public, drawn to political and social change – and I needed both to feel whole. What followed from this attempt were years of struggling and failing to balance both, searching for the fulfillment I needed but finding it always just out of reach on either path. I tried sprinting down one for a time, then leaving that to cut through a brambled mile of thickets to get back to the other, sprint down that road for a while, cut back through the less and less penetrable undergrowth, hit the other again – and so on. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I spend a lot of time between the roads in those thickets – lost.

Two lives, two careers, two destinies led to a perfect torment, a continuing inner battle about where to put my energy. If I focused too much on one path, I felt desperate that I would forever lose the second, but if I got active again on that other work, other life, I felt desperate that I would lose everything I had worked so hard for. To be on one road meant that for a time I would become that person completely and lose touch with the second self. I could not bear to lose either of those two me’s. So I spent or wasted much time in tension between the two choices, dissipating what energy I had in pure anxiety and confusion. The more I tried to follow both roads, the less progress I made on either one.

One path was a life devoted to writing and other forms of personal expression – that was me, totally me, reaching deep inside to hit the world with creative energies shaped into unforgettable stories, poems or whatever new genre I could invent. The second self was me wrapped in a mantle of social purpose, part of a budding movement to change the way government worked, to find a new place for public voices in the exercise of power. The public me, justified through a social role, came to feel more legitimate while the private writerly me was anxious, unsure, often blocked from inner creativity by skeins of winding fears. Escaping the tension usually meant following the public path because that choice removed the fear about an inner depth I could not face. The public me had to be out in the world avoiding that confusion, but whatever success I achieved felt incidental to what I felt I really wanted, what I really needed to feel myself, whole – and worthy of a place in this world.

What tied the two together was my need to fill the emptiness I felt inside. A depressive voice had me convinced that on my own I had no value as a person, and to escape that invading belief I had to reach outward to justify my life. But that was an emptiness that could never be satisfied in any way. It gave me a perverse hunger to fail, to prove that I was really that nothing the voice told me I was. It is no wonder I always felt lost in those impossible thickets, always trying to get through to something out of reach.

When I looked at those roads, the one I was on at the time was full of potholes, red lights, detours, long stretches under construction, the pavement giving out just ahead. And the one I’m not on just then is a straight sunlit road across wide open grasslands. It winds gently through the most beautiful hills I can imagine, follows stunning rivers, brings me safely to the ocean shore. The more distant it is from the road I’m following, the more beautiful it is. If I give up the tension of trying to run back and forth between the two, staying on the single path, I begin to sink into despair, convinced I will never get to that other destination, the one my soul longs for, the one I’ve always wanted to follow.

As time went on, I not only became exhausted trying to make sense of these two selves, giving each its due, trying to shift back and forth between them, I also started to see on each road someone approaching out of the hazy distance. No matter which path I was on, this figure always appeared, never quite close enough to see clearly but always moving in my direction, as if the walking motion never changed his position.

It dawned on me one day that the two roads I was trying to follow no longer diverged but were going to join, as if I had been moving steadily around two sides of a circle, destined to come in the end to the same spot. And the man in the distance who never quite arrived had to be me as well. Depression had run us both to ground. As a writer I could not break through the fear, as a professional working on public policy I was losing my grip. I had thought the problem was the tension between two lives, but in reality it was the depression that was cutting me apart. My double and I had to confront the same nemesis. If each of us could break through depression, we could get back together in the oneness I had always been without quite knowing it.

Do you find yourself thinking you’re trapped on one path or struggling horribly between two? How have you been able to resolve this, or is the tension still there?

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Are you ever able to get away from time in the sense of measuring what you do, day in, day out? I can’t seem to escape it very often, but I’m convinced that doing so is one of the ways I get myself out of depression. Of course, the clock is omnipresent, and almost all activities in the daily world are measured against it. Most people, with their usual ups and downs, adapt to schedules for everything. But psychologically, in a depressive mind, time is another weapon. It is the constant reminder, as it keeps on going, that I am not doing enough, that I am not getting things done, that I can’t do the job, that I’m not measuring up, and on and on. I feel time as relentless pressure, nonstop stress, an overlay on reality full of warning reminders wherever I look. And as writers like Richard O’Connor and Robert Sapolsky keep telling us, living in a state of constant stress brings on the mood disorders as brain chemistry goes on overload.

There are times, though, when stress stops, time stops, inner voices meet their match and shut down. It happens to me not by changing a negative pattern of thinking but by listening to something other than thought. Today, I’ve been recalling and reliving one of those moments, the first one I was really conscious of, when by chance I seemed to step right out of time.

When my wife and I first moved to New Mexico, we often drove out to explore a countryside so different from what we had grown up with in the East. We were still getting used to seeing a mountain range fifty miles away, to a wide dry rangeland spotted with twisting juniper bushes, the winding arms of cholla cactus and stunted pinon trees, the nourishing grasses clustered to conserve moisture, the land rolling up toward the foothills and clear mountains flanking either side of the Rio Grande Valley. But I still carried my worries, stress and downward spirals with me so I would soon get anxious while driving in this leisurely way, even if we were seeing so much natural beauty around us.

On one of these excursions, we headed south from Santa Fe to see a village full of beautiful adobe houses in an oasis of tall cottonwoods. As we drove back – and I was relieved to do so since I felt the pressure of time and the need to get something done that day – we followed a dirt road for many miles. At one point, my wife rolled down the window and put her head out as far as she could. She started saying something to me and waving an arm. “What are saying? I can’t hear a word!” She ducked back in the window and blurted out, “Stop – just stop! Stop the car! Here, here, here – right now!” Edgy to get back home, I didn’t want to slow down for a minute, but I pulled over because she was suddenly possessed by – I didn’t know what. As soon as I stopped by the dusty roadside, keeping the motor running – she popped the door and wandered around the car, as if looking for something. She walked about ten feet away, then came back and pounded on my window. I rolled it down to hear her. “Turn off the engine! You have to! Turn it OFF!” Reluctantly, I shut it down, and as soon as I turned the key and silenced that rumbling thing, I realized what it was and just stared at her. “Hear it? There’s not a single sound!” I got out of the car and listened hard.

For the first time in my life, I heard a silence so complete it was like an utterly different experience of being alive. Not a sound, not a distant engine, a plane overhead, a hammering or a human voice. The wind was still, the birds were quiet in the middle of a sunny day. Nothing. It stopped me, stopped everything in my busy mind and drained the tenseness right out of me. I just stood there with L, absorbed in the silence. It had a physical quality that calmed me, and I felt not just restfulness in the midst of it but something restoring me as well. The sense of time steadily beating in my thoughts a rhythm of what have you done, what are you worth, what will you do – all that was gone.

When time stopped, there was no depression, no anxiety. There was only a feeling of wellness and contentment – even a sense of fulfillment. Whatever presence or energy was circulating there, it brought the word “soul” into awareness for the time in years. It was a feeling of connecting, of bonding, but with what? That was a question I asked later. Then and there I just floated in that feeling, not having to ask anything about it, not trying to explain it. I do not know what that is, but the experience, when it happens, is one of the richest in life that I know. It restores, it calms, it erases without conscious effort all stress and awareness of time and limits and schedules and tasks and deadlines. And it dissolves depression.

In finding a daily way out of depression, the rich if unusual moments like these are among the restorative experiences that keep telling me I’m more than the dark condition I fall into. Visualizing and reliving them leads me back to the sense of timelessness that strengthens an essential inner resilience. So that is becoming part of my practice of wellness.

I’m sure you’ve had experiences like that. My question is – does it help your healing to recall and relive them, whether by writing or in some other way?