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These are journal excerpts about my fitful beginning work with meditation as a guide through depression.

After a day of feeling the chaos of panic, immobilized at work, I went to see JL, first therapist in years. This guy is real. He wasted no time, quickly running through some patterns he observed (explaining that he was hurrying things up because I had been through therapy) and then hit on something that caught me off guard completely. He said he knew how much I loved my brother, he could hear it in what I said, he could feel it in his body. At that, realizing it was true, I wanted to cry, almost did, but covered it with a forced jerky laugh, fooling no one. I was right there, ready to let loose with the feeling I have been sitting on for so long. He explained that he had methods, he did not shoot from the hip. He realized he could have pushed harder about my brother and gotten somewhere, but he prefers to work carefully, using the models he knows from Buddhist psychology. The guy wanted me to know he’d been around, as he says, raised in different cultures and countries. This should be good. I like his attitude: We can break that cycling, that pattern, we can break that, I guarantee it. Who talks like that these days? I sense in him that he’s witnessed, probably experienced, conversion or at least deep insight within the light of a powerful soul. But he’s not trying to become my guru – at least I hope that’s true.

Fast forward a few days, and I’m messed up again. I dragged myself around at work, unable to concentrate, aware only of wanting to break out of the office prison with its cash flow problems and staff tensions. I was also angry at JL as I thought back over incidental remarks he’d made about depression becoming an artifact of advertising – that seemed insulting when said to someone who first ran into the problem decades before anyone even talked about it or named it. And of course the forbidden subject never got anywhere near the mass media. I argued with him in my mind and felt myself falling into a typical pattern of battling with a dominant male, damned if I’ll let another guy glibly analyze me, and in so doing establish power over me. That male to male contest is so basic (I’ve started analyzing again!), a primitive drive to kill the rival men and possess the women – the caveman buried deep but still whacking against the shell of social rules. There is so much savagery ready to rip through civilized rationality. And I go on and on like that – I guess it’s a way of raging myself out of panic. Bad swap – one smash in the head for another.

Then it was back to JL. He went through my psychic profile based on a test he’d given me that first time. “I’m talking to your psyche now, not to you.” Well that’s interesting – to be a puzzled witness to this communication between a therapist and the invisible me. But even though I was eavesdropping, it’s helpful to hear how JL organizes the forces inside me or rather in this psyche guy. How much is obsessive, how much depressive, strains of anxiety, phobia, restlessness – he got pretty well the highlights of how the psychic force splits up and reshapes the struts of a soul. Then he gives something new – for me – a series of meditation assignments to help change things. He says they can even body chemistry. I will keep a journal – not hard since I’m doing `something like that now. We’re starting on loving and kindness as well as relaxation. He taught me a nice meditation reviewing the people who have brought love and happiness into my life, then the people whom I have given warmth and happiness to. Then I pray for compassion, for ?? – I knew I would forget the words! Depressed mind likes to blank out on important things. Anyway, it has to do with warmth and self-acceptance and peace and relaxation. Twice a day I do this – not forgetting to exercise for an hour a day and to write in the journal. At least I’ve got part of that going.

I spent this day completely nervous and unfocused, increasingly anxious as each hour passed filled with small tasks I didn’t want to do but somehow had to. None of them helped me with issues at work – I’m completely stressed out about getting forward movement on a couple of cases. All this fits with JL’s portrait of my psyche – lots of nervousness, lots of unfinished projects, lots of obsessing, little focus. Tonight I finally made time to meditate, just focusing on keeping the belly soft – awful image since I feel so fat – but I found what power there is in the act of concentration. It was late but even with eyes closed and concentrating on this one thing, there was no sleepiness, only the intensity of mental energy, a cleansing feeling, and a waking up. This is my real beginning on the assignments, and I can see that doing this twice a day with a lot of walking will help restore me.

Interesting to see how just hearing the psychic profile from JL has helped relax me at home. That’s part of what L wanted in pushing me into therapy – or any damn thing that would make me easier to live with. She gets the raging, when I can’t see anything good, and then she gets the loving side, when I’m me again, attentive, baffled that I could ever be so crazy. All that twisting rage in my gut, all that obsessing, paranoia, panic and general stress – they all seem at the moment like barriers to fear. And fear of what, exactly? What monster is going to break out, what caveman with his club, what horrible wreckage and carnage will I cause? I’ve had a few clear-headed moments – like the one years back when I understood deep down that my feelings of anger when coming home masked the real fear of losing my family. This pervasive stress and anxiety washes out everything else.

But I’m reaching for the words JL has been teaching me, trying to focus away from that chaos, focus on what? What do I catch onto in this static? Breathing in, breathing out – I have to keep remembering that simple starting point. Count the breaths, focus on the in-rush, the outflow. How high can I count before my mind wanders away. Just look at the thoughts, the feeling flashes, don’t get too close, just watch the jumble from a distance. JL said the fear was what I most wanted not to feel, but at this point fear is floating on the surface of a sea, and I’m looking at it. Is that scummy stuff really a part of me? But I turn back to my breathing – I keep losing count. It feels so simple, so refreshing just to pay attention to breathing – yet how hard it is to hear that constant rhythm in my body when I’m all shot nerves and drained by panic. At least I can hear it now. Maybe tomorrow I can remember all the words of the loving kindness meditation.

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I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness?

What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers who have achieved a way of living with depression that finds some positive value where I find none. What are they seeing that I’m missing? As I’ve indicated repeatedly, I see depression as an intruder, a trespasser that steals the vital energy of creativity that is its opposite. My last post recognized that while others whom I respect may have very different experiences, I have always wound up cheering on a Jane Chin or Therese Borchard or Peter Kramer who see depression as a disease that is just as welcome in life as cancer. – Ah, cancer—well, that gives me pause. I find a similar tension in the experiences even of terminal cancer patients. Some kick at their condition in anger and bitterness while others find a transformative spiritual experience in what they have to endure. This has nothing to do with the fact that cancer is a disease; it has everything to do with adapting to the experience of living with a potentially deadly problem. My own experience with cancer brought out a fighting spirit that got me through and that persists in my stance toward depression. I firmly believe in the need for using all available treatment options in responding to depression -it is an illness that can kill me. What I’m thinking about now is the way I live my life with this condition as a permanent part of my mind, body and soul. Can or should I adapt to it in a different way?

I’ve been trying to pull together my own sense of how my imagination has brought about my current adaptation to illness with ideas from Donald Karp’s intriguing book, Speaking of Sadness. The results are surprising.

Karp detects a pattern in responses to depression among the fifty people he interviewed, patterns that resonated with his own long experience of living with the condition. The pattern begins with an effort either to deny that depression will interfere with normal life or to seek diversion or escape from pain though intense involvement in other activities. When those strategies failed the people in his interviews, they tried hard to fix the problem by getting help from therapists and medication or alternative remedies. Sooner or later, they were forced to realize that these methods could only alleviate but never cure the problem. Faced with the reality that depression was not going to disappear, they set about finding strategies of coping and adapting to a life lived on different terms. What Karp found most often was that this last stage led people to see an advantage in their condition, either a special sensitivity to life, a creativity or a deeper spiritual awareness that non-depressed people seemed to lack. This is exactly what I have not found, or at least I have never imagined my experience in this way. Perhaps imagination is the key.

There are elements of our mental and emotional experience we want to disown, others we want to claim. When I am in a creative mode, I’m truly experiencing things in a different way than I usually do – it is part of my soul I want to cultivate, own, prize. When I am in depressed mode, I’m also experiencing things in a different way from “normal” life or thinking or feeling, yet I want to fight, disown, expel it. In this blog, I’ve often imagined depression as a person I fight in anger, sometimes as a pair I have to stumble around with, always as a presence I am trying to get rid of. My creativity is part of the real me, depression is a diseased burden I’m trying to cut out.

This way of imagining and feeling about depression has been a powerful tool in keeping me functional, and it’s been an adaptation that has generally worked. But the question I am asking myself, given the differing experiences of others, is: Could I come up with another strategy based on a different way of imagining what’s going on in my psyche, mind, emotions, soul?

One aspect of my current adaptation is that I live in cycles with highs of intense creativity and lows of intense despair with normal functionality on the way up and the way down. I feel the highs and relatively normal periods as the real me and the lows as an alien personality that is stealing my place in the world.

Is it possible to imagine and really experience all this not as an opposition of forces, a constant battle, but rather as a unified psyche through which different forces flow at different times? Is it possible that it’s neither “creativity” nor “depression” that I’m reacting to and experiencing but an underlying power of life that wants to push itself into the world? A power that sometimes terrifies and paralyzes me, even when I recognize it as creativity?

I don’t know, but I’m exploring the possibilities. What do you think?