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I keep remembering those amazing moments, all too brief, when I had the sense of stepping out of time, schedules, worry, depression into a different kind of space that was free of all that. It was an opening to peacefulness, calm and a sense of being that I can only call spiritual. As Jill Bolte Taylor
put it, she achieved a state of utter peace and oneness with the universe after undergoing the most drastic experience imaginable, a stroke that took away much of her mental functioning and memory, left her unable even to move. But inwardly, she gained access to a world of being that still remains available to her after recovery. Thomas Merton focused himself on a life of contemplation to achieve a state of union with God, but to do this he withdrew from the everyday world into the silence and discipline of monastic life. These two can stand for the many who have found access to such states only after calamitous events or prolonged and demanding practice that involves a separation to some degree from the ordinary demands of living.

I count myself among the greater number who make do, if very lucky, with glimpses of such things that suddenly strike through all the worries about the big and small events that put us on a roller-coaster of feelings and imaginings. Dwelling on these moments now, I’m looking for what they might tell me about finding a way to a more lasting recovery from the long-term effects of major depression than I have yet been able to achieve. Here is one such moment.

I had been on a business trip to New York where I stayed at a friend’s house in the West Village. That first day I had been off to various appointments, walking about the city amid gentle showers, feeling good and alert to the pleasant side of everything I saw, even in that grit and glitter place of hard-driving people. In the evening, I caught a then new film, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I had never seen anything like that before, a fable about good and evil wrapped in grotesque melodrama, and neither had the rest of the audience. At the end of the film, half the house hissed and booed loudly – and then, after a pause, the other half, including me, applauded and cheered. There was something about that strange, haunting film I connected with. It seemed to me a spiritual story underneath all the surface weirdness.

Back at my friend’s house, I was snacking on some fruit, still feeling moved by the film and generally happy about the day. I bit into a slice of bosc pear, looked at the remaining half of it in my fingers and thought, “What an amazing flavor that has…” Then everything changed. Suddenly, I was seeing what I sensed as the whole world opening before my inner eyes. The room I stood in faded into the background, making way for this different reality that had somehow appeared.

It’s a lot to say, but I felt that I was seeing, or, better, taking in with all my senses at once the wholeness and sacredness of life. The whole experience couldn’t have lasted more than a few moments – but time was irrelevant. I was full of profound peacefulness and simply understood that there was a complex structure to all of existence and that we all had our places within it.

Before me was a great living spiral of being, alive with movement and energy. I was overwhelmed with the vastness and detail, the ordering of physical, social, personal lives – great numbers of people busy in cities, whole societies, a part of the natural world of all other living thing. I saw there also myself and my family as part of the whole, at ease and loving in the spiritual order of things. And at the peak of the spiraling flow was the power of God and images I could make out of Christ and the Madonna. From that pinnacle flowed an energy that instilled a feeling at once of force and goodness. This was no passive sweet-pastures-of-heaven picture. It was a dynamic intertwining of everything in life, invisibly bonded through spiritual ties that I sensed like a flow of sunlight through a high window that lets you see the brownian movement of dust particles – except that here instead of dust there were tiny bursts of sparkling energy.

Partly, I was in awe at feeling that I was participating in this force-field at every level of mind, feeling, spirit, even as my more my skeptical self lingered on the Christ and Madonna and thought: Come on, you mean all that stuff is true? The quality of the experience was a feeling of being suffused with the energy of peacefulness. I was just one soul blending into this world with my wife and children. It was a deep relief, despite rocky times at home because of a raging depression at the time, to see that I was meant to be part of my family, at one with my wife, experiencing all this together. I was stepping back, though, thinking about that Christ and Madonna – that’s what I see because I grew up with those images – a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Lakota experience would be different. Thinking that way took me in a different direction.

Then I realized I was focused again on that half-eaten slice of pear. The opening in day to day life had closed up.. But I knew I wouldn’t be looking at things in the same old way.

The problem is that the immediacy of such experiences fades, and the tensions of life, and illnesses like depression, take over again. At times, I’m longing for another glimpse, another reassurance that all of this life includes a force toward an active peacefulness instead of destruction. The lasting effect of the experience has been a sense of centeredness, of knowledge that I am part of a vast whole, connected and not isolated, as the impact of depression would have me believe. That sense may fade out almost completely when I’m really down, but some spark of it remains even then.

What are the experiences that have given you an anchor to hold you to life while depression or other threats try to sweep you away?

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I’ve found that there is a longing for spiritual closeness just as there is a longing for an emotional bonding to another human being. But it is a form of longing, of human need, that I spent years ignoring. I’ve written here about longings arising from depression and inner devastation, emptiness and loss. Those longings tend to break up relationships, work life, family, but I’ve experienced spiritual longing as a draw toward a sense of closeness to a different dimension of life, a spirituality that is transforming when I can handle it and so remote from credibility when I’m shutting down.

Growing up Catholic, I always had a reverential attitude toward whatever was meant by the holy, the divine. But part of it was too abstract, plunging me into the catechism to learn about what was and what was not true or sinful or permitted. At the other extreme it was too concrete, too wrapped up in the details of ritual, of saints days, of rules, and the comfortable decorativeness of the statuary, stained glass, baroque buildings and beautifully colored vestments. I felt a strange combination of awe at the beauty and intensity of it and annoyance at the authoritarian side that demanded I accept everything without worrying for a moment what it was all about. God was mediated through so many layers that I came to associate the great Being with only two things: the tiny but intense red light in the lantern hanging in the church that symbolized God’s presence and the ever present universal eye that saw all my faults, sins, inadequacies, guilt and shame. That, of course, gave me a rich storehouse of goodies to feed my earliest depression.

After a time, though, my orientation toward things spiritual shifted radically. That happened because of a series of experiences over many years that gave me a greater sense of closeness to the spiritual world than I had imagined possible. There are times when a completely unexpected opening occurs and part of another world slips through, as if we existed side by side with it, ignoring hints of closeness until it reaches out and forces us to see something, really see. Almost always that experience was overwhelming, inexplicable, frightening, thrilling, peaceful – depending on how well prepared I was to deal with it. When I grasped what was going on, set aside fears of going crazy, I was filled with a sense of peace and purpose arising from an awareness that I was part of a vast spiritual reality. Depression, loss, grief – all that disappeared completely. However, as the immediacy of those experiences dimmed in time, I came to experience something new, that longing to be there again, to be reminded that there was a level of life beyond the frustrations and illness I was experiencing. That’s how I came to understand what spiritual longing was all about.

Every religious tradition I’ve tried to understand has defined a life-long discipline about how to approach communion with its spiritual source. Each has also generated amazing descriptions of the ups and downs, the dangers and distortions of attempts to dedicate one’s life to the sacred or enlightenment or vision – however the ultimate experience might be described. These are full of warnings about the potential misuse of seeking a mystical bond for the wrong reasons – to gratify ego, to solve a personal problem, to achieve a kind of “high,” to cultivate magical powers or to fulfill some mundane or even harmful purpose. I know I can’t seek spiritual experience specifically to free myself of depression – it just doesn’t work that way. The practice requires a setting aside of personal issues and a real devotion to seeking God on God’s terms. I have not devoted my life to the disciplined practices that the religious traditions describe.

But everyone prays in one form or another and at some point in life is open to spiritual experience. And that’s what has happened to me. Things happen, as I recently tried to describe, and I find myself in a different world that restores me completely. There is no such thing as depression there, and all the negativity, the mental and physical symptoms disappear for a time after those episodes. But spiritual experience is not so simple as that. Taken seriously, it demands paying close attention to everything that feels intolerable and destructive within, not simply wishing it away or having it taken away in a flash.

One of the remarkable interpreters of spiritual practice from a Catholic perspective is Thomas Merton. I’ve been letting his words about the contemplative life, as he calls it, sink in, become part of who I am. Here is one of his passages getting at the essence of living with a spiritual center to one’s life.

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s inmost self. The movement of recognition which accepts our own obscure and unknown self produces the sensation of a “numinous” presence within us. This sacred awe is no mere magic illusion, but the real expression of a release of spiritual energy, testifying to our own interior reunion and reconciliation with that which is deepest in us and, through the inner self, with the transcendent and invisible power of God. … The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is within us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe, and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of the inmost self. In silence, hope, expectation and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as to an arbitrary and magic power … but as to the stream of reality and of life itself. (The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, pp. 54-55)

Seeking a spiritual path, then, requires acceptance of that “dark self” while sorting out the “good ground of the soul.” That’s not so different from what I feel I’ve been through. In my case, though, I seem to have gotten this backwards. Instead of starting with the goal of seeking God and learning how to deal with inner darkness, I have followed my rigorously secular path of depression until it forced me to confront the larger need for spiritual fulfillment.

Has that happened to you?

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Ever since reading about Bill Wilson’s struggle with alcohol and the role that religious experience played in his recovery, I’ve had hope that spirituality can also be decisive in undoing the impact of long-term depression. William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience was so important to Wilson and other founders of AA, wrote in that study that the world is divided into two broad classes of people as far as religion is concerned, the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born take the world as it is, sum up their problems and successes and move along in life with a core acceptance of themselves and the religious practice they were raised with. The twice-born, as you might suspect, run into problems. They long for and work hard at finding a second birth into a new life of spiritual fulfillment. James describes them as the “sick souls who need to be twice-born in order to be happy.” Hmm, wonder where I fit.

Sick soul? Now I’m not saying that depression is a spiritual sickness, but my search for a way to get beyond that condition at least coincides with another lifelong search, the driving need to understand spiritual life.

OK, red flag right there – “driving need” – that sounds too wrapped up in this world, unbalanced, not at all detached, perhaps even indicating that I’m under the influence of the undesirables and rejects of the spiritual world. All the mystical traditions agree that you don’t reach enlightenment or communion with God by the sweat of your brow or by your willing it. True, that world may open to you after you’ve cultivated a certain discipline, and that includes not taking worldly things and your less ruly emotions too seriously. But when it really happens, well, it just happens, ready or not, you are tapped and zapped. It’s a gift, however your tradition might define it. In the Christian/Catholic one I was raised in, it’s grace, God’s free gift to you. And after it’s over (because it won’t last all that long), you have to wait for its return. You can’t command, will or work it back. You can only plug at your daily practice to keep you in shape for the main event – if it ever comes your way again.

You certainly can’t go chasing a spiritual encounter simply to get rid of depression or any disease. So what’s the connection? Why do I keep thinking that one path to help me out of depression is spiritual? Step one is finding my own connection to spirituality as part of deep belief. After that, perhaps I can figure out, with help, the way that belief can lead to healing.

There are experiences I’ve had that convince me there is a spiritual world and that part of my well-being has to do with that world. Now I realize that the guardians of the mystical traditions – and there are people in every tradition who can guide and let you know when you’re kidding yourself and when something “real” is happening – would probably say I was simply suffering from illusions (distortions of reality) or, worse, delusions (completely unreal stuff). But even if that were so, what incredible illusions they are!

I’m including dreams in this category – in fact, I might be on safer ground if I just refer to all of them as dreams. After all, I’m writing in a mental health context here, and I wouldn’t want to have another tag added to my diagnosis. Perhaps I thought I was awake when some of these things occurred, but, of course, I must have been day-dreaming.

Here’s an example of one day-dream. This was not the transcendence of instant conversion – the flash of light, the mountain-top view or the voice of God. It was only a glimpse of a different world, yet one that filled me with a sense that there was a lot more to “reality” than I had been imagining.

I was listening to music – the most powerful evocation of spiritual creative forces bringing a world into being that I’ve ever heard. It was the orchestral opening of an opera that entranced me into a meditative state in which the buzz of thoughts and words and feelings disappeared completely. The rhythms, chords, melodies blended into a unified flow that carried me into a different state of mind. Suddenly, there was no room, no music, no thinking or feeling, hardly a “me” at all. I was immersed in a different medium that felt like a separate world, and I seemed to exist as part of a flowing consciousness in which everything was a part of everything else. As a part of this consciousness, I simply apprehended everything encountered there. Things were not solid, separate entities but flowed right into me so that I was taking part in what they were – knowing them completely, instantaneously, as if they were simply part of me. There was no need to think, identify something, place it in a context, wonder about its meaning – I just became one with it. There were trees, rocks, animals, people contained in this medium and sharing their essences with my own. I had the deepest conviction that I was glimpsing a part of reality hidden away from awareness most of the time but which was the other side of normal life – unity instead of division, wholeness instead of separateness.

This experience came to an end as I started to think about how it could be connected to everyday life. I realized that this special world I was seeing was somehow under or prior to my existence as a person. Struggling to imagine how to capture it in words, I envisioned in a flash that essence I was trying to represent and saw it rise up from a cellular level through all the systems of nerves, blood, the clumsy physicality of the body and the mind and try to merge with syllables, words, sentences, which then managed with great difficulty to emerge from my hand through the structure of a pencil onto a piece of paper. But what emerged was only the dead shadow of the essence I had started to try to capture, an essence that had been a part of me in that fluid world. Now it was just words on paper that could not begin to incorporate that different reality. And so that day dream ended. I felt thrilled to have discovered a different world, one that I could only think of as spiritual, and yet dismayed that in this physical world I did not have the means to grasp or portray more than a tiny sense of what it was like.

For a long time afterward, I tried to recreate that experience, but such things happen without your willing them – in unexpected ways. I thought then that the key to this life could be found on a spiritual plane, quite removed from normal reality, that spiritual knowledge or clairvoyance would dissolve any problem with depression or other life crisis. So I looked for, and sometimes found, more glimpses of that world, moments when a very different awareness took hold of me and brought me again to that feeling of wholeness and oneness with a world underlying the one we see. But whatever that place might be, it’s not the place I’m really living in and experiencing everything I go through.

It became clear to me that it had to be in this life and this reality that I would find a way of deal with illness – there would be no shortcut to being born again.

What these experiences left me with, though, was a deep belief not only that there is a spiritual dimension to life but also that this dimension is a part of dealing with struggles like depression. I’m still trying to grasp what that means and find a way of pulling this awareness into my life as part of a healing process.

I’m looking deeply into the spiritual traditions I’m linked to through my own history to see if I can undo years of disbelief to find a core of practice that will guide me. Like many, I have a fractured faith – a belief in spiritual reality, and in God as a kind of ultimate presence, but great distance from the organized structures of belief in religious institutions.

The sharing of stories about this effort is my way of learning, and I’m grateful for any you can tell. Do you have a spiritual belief and practice that really helps in healing or adapting to long-term depression?

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In sorting through boxes of old papers today, I came upon part of a meditation and some journal notes from the period in my life when I was recovering from a cancer operation. I was dealing with depression at the same time and searching for new approaches to healing beyond the physical treatments and medications that comprised the aftermath of major surgery. I was trying to deal more with depression than cancer since the surgery had been successful.

What I found was a part of the Loving Kindness Meditation, as that had been taught to me:

May I be healed

May I feel love

May I experience myself for what I am

May I accept myself

As I have written in an earlier post, I felt my ability to deal with cancer directly and with a strong spirit came from a sudden and powerful burst of basic life force when the voice of depression was trying to lull me into using cancer as a way of ending my life. I just refused to let myself die. That resurgence of spirit carried me through the operation and its immediate aftermath, but as more normal life returned the underlying depression reasserted itself. It wasn’t long before I was searching for help again. I found it with a therapist who made extensive use of meditation. I was open to that approach since I had been reading about buddhism and healing approaches based on meditation, such as that described in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living. His description of mindfulness and healing was more accessible than others I had read.

He distinguishes between healing and curing. Healing captures for Kabat-Zinn the ability to see things differently, to experience wholeness. Meditation is the method to attain an inner stillness in which you can grasp the fullness of your being and transcend fears and boundaries of both mind and body. As he puts it:

Moments of experiencing wholeness, moments when you connect with the domain
of your own being, often include a palpable sense of being larger than your illness or
your problems and in a much better position to come to terms with them.
… We are not meditating to make anything go away.

I meditated every day, often on long walks into the foothills near our New Mexico home. Those hours helped me first quiet the intense anxiety I was feeling (for me that’s a common part of what I go through in long depressive periods). Here is some of the guidance the therapist gave me for dealing with nervousness – an essential step before I could hope to reach an experience of the wholeness of my own being. My being was constantly zapped with electricity from all directions – the anxiety was like a dense and turbulent cover for whatever I was feeling.

Mindfulness of fears and nervousness
Number them
Focus on breath
Note them in turn, return to breath
Awareness of breathing – acknowledge breath by saying: in/out
Focus on center of chest – go way inside – explore the feeling.

And here is what I wrote one day in the midst of this work with meditation:

Crying so much in the last twelve hours, it feels like the beginning of healing. To know that I have finally hit my deepest feelings breathes relief right through me. It is all right to feel overwhelmed, to feel grief, to let it sink in that this is not an adventure or diversion, but it is really all of me. I know that I can be helpless and sad in the face of this reality. The self hate seems so rooted in the what the buddhists called the eight worldly concerns (I wanted to call them griefs) – attachment to getting material things, aversion to blame, attachment to praise, etc. Perhaps now I can feel myself touching bottom and can begin to see where I really am – what my hunger and hurt are all about. What I learn. What I die for and live for.

Finally feeling/ knowing I am sick is the beginning of healing.

Ultimately, meditation helped me see clearly the forces of anxiety, shame, self-hatred, fear darting about in me like wild birds suddenly caught in the confines of a room. Lightening-like breaks for escape, flying bodies crashed into every barrier, shot-like bursts away from a strange human waving them toward windows, caws and shrieks of panic filling the air. In meditative walks, I could finally see them as separate from me and sweep them for a time from my soul. But only for a time.

Even though the fears and anxieties and the depressed feelings of self-hate would come back again and again, something changed within me. I lost the belief that I consisted solely of those maddening furies. I could believe that I was more than the sum of those parts of depression, and this new belief was the most powerful change that meditation helped me to achieve.

The force of belief is everything in trying to overcome depression. Until I could stop believing that what I thought of myself when depressed was true, I could not begin to turn things around and heal, or experience the wholeness of my own being. Rachel Naomi Remen captures the power of belief well in her quietly remarkable book, Kitchen Table Wisdom.

What we believe about ourselves can hold us hostage. Over the years I have come to respect the power of people’s beliefs. The thing that has amazed me is that a belief is more than just an idea – it seems to shift the way in which we actually experience ourselves and our lives. According to Talmudic teaching, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” … Sometimes because of our beliefs we may have never seen ourselves or life whole before. No matter. We can recognize life anyway. Our life force may not require us to strengthen it. We often just need to free it where it has gotten trapped in beliefs, attitudes, judgment, and shame.

What role has meditation played in your efforts to overcome the effects of depression and its related disorders?