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 […]
Archives for April 2008
Connecting Out of Depression
Some Rights Reserved by Spigoo at Flickr. Does recovery ever happen this way for you? Something quietly takes you out of yourself? My room at the inn on the Olympic Peninsula coast looked out broadly on the foggy beach, an early morning panorama grayed out by the ground-level cloud. I tried to discern outlines through […]
Working Depressed: Changing Careers
I’ve just gone through a six weeks experiment to see if a moderate dose of lithium would strengthen an antidepressant that’s been fading in effectiveness. No such luck. Instead, I went through a tortured sequence of headaches, dizziness, muscular wobbliness, loss of balance, tremors and thick mental fog that always hits in depression but this […]
Meditation, Recovery and Healing
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 […]
Searching for a Way Out of Depression
Some Rights Reserved by fdecomite at Flickr In a previous post I started thinking aloud if my stance toward depression could change from hostility toward an invader to the acceptance of a primal force in my make-up, something that was giving me a message I was imperfectly grasping. I’ve found a remarkable book that helps […]