Brain research is one of those many scientific fields that I’ll never know much about, but I find it important to get even a limited understanding of the direction of recent findings. It helps me to know, for example, that emotions are generated unconsciously through multiple brain systems before anything gets to awareness. As I […]
Mindfulness
Meditation and a Prayer for Healing
This is an edited and shortened version of a post on meditation I did some time ago. The prayer at the end remains important to me, so I thought I’d put it up again. I hope it makes some sense to you. Here are a few journal excerpts from many years ago about early experience […]
Getting Ready to Recover
In thinking about how I managed to rid myself of depression, I’ve realized the importance of getting ready to recover. This idea never occurred to me during many failed attempts to find a way out of the underworld of living. I had hoped there would be a quick, linear pathway to feeling fully alive again, […]
The Problem of Now in Recovery from Depression
Some Rights Reserved by monkeytime at Flickr 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 […]
Many Selves, One Mindful Direction
1. I walk around with a crowd inside – so many selves wanting to go in different directions. Too many voices are talking all at once, and it’s hard to pick out the one I need to listen to right now. Here’s the intuitive talker, waking up with the big picture and the ideas for […]
Early Steps Toward Recovery
Lynn left a comment on Why Depressed Men Leave that ended with a question I’ve been thinking about all week. She summarized the wrenching story about her bipolar husband and his blaming her for everything that was wrong with him. Then she asked me how I gained the insight that my blaming and raging behavior […]
