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 […]

Some Rights Reserved by notsogoodphotography at Flickr Which insightfully bewildered comic strip character was it who said: I never knew what I was missing until I lost it? I read that line about ten years ago after a series of surgeries had removed a few expendable body parts and left me in a lot of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]