There are no more beautiful and moving stories of healing than those told by Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom is one of those books I come back to again and again. Each of its brief stories renders a moment of discovery that reveals a life’s meaning to someone lost in pain or rigid routine. […]
Reconnecting
Why Talking to Myself Makes Sense
I’ve tried to stop talking to myself, but I haven’t had much luck. I’m referring to the silent internal conversation that accompanies almost every waking moment when my attention is left on its own. I’ve often wondered why the talking has to keep going. Listening with Awareness As part of dealing with depression, I’ve worked […]
Depression Therapy: Lonely Talk in a Crowded Room
Therapy for depression usually meant talking about the world I was seeing, the thoughts I had, the pain I felt, the judgments about me I projected onto others – all me, all the time. Once, I was talking to a therapist in that way when I sensed a crowd of people filling the room. The […]
Revisiting: Recovery and Creative Experience
All that I am, all that life has made me, every past experience that I have had – woven into the tissue of my life – I must give to … new experience. … [The] past … has indeed not been useless, but its use is not in guiding present conduct by past situations. We […]
Depression in a Red Suit (v. 2.0): On the Holidays Past and Future
Some Rights Reserved by Auntie K at Flickr So that was Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, … and what have you done? … It happens every December, the moods of so many darken in the midst of the season of joy, and bloggers write up their tip lists about how to survive the holidays. Depression […]
Talking to Save Relationships and Talking to Walls
Image by nasrulekram I’ve written a pair of posts at Health Central about trying to explain what depression is like to family and close friends. The first one describes opening up in a way that’s helped me dispel the assumptions others been making about why I’ve changed so much. The second looks at what I […]
Depressed: No Friends, No Life
Lately, I’ve come across a number of questions online by plainly anguished people, asking: Why do I have no friends, no life? The first time I saw one this blunt, I reacted almost defensively, laughing as I recalled an old film in which a man hires a private detective to find out why he has […]
Healing & the Power of Place
Some Rights Reserved by frapestaartje at Flickr In a couple of excellent posts, Susan at the Wellness Writer has written about ecotherapy, a form of treatment that seeks to restore the lost connections with the natural world that are essential to health. (She cites a new book of, the same name as a good introduction.) […]
