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?
Image:Some Rights Reserved by windiepink at Flickr
Irish says
Greetings John,
Years ago when they made the first artificial replacement heart, it was made from plastic. The reason the plastic heart failed was because the plastic contained no cells with human intelligence and memory to tell the plastic heart how to perform. By the same token people who have had organ transplants, such as a human heart, have had amazing emotions, cravings, memories and thoughts inherited from the cell memories of the organ donor.
Deepak Chopra has stated it is possible to interrupt the memory in degenerative cells, such as those that produce cancer and replace them with new healthy cells and this occurs when two things happen. A person is able to get in touch with the silence of being, the infinite intelligence, the wisdom beyond the mind and secondly that person is able to let go of memories stored at a cellular level.
I think ……… depression keeps coming back from stored cellular memories at some level and those memories can be released by getting into the bodies molecular gap.
I read this information in a book entitled “The Journey” by Brandon Bays and found it to be so enlightening and more than so positively informative. There is also a website on this: http://www.thejourney.com
Our bodies are more honest than our minds so tapping into the bodies intelligence heals our minds as well.
Dreambuilders says
Your experiences are all teachers. They empower you to get-to-know yourself, your self-created limits and illusions as well as the worlds of possibilities taht exist beyond the former. Its all good! It can help to know what you don’t want because then you will recognize what you do!
Anon for now says
“I still have my feeling answering machine turned on to catch all calls before they can connect.”
That is a perfect description, John! Thank you.
JohnD says
Jazz – Thanks for those kind words and encouragement! I’ll be writing more soon about those moments you describe so well – the physical reminders of connectedness and the moments of sensing that everything is a part of everything else. i have to keep writing about those times!
Clueless – That is very moving, to capture the everyday reminders of love and care that are so sustaining. I’ve read on your blog of how unbelievably painful the surfacing memories can be for you, but your writing shows how powerfully you transcend that past.
Dreambuilders – What you say reminds me of a neighborhood activist I knew once in a Texas border town – a dangerous place to be a hell-raiser. He told me once about his training in the marines, and the unbelievable physical feats his unit had to carry out. But, he asked, why are you amazed – you don’t know the things your body can do. If you always think everything’s hard, impossible, you’re losing. You can’t imagine what you can do physically, mentally until you are pushed to a spot where you have to do it to stay alive. I agree with your thoughts about getting rid of the limiting views. That’s a good way of capturing what this struggle is all about.
John
Dreambuilders says
Human beings are never beyond reach, beyond hope, beyond anything. Yet, the tendency exists to assume misconceptions about time, space and potential. As you peel away all the negative, limiting views in the back of your mind, you realize much more can be uncovered than you ever imagined.
Clinically Clueless says
My Bible and certain favorite passages, my wonderful husband, cuddling with him every night, my therapist and reminders that my life is actually pretty good and that it is my surfacing memories that have me all out of sorts. Those are often fleeting moments of light that sometimes drown into the darkness. But, I’m glad that I have them.
Jazz says
John–
Thanks for visiting my blog yesterday! I’ve been stopping by here every so often for a while now and I love your writing, and the photos you choose are always so beautiful and so right for what you’re writing about!
Anchors…like your pear, and like the moments Stephany talked about…I think those fleeting glimpses of connectedness, when I sense that everything is part of everything else, those are anchors for me. And then there are those isolated moments when something touches my heart–a look in one of my children’s eyes…a glimpse of a beautiful flower, a smell that takes me back to childhood–just little physical reminders of that connectedness. I’m not explaining this very well, but based on what you wrote above, you “get it”!
Peace,
Jazz
stephany says
They never fail anyone.
JohnD says
Stephany – That is so beautiful and so true – thank you! Letting the feeling just be and come through without screening is the hardest thing. I still have my feeling answering machine turned on to catch all calls before they can connect. Fleeting glimpses – you are so fortunate they never fail you.
John
stephany says
What anchors prevent me from being swept away?
The glimpses of life. Like your pear.
It could be the fluttering of leaves on a tree that suddenly catch sunlight and my attention; or a pond with lily’s floating; or the sound of children laughing; there are many anchors.
In depression, they are there but it is the spark that is missing to really feel the experience.
I might see the leaves flutter 1000 times, walk past a pond 1000 times, hear a child laugh 1000 times—but when my soul needed to hear or see or feel, it never seems to fail me to do so.
It is also fleeting.
It’s all about glimpses.
For some people, that is not enough. Some may not have/or see the glimpse, the glimmer of hope– and most of all, one must not forget to yearn for that glimpse.
That, is key.
Because,when we yearn for the glimpse, that means we have not given up.
We are just drifting on an ocean of hope, and when we realize we do not really need the anchor– we are free to feel.
Feeling creates healing.