death

It’s like depression in one way. People don’t understand grief for a lost pet unless they’ve been there. We’re there now, once again. A couple of years ago, I updated an early post about grieving the death of an Australian shepherd who had been with us for 14 years. She’d done her shepherdly duty in […]

I always had a hard time linking forgiveness and peace with my early family life. In fact, it was hard for me to understand what forgiveness itself was all about. I thought of it as a remote dream, a utopian feeling. There were many people I had struggled with, and I often let go the […]

Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering […]

Here are more journal excerpts from many years ago about my first experiences working with meditation to deal with depression. Unlike Revellian, as he explains so well in a recent comment here, I have not so far cultivated meditation as a long-term practice and discipline. Nevertheless, from these first attempts I found a method that […]

Susan and Dano have presented in comments here two different ideas about isolation that I need to explore more deeply, with your help. This is hard for me to pin down alone. My mind wants to wander, to lose focus, to put itself to sleep because this gets at something I don’t want to face […]

Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber at Flickr When my mother died, I didn’t know what I felt. Throughout my life, I had been struggling to shed the influence of her searing and shaming words, her anger, at times rage, above all, her depression during my childhood. How many of us spend adult years still […]