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 […]
depression
Spiritual Paths to Healing – 1
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 […]
Connecting Out of Depression
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 […]
Working Depressed: Changing Careers
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 […]
Healing, Butterflies and Hawks
At times, emerging from depression seems like a gift. I’ve written before about a sudden shift, a kind of renewal, that occurred when crossing a shallow stream. In my experience, healing may come from a special place more effectively than from medication. I became sensitized to the power of certain places through years of work […]
Depression Against Life
Anon for Now recently commented on the sense of renewal in life that served as a deterrent to suicide. This struck me as capturing the most baffling aspect of the temptation to end life. For what does the evidence of life on earth point to but the endlessly inventive will to survive? There is no […]
