Storied Mind :

Meditating through Depression - 2

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:04:00 -0500

Some Rights Reserved by kevindooley at Flickr

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 has helped blunt the deep stress and anxiety that accompany depression. Sometimes it can even bring me out of a deep downswing.

Today I tried meditating while getting one of my periodic bone scans – one grisly aftermath of a cancer exam. Has it metastasized to the bones? If so, likely an agonizing death ahead – but fortunately that’s not probable. This is the second one, and the first only showed the widespread spots of arthritis that one day will give me a lot more pain than they do now. To do the scan I have to lie down on a narrow gurney and be absolutely still while this big machine moves slowly over my whole body, just an inch or so away.

So I worked at meditating during the scan and that made the time pass very quickly. It also distracted me from the fear of the machine’s humming invasion that recorded every inch of my body’s deepest structure. I couldn’t help but think of death while this was happening, and even the narrow gurney reminded me of how small a body gets when the life is gone. I strained to hold still since there was nothing to rest my arms on, but I finally figured out that I could keep my hands from slipping off the cold side bars by tucking the thumbs just under my hips. Still I couldn’t get a restful position for my elbows. So I closed my eyes and meditated on loving kindness and tried enumerating the things I was worried about and afraid of. Those fears felt more distant then, not as urgent – more like empty shapes or brief flashes rather than stabbing realities. After the scan, I felt a peacefulness that made it easier to hear whatever the results might be. Once again, I was clear of any sign of cancer in those aging bones.

I am trying to meditate and observe my feelings and thoughts and judgments and just note them. They’re they are. That is a wonderful part of this practice – in a way it helps internalize the therapist who is getting an objective view of you and so able to help identify what you are doing. I can observe what flows in and flows out and, while I’m doing it, enter into the peaceful but alert state I achieved during the bone scan. I only wish I could sustain this – perhaps I will internalize the discipline after a time. I wonder if the practice could help root out the deepest depression, for that strikes at a level far below thought or feeling within a deep hard structure of the brain. After decades of residence there, it just won’t move.

These last two days I have been meditating for forty-five minutes at a time. As my therapist says, that sounds like a lot of minutes, but it’s nothing – and he says it is work, with a capital W. You can’t play it like ping pong. You have to do it. He himself plans to spend a year in a monastery before too long. I see better now that following an emotion with detachment brings you into its midst – you can even move around inside it, so to speak, taking its measure, observing what it is about but without being dominated by it. The key is that distance, that stance. I am not sure I can or even want to maintain that as the norm, but it is helping me see how I put my life and reactions together. I am always amazed at how much time I spend tearing myself down, and in meditating I can see myself doing this more objectively. That alone helps me to stop the torment of that inner ripping. This practice isn’t yet helping get to the depression in a sustainable way, but achieving that would take much longer. I just wonder if it is possible to go that far.

Lately I have been meditating irregularly even though it has become a crucial centering activity. I’m not cultivating much of a discipline about it or having a sense of developing skill in exploration of consciousness. This is the trouble with depression – when it takes over, all the defenses I have don’t just fail. I forget all about them, as if I had never known what they were. Except in those worst times, there are mantras, and a prayer I have developed over time, that help bring balance into my life. Concentrating on breath gets me deeply into that different space.

The guidance for meditation to calm nervousness and fears is this:

Mindfulness of fears and nervousness
Number them
Focus on breath
Note them in turn, return to breath
Awareness of breathing – acknowledge breath by saying: in/out Focus on center of chest – go way inside – explore the feeling.

And the simple lines I go over and over as part of the meditation on loving kindness are these:

May I be healed
May I feel love
May I experience myself for what I am
May I accept myself

This next is a meditative prayer that formed gradually while I was trotting up and down arroyos in the foothills near our old home in northern New Mexico. It is influenced by Lakota practice, but out of respect for those traditions, which are not mine, I do not use them directly.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world
for I am a part of all life
now, through the past and into future time.

I pray for the earth, surrounded by the great directions,
the eastern white light of the new day
the yellow warmth of the south
the west’s returning red
the sacred night of the north
and the rooted earth below me
the flowing sky above
and here the center of the world,
all embraced by the greatest spirit of God.

I pray for all life and living spirit
I pray for the creatures of the earth,
for the winged beings and the sea swimmers
for the crawling creatures and for those that run
and for the beings that stand upright on the land
I pray for the flowing waters, the surging mountains
for the open plains and bounded valleys,
for the seas and the oceans of air we breathe.

I pray for my family and the love flowing through us
I pray for the friends I have known,
for all the communities I am a part of
and for the nations of the world,
that peace may become their way of life.
I pray for humankind.

I pray for forgiveness from those I have hurt
and pray I may forgive those who have caused me pain.
I pray that a growing love may fill me to overflowing
through the enduring grace of God.

I pray for all I am related to throughout the world,
for I am a part of all life
now, through the past and into future time.

Meditating through Depression

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:40:00 -0500

Some Rights Reserved by anna_pearson at Flickr

These are journal excerpts about my fitful beginning work with meditation as a guide through depression.

After a day of feeling the chaos of panic, immobilized at work, I went to see JL, first therapist in years. This guy is real. He wasted no time, quickly running through some patterns he observed (explaining that he was hurrying things up because I had been through therapy) and then hit on something that caught me off guard completely. He said he knew how much I loved my brother, he could hear it in what I said, he could feel it in his body. At that, realizing it was true, I wanted to cry, almost did, but covered it with a forced jerky laugh, fooling no one. I was right there, ready to let loose with the feeling I have been sitting on for so long. He explained that he had methods, he did not shoot from the hip. He realized he could have pushed harder about my brother and gotten somewhere, but he prefers to work carefully, using the models he knows from Buddhist psychology. The guy wanted me to know he’d been around, as he says, raised in different cultures and countries. This should be good. I like his attitude: We can break that cycling, that pattern, we can break that, I guarantee it. Who talks like that these days? I sense in him that he’s witnessed, probably experienced, conversion or at least deep insight within the light of a powerful soul. But he’s not trying to become my guru – at least I hope that’s true.

Fast forward a few days, and I’m messed up again. I dragged myself around at work, unable to concentrate, aware only of wanting to break out of the office prison with its cash flow problems and staff tensions. I was also angry at JL as I thought back over incidental remarks he’d made about depression becoming an artifact of advertising – that seemed insulting when said to someone who first ran into the problem decades before anyone even talked about it or named it. And of course the forbidden subject never got anywhere near the mass media. I argued with him in my mind and felt myself falling into a typical pattern of battling with a dominant male, damned if I’ll let another guy glibly analyze me, and in so doing establish power over me. That male to male contest is so basic (I’ve started analyzing again!), a primitive drive to kill the rival men and possess the women – the caveman buried deep but still whacking against the shell of social rules. There is so much savagery ready to rip through civilized rationality. And I go on and on like that – I guess it’s a way of raging myself out of panic. Bad swap – one smash in the head for another.

Then it was back to JL. He went through my psychic profile based on a test he’d given me that first time. “I’m talking to your psyche now, not to you.” Well that’s interesting – to be a puzzled witness to this communication between a therapist and the invisible me. But even though I was eavesdropping, it’s helpful to hear how JL organizes the forces inside me or rather in this psyche guy. How much is obsessive, how much depressive, strains of anxiety, phobia, restlessness – he got pretty well the highlights of how the psychic force splits up and reshapes the struts of a soul. Then he gives something new – for me – a series of meditation assignments to help change things. He says they can even body chemistry. I will keep a journal – not hard since I’m doing `something like that now. We’re starting on loving and kindness as well as relaxation. He taught me a nice meditation reviewing the people who have brought love and happiness into my life, then the people whom I have given warmth and happiness to. Then I pray for compassion, for ?? – I knew I would forget the words! Depressed mind likes to blank out on important things. Anyway, it has to do with warmth and self-acceptance and peace and relaxation. Twice a day I do this – not forgetting to exercise for an hour a day and to write in the journal. At least I’ve got part of that going.

I spent this day completely nervous and unfocused, increasingly anxious as each hour passed filled with small tasks I didn’t want to do but somehow had to. None of them helped me with issues at work – I’m completely stressed out about getting forward movement on a couple of cases. All this fits with JL’s portrait of my psyche – lots of nervousness, lots of unfinished projects, lots of obsessing, little focus. Tonight I finally made time to meditate, just focusing on keeping the belly soft – awful image since I feel so fat – but I found what power there is in the act of concentration. It was late but even with eyes closed and concentrating on this one thing, there was no sleepiness, only the intensity of mental energy, a cleansing feeling, and a waking up. This is my real beginning on the assignments, and I can see that doing this twice a day with a lot of walking will help restore me.

Interesting to see how just hearing the psychic profile from JL has helped relax me at home. That’s part of what L wanted in pushing me into therapy – or any damn thing that would make me easier to live with. She gets the raging, when I can’t see anything good, and then she gets the loving side, when I’m me again, attentive, baffled that I could ever be so crazy. All that twisting rage in my gut, all that obsessing, paranoia, panic and general stress – they all seem at the moment like barriers to fear. And fear of what, exactly? What monster is going to break out, what caveman with his club, what horrible wreckage and carnage will I cause? I’ve had a few clear-headed moments – like the one years back when I understood deep down that my feelings of anger when coming home masked the real fear of losing my family. This pervasive stress and anxiety washes out everything else.

But I’m reaching for the words JL has been teaching me, trying to focus away from that chaos, focus on what? What do I catch onto in this static? Breathing in, breathing out – I have to keep remembering that simple starting point. Count the breaths, focus on the in-rush, the outflow. How high can I count before my mind wanders away. Just look at the thoughts, the feeling flashes, don’t get too close, just watch the jumble from a distance. JL said the fear was what I most wanted not to feel, but at this point fear is floating on the surface of a sea, and I’m looking at it. Is that scummy stuff really a part of me? But I turn back to my breathing – I keep losing count. It feels so simple, so refreshing just to pay attention to breathing – yet how hard it is to hear that constant rhythm in my body when I’m all shot nerves and drained by panic. At least I can hear it now. Maybe tomorrow I can remember all the words of the loving kindness meditation.