WillSpirit

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ A Blog Devoted to Balance, Peace, and Clarity ∞

A formerly depressed physician tells stories of trauma, grief and recovery, and offers suggestions for emerging from darkness, living with mood swings, and awakening to life.








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • Dear Visitors:
      Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.

    • ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.




Recovering

woundedDog

Many people have pointed out to me that depression and spiritual growth do not exclude one another, and the fact that I keep getting this message shows that it has not yet really sunk in. Because spiritual awareness erases the bulk of my anxiety, whenever I’m in touch with it I feel incredibly free and light, and it seems like depression should vanish too. But although being more awake to the deeper structure of reality eases worry, it does not necessarily lighten sadness. If one understands the true nature of life, one realizes that most daily concerns are petty; but tragedy remains very real. If anything, transcendence heightens awareness of how living things suffer on this earth, and increased sensitivity can readily spawn depression or something like it. So on the one hand I agree: one can remain depressed and still grow in terms of conscious presence.

On the other hand, it is hard to feel truly enlightened when life seems unlivable. Embracing the reality of grief and sorrow is consistent with—and necessary for—spiritual advancement, but when one feels so oppressed by disappointment and loss that life loses all value, then one has been derailed from the spiritual path. When I gave my presentation Saturday I quoted Tom Wootton’s immortal phrase ‘Depression is Beautiful’, and I believe the words. But feeling so defeated and disgusted with one’s story that suicide sounds perfectly sane is not, I submit, a very spiritual condition. At those times, depression is anything but beautiful.

The goal has to be to feel sadness and grief, and see tragedy and injustice, but still yearn for life. Maybe the word that best describes my mood during my sickness is ‘despair’ rather than ‘depression’. In my experience, despair only leads to spiritual growth when it triggers a transformation in consciousness: in that case despair disappears. Unfortunately, my recent feelings of hopelessness have not pushed me to the point of breakthrough, and I suspect that such an easy way out will not be available to me this time around. Somehow, bit by bit, I have to rebuild belief in myself and my life.

Ten years ago I had a job that brought me status, provided a reliable income, and kept me busy. After arthritis and poor decisions ruined that situation, I’ve tried graduate school, informatics, teaching high school, public speaking, writing, and a few other minor pursuits; all ultimately led nowhere. These days no one has any reason to look up to me, my finances are crumbling, and I have far too much free time. If I could magically build a new career, many of my problems would vanish, but magic is in short supply. Many have suggested I work again as a doctor, but that would entail far more than people outside medicine realize; I would need to retrain, which means securing and completing a residency. After ten years of not working in the field, both of those steps would be challenging, to say the least. Even if I managed them, after adding in the several years post-residency required to master and get established in a field, by the time I was done I would be sixty years old. It is simply not realistic, and after the failed enterprises listed above, most other possibilities are also looking rather unlikely. I will probably need to find self-esteem that does not depend on my having productive work, at least in the short run.

On a positive note, I have recognized one important fact about my old work that seldom occurred to me before: it could be done by anyone with proper training. I was good at it, to be sure, but so were many surgeons. There was nothing about me that made me particularly suited to that work, or enabled me to do things that only I could do. Nowadays, I have a history with childhood trauma, mood disorders, and recovery that could (in theory) be leveraged into helping others in a way that would be uniquely mine. Unlike a surgical procedure, which if done well can seldom be traced to a particular surgeon, I could write or speak or in some other way produce a message that could only be delivered by me. Not that it would be better than all the other helpful sources of inspiration and advice, but it would be identifiably mine. It would be my creation and my expression.

Would writing a memoir, or speaking, or just blogging make up for the career I once had? Frankly, I doubt it. But at least I can see how the old line of work did not give me as much opportunity to express myself. Also, if I had not been through the past ten years of loss and recovery, I would not know nearly as much about the deeper currents of life as I believe I now do. So there are a couple of possibilities here that could only have arisen with the collapse of what went before.

When I can begin to see ways in which my new life offers things my old life could not, then maybe my despair will transform back into mere depression, and I can once again claim spiritual awareness. At the moment, all I can do is write about the possibility, but many times since I started this blog what I’ve written as speculation has gone on to become my reality.

Recovering was published on March 3rd, 2010, with the tags , , , . There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Once More

To anyone who has missed seeing entries here, if anyone has missed them, I apologize. The severe flu that has been going around this year, or something like it, finally struck me. It has been a long time since I was so sick, perhaps not since I contracted mononucleosis in high school. Not only was it impossible to sit at the computer for more than a few minutes, but my mood gradually deteriorated over the entire two weeks until my interest in all things, including the blog, utterly vanished.

Now, fortunately, I am feeling better. A bit chagrined at having sunk so low after weeks of touting spiritual enlightenment, but whether you call my condition ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘chronic depression’, or just moodiness, it evidently far outstrips in vitality whatever transcendence I had attained. Given the opportunity of my feeling physically ill, the demons defeated the angels within days. So I’m back at the beginning, facing once again the task of reaching that point of consciousness where life makes complete sense. Whether I can get back there is not at all certain, but the alternative path—staying in a funk—is unacceptable.

The fact that I’m finally writing again, even if just briefly, is a good sign and an indication that I’m trying. I will try to get something longer posted soon.

Once More was published on March 3rd, 2010, with the tags , , . There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Three Points

Trident

On this coming Saturday, the 27th of February, I am slated to give my first presentation about mental health. The talk will only last fifteen minutes, so it’s not a big deal, but the location and timing are unusual. The venue will be a hospital about an hour’s drive from my home, and it happens to also be the institution that confined me when I suffered a manic psychosis almost exactly a decade ago. In fact, my last full day at the medical center where I performed oculoplastic surgery was the 27th of February 2000. (It was the loss of my career—due to severe arthritis in my neck—that led to my psychiatric breakdown.) I wonder if there is a bit of serendipity in the fact that this first chance to speak publicly about my new domain of interest falls on the ten-year anniversary of my prior career’s collapse.

Off and on throughout my life synchronicity has seemed to play a role in the major turning points. In my more open-minded states I wonder if there exist complicated cause and effect relationships that result in such remarkably timed opportunities; some events seem to ‘fit’ too perfectly to be explained by happenstance completely unconnected to my trajectory through life. At this moment, I’m uncertain and feel more inclined to dismiss the possibility of ‘cosmic’ meaning. Maybe it’s because my luck has been dismal for so long that this oddly timed opening doesn’t stimulate a feeling of: “Wow! How perfect!” Instead, my thoughts are more along the lines of: “It’s about time something went right!”

Either way, my task now is to clarify my message. Visitors to this blog have seen my philosophy evolve over many months. At one time I started to argue the thesis that neither science nor logic rule out the possibility of a Universal Consciousness permeating the cosmos. (I had planned to cite the frequent occurrence of serendipitous events as one support for this assertion.) The several posts I wrote on that topic primed me for a profound ‘breakthrough’ experience in January, which made completing the argument unnecessary. The ‘awakening’ also had the effect of sharply reducing my psychological distress; worry and depression faded to a mere fraction of their former intensity. So one point I want to make in this upcoming talk is that there exists a state of consciousness that greatly reduces psychic suffering.

This enlightened condition has been described many times, both by individuals and investigators such as William James. I mentioned the book Quantum Change in my last post; William Miller and Janet C’de Baca demonstrate that people can attain this elevated consciousness swiftly, and sometimes almost instantaneously. Contrary to the western mental health model wherein years of strenuous psychotherapy are intended to promote slow and gradual improvement, Miller and C’de Baca show that change can occur as a more-or-less sudden event. That will be my second point in this upcoming talk: elevated mind-states can develop abruptly.

The third point will revolve around ways we can make such sudden elevations of consciousness more likely to occur. In fact, there is already a well-known mental health treatment system designed to do just that; since the 1930’s Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been guiding people to spiritual awakening. The DSM (a manual used by mental health professionals to classify psychiatric conditions) lists substance abuse disorders as mental illnesses, so it is appropriate to consider AA as a mental health program. However, the 12 steps of AA are not directly applicable to pervasive psychiatric issues like depression and anxiety. They have a number of phrasing problems that make them inappropriate for that purpose. In my talk, I hope to point out ways that the 12 step system could be streamlined and modified to make it work for emotional distress.

In coming days I may elaborate on each of the three points just presented. Not only will discussing them here further spread the message (a little), it will help me prepare for my brief talk. This would be a great time for me to receive comments, since I could incorporate suggestions into my upcoming presentation.

Three Points was published on February 21st, 2010, with the tags , , , . There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

First Love

Lovers2

After perusing a variety of texts about spiritual growth, I better understand the universality of my recent stirring mind states. This perspective helps, because it is easy to get carried away after numinous experiences. Hopefully, visitors will forgive my naïve enthusiasm and beginner’s ignorance.

It is no secret that profound experiences have blessed many people around the world and throughout human history. Those committed to spiritual paths devote their lives to seeking and exploring such epiphanies, and no doubt enjoy far greater understanding, equanimity, and wisdom than I ever will. My purpose here is only to describe my particular journey, and perhaps offer hope to others burdened with chronic depression. The most important fact of my ‘breakthrough’ is that it has swept away most of my misery. Even when I stumble and feel defeated for a few days, the memory of a better place remains, and the ease with which I exit the darkness astounds me. Six months ago my plan was to learn how to live a full life in spite of depression. That I would ever be completely free of it, even temporarily, seemed impossible. Before, in my best frames of mind, there remained patches of depression that threatened me with shade, like scattered clouds on an otherwise sunny day. Now I spend the majority of my time feeling light and balanced, with no ominous darkness on the horizon. And when depression does descend it doesn’t linger, it leaves behind no shadow, and while it lasts I appreciate its solemn beauty (most of the time, at least).

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, is familiar to many western seekers of spiritual growth. The book describes the vast range of spiritual frames of mind, and the large variety of ways we reach them. Sometimes a person achieves transcendence after years of meditation, study, and intention. Spiritual awareness accumulates gradually as the result of such effort, with progress punctuated by moments of sudden growth. But a life of seeking is not required. Not infrequently, a person ‘awakens’ in the aftermath of catastrophic stress or after collapse into utter despair. Crisis and failure offer us the opportunity to give up the fight and drop all barriers. The reward can be a flood of clarity, acceptance, and universal love.

If I were to classify my current situation, it would fall between those extremes. Although I have certainly not devoted my life to a quest for meaning, I nonetheless have been studying and searching. And despite a decade of bad luck, nothing in the past year has been particularly awful, nor did my ego disintegrate in an acute moment of hopelessness.

The nature of my recent spiritual experiences also lies between extremes. Ten years ago a series of ‘visions’ transported me into a mood of wide-eyed ecstasy, a kaleidoscope of marvelous sensory experiences, and a conviction that I had seen and spoken with God. A more magnificent and soul-quaking episode would be hard to imagine. However, much of the mental content was unbalanced, irrational, or poorly grounded. Although the clarity and salience of recent weeks equaled those of the earlier episode, they were not accompanied by ecstasy or hallucinations. As I’ve discussed, strictly supernatural beliefs played no role. Instead, what I know to be true about how the world is structured and how my life has unfolded took on a new light. Every particle of my mind understood that the universe is both dispassionately random, and lovingly numinous. This sounds paradoxical when stated in words, but from a state of exquisite nonverbal awareness, it made perfect sense. This solidly sane sacred experience felt just as profound as the arguably insane ‘religious visions’ of a decade earlier. But it was a little less intense, and was free of ‘delusional’ and ‘hallucinatory’ content.

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, I’ve explored mindfulness meditation for some years, and the recent ‘awakenings’ felt akin to the state of wordless peace that comes with such practice. The way I felt intensely ‘alive’, for instance, mirrored the way mindfulness brings one in touch with one’s body and sensory surroundings without the intervening filter of the verbal mind. In fact, three days ago it was a combination of meditation and acupuncture that returned me (for a whole afternoon) to the frame of resonant clarity that began with my spiritual retreat in January, and which is becoming more and more familiar. But the psychic impact of my recent moments of understanding exceeded that of even the deepest meditative states I’d previously achieved.

Experienced practitioners probably read my descriptions with a bit of amusement. I must sound like an adolescent who has just discovered sensual romantic love, and thinks he or she has stumbled on something personal and exceptional, when in fact it is universal and expected. But even if everyone else already knows about such love, it’s new to the teenaged romantic, and soul-penetrating clarity is new to me. So I hope those further along this path will indulge my childlike wonder.

First Love was published on February 11th, 2010, with the tags , , , . There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Where next?

WhereNext

Recent posts have, hopefully, demonstrated big changes in my mindset and emotional stability. A profound awakening has lifted me out of my rut and set me on a new path. But where is this new road headed?

For the past thirty years I’ve worked to overcome chronic depression, and other emotional challenges. There have been some successes, and some excited moments, but low moods have remained stubbornly clamped over my heart. Twenty years ago, attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings convinced me to look for a ’spiritual’ solution. I toyed with Buddhism, but ended up in the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, which had been the spiritual heritage of my maternal ancestors. Since it demands few doctrinal beliefs, it fit me well. But although I attended countless Meetings for Worship, and many weekend retreats, my so-called spirituality remained an intellectual exercise. I liked the idea of deeper forces in the cosmos, but I never felt connected with anything more than curiosity.

Ten years ago I enjoyed my first set of spiritual breakthroughs, during a diagnosed ‘psychotic episode’. Some of them had a Christian theme, which prompted my conversion to Roman Catholicism. After five years or so, my glowing convictions about Christ faded back into the atheism of my upbringing. Once again, I found myself in need of a spiritual home, only now it seemed clear that lasting belief in supernatural concepts was beyond me. Even with another try, Buddhism remained a poor fit for my personality and philosophy. Tenets about reincarnation would have been easy to sidestep as a Western Buddhist, but the emphasis on reason, although laudable, reminded me too much of science. Rigid scientific thinking seemed to be part of my problem.

Two weeks ago I had my second series of spiritual breakthroughs. During them, ideas that had been building in my mind for many years coalesced into an empirically based worldview, but one that did not rely on scientific reasoning. It came to me by wordlessly, without resistance, embracing known facts about what it means to be a human. After the epiphany blossomed, I pulled out the book, 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao and read a few random pages. To my amazement, the texts articulated a worldview nearly identical to the one that had flooded me after years of struggle. The book had been buried in my little home library the entire time, but I had never opened it before. (Although I had often meditated on the shorter and more cryptic Tao Tse Tung.) There were minor differences in perspective, but in essence the end result of all my grappling had been on my bookshelf the entire time. Taoism seems to have roots deep in a receptive awareness of nature. I reached my similar frame of mind through opening myself, without resistance and with as little ‘thought’ as possible, to the awesome sweep of proven biology and physics (it’s no coincidence that I have a Master’s degree in biophysics).

Taoism is based on an abstract idea (The Tao) that stands for an all-encompassing, endlessly mysterious, and deeply consistent animating principle. There is little if anything blatantly supernatural, at least not in the little Taoism I’ve read so far. My experience remains hard to articulate, but it came from taking all my knowledge of our physical and biological nature, and allowing it to sweep through my heart. Doing so prompted a soul-saturating awareness of the ‘rightness’ and ‘interconnectedness’ of creation.

It needs to be emphasized that I don’t rule out the possibility of overtly supernatural phenomena such as ‘God’ or reincarnation. However, I learned that such beliefs are not needed to support a spiritual awakening every bit as profound as my one of ten years earlier, at which time the idea of God had been central.

When I began my spiritual journey, it would have been impossible to predict that it would end like this. All I could do was stumble blindly until the pieces fell in place. Possibly, I could have picked up 365 Tao a decade ago, and been spared the struggle. But it is more likely that the words would have remained veiled until a designated and unpredictable moment when my eyes were opened.

It is hard to overstate the value of the awareness that has come to me. It has melted away my petty, egoistic concerns. It has given me faith that the universe is benign, and that despite the inevitable traumas of life, I will be safe. It has prompted me heart to literally ache with the desire to help others find peace. It has swept away decades of depression and cynicism. And it only invokes truths that most rational and educated people would accept.

So what is my next obligation? Where do I go from here?

Where next? was published on January 28th, 2010, with the tags , , , . There are currently 10 comments on this article so far.

The Stubborn Ego

StubbornAnimal

The hardest thing, sometimes, is admitting error. That it should be such a challenge is a bit mystifying. Why can’t we look truth in the face, see the mistakes in our previous thinking or behavior, and tell the world we had it wrong?

Honor is an ego prize. Honesty is of the heart. In this world, ego values dominate. So we insist on the accuracy of our opinions, and on the rightness of our actions. A great deal of marital discord would evaporate if spouses learned to admit error. Since political parties, nations, and religions are just as willful as individuals, the world is rife with gridlock in congress, imperialist invasions, and wars between religions.

Not only is rigidity bad for society, it keeps us locked in behaviors and attitudes that promote suffering. Case in point: I spent most of my adult life fighting for my own unhappiness. Even as I began to learn ways to shuck my depression, I resisted out of psychic stubbornness.

Not that I couldn’t justify my misery. Many posts on this blog have explained the ways my childhood sucked. Divorce, maternal suicide, child abuse, paternal alcoholism, and sibling psychosis were the staples of my upbringing. In the same vein, there is little doubt that I had a run of bad luck in adulthood: severe neck problems, career loss, psychiatric hospitalizations, permanent medication side effects, and multiple failures plagued me during the past decade. Fate has given me plenty of ammunition to shoot my mood to hell.

And yet, in recent years the suspicion grew that my attitude could change. Just as there were awful things in my family home, there were delightful things outside of it. My grandparents took custody of me one month a year, and lavished me with attention. In order to keep me out of my stepmother’s hair, my father had me spend half of every summer at camp. And although it was awkward being the only kid in residence longer than two weeks, I had lots of fun. My adulthood has brought me good times as well as bad. My prolonged education fascinated me every step of the way. For a brief time, I had a rewarding career. Financial concerns, while present, are not severe. My health is pretty good, and my wife loves me. Ever since I first worked with CBT in 2006, it has been clear to me that my biggest problem was a severe tendency to focus on the negative.

As readers have learned in previous posts, my opinion of my worth was very low until a week ago. Now, I can see how my deep feelings, perseverance, kindness, and insight make me a valuable person. That my outlook reversed in such a short time is telling. I believe the recognition of my good qualities has been secretly building inside me for years. But I resisted it. Why? Because I did not want to admit error.

How would it look if unhappy Will, who always had something discouraging to talk about, suddenly started acting joyful? Wouldn’t that prove that he could have changed long ago? Wouldn’t that negate all his complaints? Perhaps.

Maybe I could have let go of my sour attitude decades back. Former lovers and friends might have remained in my life. Years of sorrow might have been avoided. But would those be reasons to keep on in the same mode? One of my favorite sayings is, “cut your losses”. Last week, it finally came time to do just that.

It is not surprising that it took a long time to recover from such a traumatic childhood. And a period of mourning after my career ended was probably unavoidable. The problem was, my grief stretched on too long.

It is time to admit longstanding awareness of my attachment to sorrow. In essence, my unhappiness hardened into a habit. Although the word is overused, I’m tempted to call my pessimism an ‘addiction’. After all, it became a repetitive behavior (of thought) that ruined my life for many years.

Like any bad habit, the best way to break free is to recognize the problem, resolve to change, and then take concrete steps to improve. Although I could see my insistence on pessimism, and had pretty good resolve to change, I resisted releasing my negativity. The fact is, I feared that if improvement appeared suddenly, it would imply that I could have ended my depression at any time. It would indicate a big mistake.

Finally, using recovery jargon, I ‘hit bottom’. The constant misery became too much, and contentment became more essential than being right.

The Stubborn Ego was published on January 20th, 2010, with the tags , , , . There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Waking Up to a Wonderful Life

EarthFromApollo

Why did it take me so long to see the big picture?

A court ordered my first visit to a therapist at age sixteen. Since then I’ve been in and out of counseling many times. Since 1987 I’ve been a regular attendee at 12-step groups. I became a spiritual seeker. I’ve read innumerable books about psychology, self-help, recovery, and spiritual growth.

But until a few weeks ago, I could not give myself a break. Although I made progress, negativity, fear and regret continued to plague me. I felt little love for myself, and often yearned for death. Those unfamiliar with depression may be shocked by these words. But they won’t surprise many who have experienced mood crises.

Between the ages of sixteen and fifty-one, I engaged in a pitched battle against my demons. In just the past week I’ve experienced an opening. I ask again, why did it take so long?

Having just finished a book entitled “The Five Stages of the Soul”, by Harry Moody, I understand that my path was not unique. Moody charts the typical road to enlightenment as composed of: The Call; The Search; The Struggle; The Breakthrough; and The Return. Note that “struggle” sits right in the middle. To achieve understanding, apparently, one must suffer.

It is hard to imagine anyone having a more sorrowful, pessimistic attitude toward life than I sported until a short time ago. Coming from a catastrophic upbringing, and with many family members afflicted with psychiatric issues, I entered adulthood with both environmental and genetic reasons for major depression. Not that many months ago, I consciously resigned myself to permanent grief, and started working to build a satisfying life in spite of it.

Sadness has not departed. Having lost my mother to depression at age six, my personality may forever feel rooted in bereavement. To my surprise, on the other hand, I now see that my heart retains more capacity for joy than I ever guessed. Despite decades of depression, discouragement, and despair, my resilient human spirit has generated something I never expected: true love of life.

This is not the giddy high that psychiatrists label ‘hypomania’. I am familiar with unbalanced feelings of grandiosity, churning excitement, and unrealistic expectations. They are pleasurable, but short-lived and not particularly wise. My current frame is one of clarity and acceptance. From this new plateau, I see the entire spectrum of my history. For one thing, I recognize that there has been pleasure in addition to pain. Before now, I’ve resisted cherishing even the happy epochs in my saga. But today I can say it: my life has been wonderful in its own way.

This all seems so obvious now, that it is a mystery why I could not see it before. But no matter how long it took, I am glad to be open at last. It grants me an eagerness to help others embrace their lives. Let me start with a guarantee: peace is possible, even for stubborn pessimists.

Waking Up to a Wonderful Life was published on January 19th, 2010, with the tags , , . There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Self Love and the Biology of Self

Heart&Lungs

In recent months, a plan has formed to wean myself away from the comforting bosom of therapy. A post I wrote six months ago detailed the huge amount of psychotherapy and group work I’ve completed. Some of it enlightened me, some of it led me astray, and much if it had little effect at all.

Just as I prepare to swear off therapy forever, fate has brought me a counselor who truly helps me. Partly it’s a good personality match; partly the ACT philosophy he adheres to works well for me (as discussed on this site many times); and partly I’m finally ready for a fundamental change.

Not that I’m close to ‘cured’, or even ’stable’, but something inside seems to be shifting. One good example came in my most recent session. It was the first in almost two months, and had been arranged as an urgent appointment because of severe depression.

The biggest reason for my suffering, being perfectly blunt, has always been self-hatred. My upbringing beat it into me. My earliest memories are of my parents’ bitter divorce, during which it became obvious that my dad despised the role of father. In most of my memories of my mother, she lies in bed nearly catatonic with depression. She couldn’t offer much love. After that came her death, a probable suicide; a six-year-old takes a mother’s dying as a personal rejection. Within weeks I began living with my bitter father and sadistic stepmother. The woman humiliated and tormented me with cold, calculated efficiency. (Those interested can read about her in a memoir fragment .) My dad, narcissistic and obsessed by his work, was also an alcoholic. In short, my childhood taught me to feel unwanted, unworthy, despised, tormented, and abandoned.

Sadly, I still feel all those things, only now the hatred comes from my own heart. This is probably the most sensitive secret I’ve revealed on a site riddled with self-disclosure. It is the root of the worst of my problems. It keeps me at arms length from life and loved ones, because I never believe I deserve either.

My counselor and I have talked about this self-loathing many times. On this last visit, he instructed me to hold out my hand. “Can you love your hand?” he asked.

To my surprise, the answer was, “yes”; loving a body part seemed easy. The full significance did not sink in right away.

My adoration of biology, which goes back to my earliest days gardening and fishing with my grandfather, makes admiration of anything alive no problem at all. People, redwood trees, mice, and all other living things enthrall me. I’m even fascinated by mosquitoes. I have an inborn reverence for everything that lives. But until recently, I had never honored myself for my own biology.

For some time, I’ve practiced a meditation where I simultaneously feel and visualize my internal physiology. I sit on my meditation cushion and breathe, all the time imagining the air seeping into the tiniest passages and pockets of my lung. I think of the oxygen turning my blood corpuscles bright red. While concentrating on the sensation of my heartbeat, I form a mental picture of my heart pumping this freshened blood to the rest of my body.

Even though I regularly settle into my biological nature, it had never occurred to me to love myself as a living organism. I was too busy hating my personality, my decisions, and my sins. All my hatred has been directed at me. Which raises the question, “what am I?” Am I a disembodied mind? Can I really separate what goes on in my brain from the body that holds it? The obvious answer is “no”.

After my appointment with the therapist, I did my usual ‘biological’ meditation, only this time I honored the miracle of my animal form, and allowed reverence to surface. At the same time, I held the thought that I am my body. After all, the sensation of a mind separate from the physical self is an illusion, or even a delusion. It’s the ego’s way of isolating and empowering itself. The truth is that body and self are one. In accessing my respect for my own life processes, I discovered a bit of love for myself. It feels wonderful.

Not long ago, I thought my recent spiritual growth had banished inner darkness. Soon after, I found myself fueling a depression with my habitual self-contempt. The old obsessions, regrets, and fears returned with full force. Having learned from that relapse, and despite this insight about my value as a living animal, I will be shocked if the horrible despair does not soon resurface. On the other hand, perhaps I will remember to feel reverence toward my body, and the biological mind it supports. Perhaps I will feel a trickle of love for myself.

Self Love and the Biology of Self was published on January 15th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , . There are currently 5 comments on this article so far.

A thousand words

RiverOfIce

This picture captures how I feel right now, spiritual progress notwithstanding. Sometimes, often in fact, I envy those who don’t get depressed. Perpetual sorrow has an an element of beauty, but it is also cold and lonely.

A thousand words was published on January 9th, 2010, with the tags . There are currently 11 comments on this article so far.

Off the brink…

cliffsign

Yesterday I sat in my therapist’s office in the midst of an inky cloud of sorrow; I can hardly imagine a greater sadness. There was no talking me out of it. The despair did not attach (too much) to any particular complaint. I just felt a broad and bottomless emptiness, an utter absence of hope. Fortunately, suicide has dropped off my mental menu, but if I could have pressed a button and been sucked into a black hole, crushed to the size of a proton, I’d have pressed it. The nights leading up to this session had been spent hoping to die in my sleep. The physical pain I’ve mentioned played into my despair. So did returning from the Sierra Nevada foothills, where my wife and I live part-time; I always feel grief after leaving that area. (As an aside, I attribute some of that sorrow to flashbacks of experiences growing up. Every summer, the day after school ended in Los Angeles, I was shipped to my loving relatives in the midwest: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. Then summer ended, and the day before school started I had to board the plane back to Hell. The terror and bereavement I felt every single summer has been seared into my psyche, and gets resurrected each time I come back from the Yosemite area.) Another fount of despair derives from all the memoir-type writing I’ve been doing. I posted the story about my stepmother not long ago (now updated, for anyone who wants to observe a work-in-progress making progress—editorial suggestions will be welcomed.) I’ve also written stories about my mother and father in the past six months. All of this history is dreadfully sad, at least to me. I did take a break to write about a backpacking trip, which long-term readers might remember; plus a story about how I got into ophthalmology. But the positive (or at least zany) memories do not outweigh the burden of discouragement loaded onto my heart by all the awful sagas of childhood. The past ten years of repeated disappointment and failure have not helped.

cliff

My therapist’s goal, to the extent I understood it, was to get me to sit with the darkness and not allow it to germinate into analysis about my life. From that bleak landscape, absolutely nothing in my current world looked good. So he kept steering me to just experience the sorrow. I sat drenched in tears, wishing I could vanish into another dimension. An exhausting experience, to say the least. Before this, or while it was happening, I would have said that I often allow the grief and despair to permeate my psychic universe without blaming my present circumstances. I believed I had learned to just live in the depression without either running with it or away from it. Not so. From the safety of today, my posture on the precipice of yesterday looks like a new creature in my taxonomy of mood states. For a few moments, I stood at the cliff’s edge without looking either up or down. Not trying to talk myself out of feeling so rotten (actually, there was little danger of that,) or dwelling on my complaints (a much more tempting activity.)

I realized that whatever the ultimate cause of my despair (residual grief and fear from childhood, disappointment at having no career and facing financial uncertainty, anxiety and discomfort from worsening arthritis,) the proximate cause was some kind of neurotransmitter warfare in my brain. Maybe that goes a step further, with some demon pushing the chemical buttons (I do not think this very likely—but who knows?) Either way, I realized it was a state of mind that I could not control, could not explain in terms of current circumstance, and just had to endure. Like bad weather in the brain. So I sat there without an umbrella, without running for a nonexistent cabin in the wilderness, without starting a fire. Nor did I dive into the rising floodwaters and drown. I just let the rain and tears soak me.

Today the sun is not exactly shining, but I can see it. I think the switch can be attributed to yesterday’s session. A not-too-disrupted night of sleep helped. Settling into this house, and getting past the departure from the other, also helps. And I’ve been taking more NSAIDs and Tylenol to alleviate my pain. But mostly I think the improvement comes from letting the demons assault me until they got bored and drifted back into the dispassionate ether. A bit like a method I’ve heard for combatting recurrent nightmares: rather than running away from your predators, turn and face them. When you look them in the eye they stop charging, and you can welcome them into your psyche like domesticated prairie mustangs. I don’t expect, maybe don’t even want, this to be the end of familiarity with my bottomless psychic cesspool. I know, with every molecule in my brain, that the storms will recur. But perhaps next time I can pull off the trick of letting them pass through my mental atmosphere without wrecking my opinion of myself, my life, and my surroundings. One can always hope. One should always hope.
cloudbreak
Obviously, there are times when hope remains hidden. But right now, at least, I can see it its cheerful face behind the dispersing clouds.

Off the brink… was published on November 3rd, 2009, with the tags , , , , , . There are currently 5 comments on this article so far.