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.








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    • 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.




Commentary

JesusBuddha

As often happens, a reader’s comment prompted me to discuss an important topic that I should have thought of on my own. Invoking Buddhist meditation as a path toward freedom from anguish risks giving the impression that I am suggesting a particular spiritual path. In fact, I view Buddhist meditation pragmatically, as a way to learn about myself and my relationship with the world. For spiritual philosophy, I draw from many other sources. My thanks to Wendy Love, who pens an inspiring blog entitled Depression Getaway, for reminding me to emphasize that Buddhist meditation can be blended with many other spiritual traditions.

Wendy asked: “Can you tell me is there is a specific kind of meditation that fits in with Christian theology?”

Here’s my response:

Wendy–

There is a rich meditative tradition within Christianity. For my part, after some profound spiritual experiences ten years ago, I twice completed 8-day versions of the exercises of St. Ignatius. They really deepened my spiritual awareness, and set the stage for my current work in Buddhist meditation. I often hear Thomas Merton mentioned as an important commentator on Christian meditation, though I have not yet read much of his work.

In my view, Buddhism on the one hand consists of a set of meditative practices that help one better live within a human mind and body, and on the other it develops a metaphysical picture of reality that centers on the concepts of karma and repeated lifetimes. The meditative part can be comfortably practiced by people of any spiritual faith, since it makes no statement about the nature of the universe or the existence of God. In western meditation centers, Buddhist metaphysics are often ignored or at least downplayed. Many people work to blend Buddhist with Christian wisdom.

Personally, I define myself as a Quaker, not a Buddhist. Quakerism came from a protestant lineage, and still centers on a particular understanding of Christ (as the Light within each person). I see no conflict between my Quaker philosophy and my Buddhist practice.

The specific advantage of Buddhist meditation in the context of accepting hardship is that it helps one see the inner workings of the mind. With that understanding, it is possible to begin to influence the flow of thought and feeling so that grief is honored but needless suffering is avoided. Christian meditations are more about deepening one’s feelings of connection with divine energies. Both approaches help with gracefully embracing sorrow, but they do so by different means. After many years of meditating with an eye toward deepening my connection with the divine currents flowing through creation, I am now concentrating on learning to work with my mind so that I get the most out of this experience of human life. I find the two methods complementary.
–Will

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Commentary was published on May 15th, 2010, with these tags: , , . To date, this entry has received 2 comments.






Praying for Selflessness

Prayer

Prayer draws us near to our own souls. (Herman Melville)

Last time, I made the point that (at their best) most religions promote a state of mind that dethrones ego. This elevated condition goes by many names: Christ-consciousness, selfless awareness, enlightenment, etc. Anyone following this blog knows that I have been blessed with this frame of mind off and on since mid-January.

When I am fully installed in it, my petty concerns melt away, and my heart feels full and grateful. I don’t worry about my future, or fret about my past. Criticism goes silent. In its place comes a nonverbal belief that life is acceptable in every way. Not that I’m unaware of the need for improvement; in particular, working toward greater selflessness becomes more important than ever. But life seems calmer, easier, and more beautiful.

When I give up all resistance, and settle into this accepting and loving mode, the world feels sacred. It is easy for this awesome feeling of peace to take on a religious character. The first time I experienced it, in 2000, I felt embraced by God. At one point, Jesus spoke to me, directly and in person. It was a profound religious moment that led me to convert to Catholicism.

In the years that followed, I read a lot about spiritual experiences. In particular, I educated myself about the neurological underpinnings of transcendent consciousness. I found out that there are regions in the brain (e.g., the temporal lobes) that seem to be activated during profound states. Others (e.g., the left parietal lobe) may become quiet. Learning these facts led to a series of changes in my outlook. At first, I concluded that these brain structures must be the portals through which God operates. Later, doubt crept in, and I started wondering if the experiences were simply seizure-equivalents; perhaps ‘it was all in my head’. Over time, regardless of what I believed, I settled back into egocentrism, more depressed than ever.

This year, after I again encountered Peace of Mind, I realized it doesn’t much matter whether it is a purely biological condition versus something of divine origin. These are the important points: 1) this state of mind has been experienced by many people; 2) it does not depend on any particular belief system; 3) it erases my depression whenever it is active; and 4) it makes me want to be a better person.

In Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives, William Miller and Janet C’de Baca describe many swift transitions from common ego-bound human neurosis, into exactly the state of grace I’m describing. The transformations felt like gifts (often in the midst of crisis) rather than earned rewards. The authors maintain neutrality about the origin of these changes, but they emphasize that many lives were permanently improved.

In my case, the improvement has not been exactly permanent; my feelings of transcendence wax and wane. A few days ago I suffered food poisoning, and selfless consciousness evaporated. Within hours I felt as miserable and depressed as ever. I’ve been working to realign myself ever since. At first I tried meditating, walking in nature, exercising, reading and writing. Nothing seemed to help.

Then I did something new: I prayed. Not to God, because my atheist upbringing makes belief in God challenging for me. I needed to pray to something that I knew existed. So I prayed to that deeper part of my mind that is so much wiser than me. I know, from firsthand experience, that something within me understands the world in a holistic way that erases anxiety and depression, so I prayed to that part of myself, and asked it to rise again. I begged my deeper ‘Spirit’ to come to the surface and take over. My ‘Will’ admitted that it was making a hash of things. It surrendered.

Praying worked: before long I felt the warmth again. I watched the anxieties fall away, the depression lighten, the smile and the love return. I found that surrendering to this deeper part of myself, through the mechanism of verbal prayer, brought me back to my center.

There are those who will believe that God must have played a part here. Why rule that out? Perhaps God is open-minded enough to accept my ego’s surrender, even if the surrender was not specifically directed toward God.

But it is also possible that this act of prayer merely allowed my deeper nature to step into the driver’s seat. My ego admitted it needed to hand off the wheel, and that allowed my heart to start directing things again.

Whatever the mechanism, the transformation was effected, and I feel more contented, more accepting, and more motivated to be a better person. Isn’t that all that matters? And if orthodox religions can bring others to this place of comfort and growth, then shouldn’t we respect them for it?

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Praying for Selflessness was published on February 17th, 2010, with these tags: , , , , . To date, this entry has received 6 comments.






Working It Out

I’m learning HTML right now, in order to build a better template for my blog, and pages for my site. I’m also thinking about what the next step might be in developing my blog concept. I would welcome any ideas, if anyone were to read this. But for now I’m on my own, obviously. I have been working on the concept of multiple views on religion in one person’s psyche. I think it is the easiest way to deal with doubt. One part of me does not believe, another does. Since I’m not strongly attached to a concept of unitary truth, this approach is fine for me. When I’m in my doubt phase I accept the stance that any supernatural being is unlikely. When I’m in my faith phase, I buy into the God concept, at least in a general sense (not in a Judeo-Christian sense, however). Which side is right does not concern me very much. We’ll never know. Science does not support the existence of anything supernatural, but it does not rule it out, either. There is plenty of room in what we don’t understand about matter, light, and energy on their most fundamental levels for some kind of extra-sensory phenomenon to arise. Maybe science will someday pin such a thing down, or maybe not. Either way, there is room for such things. “Absence of proof is not proof of absence.” So I can sit on the fence easily, by just compartmentalizing the two ways of seeing things. Ultimately, I think it comes back to the Will and Spirit dichotomy. (See earlier)

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Working It Out was published on June 17th, 2009, with these tags: , , , . To date, this entry has received no comments.