book stack tuesday : mindfulness and depression
The poet Jane Kenyon, who suffered from devastating depressions, wrote, “With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends…to my desk, books, and chair.”
And, at another time, she wrote, “Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again…and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak; someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can’t read, or call for an appointment for help. There is nothing I can do against your coming.”
It comes, and it goes.
Like many others, like Jane Kenyon, I have suffered an awful, debilitating depression. Unable to focus. Paralyzed by the enormity of life. Sleeping until the afternoon, or all day. Never dressing. Not going outside. Not brushing my teeth or taking showers. Eating too much. Such suffocating fogginess, the kind that disorients so fully it strips me of all bearing, like John-John Kennedy in that plane unable to tell up from down, until he hit the ocean. Stunned into my chair, weighted down into it by this boulder unmoving and cold, its gravelly surface stunning like unexpected sandpaper.
My friend Curt and I are reading The Mindful Way through Depression together, and we’re having conversations about it every week as we read. I’m halfway through it, now. There are parts I am really resonating with, including the suggestion that we “get out of our heads and learn to experience the world directly, experientially, without the relentless commentary of our thoughts. We might just open ourselves up to the limitless possibilities for happiness that life has to offer us.” They are suggesting a “different way of knowing: sidestepping the ruminative mind.” In a beautiful twist of language, the different way of knowing, outside the ruminative mind, is “mindfulness.”
I have an intellectual mentor, about whom I have long said, and he has agreed, that his body is simply there to carry his considerable brain around. So disconnected as if to disappear, ghostlike. It is so easy to live inside our heads, isn’t it? Ruminating like thick, hot soup inside there, feeling disconnected from our bodies, from experience, living inside thoughts instead. There is a certain delight there. And danger. Sometimes critical thinking skills are the wrong tool for the job.
- “At the very earliest stages in which mood starts to spiral downward, it is not the mood that does the damage, but how we react to it.”
- “Our habitual efforts to extricate ourselves, far from freeing us, actually keep us locked in the pain we’re trying to escape.”
The book provides written instruction (and an accompanying CD) to help develop meditative practices to incorporate into your daily life, moving you beyond “doing mode” to “being mode,” beyond “rumination” to “mindfulness.”
On mindfulness
The core skill the book helps develop is mindfulness, the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, to things as they are. Mindfulness is intentional, experiential (focused directly on present-moment experience), and non-judgmental.
- “Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be.”
- “And when we make choices informed by a depressive state of mind, they’re more than likely to keep us stuck in our unhappiness.”
Andrew Solomon has written so eloquently on depression, wondering if there is a purpose to it (The New Yorker, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1998):
“I wonder constantly whether these experiences have served any purpose. Is depression a mood state that nature or God willed us to have for some reason? Is it useful? ‘Organisms have a selective advantage if they have different states that give them the upper hand in particular circumstances,’ Randolph Nesse, of the University of Michigan, says. Is depression on of those states? Is it merely a derangement, like cancer, or can it be defensive, like nausea? Some people argue that it’s best seen as a mixture of maladaptive or pathological withdrawal and so-called conversation withdrawal, which may be useful in some circumstances: hibernating, avoiding danger, saving energy.
This is an idea that has been elaborated in Emmy Gut’s book Productive and Unproductive Depression, which proposes that the long pause brought about by a depression causes people to change their lives in useful ways, especially after a loss. It can draw people away from unproductive pursuits and relationships.
The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when it’s sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again. But I know what is left of me when my mind is gone and my body is going. I was not brought up religious, and think that when you die you’re dead, yet I have also discovered what I guess I would have to call a soul — something I had never imagined until one day, two and a half years ago, when Hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery. This week, on a chilly night when I was overtired, I felt a momentary flash of hopelessness, and wondered, as I so often do, whether I was slipping, for a petrifying instant, a lightning-quick flash, I wanted a car to run me over, and I had to clench my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turned green. Nevertheless, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life took.”
Mindfulness may be the way toward that vitality. It’s worth a shot.
Resources:
Andrew Solomon’s TEDx Talk: Depression: The Secret We Share The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon
A blogger’s more detailed review of The Mindful Way Through Depression
