It is often said that depressed people should not meditate.
I do not agree.
Depressed people often see the world in a more realistic way
then non-depressed people. They have lost their rose colored glasses somewhere
along the line.
1.
Depressed people often have the feeling that
they can drop dead at any given moment, which is the truth.
2.
Depressed people often see their body as a pile
of shit, which it is.
3.
Depressed people often ask: is this all there
is? The answer is: Yes.
With so much truth already present one can use depression as
a means to travel towards enlightenment.
A well-known Buddhist practice is to imagine that you are
going to die tonight. Today is your last
day. How do you see the world? What are you going to do? This seems a morbid exercise. It is not. It is
in fact very uplifting. We come to see the world as it really is: unbelievably
beautiful and rich, and endlessly mysterious. Even if you are lying in a
hospital ward. Or in a little room at home. The amount of things that are going
on around you are countless; even if you keep your room as empty as possible
and the walls white. Even if you can hardly lift a finger.
There is the light that is ever changing, there are smells,
tastes, noises, temperature, textures. And there is the inner universe: your
thoughts and everything else that is going on in your body. There are objects
too that can be seen and felt, heard and smelled. It is in fact unbelievable
how rich even a sparsely furnished room is. The simplest object becomes
mind-blowingly beautiful in the face of nearing death. It is as if you are on
drugs all of a sudden: wow, that tube of tooth paste is really beautiful, with
these red letters, and its’ shiny smooth surface! The color red alone! I am
seeing this for the last time ever. Why have I never paid attention to how
beautiful it is? Yes, this all happens to you when you imagine strongly and
persistently that you are going to die tonight. It’s better and safer than LSD.
It’s the body’s own LSD (adrenalin, endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and other
hormones) at work. Simple awareness; being in the now, not tempted by the
stream of thought is, in fact, the best drug on earth.
A bit of morbidity helps too. For example the practice amongst
Buddhists nuns and monks to meditate on the foulness of the body. We are but a
sack of skin filled with bones drifting in all sorts of liquid rubbish. Our
beauty is literally skin deep. Underneath our skin we all look the same: like
on those posters at the doctors’. Very unattractive. The body also smells bad
inside. And if we don’t wash for a mere two days the outside joins in stinking
too. Nails and hair that are apart from the body are repulsive. And we constantly
have to remove shit and piss and nose and ear rubbish, puss from pimples,
blackheads, blood. . . in order to keep feeling well. It is, in fact, a miracle
that we can see beauty in the body at all.
And when we die we rot away. Buddhists contemplate on this
process often. How the corps first turns blue and swells up. How it then starts
to fester and attract flies and worms. How the bones are held together with
bloody shreds of skin and sinew. How the bones are yellow when still wet. Then
the body dries out and the bones fall apart. Add a bit of wind and a couple of
wild animals and the white bones scatter in all directions. That is the nature
of our bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The depressed person is right to
see this so clearly. What the depressed person has to learn is to not hate it.
And then there is that typical depressed question: Is this
all there is? Yes! This is as good as it gets. No unicorn will gallop by. The
trick is to calmly accept what is. The depressed person sees what is and hates
it. She has to turn that hate into acceptance and she is very near
enlightenment. All Buddhist training is designed to learn to love/like/accept
what is. That’s why Mahayanan and Zen Buddhist monks and nuns work so hard. If
you can work hard and not feel unhappy you are a step on your way to
enlightenment. If you can feel a calm
loving kindness towards pain and fatigue you are well on your way.
We are not meditating to change ourselves or the world, we
are meditating to accept ourselves and it. As soon as we accept that we don’t
accept; as soon as we accept our depression, the depression collapses.
Depression stems from childhood. Very old and automatic
processes are at work. We tend to self-medicate old hurt. Often with the wrong medicines:
tobacco, booze, illegal drugs, shopping, sex; whatever it takes to not feel the
pain and the anxiety, the anger and the loneliness.
To listen to the pain, the anxiety, the anger and the
loneliness; to feel these feelings again, but this time in a safe environment,
while deeply listened too, empowered by adulthood, over and over again if need
be, is the way out of depression. Awareness is one of the answers to
depression, appropriate medication another. Old automatic responses that are
seated in the limbic part of the brain can be overcome by using the newer,
rational frontal lobes of the brain. It is there that awareness forms. And
awareness of awareness: consciousness. The more the frontal lobes are
stimulated through awareness the better. Add a bit of cardiac exercise to release
endorphins and chances are that the depressed person starts to feel much better.
Which she hates! Unless she imagines strongly she’s going to die tonight. The
suddenly she can lose herself in a plastic cup, in a shred of wool on the
floor, or the good old tea pot and say WOW what a wonderous world we live in.
It gets even madder: all of it, you and me, the tooth paste
tube, the shred of wool, the plastic cup and the good old tea pot are made of
star dust. Literally. Billions of years a star exploded and lead to this moment
with you and me the tooth paste tube, the shred of wool, the plastic cup and
the good old tea pot in it. So who needs unicorns and hobbits? Reality is a
thousand times stranger than fiction.
(This story was written for Diana's 31st birthday)
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