David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Mindfulness & Recovery from Depression
by john, Storied Mind Blog
May 19th, 2009
Over the past year, I?ve been trying to get a better understanding of mindfulness and its role in recovery from depression. Mindfulness, of course, means much more than finding another technique to overcome a debilitating condition. It?s a way of being alert and present to just about everything I experience. Getting to that state of mind, though, and staying there are two of the most difficult things I?ve tried to do. In the last year, I?ve been working with a book that?s as helpful to understanding mindfulness as any I?ve read.
The Mindful Way through Depression has been an effective guide to mindfulness generally, but more specifically in the context of recovering from depression. Most important, it keeps reminding me that mindfulness brings me back to the knowledge that I am already a healed, whole human being. The practice of meditation cultivates and sustains an awareness of that person under the disguises, the punishing ideas and the bleak feelings of depression. I think of what Michelangelo said about his work as a sculptor, that it was his task to discover the statue within a block of marble by chipping away everything that concealed it. In a similar way, I?m clearing off everything that keeps me from finding and being this well person within.
Here are a few of the book?s insights that have been helpful to me:
Have you found resources or experiences that help you through the painful setbacks inherent in the process of recovery? If books can do that for you, this is a good one to look at.
by john, Storied Mind Blog
May 19th, 2009
Over the past year, I?ve been trying to get a better understanding of mindfulness and its role in recovery from depression. Mindfulness, of course, means much more than finding another technique to overcome a debilitating condition. It?s a way of being alert and present to just about everything I experience. Getting to that state of mind, though, and staying there are two of the most difficult things I?ve tried to do. In the last year, I?ve been working with a book that?s as helpful to understanding mindfulness as any I?ve read.
The Mindful Way through Depression has been an effective guide to mindfulness generally, but more specifically in the context of recovering from depression. Most important, it keeps reminding me that mindfulness brings me back to the knowledge that I am already a healed, whole human being. The practice of meditation cultivates and sustains an awareness of that person under the disguises, the punishing ideas and the bleak feelings of depression. I think of what Michelangelo said about his work as a sculptor, that it was his task to discover the statue within a block of marble by chipping away everything that concealed it. In a similar way, I?m clearing off everything that keeps me from finding and being this well person within.
Here are a few of the book?s insights that have been helpful to me:
- Mindfulness of thoughts and feelings looks at the patterns they form. By observing with detachment what those patterns stir up, I can more readily let them arrive and leave without succumbing to their turmoil. In my experience, it?s like the work in psychotherapy of spotting patterns generated in the distant past and learning how to see them as strategies that no longer work. It?s then possible, hopefully, to let them go.
- In one image, they compare the constant onrush of thoughts and feeling to a waterfall. Instead of standing under it and receiving the full impact of its power, you can stand behind the cascade and observe without being swept away in the currents. The flow is no longer your total reality in that moment but only part of a larger world.
- I depend on images, as well as stories, to internalize a concept like this - to give it emotional reality. Another image the authors use is especially helpful: that of making more room in your mind so that the intrusive thought patterns of depression and its companions take up only a small space rather than the whole. I see this as a real room - not just additional mental space. In one corner is a heap of trash, but the rest is a comfortable, supportive place to live. There is plenty of air and light around me, and the trash is confined to a narrow spot where it?s easy to see it for what it is. I know it has nothing to do with me.
- One of the most helpful insights is that any thinking about the mind?s patterns is meditation. To help people keep this in mind, they recommend a practice that corresponds to what I?ve approached from a slightly different perspective - that of naming the patterns. Mr. Critic comes and goes, but I don?t have to keep him around.
I?ve written many posts that dramatize and personify these patterns as voices, selves, or specific characters who accompany me during the day. That method helps me maintain distance, and I can then tell them to get out or simply refuse to listen to what they say. They are no longer shaping my sense of who I am.
- The book illustrates what people go through to achieve mindfulness with several individual histories. One of these led me to a breakthrough of my own. It concerns David, who had made a lot of progress through private meditation. Under the pressures of daily living, however, he started to experience again a number of problems - extreme anxiety, an inability to focus, constant torment that he couldn?t do anything right. His mind was telling him he wasn?t good enough for anything and would never being able to be happy. He longed for things to be different than they were and grew more and more desperate.
Then he returned to some basic practices he had learned and worked hard at restoring a sense of perspective about his thoughts and feelings. His moment of clarity came when he realized that he could simply let go. The words came to him: I don?t have to be happy. Then he experienced an incredible lightness - and felt happy. That wasn?t the end of the difficulties. Mindfulness is a daily practice that has to be sustained under all sorts of circumstances, and no one can do that without struggle.
- As I read this, aware of my own recurring sense that I was never doing enough, never getting things right, never going to be successful in my new career, I suddenly thought: I don?t have to be successful - and I cried at how deeply that went.
- I could see that my idea of success wasn?t real. It was all about constant measurement in relation to impossible and arbitrary goals I had set for myself. They were part of an old pattern - those goals could never be achieved. They kept moving beyond where I was just as they appeared within reach. There was always something wrong with what I?d done. OK, I wrote all that, but it took too long! Or if I wrote it in less time, it wasn?t good enough! Or if it was well-written and completed in a short time, it was useless because it didn?t produce any income! There was no winning, no chance of ?success.? My own rules made sure of that.
- Seeing so clearly what I was doing, I could feel - not ?successful? according to an arbitrary standard - but fulfilled at doing the writing I?ve always wanted to do. Realizing this has given me peace and helped restore the precious distance I need so that I can listen to myself rather than the patterns, voices or characters of a depressive mind.
Have you found resources or experiences that help you through the painful setbacks inherent in the process of recovery? If books can do that for you, this is a good one to look at.
