Meditation and Depression

Question 2: When meditating I sometimes fall into despair.    Isn't meditating supposed to be fun?

Mataji/John's response:  Well, meditating is often fun, but sometimes not fun at all. As St. John of the Cross wrote hundreds of years ago, in a spiritual journey, one can encounter dark nights of the soul. For meditating westerners, there are two triggers of despair: clinical depression; and the disappearance of our fantasies of a "heroic solution" to life's challenges.

Clinical depression occurs when there is a mixture of mind and body predispositions to depression. It can be overwhelming, and the chronically deeply depressed person should seek medical guidance. I have psychically observed several people with bipolar disorder (where episodes of clinical depression alternate with periods of excessive excitement) and its intensity when the person is suffering an attack is awesome, like a force of nature. Even for milder, yet chronic forms of depression, sitting still meditation hasn't been found to be generally helpful. So, caution is called for. Meditation isn't for everyone. For the severely depressed person I would suggest medical intervention, and for any chronic depression I would recommend a form of therapy or self-help often called cognitive therapy. Also skillful complementary healers might help. When chronic depression is within a safe range (where one is reasonably functional and reasonably willing to engage life), then the right form of meditation and other growth work can help. I know of people who are under a conventional doctor's care for clinical depression, and who do benefit from meditation.

The second trigger of depression or even despair in meditation occurs when we release treasured illusions that we can find some heroic answer to life's pains. Ironically, this depressing release is a kind of breakthrough. For example, westerners often encounter a certain level of "no-thingness", of "no self". You don't have to be enlightened to tap into a chakra just above the center of the head called the Nirvanic chakra. Westerners, often, upon seeing that ultimately there is no separate self, and there is nothing to strive for, say to themselves, "If I have no self, then why do I have to be so stressed and sometimes break my heart?" The answer is the same words with a different emotional twist, "If I have no self, then why do (I act as if) I have to be so stressed and sometimes break my heart?" When you ask yourself the question with the right emotional understanding, you begin to return to a level of what the Buddhists call suchness.

Suchness requires letting go of the way we grasp onto pain. I believe it was Marcus Aurelius who said there is nothing bad except that thinking makes it so. This isn't to say that we don't have painful and tragic events. Something more subtle is intended. What is meant is that pain and tragedy can be borne, and even experienced in an overall context of meaning. The Buddhists might say that we have to let go of grasping our experience. In this instance we must let go of grasping our unpleasant experiences.

The way we hold onto our pain is by engaging in thinking with should's, ought's, and have to's. Telling ourselves that life should, ought or has to be a certain way distances us from life, and undercuts our effectiveness. Most important, perhaps, it multiples our subjective experience of pain. When we can allow our experience to be just what it is; allowing pleasant experiences be pleasant in that moment, and unpleasant experiences be unpleasant in that moment, then there is no grasping. Then we can engage life with increasing skill and compassion, and then a larger framework of joy surrounds and interpenetrates increasingly large portions of our experience, whether we are having success or failure, pleasure or pain.

Most of us enter into meditation with the desire to solve our life's problems and dissatisfactions. This is a reasonable motivation and skillful meditation does indeed result in our becoming more capable and resourceful and compassionate. These attributes bring great pleasure. But even the most skillful among us cannot gain such heroic skillfulness that he or she never suffers.

When we are young, we struggle to learn how to join with others and society, as we get older we may continue to struggle with relationships and have new kinds of societal challenges, and we must cope with getting older, or with seeing our friends and loved ones die. And we all see many on the planet who suffer, and we cannot by skill solve all of humanity's suffering.

The Buddhists call this dilemma impermanence. The solution is to embrace life with the understanding that while we can become more skillful and compassionate, there is a kind of meaning and joy that do not depend upon success or failure, or even upon pleasure or pain. We will find meaning and joy to the extent that we engage life with intensity without holding onto the outcomes. We can do that when we let go of the should's, ought's and have to's.

Meditating can be a powerful aid in cultivating this non-grasping awareness. Meditating can bring us face to face with despair and can then help us let go of our illusions that we must have life in a certain way. Then we can tap into an increasing degree of pleasure, while recognizing that our joy is independent of the transitory, yet intrinsically glorious dance of life.

c 2001 by John Friedlander
www.PsychicDevelopment.cc

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