A (6:30)
So it's nice to see you all and also to feel our extended field of people listening to the podcast and those who have joined us on the live streaming. We're doing the second class in a row on depression. And when I've done a kind of hand raise, it's pretty much everybody, and I can say this for myself, everyone I know has had some experience of depression. Many have had major depression. And all of us know someone, usually someone very close and dear, who suffered a lot from it. So it's this really ubiquitous part of our culture. And it's an important question, how do we find depression as a portal for spiritual awakening? How does it fit and be included and addressed on a spiritual path? And so this is part two in that and as I described in the last one, many, many different causes, but generally some form of stress where it's too much trauma, poor Parenting. It leads to a severed belonging, a loss of connection. And it's connection with aliveness, a connection with love and with other people. Often it's a connection with our own body, connection with all of the potential of who we are. So it's a real kind of severing. We're no longer part of the flow in those moments. It's a very stuck, contracted, internalized feeling. And I likened it to a log jam. When especially I think of the Northwest, where these logs are floating down a river and they get jammed up. And in that logjam, in terms of depression, the jamming continues. It reinforces itself with looping thoughts, rumination, you know what's wrong. It sustains itself with the whole experience of the emotions that go with that and with the physiology. So for instance, you can start having a sinking feeling and that'll generate more thoughts about what's wrong. That then creates more feelings and more of that physiology of depression. It keeps circling. One of the big things that keeps depression cooking is that it then leads to behaviors that actually reinforce depression, that keep us isolated in different ways, withdrawn, sleeping, addicted in certain ways. Rita Rudner is one of my favorites, and she says, I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don't know, I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes if I see a really great outfit, I will break up with someone on purpose. So we have our behaviors. So when we think of this logjam and how logjams end up being broken up so the logs can rejoin the flow of life. Sometimes the image is of a guy standing at the bend of a river with a long pole. And if he finds certain logs that he can push a little, everything seems to rearrange itself. So when we think of treating depression, it is kind of like that. Some people can treat depression really kind of pull out with the log of exercise. Doing really good exercise. And for many, medication becomes one of those logs that's moved many people. Therapy for almost everyone. Deepening relationships, that's a big one. Meditation. Learning to pay attention in a wise way to the present moment. Cultivating love, cultivating loving presence. It is not sufficient in treating strong depression. We need relationship and we often need therapy. So other things are needed. So it's not sufficient, but it's essential if the depression is going to be a portal to really waking up to true healing. So that's kind of the frame I'd like to offer. Not sufficient. We need other things, but absolutely essential. The reason, one of the reasons is that A key part of depression is a kind of hopelessness and a stuckness. And when we start learning how to shift our attention, shift out of the incessant thoughts of something's really wrong with me, I'm really the one that's flawed. We can start shifting that if we know how to start paying attention to loving kindness, which we'll explore some. We actually change our biochemistry. The mood in the body changes. It's empowering. This is one of the reasons meditation is essential, that when our well being isn't hooked to a medication or another therapist, something we have to pay money for, that we ourselves sense. Oh, there is a way to evolve my own psyche. That's one reason. The second reason is it's only by learning to pay attention in the present moment to what's actually here, with real kindness right here, that we actually experience a shift in identity. A radical shift in identity from being the limited, flawed, depressed self to really being the spirit, space, the compassion that everything's happening in. It's not anymore about moving a log. It's about realizing that we're not just the river, we're really all water and all earth and all sky. We're the whole universe of formless presence that things are happening in. And that shift in identity is what liberates. So we'll explore tonight a bit about both how we can empower ourselves, learning to move the logs and shift our attention. And one of my favorite examples of shifting things is of these two guys. We'll call them Saul and Mort, who they're coming out of a religious service and Saul's wondering if it's okay to smoke while he's praying. And Mort says, go ask Rabbi Schwartz, he'll tell you. So Saul goes to Rabbi Schwartz and he asks him, rabbi, can I smoke while I pray? And Rabbi says, no, my son, you can't. That's utter disrespect to our religion. And he goes back and he tells his friend what the good rabbi said. And the friend said, I'm not surprised you asked the wrong question. You have to shift how you're paying attention to this. So let me try. So Mort goes up to Rabbi Schwartz, he says, rabbi, may I pray while I smoke? To which the rabbi eagerly says, by all means, my son, by all. So we flip things around, we shift our attention. And of course that example isn't totally really nail it, but it was fun anyway. So we'll be exploring what we call gladdening, the mind, shifting our attention to create a different body, mind experience. And then we're going to explore. The second piece will be a full, compassionate presence with reality just as it is, which is the liberating piece that really shifts our identity around. And we started last week with the importance of intention. And we have to keep coming back to it because if you're caught in that depressive space and I ask you the question, well, what really matters to you? Generally, the mood of depression is nothing matters. And yet if we really ask and keep paying attention, there's something in us that wants to get better, that intuits that there's something more in life. There's something there, there's some tendril that's still there. And if we can find that, that what really matters and even sense a tendril of it, it energizes the movement towards freedom. So that was. We covered that in the first part of this. The other piece we covered is really getting the skill of recognizing fear based thinking, okay? Thinking, thinking, come back to the senses. And this is one of the basic skills in meditation that we train in. So then we move on, as I mentioned tonight, to gladdening the mind. And these are ways of paying attention that reconnect us with positive emotion. I saw a cartoon many years ago and had a dog that was lying on a couch and had his earbuds in. And the caption was positive mirroring. And what was going on in his earbuds was, you're such a good doggie. You are such a good. Oh, you are such a good, good doggie. You know, so it's like, it's not necessarily that we're at the level of telling ourselves affirmations like, you're getting smarter and prettier every day or whatever. But it's being able to step out of limiting thoughts and regard ourselves with kindness. That's one approach that does gladden and open our heart and mind. So that's what we'll be doing. And then again, we move from that because if we have a little more access to resourcefulness, then we can start very directly, courageously. Contacting what's here. Does that make sense? These two parts we're talking about. Another word on contacting what's here is in the example, a story with one man who was struggling with depression and anxiety. They often go together in shame and so on. And his therapist encouraged meditation. He said, you'll feel better. So he encouraged him to go to classes. And he said, go to a retreat, you'll be better. So he goes to this retreat and he comes back and he said it was really difficult. I got in touch with fear and I really was caught in it. There was a huge amount of fear and then shame and then I felt sadness and there was self aversion. And you said I'd feel better? He said, yes, you're feeling your shame better and you're feeling your sadness better and you're feeling your self aversion better. And the truth is that when we begin to bring mindful presence to depression, we can feel more strongly what's there and the way through is through. But as I mentioned, for many people, if there's a really strong current of depression and we prematurely try to feel it, we can sink into it too much. Hence, this is why we're starting tonight with Gladdening the Mind. Oh yeah. This cartoon therapist is saying to this very, very, very depressed person on a couch, and how does your crisis crippling depression make you feel? So that's the sinking in. Gladdening the mind has often been described in positive psychology as a really key part of healing because, and we know this from kind of evolutionary science, we have a negativity bias. Anyway, we move through the world and we spend a lot more time thinking about what's going to go wrong, what's around the corner that's really going to nail us. Then we go around saying, how is today going to be the best day of my life? We don't do that as much. And if we have 98 experiences that are really positive with a dog and twice a dog scares us, what do we remember? And this is the way our survival brain is designed is to keep on looking towards what went wrong to protect us. And of course, with depression it's even more so. And we're entirely geared to look through that lens of what's wrong. So just as physical exercise can shift our bodily state, attending differently can shift our mental state. And the first place I'd like to pay attention to in terms of gladdening the mind is the practice of gratitude. There's been a lot of research in the last five years on gratitude and depression. So it's particularly interesting to me that you know that it does show that the practice, the intentional practice of gratitude relieves depression. And in addition, it increases happiness. And for those with illness, it creates more optimism and hopefulness. And you can see the shift in the brain that when you practice gratitude, practice, there's an activation of the left frontal cortex which correlates with positive emotion and a kind of quieting of the limbic system. This is Father Gregory Boyle. He says in A much more if we shift from science to spirituality, he says the block, he's describing the block to divine love, he says, our marriage, to the pain we carry and the lament that accompanies it. That's the block, he says with grace. We come to know that lament can't get a foothold if gratitude gets there first. So gratitude in training, in gratitude, the trick is to get a state of gratitude to become more of an ongoing trait. Because we all know we're happiest when we're feeling appreciation. But then that negativity bias takes over again. So the skillful way about it is that when you do have some tinge of appreciation to get the knack of pausing, let's say you see something beautiful and you go, wow, that's really pretty. Or there's an actual sense of wonder, or you sense somebody that you care about and sense their goodness. Just get a kind of feeling about it. When you're touched by something, stop, pause, and for 15 to 30 seconds actually pay attention to what it feels like in your body, kind of marinate in it. And the reason is that when we have negative experiences, they go right into the implicit memory. In other words, they're stored and they keep coming back. When we have positive experience experiences, they don't. We just kind of skim through them. And so in order to have it enter the implicit memory, you have to pause for 15 to 20 seconds and really feel it in your body. And there's more and more really good neuroscience on this. Okay, so what are the ways that we begin to rev up the gratefulness muscle? Well, for some people, and this is the research has looked at the strategy of simply journaling. Like it can even be as little as once a week. Journaling five things that you're grateful for and that can make a difference, a sentence each. A lot of people I know like having a gratitude buddy and you just do an email every day at the end of the day and just say something you're grateful for. You don't have to say anything else, you don't have to acknowledge their email, nothing. But you just do it. And now and then you check in another one is it's described as a gratitude visit and I'll read it to you. Write a 300 word letter to someone who changed your life for the better. Be specific about what the person did and how it affected you. Deliver it in person, preferably without telling the person in advance what the visit is about. When you get there, read the whole thing slowly to your benefactor you'll be happier and less depressed one month from doing that. There's some powerful rearranging. This is Seligman, who describes this in Flourish, his book. When I lead day long and weekend workshops, there's one meditation I try to do every time if I have time, and it's with people in pairs asking each other the question, please tell me, what do you love? And then asking it again and again and again. And I watch the group in pairs doing this and I watch the faces and I feel like I'm the one that gets the best treat from it because to watch faces start to light up with what they love, I think is the most touching thing in the world. It's just beautiful. I can feel my oxytocin and my endorphins, all that going. My own practice is I'll sometimes do gratitude walks where I'll go out in nature and when I'm, you know, some mornings I get up and I'm feeling kind of grim because my body doesn't feel good and I have a lot to do. And so I'll just dedicate the walk to gratitude walk. And anything that comes to mind, I'll kind of mentally whisper it and say thank you. Like anything I can come up with. Thank you for my dog keeping me company and thank you for the feeling of the wind and thank you for this stick that's helping me to break the. There's webs everywhere, and I'm sorry, spiders, but they get all over me. So, you know, so I'll just. And thank you for baby Mia, my granddaughter, and thank you for Jonathan, my beloved. I'll just keep doing it, you know, and a lot of the times I'm just saying thank you because I woke up out of thoughts and oh, thank you. I'm back again. You know, it always works. It just does. It works. I'm not in the same state. The deal is, no matter how forced gratitude is, deep down our heart does feel appreciation and love for life. And it gets us down to that place. Place. So we'll pause here. We'll do a little. A little touch of gladdening our minds with gratitude. You might sit up, however you're comfortable, and close your eyes and we'll do just a gratitude sit where just to bring to mind. And I invite you to whisper. And don't worry about other people nearby. They're not going to be able to hear you, but just whisper and whisper what you're grateful for and say thank you. And you might whisper a person's name and Say thank you and see what happens. Names of people, things you're grateful for in your life. You might start with the words I'm grateful for thank you. Once you're off and running, just naming the things you're grateful for, and then see how sincere your thank you, thank you can get it. And you might ask yourself, what am I most grateful for really? And sense the innocence in your heart when you say thank you. And then just let your attention go to the quality of presence when you're grateful, what it feels like in your body and your heart. You might even sense, well, who am I when there's a heart full of gratitude right here. One gratitude researcher says that if you're going to sleep and you want a good night's sleep, instead of counting sheep, count your blessings. Now, similar to gratitude, another way to gladden the mind is practicing loving kindness. And the traditional practice is to offer blessings to myself. May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I feel safe, may I feel filled with love, whatever the blessings are. And then to offer to other people that you know, people you don't know. And again, even if it's mechanical, deep down we care about caring. And so it starts to, to access that care. And what we're doing is shifting the patterns of thinking and feeling, and we're expanding ourselves, removing logs in that way. So that's one way to do it. And you can just right now, again, close your eyes for a moment and just offer the words, please may I feel happy and say it a few times and notice what happens when you say it and you're really sincere, like you're offering it in a way that comes with real caring. Please may I feel happy. You might sense that when the sincerity is there, there's a softening, the armoring starts to dissolve. So there's many resources to support you in the loving kindness practice, and that one is quite beautiful. But you can also do it with other people. And this is where we can do meditation practices with others and get the benefit of the relational fuel, too. There is a story in one African tribe that when somebody behaves in a way that creates separation from others and they are troubled and they are breaking rules or customs, they call together all the members of the tribe and they form a great circle, and that person is in the middle. And everyone in the tribe tells that person what's good about them. They tell a story about kind and generous things that person's done in their life. And so this ritual recitation can last for several days. And when it's over, the circle is broken. Everyone celebrates as the person feels their welcome, their belonging again. And I don't know whether this is true or not. It's a really beautiful story, but it speaks to a truth which is that when we're depressed, there's severed belonging. We do not feel like we belong. And when others in some way let us know, they offer their metta, they let us know our goodness. It reconnects. I've shared here before that in the Buddhist tradition, we have spiritual friends groups. They're called Kalyana Mitta. And some of them meet every week, some every other week. That's more common. And they meditate and they share what's going on. And in one of them, one of the people in the group and this story was shared with me, was very depressed. A lot of self castigating. So the group went around and at one point, one of them had the idea, we're going to give you a little bit of a reality test. We're going to say what we see in you. And so one of them said, oh, you've got a lot of insight. You really are attuned to what's going on for other people. Somebody else said, you are honest, you will cut through. You're courageous with what you said. And somebody else said, you know, yeah, you're really for real. You say what you feel. You don't hold back. Another said, your humor slays me. And, you know, it kind of went like this. One person said, I love the way you hug. I feel safe in your arms. Well, this person wrote them down because as happens, they just were bouncing off. She could not take anything in, but she wrote them down. And she didn't tell the group members. But over the next month or two, she read them all the time. I mean, that was her metta. In other words, she took them and she offered that kind of seeing the goodness metta to herself and came back to them and said, you know, I'm more than the flawed self, my flawed self. But it was hearing it from you that helped me get in touch with it. In fact, on Valentine's Day, you know what we did when we were in second grade? Those little cards we gave, they all gave cards with all these little messages of the goodness in each other. But it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Arne Garborg. He says, to love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. So loving kindness, practice. We can do it for ourselves to gladden our mind, and we can do it with each other. My great hope, writes Maya Angelou, is to laugh as much as I cry, to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return. This is the field that we can gladden our hearts. Okay? So I want to move from gladdening the hearts to how do we be with. How do we stop controlling and be with. And we're going to be using the reign of compassion as a way to be with depression and the value of it. Like, why do we want to be with this suffering? Some of you might remember the story of wise sage that lived far in the wilderness, and people would have to trek through forests and over mountains and so on to see him. And when they'd come to his hut, he'd swear them to silence and he'd give them a question. And that is, what are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? That as the liberating question. Because when we're depressed, we don't just try to bury the pain, we also bury our aliveness. And it's not until we're willing to touch the layers of pain that are there under the depression, the grief, the hurt, the fear, the shame, that we can reconnect with the aliveness. It's the pathway back to aliveness, to contact what's there. But it requires a lot of compassion, a lot of presence. So I'm going to give you an example of one woman who worked with Rain to begin to tap into those layers underneath the depression and find some healing. And she was young actually, when I met her. She was sophomore year of college, and she had to leave college because she had plunged into a really big depression. And before she left, she was studying child psychology. She had tutored disadvantaged young people when she was back in high school, and now she was working at clinic. Clinic, teaching emotional resilience. Really cool stuff. And that's when she felt most alive. But right at the beginning of the new year, she crashed because her high school boyfriend, who was still her boyfriend in college, broke up with her, and she just completely crashed. And she lived at home, and for three months, she came back home for three months. She just basically ate and slept and wandered around the house when her parents were at work. That was it. And finally she started working with a good therapist, started going for some walks in Rock Creek and started meeting a couple now and then with some friends from high school. So she was climbing out. The point I met her, she was climbing out, but she was in a major Depression. This is major depression. And when she told me her history, it was not her first round of major depression, which is often the case because it's recurrent. And one of the big questions with recurrent depression is, let's say you climb out. What's the way of being with your life that can prevent going down again? So this is what we were looking at because she was just beginning to climb out. So she had had a major depression back in early high school. Similar things several months where she just couldn't keep going. She was really afraid about going back to college because she was. Even though she was depressed, she wasn't in as deep a slump. She had this critical voice that would go on a rampage and just drive her into depression. And she said, all it's going to take is I'll start thinking about Zach again, her boyfriend, you know, she said, she'll start thinking about why he left, you know. And her critical voice would say, you know, you're too insecure, you're needy. No one else is going to want to be with you. Or else, you know, she'd try on a pair of jeans that were too small and all of a sudden her body undesirable, or she'd miss some questions in a quiz. But this voice would get her and just really bring her down. So she needed something. She needed a way to work with herself so that she wasn't at the mercy of those voices and she could start getting at what was under the depression. So I agreed to teach her rainn, and this is what she worked on. So here's how RAINN works. And for those of you that aren't familiar, recognize. It's an acronym. Recognize, allow, investigate, and Nurture. It's really how to bring mindfulness and compassion to the moment. Recognize and allow. Investigate and nurture. So for her critical thoughts, that was her cue, and she'd recognize, okay, critical thoughts are going on. And allowing doesn't mean you're going to let yourself be swamped by them and believe in them. Allowing means that you've recognized them and you're going to pause and just let everything be for a moment. Because we can't interrupt and change the logjam, the patterning. If we're continuing to react, you have to pause. This is radical. So recognize and allow. She would pause, and then that allows her. You. When you do that, you can then make what I call the U turn. You can then start invest, turning the attention like this from the thoughts to, okay, what's really going on under the thoughts that's the question. So that's what I asked her. I said, okay, under those critical thoughts, what's going on? Check your body, check your throat, your chest, your belly. What are you aware of? And she said, well, it's dark, heavy and closed down. Okay. And I asked her, well, where is that happening? She goes, right here. I said, okay, keep your hand there because I'm going to keep exploring that area. And I said, if this dark, heavy, closed down place could communicate, could express itself, what would it do? What would you notice? She said, well, I see myself in it. I see a little child crouched inside the darkness. So I said, well, how come she is in the dark? And she goes, well, she doesn't want anyone to see her. I said, what does she believe would happen if others saw her? And her response was, they'd see something's wrong with me, that I'm in some way completely flawed or broken. And they wouldn't want to be around. They wouldn't want to be around her. How does that make the little girl feel? And this is when she started filling up with tears. She said, well, it makes her want to stay in the dark so nobody will see her because it hurts too much for people not to love her. It's like dying. So I asked her, so what is it like, Jody is her name, to sense this younger part of you who feels unlovable? And she was weeping then, and she said, she's just a child. She didn't do anything wrong. It's so sad to see her. I asked, what does she most need from you? And she said she wants me to see her and know she's there. She wants to know I care. So now that's the investigating, you know, she's investigating. She's feeling these feelings. She's sensing a child in the dark, a child that feels unlovable. And the child needs her care. Okay, now we're going to shift to nurturing. And. And I said, you know, in some way call on the wisest part of yourself right now for this. And I told her about future self. I said, might for you, it might seem like your wise self or your high self or your body, Buddha nature could be your future self, who you sense you're becoming. That's really, it's the most awake part of you. And she liked the future self. So she said, So I said, okay, now just inhabit that future self. And her hand was still here. And I said, and just offer what the child needs. And so she started whispering, I'm here, I want to Be with you. I'm sorry it's so hard. I care. And she did that. And let her do that for a while because that's nurturing. And often it involves a hand on her heart and a message. And after she'd done that for a while, I just said, now just. You don't have to do anything more. Just sense the presence of your future self and just relax. Just rest in that awareness. Get to know it. Nothing to do. This is what I call after the rain. After you've done all the recognizing and the allowing and the investigating and the nurturing. This is a key, key part of healing. You just rest in the awareness that's here. Don't race past it. Just rest. Get to know it. Because that formless, kind presence is more the truth of who you are than any story of a depressed self or an anxious self. And the more you get to know that, the more freedom there is. That's what she did. And before leaving, she told me, I want to share this part with you. She said, I wish my future self could enroll in my play place. Which made a lot of sense. But then I shared with her that really, the more you do Rain, the more you're actually inhabiting and living from your full potential. Which was motivation for her. Depression is a trance. If you're depressed right now and you're listening, it's a trance state. It's a trance because it's a kind of stuck place that's looping and smaller than the whole of your being. So the question is, how do we bring a presence to what's here in a way that can help us to reconnect with that wholeness? And it has to be kind. It won't work unless it's kind of. One of the challenges with depression is that all of us go through losses. Whether it's the pain and loss of love, feeling that we didn't have, the love we need when we were very young? Our the loss of a relationship that's really, really important to us as we're adults, or the loss of our health, we all go through losses. And if we don't grieve the losses, like open to the rawness of that pain, it becomes depression. If we don't open to our fears, it can become depression. If we don't open to the sorrows, it becomes depression. So the teaching is, whether it's on our own with rain or with others with some similar process of presencing, we need to commit ourselves to being with the rawness of our experience. So it doesn't get covered over in trance. Does that make sense, the importance of it now, sometimes we have to gladden our minds first, sometimes we don't have the opportunity. But the key is that we have to be true to the feelings that are here. So I'm going to share with you as part of closing now, a story that I read in Frankozewski's book, the Five Invitations, that I think really describes beautifully the power of not short changing the real feelings he describes. He got a call and he was asked to come over to the home of a family where a young boy had just died and Frank. This is Frank's work, working with death and dying. So he goes to the house and he says, I arrived at the house a short while after the call. The dispirited parents greeted me and they showed me to the boys room. And walking in, I followed my natural inclination. I went over to Jamie's bed, leaned down and kissed him on the forehead to say hello. His parents broke into tears because while they had cared for him with great love and attention, nobody had touched the boy since he died. It wasn't their fear of his corpse that kept him away. It was a fear of the grief that touching him might unleash. So I want to keep reading. I suggested the parents begin washing the boy's body. They gathered sage, rosemary, lavender, sweet rose petals from the garden. They moved slowly. They put the herbs in warm water, collected towels and washcloths. After a few moments of silence, the mother and father began to wash their little boy. They started at the back of Jamie's head and moved down his back. Sometimes they would stop and tell one another a story about their son. At other times it became too much for the father and he'd go and stare out the window to gather himself. The grief filling the room felt enormous, like an entire ocean crashing upon a single shore. The mother examined and lovingly cared for each little scratch or bruise on her son's body.
