Mindfulness for depression

Again from Psychology Today:

"Depression is a common condition that affects most of us at some time in our life. For most of us, these depressive episodes pass through like a rainstorm, but eventually they resolve themselves and we bounce back to our normal state of balance. For some, the patterns of anxiety reactions do not lift so easily and the same negative thoughts repeat over and over like a broken record player. This reliving and re-experiencing emotional agitation and pain is a major source of stress and leaves us feeling exhausted and unable to cope. We become apathetic and feel our life energy draining away.

Depression and other anxiety disorders have an internal structure in the form of habitual cognitive reactions to which we have become blindly attached through the process of identification. The negative thought arises and then we become the thought. A worry-thought arises and we become worried. Anger arises and we become angry. Fear arises and we become afraid. This process of becoming happens quite automatically and is sustained by the fact that we are unaware of the reactive process of becoming. The thought arises and literally grabs hold of us and pulls us into a predetermined state of consciousness against our will or choice. Habitual reactions thrive on our unawareness of them and will continue indefinitely so long as we remain unaware. So, clearly the very first step in overcoming depression requires that we reverse this process and train ourselves to become aware of our negative emotional reactions. As the saying goes, “no consciousness, no choice; partial consciousness, partial choice; complete consciousness, complete choice.” In mindfulness psychotherapy this is called awakening to our reactivity.

We may think that we are aware of our thoughts and emotions, and this is true up to a point, but the issue is that we are seldom aware of our reactions in the moment that they arise, only after the fact when we are consumed by becoming the reaction. Our awareness is not immediate and direct, but delayed, and the delaying factor is unawareness. Mindfulness is first and foremost a deliberate effort to change this and awaken to our reactions as soon as they arise. In fact, we learn to recognize the impulse to react that precedes the thought form itself. Each moment in which we become mindful of our impulse to react creates a space, a brief interval in which there is freedom and choice. Sometimes this is all it takes to interrupt the reactive process altogether and we are able to choose to think or act differently. Other times, the impulse is so strong that we are tempted back into becoming the reaction again. Nevertheless, each moment of mindfulness strengthens and cultivates this inner state of freedom, and with conscious effort and repetition, the space of inner freedom will grow. What we are learning to do is to refrain from feeding the beast, the inner structure of habitual reactivity. If you stop feeding a reaction by becoming identified by it then it will begin to lose power to sustain itself. It will also lose its power over you.

Now that you have gained some freedom from your reactivity, you can do something quite remarkable and actively turn your attention towards the suffering, towards the feeling energy that fuels the impulse to react. This is the second part of mindfulness practice and a very important part of the method of Mindfulness Meditation Therapy. We literally make the emotion, itself, the focus of our meditation, which is why we use the term Mindfulness Meditation Therapy.

When we are in the unaware reactive mode of consciousness, we do anything but turn towards our pain. We react further to the anxiety, fear or depression with secondary reactions of avoidance, resistance and aversion. We seek positive distractions; we try to drown our sorrows in drink, obsessive sensory stimulation, or work. We become aggressive and project our inner suffering onto others and even onto those we love. But, through mindfulness, we are able to avoid the secondary reactions of aversion, wanting and distraction and come back to the simple process of being present with our pain. You may think you are present for it, but if you look more closely you will probably see that you are not really present, but reactive. Even the act of thinking about why you are upset or worried is NOT the same as being fully present for the feeling. Mindfulness is the art of being awake to every subtle movement of mind that tries to take you away from being present.

So, through the practice of mindfulness, we learn to be more and more present with our experience, including our direct experience of suffering. This has a remarkable effect on the configuration of emotional energy attached to the negative thought or belief. The feeling energy begins to regain mobility and malleability and in the inner free space of mindful-awareness, the emotion begins to change. We create, what I call a therapeutic space around the emotion, and in this space the emotion responds positively by undergoing therapeutic change. An emotion is an unstable configuration of energy, and the psych will always seek to resolve instability as long as it has the freedom to change. Mindfulness creates this inner freedom and this is why mindfulness is so therapeutic. As we say, “reactivity sustains suffering; mindfulness resolves suffering.” We do not have to try and change the suffering, it changes itself – as long as we stay mindful."

I need to realign. . .

From Psychology Today:

Here are ways to keep anger from feeding your depression.

• First, of course, is to identify anger and to acknowledge it. Anger is one of those emotions whose expression is sometimes subject to taboos so that people can grow up unable to recognize it; they feel its physical discomfort but can't label it.
• Build a lexicon for your internal states. If you have a word for your emotional state, then you can begin to deal with it. Feelings are fluid; you need to stop and capture them in a word, or else you lose them and don't know you have them. A label improves your ability to understand your feelings.
• View your anger as a signal. It is not something to be escaped. It is not something to be suppressed. It is something to be accepted as a sign that some deeper threat has occurred that needs your attention.
• Make yourself aware of the purpose your anger serves. Be sure to distinguish purpose from passion. Things that have a positive purpose seek betterment, growth, love, enhancement, fulfillment. Things that have a negative purpose are motivated by a sense of deficiency. Your boss yells at you, you feel diminished; the anger you express at others is driven by the blow you've just received. Are you enraged about an inequity or unfairness? In order to identify your motivation, you need to look within. It's a matter of becoming psychological-minded and engaging in introspection. Tune into the inner dialogue that you customarily have with yourself.
  
• If your anger is deficiency-motivated, driven by a wish to rectify a wrong you believe done to you, work on acceptance. Give up your obsession about the wrong. See that the opposite of anger is not passivity but more functional assertiveness.
• Uproot mistaken beliefs that underlie your response. Very often anger is the result of beliefs that lead you to place unreasonable demands on circumstances, such as, that life must be fair. Unfairness exists. The belief that you are entitled to fairness results from the mistaken idea that you are special. If you feel that you are special, you will certainly find lots to be angry about, because the universe is indifferent to us. Insisting that life must be fair is not only irrational, it will cause you to collect injustices done to your noble self. Even if you are experiencing nothing more than your fair share of unfairness, such a belief can still fuel rage and lead to depression.
  Those who hold the deep belief that life should always be fair cannot abide when it is unfair. That leads directly to rage that is totally inert, because they believe there is nothing that they can do about the unfairness. They feel helpless and hopeless—in other words, depressed. Self-pity is another description of the same phenomenon.
  
• Notice your own complaining. Listen for both overt and covert complaining. Overt complaining hassles others. It's really a manipulative strategy. Know when it's becoming a downer and a barrier to a strategy of effectiveness—like complaining about a fly in your soup. Covert complaining hassles you; it drags you down into passivity and inertia. Once you notice it, determine to give it up.
• Once you can accept that life sometimes is unfair, then you can pursue positive purpose. You can work constructively against injustices you find, transforming your anger into passion. Or you can pursue fulfillment in spite of the unfairness that exists.

From Matthew Ricard's Blog

Our happiness depends on that of others
Tuesday 27 March 2012

Among all the clumsy, blind and extreme ways we go about building happiness, one of the most sterile is egocentrism. “When selfish happiness is the only goal in life, life soon becomes goalless,” wrote Romain Rolland. Even if we display every outward sign of happiness, we can never be truly happy if we dissociate ourselves from the happiness of others. This in no way requires us to neglect our own happiness. Our desire for happiness is as legitimate as anyone else’s. And in order to love others, we must learn to love ourselves. It’s not about swooning over the color of our own eyes, our figure or some personality trait, but about giving due recognition to the desire to live each moment of existence as a moment of meaning and fulfillment. To love oneself is to love life. It is essential to understand that we make ourselves happy in making others happy.

In brief, the goal of life is a deep state of well-being and wisdom at all moments, accompanied by love for every being, and not by that individual love that modern society relentlessly drums into us. True happiness arises from the essential goodness that wholeheartedly desires everyone to find meaning in their lives. It is a love that is always available, without showiness or self-interest. The immutable simplicity of a good heart.

click here for more wisdom

Small lessons on letting go

1. I have a billion CDs. It comes from my love affair with music, and the fact that I ran a music store for five years before the industry tanked. My attachment to these objects is one that has been unwavering for years. I was slow (compared to most) to move to digital music. Once I did, a few years ago, I painstakingly took months to convert everything I had on disc to digital format for our portable players. We then bought a house not long after, and since we moved in, all those CDs have mostly been in boxes in our laundry room. Rarely have any of them been used since. So finally, I opened up those boxes and called over friends to ransack it all. Take anything and everything. I have a big part of me that was very ready for this. The other part had a hard time giving them up. Although it is hard to part with them (and know that I am not really sentimental about objects, in general), three pretty wonderful things also happened:

A. This brought a lot of joy to my friends. I think they had fun rummaging, remembering lost gems and finding new curiosities since price was not a limiting factor. And I had fun seeing their joy.

B. Watching my friend Rick, with completely fresh ears, take stacks of CDs to try out on our neglected and lonely CD player. No real bias, no preconceived notions, just child-like curiosity. For a "music expert" such as myself, it made me ask myself, "When was the last time you listened to music like that?" With no real knowledge or pre-judgement on what is being heard. It was refreshing to see that his only criteria was listening, and based on whether he liked what he heard determined whether they made it into his keeper pile.

C. Simply rediscovering pieces of my older collection. Remembering why I had some of that stuff in the first place. Since I'm always on the hunt for something new, often I forget to go back to older works, mainly because there's limited time and drivespace. Lately, I've been using my party shuffle function when driving, and this has been fun--to see how things mix, to sometimes be surprised by a forgotten song, and to have some variety. Music is art, and art has a way of speaking to you differently during different times in your life. I kind of need to put the party shuffle on my older collection to see what might speak to me now.

2. Christin's mom is going all-in; she sold her house, is moving to D.C. and getting rid of a ton of stuff that are daily reminders of her childhood and adolescence. The generation before us, I think, generally has a greater attachment and sentimentality towards objects. Their parents might have had it harder, and their grandparents certainly did. People had to get by on what they had. They had to make their own things. They had to work and fight for what they had because there wasn't much to go around. She's tried for years to get us and the rest of her children to take things, but for the most part, we haven't been interested. For her, these things are memories, but to us, it's just stuff. It's been hard for her to understand that, and probably harder to finally let go of a lot of these objects. But she is. She's exhausted this week, but I think she will find it freeing once she's done with the task. And I'm impressed with her ability to jump head first into a new life and let go of the objects of her past despite how hard it's been for her this week.

3. Work is getting to me. We have a huge project going on to move our agency into the digital age, and pretty much from the beginning, it has not gone as we expected it would or think that it should. It is very hard for me to let go of this. It's causing many of us a lot of extra work, we're constantly behind (which makes me feel like I'm failing every day), and we're tired. Normally, when faced with situations like this, I just put my head down and plow through it. But this is a project that involves tons of interdependency. I'm not super great at relying on others to help me. Especially when we feel like we're not really getting the help we are asking for. I haven't been able to find a place for this yet. Usually Christin and I ride this supportive see-saw. One of us will be anxious/angry/frustrated/etc about it, while the other is more collected and unaffected. Then another day, we switch roles. It's exhausting. But I can't help but feel like some aspect of how I'm dealing with this is eluding me. And thus, causing more suffering than there needs to be. I'm aware, and I'm observing myself and searching for triggers, so hopefully I can continue to distance myself from the chaos of it. And. Just. Let. It. Go.

4. Christin and I discussed downsizing some of our expenses, so that we can continue to live comfortably when she begins her internship this fall and goes part-time at work. Two obvious eliminations: U-verse and smart phones. Again, there's a part of me that would feel freed by not having the option of TV and internet on my phone, while another part feels uncomfortable. Besides, it's not like we wouldn't have the internet and still be able to stream Netflix. It's not like I don't have 3 gaming systems in the house (four if you count the PC) if I wanted to play games. And most importantly, it's not like I don't have 100 other things competing for my interest (music, reading, home projects, RPGing, becoming more physically active, etc.).

Great Expectations

I've been thinking lately that when I feel disappointed, angry or upset about something, that it's really because something didn't meet my expectations. And while there may be good reason sometimes for me to actually have those expectations, it is the clinging to them that causes the suffering.

This works with the aesthetics of my hobbies (being disappointed in a particular artist's album); watching the media, pundits and politicians debate with sophistry and casuistry (which I try to avoid these days); or having disagreements and conflicts with friends, family and co-workers (somebody does something I don't agree with, whether it is merely an inconvenience or some sort of perceived moral failing).

Is it helpful to establish blame and wield anger and resentment as sword and shield? Or should we accept that sometimes things do not live up to our expectations of them and simply work towards a solution and/or move on?

Pip got his heart broken, Estella was cruel and unhappy, and Miss Havisham went up in flames in her mouldering wedding dress. Maybe sometimes expectations shouldn't be great.

Non-violence In The New Century

Turning Swords Into Plowshares

Unexamined

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Here's how I'd say it:

If you don't examine your beliefs, they're not beliefs. And they're not yours.

Birds on our porch

So for the past week, we've been watching a pair or sparrows or finches (I don't really know what they are, but they're smallish) build a nest in one of our hanging plants on the front porch. The plants require watering every two or three days, or they become kind of wilted, so I've been trying to be careful. Yesterday, I noticed that I hadn't seen the pair, and so when I watered the plant, I pulled it down from the hook to see if there was anything inside. There is a tiny nest that could fit in the palm of your hand, and inside the nest is a small, speckled egg. I carefully rehung the basket, noting on which side the nest was, so I didn't cover it in water.

Then I noticed the concrete below the plant. There were the remains of a different, light blue, non-speckled egg, shattered around its dried yolk. Some other bird threw out the original pair's egg and stole the nest from them. I haven't seen the original pair again, and I also haven't seen the nest-stealing culprit. The egg remains.

There is an overwhelming part of me that tells me this is awful and wrong. But that's me applying my human morality to nature. The original pair worked hard for days to build that nest. They gathered weed stems and tender twigs. They plucked their own down feathers to line the inside. They gently placed the product of their love (see, there's some more anthropomorphism) inside that nest. And some other species that has learned to survive by conserving it's own energy and taking advantage of others destroyed that potential offspring and stole their spring home. Are these birds seething in rage? Are they plotting revenge? Should I lie in wait to find the intruder to enact justice? Or have they simply moved on?

The original birds are without our attachments, and they will trudge on. If there is time in the season, they probably have already started a new nest and new egg somewhere else. And the intruder will trudge on as well. They do what they do. I still feel sadness at the way in which the world sometimes works, but there is a lesson that little bird family can teach me.

Dalai Lama's panel discussion in Fayetteville

Currently waiting to watch the Dalai Lama's panel discussion on nonviolence, Turning Swords Into Plowshares: The Many Paths of Nonviolence, at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. I'm sure there will be much to blog about later. Will update.

UPDATE (again): Well, something happened on Blogger, and my update I posted yesterday was deleted, so I'll try to recreate it.

The panel discussion also featured Dr. Vincent Harding, a civil rights activist and professor that wrote the speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered about the US involvement in Vietnam in 1967, and Sister Helen Prejean, a nun that has worked in the prison system and wrote "Dead Man Walking".

These were the points I took away from the panel:

1. Our actions have motivations for them to become actions. We need to have our motivation be compassion, instead of fear, anger or hatred, like is so common in our culture right now. Compassion must come from within and be genuine. It is not pity. It is a general understanding and wish that all beings find peace and happiness. Nonviolence can be achieved by having compassion be our motivation for our actions. It does not entail that we "roll over" for our enemies either. We must still sometimes prevent wrongdoing, but we should still hold compassion for our enemies, or the cycle of violence will continue.

2. Our enemies are our teachers. In order to practice compassion and forgiveness, we must engage in productive ways with our enemies. It is easy to be compassionate and forgiving to our friends, family, etc., but it is hard to do this with your enemies. We must understand one another, and that all of us want basically the same things. In finding the commonalities, in finding that our enemies are not "demons", but humans with motivations and emotions and makeup similar to our own, it will be easier to find compassion and forgiveness. But this cannot happen if we do not bother to engage in a meaningful way with our enemies.

3. Holding on to fear, anger, hatred, etc. takes time and energy. This energy is better spent on simply trying to do good things; helping people (even if it's just one person); making things better. If you instead try to do good, you simply will not have time for hatred.

I can't help but feel like what I wrote yesterday was better, but the basics were the same. As soon as I can find some video and/or transcripts of the talks, I will post that as well.

Some brief thoughts on celebrating death

So after about a decade and a half of being on the Most Wanted list, Osama Bin Laden has been killed. Without really finding a delicate way to say what I'd like to say about such a passionate subject, I'll just pose some questions and brief thoughts.

Is the world really better off without this man? I have no doubt that he was at least, misguided, and at worst, despicably evil. I understand the emotions surrounding his death at U.S. hands. While I know no one personally, directly affected by what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, that event did hurt us all. We all felt it in a rare moment of national (perhaps international) emotional gestalt. I understand the human need to place blame and seek vengeance. I'm pretty sure I would kill to protect people I love without pausing to feel conflicted about it. These are natural, human reactions, and we're all human. And I understand that.

But what happens later? Why must we always think and react with the reptilian part of our brains? While I could no doubt kill someone intending my loved ones harm, I can't as certainly proclaim that it wouldn't haunt me later. This is what you should be thinking about when you get patriotic about our servicemen. That they kept you from having to make those decisions that may haunt you for the rest of your life.

While I believe it was probably an unavoidable blow that had to be given, I hope it has the meaning that we wanted it to have. I hope that it becomes a goal that was worth all the time, money and lives spent in achieving it. I am not a nationalistic chest beater, but I see the importance (and maybe even the necessity of this event). But what saddens me is seeing how people react to it. Whenever I would see some third world country's streets full of revelers over the death of some overthrown or assassinated leader, beating effigies or burning flags, I always thought, "How primitive." And now I see that we have shown the world our primitive side too. It's no wonder that we can't get along better when we run through the streets in exuberant celebration of someone's death.

I understand it, and I empathize, but I'm not sure it's the right response. I don't want to deny anyone healing that needs it, but taking pleasure in the death of someone (no matter how despicable), and in some cases going even further to wish your particular brand of eternal damnation on a being, seems like a dark blemish on the soul, not a healing salve. When dealing with loss, do we assemble totems that will bring the object of our loss back to us, or do we instead find a way to accept and move on. To live our lives well, as the saying goes.

Please ask yourselves some of these things as you think about current events, and if you feel like dancing in the streets, maybe try this celebration in it's place: Here's to living our lives well. Here's to being better. And here's to hope that we can all heal our wounds without inflicting new wounds on others.

Be good to one another.