Offer Your Depression – Ending Part

So, surprise, the secret antidote for depression is opening to it and watching it transform into a fount of kindness.

Large depressions also\r\nbenefit from precision and openness, but something more seems to be needed yet\r\nagain. These are the kinds of depressions that arise when a parent or child\r\ndies or when you learn that you or someone you love is terminally ill.\r\nEverything is permanently different, there is no way around it, and there never\r\nwill be. Or, absent a clear cause, you could be in the midst of a lifelong\r\ndepressive state that seems to have no beginning, middle, or end. Then what?

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Well, I don’t know,\r\nbut I can tell you what I do when I find myself having fallen off the deep end.\r\nI remember something that dharma teacher Reggie Ray said to a student during a\r\nmonth-long meditation retreat in the Colorado Rockies. We had been practicing\r\nfor about two weeks when a young man asked how long he would have to sit there\r\nbefore his agitated, frightening, dark thoughts went away. I mean, even after\r\nsitting for five or six hours a day they were unchanged, and he was starting to\r\nfreak out. What should he do with his thoughts and feelings? Reggie said,\r\n“Well, you could always offer them to the deities. They love the display.” At\r\nthat moment, this seemed like a totally reasonable suggestion, and we all\r\nnodded and went on with the retreat.

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After I returned home,\r\nI reflected on this suggestion with the additional insight that I actually\r\ndidn’t know what it meant. However, that has not impinged on its helpful\r\nnature. In the intervening years, I’ve returned to this idea countless times.\r\nWhen I’m at my lowest and have no more ideas about what to do, I think, “Offer\r\nit,” and something shifts. Even if only for a moment, I feel lighter. It’s not\r\na simple offloading into the ether; I intend my feelings as a devotional gift,\r\na kind of mind-prasad.Even though I have no idea how my “gift”\r\ncould be of any value, I offer it anyway . . . I know not to what or to whom.\r\nMaybe it’s the universe. My teacher. Myself. Whatever deity I am meditating on\r\ncurrently, whether peaceful or wrathful. I feel a sense of gratitude that my\r\ndepression could somehow be turned to grist and that someone or something out\r\nthere is loving the mere display. I think of the bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara\r\nand Manjushri and Vajrapani seeing, not my emotional puniness or lack of\r\ncourage, but something now shimmery and now thunderous, now bright and now\r\nfaint. Bursts of blue or red or green. Fireworks.

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I have suggested this\r\ntack to students of my own. Most of them don’t share an iconography with me so\r\nI ask them, who is your deity? I get all sorts of answers, from Jesus to the\r\nGreat Mother to no one.

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No problem. Offer your\r\ndepression tothat.This is the direction of joy.

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Adapted from\r\nSusan Piver’s essay,“The Sadness in Bliss,”from “Darkness Before Dawn:\r\nRedefining the Journey Through Depression,”edited by Tami Simon,\r\npublished by Sounds True.

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Please note that\r\nclinical depression is a medical condition. The article is not intended to\r\nprovide treatment options for those who may suffer from clinical depression or\r\nother forms of mental illness.

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End

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Susan Piver – Lion’s Roar