Offer Your Depression – Part 1

Once I was in a meeting with a publisher to discuss a book I was writing (for which he had paid a tidy sum). He hated it. He hated me.

We did not understand\r\neach other at all. I came to the meeting having thoughtfully considered his\r\nperspective, prepared to defend the points I was passionate about and\r\ncompromise where possible. He came to the meeting with only two words for me:\r\nThe first one was “fuck” and the second one was “you.” “Fuck you” is what he\r\nsaid to me. Game over.

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I was devastated,\r\nreeling, crushed. It was like inviting someone over to meet your newborn (in\r\nthis case, my book) and having them pick her up out of the crib and throw her\r\non the ground. I left the building sobbing, enraged, certain my life was over,\r\nwith only my ever-diminishing bank account to keep me company. I hadn’t taken\r\nten steps out of the building when I bumped into my friend Michael. Michael is\r\na deeply practiced and wise practitioner in my Shambhala Buddhist lineage,\r\nsomeone I turn to unhesitatingly for advice and insight into the dharma. He\r\nalso used to work in publishing and would understand exactly what had just\r\nhappened. He also didn’t even live in New York City (where this all took\r\nplace). That he happened to cross my path at that moment was absurdly lucky.

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We sat down in a\r\nrestaurant, and I said, “My meditation practice must be so weak if one person\r\nsaying two words can knock me down so thoroughly.”

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He said, “So you think\r\nnot getting upset is the sign of a strong practice?” I hoped it was. “It\r\nisn’t,” he said. “What matters is how directly and immediately you can bring\r\nyour attention to what you feel. That is the sign of a strong practice.”

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Depending on the\r\nquality of the depression, sometimes I can actually do this.

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Small depressions\r\noffer the perfect opportunities to try. These are the depressions that don’t\r\nprevent you from living life as much as they color your experience in a darker\r\nshade. They may be situational, the result of not getting into the school of\r\nyour choice, having an argument with a friend, or screwing up a job interview.\r\nOr maybe you’re just kind of constitutionally morose. What helps is to simply\r\nturn toward your feeling and, yes, feel it. Allow it. Lean into it, as Pema\r\nChödrön says, without—and this is the key to the whole thing—attaching a\r\nnarrative story line to it. In other words, feel the feeling and let the story\r\ngo. When the story wants to come back (“I feel this way because it is her\r\nfault,” “I was raised by nincompoops,” “I always attract the wrong person”),\r\nlet it go and return attention to what you feel, which means what you feel in\r\nyour body. Place your attention on the sensations (hot, cold, tight, diffuse,\r\nin the shoulders, belly, elsewhere) and feel into them, discern their\r\nqualities. Become very, very precise about your exploration. This seems to\r\nintroduce the process of metabolization, a way for you to digest what you are\r\nexperiencing and convert it to energy.

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Medium-sized\r\ndepressions are not addressed by simply creating room to feel them. That is\r\nonly the beginning. These depressions could be for any reason or no reason at\r\nall. Maybe you were born with a depressive nature. Maybe you don’t like yourself.\r\nMaybe you have inner issues that continually create obstacles for you, and you\r\ndon’t know how to change them. This is the kind of depression that is always\r\nhanging around; it lives alongside you. Feeling it is a good start but more is\r\nrequired—making a friendly relationship with it is necessary. Here, making\r\nfriends doesn’t mean having fun together. It doesn’t even mean liking each\r\nother. It means creating space to hang out and to become curious about this\r\nstrange friend. Our friends like it when we take a warm interest in them\r\nwithout an agenda (in fact, this could be the definition offriendship:warm\r\ninterest without agenda); our depression likes this, too. We could actually\r\nbecome loving, open, and accommodating toward it and in just this way, develop\r\nsome agency within our depression rather than being defeated by it.

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As we do so, we find\r\nthat we are able to meet others in their depressions and, bit by bit, shift our\r\nattention away from ourselves and on to them. Far from making you a goody-goody\r\nin yoga pants, this makes you powerful—and feeling powerful is the opposite of\r\nfeeling depressed. So, surprise, the secret antidote for depression is …

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To be continued

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Susan Piver – Lion’s Roar