Depression and Meditation, Part 1 — Crossing the Threshold

I’ve suffered from depression for most of my life. It’s been such a pervasive fact of my experience that for many years I just assumed that that was the way life was — miserable, or that the misery of the particular stage I was in at the time was a temporary price to pay to get to the next stage, to get what I wanted, to accomplish some goal or get some thing that would make me happy.

When I look back and try to understand my depression it can get messy. Depression manifests in so many ways and it can be confusing and complicated trying to figure out what is a symptom and what is a cause. But if I were to pinpoint one factor, one perspective that pervaded every dark moment, it would be the knowledge of the fleeting nature of life and my inevitable death.

My earliest memory of being aware of this reality was somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8. I was lying in bed and for the first time I realized that I would die some day. It didn’t even matter that I believed at that time, as I would for many years later, that there was a life after death. It filled me with fear, sickness and panic and I burst into tears. I remember my Dad coming to see what was the matter. I explained my fear and my Dad reassured me that I would experience many wonderful things along the way. The reassurance may have worked at that moment, but the despair would return again and again throughout my life.

Many years later, having returned home from a two year stint as an LDS Mormon missionary. I looked back at the last two years, an iconic era of life for a young Mormon man, and was overwhelmed with a feeling of grief that it was done. It was over. Not that I loved being a missionary. To the contrary, it was mostly stressful, exhausting and tedious work, punctuated with occasional moments of joy. I felt immense relief to be done, but the grief was a grief for the finality of it. Anything I had wanted to be or do as a missionary was done, and I would never add anything more to that chapter. In an uncanny re-enactment of my earlier moment of despair I again broke into tears, and again my father was there to comfort me.

Over the years I have gained a greater awareness of my depression. You can’t be so constantly miserable and not have it interrupt your ability to be a functional human being. And in a society so focused on functionality and productivity, that can be a big motivator to try and fix things.

Along the way I tried lots of interventions for depression: counseling, medication, cold exposure, heat exposure, nature exposure, abstinence, recreational drugs, nurturing friendships, traveling, meditation, exercise, service, heroic feats, media fasts, following my dreams, taking it easy, pushing myself more, week-long fasts etc.

Over time, I found some stuff that helped. Regular exercise, good eating habits, getting good sleep, occasional meditation and therapy all made things better.

There was also another higher level, philosophical set of interventions that helped. They didn’t remove the despair, and I can’t even really say they gave me peace, but they gave me a sense of meaning and stability in the face of the grinding tragedy of life. It was simply to live my life with integrity. I couldn’t affect how I felt from moment to moment, but I could choose to live my life in a way I could be proud of. In the face of despair, this was a profoundly emboldening perspective to hold on to. I could be a good father, a good husband, make work I was proud of and live a moral, generous life.

I could see the positive effects of the incremental work I had done over the years. I was functional and in many ways believed that I did such a good job that I didn’t really have depression.

And yet, signs would emerge that all was not well. The day-to-day was smoother, yet the moments when the darkness did emerge where more dramatic, more intense and more destabilizing. Any article on treatment for depression still made my ears perk up and I would find myself considering more and more risky interventions, and considering more and more destructive choices that threatened to undermine the precious sense of integrity that I had worked so hard to build.

I had a life that was objectively abundant. I was in a great place financially, I was healthy, I had a loving family, a beautiful home and I was doing exactly the type of art that I wanted to do.

And here I was — angry, frustrated, feeling disappointed with my life up to this point and confused and aimless about my future. In many ways it was a stereotypical midlife crisis, and I guess that’s just how things naturally unfold. You live a certain amount of life, gain enough experience and eventually this momentum of experience meets the unavoidable reality of the passage of time. You have to process that, make sense of where you’ve been and where you are going. I was not doing a great job of processing.

The other symptom that began to become more and more distressing was a pervasive anhedonia — an inability to feel pleasure. I found food to be completely uninteresting to me, but I was finding it increasingly hard to find pleasure in other things as well like art, sex, or even simple pleasures like walking on a sunny day, or watching a good movie. I would think back on pleasures I enjoyed as a child and bemoan that my ability to enjoy life was gone. I saw it as a natural effect of ageing. I had just seen enough of life that it was no longer interesting to me. I would never enjoy anything as much as I did drinking a can of Orange Crush at the age of five. Only very intense interventions seemed to change this — recreational drugs, high intensity exercise and hot and cold exposure — although nothing lasted long.

Although I had some hopes of positive things happening in my future, I mostly looked forward to the rest of my life with a sense of inevitable, intensifying misery — less energy, less pleasure, greater fatigue with life, more pain, sickness and of course the impending fear of death. I didn’t really have any serious suicidal ideation, but I could rationally look forward to my future and see suicide as a likely outcome, once the misery compounded enough. I had seen stories like that of Chris Cornell or Anthony Bourdain, and this seems like exactly what happened in their cases. You can spend much of your life successfully running from the darkness, but at some point reality catches up. Suffering gains in momentum, while your ability to run slows. The drugs don’t give you the same high, novelty isn’t as novel and you are backed into a corner where you have to face the ugliness, fear, sadness and horror.

I was finding myself increasingly cornered. I could no longer ignore the surging despair welling inside of me. I couldn’t escape it. Not through drugs, or games, or binging Netflix, or pornography. I felt like life was cutting off all of my means of escape, and I there was only one door I could see left to take — meditation.

I initially started meditation about 12 years prior and had a very positive experience with it. Part of what makes meditation so thrilling is that it is not about escape, but about slowing down and paying attention to what you’re actually experiencing from moment-to-moment. I started with John Kabatt-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, and had some powerful and deeply tranquil and blissful experiences. Much of what I was feeling with meditation I had only ever felt within the context of my worship as an LDS Mormon, and this encouraged me there that there was something at least of equal value to Mormonism within the practice. Sadly, my commitment to a regular practice flagged over the next several years as I started a family and made several career moves. I would go months or more without doing any meditation then resolve to recommit and and do so for a month or two.

In late 2018 and early 2019, as I was experiencing increasing eruptions of negativity and confusion I started recommitting to a regular practice. I would sit for about 30 minutes most weekdays, but wasn’t so good on weekends. As I would understand later, I made some good progress during that time, eventually even being able to sit for 30 minutes and focus on my breath without losing concentration.

I was also increasingly determined to do a meditation retreat. Honestly, I was also interested in psychedelics at that time and hoped that a retreat would do something similar to what I heard from early research on psychedelics — it would produce mind-blowing, maybe terrifying, or sublime hallucinations that would be life altering, and cure my depression.

I had looked at retreats before, but the combination of price, travel and lack of confidence in my meditation practice conspired to keep me from making the decision.

Fortunately, I had started attending a local meditation group and learned about a retreat that was going to be held in Cache Valley, Utah — a 2 hour drive from my home. It also happened to be extremely affordable. I signed up.

The retreat was held at the end of July 2019. As the name suggests, a meditation retreat is a retreat where you meditate. There is not much more to it than that, which can understandably be kind of terrifying. He are some more details to help add more resolution to the picture: There are no phones, no computers, reading and writing are discouraged and most importantly, no speaking. It is 5 days spent in what is referred to as “noble silence”. The schedule starts with the first sit at 6:30 am and alternates between sitting meditation and walking meditation (about 45 minutes per session) with some instruction and Q and A. There are three vegetarian meals served throughout the day and the last sit finishes at 9pm, after which you are free to continue practicing or prepare for bed.

The further I got into the retreat, the more my anxieties were alleviated. First of all, it isn’t 5 full days of retreat. The first day is the day of arrival, which is much more of an orientation. You get all the info, you eat, you listen to a talk and by the time it’s all done you might have had 30 minutes of actual mediation time. The 5th day is also not a full day, although there isn’t all the orientation work and it goes until 3pm, so it’s actually a decent amount of time to spend sitting, but also not a full day.

So, it’s really more like 3 ¾ days, but still, it was enough to inspire some anxiety. I entered into Saturday mostly worrying about being able to do it. It’s funny how suddenly being separated from the deluge of stimulus we are so accustomed to can be so anxiety inducing. Boredom is a completely untolerated state in contemporary life and being plunged into it so suddenly and without respite can be immensely uncomfortable.

The setting of the retreat was what appeared to be a bible camp. A small brook ran through the middle of the camp with sparse bunkhouses running along one side of the creek and a sitting area on the other side shaded by a fallen willow that had continued to grow and created a vast canopy over the lawn. Past the willow, the lawn extended to a forlorn volleyball net and on to small pavilion where we ate our meals.

Saturday was exhausting. Between working through the discomfort of so much sitting, sleepiness and the constant mental work to stay focused, I ended the day totally enervated.

The next day started with a heavy rain that left us spending the first half of the day sitting in what appeared to be a large sheet-metal milk barn converted into a meeting hall. We sat within a ring of pews that had been pushed to the perimeter. The weather was a bit glum, but the sitting was getting easier.

By the middle of the day, the first group of retreatants was preparing to leave. There was an option for a 3-day retreat, which I had originally considered, but at the last minute, decided to take the plunge and do the whole thing. As the others left I remember feeling a great sense of relief that I was still on retreat. I have since learned that the first day or so of a retreat is actually the hardest as your mind and body is adjusting to the drastic change in routine. By Sunday afternoon I had settled in. My practice had relaxed into this place where my attention was casually shifting between my breath, sounds and sensations in my body. Thoughts would drift in and out, but they all had a softness to them. I was mostly finding myself in an increasingly blissful, relaxed state.

Sunday night the teacher gave a talk that would end up transforming my life. She spoke about Ajahn Cha, a monk in the Thai Forest Tradition who was highly influential on the Western Insight Tradition, teaching such prominent meditation teachers as Jack Kornfield. As the teacher related, Cha was known to be an extraordinarily happy person. Once when asked why he was so happy, Cha responded with an object lesson. He gestured to a glass and said something to the effect of, “See this glass. Someday it will fall and break. I love this glass because it is already broken.” The teacher used the story as a lesson in impermanence, and how it reveals the preciousness of life. She elaborated that we will all someday be sick, grow old and die. We are all already sick, we are already old, we are already dead. We are already broken.

My initial reaction to this story was confusion. I had known this to be a reality all my life. Since my earliest memories I had been aware of my impending death, and the fleeting nature of life and it had only brought me despair. How was it that this same knowledge could somehow lead to someone being intensely happy?

I continued my practice for the rest of the night, not dwelling too much on it. The next morning, during the first sitting of the morning, I was back in the meditation groove I had established, noting sound, breath and sensations. In the midst of this I recalled the teaching from the night before. I pictured myself growing old, getting sick and dying and did the same for my wife, and children. It was made easier by the fact that not a week prior we had spent four days in the hospital after our son had been hit by a truck. It wasn’t hard to imagine salient images about how bad things could have been. What happened next happened within a split second, but it was so rich and layered that the time to read it might give an inaccurate sense of the explosive nature of the event.

The images came starkly and clearly into my mind and I could feel a surging rush of something starting to build. The phrase “How Wonderful Life Is” suddenly came into my mind. On the first syllable of Wonderful, a diamond shaped solar burst erupted in my chest, washing me over with an overwhelming feeling of love, gratitude and joy. I opened my eyes and looked up in awe at the willow branches as they radiated with a pure, crystalline clarity. I looked around at the others sitting silently around me, and I chuckled at the beautiful transcendent secret I was savoring in their midst. I imagined my wife sitting in the group and was filled with an intense love and gratitude for her. I closed my eyes and was washed over with memories from my life. All the disappointment and the pain; the frustration and despair. It was all okay. It all led me to this place, to be able to see things in the way I was seeing them now. I thought of my friendships. All of those that had shared their lives with me and given me their love. I wept uncontrollably, the feeling of my tears running down my face filling me with a sense of warmth and pleasure that was incomparable to anything within my recent memory.

Someone that has done MDMA will get a sense of the intensity and flavor of the experience, but there was an additional quality to it. It wasn’t just a feeling, but an understanding — a re-contextualization of everything I had lived and felt — and it was a release. Before the retreat, I had depression. Now? It was gone.

In my few experiments with recreational drugs in the past I had gained an insight that would turn out to be relevant to this moment. My first time using pot, I had the distinct feeling of removing a cloak — a thick layer of heaviness suffocating everything underneath. This was my depression. Underneath was pure and simple goodness. Love for my family and love for my work.

Not surprisingly, the effects of recreational drugs were not long-lasting and the contributions to insight did not return in subsequent drug use experiences. Nonetheless, I had gained this insight of depression as a cloak, as something covering me and smothering the emotional reality underneath. There, sitting under the willow tree, the cloak had vanished, but something felt permanent about it. I could say it was a purification, that the cloak was burnt away by this fire of gratitude erupting in my chest. That comes close to describing the feeling. I could also say that it felt like I had seen through an illusion. The same way that you see a magic trick, and are charmed by it, but as soon as you see how it’s done the charm vanishes — even though you’re seeing the exact same thing. My depression was a trick, an illusion, and in that moment I saw how the trick is done.

The euphoria dropped from MDMA-level intensities fairly quickly, but I was still on a high. After the morning sit we adjourned to breakfast. I remember taking a bite out of a plain, unassuming biscuit and being stunned at how delightfully surprising the experience of eating it was.

Contrary to what I explained before, a retreat does actually offer a few opportunities for speaking. One is a short interview with the teacher and the other is a Q and A session. I was going to make the best use of these opportunities to try and make sense of what just happened.

I explained the experience in my interview, including my metaphor of the cloak of depression and the teacher responded matter-of-factly that this is exactly what depression is — you go through life experiencing unpleasant things, and find ways to avoid the unpleasantness, whether that is counteracting the bad feelings with addictive pleasures, avoiding stuff you don’t want to feel or telling yourself stories to pretend you aren’t a vulnerable, fragile, hairless mammal that will someday die. Over time you learn to become numb to bad stuff, but you also become numb to all the good stuff. You create a cloak of depression that suffocates all feelings, good or bad. It also distorts reality. This is the illusion that I was mentioning before. You experience everything through this distortion field and come to believe it is the way things actually are. Not surprisingly, when you misperceive reality, you act in ways not congruent with reality. This causes depression, disappointment and suffering.

Later in the Q and A session, I asked a follow up: What is the difference between the knowledge of impermanence leading to despair vs. leading to happiness? The basic explanation was that despair comes from impermanence as a concept, as an idea that sits in your head vs. impermanence as an ever present feeling in your moment-to-moment experience. Impermanence as a concept is something to be feared — a threat that is always looming somewhere out there, hiding around the corner like a dark hulking shadow. Impermanence that is felt opens you up to the abundant flow of experience of life as it is.

I returned home filled with a sense of hope. I looked forward to a future where my meditation would only deepen and where I could approach aging and death with a realistic hope of actually being happier and more at peace by the time everything was said and done.

A week after I returned I went out with my wife and kids to get gelato. As we shared our treats I delighted in the flavors and textures and the simple games my children played on the lawn in front of the ice cream store.

Slowly, over the next few months, the euphoria would fade, but something felt permanently gone. I had crossed a threshold, one that opened a path I had never known before. Meditation would now be at the center of my spiritual life. There was still much I didn’t understand about what had happened (I’ll explore this in a future post) or what lay ahead of me, but I gained a gift that felt far more generous than I deserved.

Not long after I returned, I read Jack Vance’s Dying Earth trilogy for the first time. Within the first book is the arc of woman named T’sais who is cursed to find all of creation repulsive. Her initial response is to destroy everything she sees, thinking that what she sees is the truth. It is not until she meets a copy of herself devoid of the curse that she realizes that the ugliness is an impairment in herself, not in the world.

She sets out to find happiness and only seems to encounter increasing evidence of misery and horror. Finally, she befriends a man cursed with the face of a monster. Her attempts to help him undo his curse lead them to witness the greatest depths of evil but also eventually lead them to an ancient deity whose pure goodness and benevolence can not help but grant justice unto those that deserve it. As expected, the man’s true face is returned, and the curse of T’sais lifted. In awe, T’sais simply proclaims:

“I see, I see the world!”