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My Bed of Nails - Page 2

© Yeshe Chodon

Miserable as I was, professionals didn't prescribe medication, nor was I hospitalized. I was walking wounded, left to find my own solutions.

I feel better today. It took grasping every lifeline I came across. That included: counseling; 12-Step programs; Yoga; exercise; getting a master's in counseling; talking to counselors, hanging around counselors, being a counselor; self-help books; inspiring little newspapers; Nature and Pets. Those last two were major influences. Friends and family are part of the mix, but even today it's hard to say if they were part of the cure or part of the problem. There's meat for another article...

And notice Buddhist meditation is not in that list. Like John McManamy--I quote from his April 20, 1999 Suite101 article:"...

I would fire any doctor who recommended it [Buddhist meditation] as a first line treatment against severe depression."

It seems I've always known about Buddhism. Anybody who has lived in Asia and then has read the Beat poets and the acid gurus knows about Buddhism. During my darkest days I could feel it out there-- for me it had and still has a force, a power behind the scenes, the mother of all metaphysics.

But I didn't like it and I didn't seek it out. The teachers I met weren't interested in what I considered to be me. It was too general and impersonal. I sought comforting earth mother therapists who understood for $80 an hour, who felt my pain. As Judith Hooper puts it in her article "Prozac and Enlightened Mind" in the Summer, 1999 Tricycle Magazine:

In traditional Asian Zen, the psychological self is not an appropriate subject for study....
Ten years ago, or even five, a Buddhist student struggling with the symptoms of depression would most likely be prescribed more dharma. "You'd be told that you're not practicing enough".
...Another entrenched Buddhist taboo concerns a certain type of emotional self-involvement, the promulgation of one's "personal story".
"A lot of Zen teachers think you should never talk about your emotions..."
Traditionally, Tibetan lamas, too, have been oblivious to a personal interpretation of psychological pain...

For me it was as Sylvia Boorstein says: "In order to see the emptiness and impermanence of all phenomena, you have to have enough energy in the mind to see clearly. When the mind is torpid you can't see anything." I would add that without first achieving a certain stability of mind, this glimpse of reality, of impermanence, can be hopelessly depressing.

Buddhism isn't about feeling good, at least not at a superficial level, which separates it from so many current spiritual movements. And Buddhism certainly isn't about getting what you want. So what use is it? None until you see the futility of trying to feel good all the time and the futility of yearning for what you want. We're hypersensitive when we're depressed. We can't take more bad news and we don't want to hear about futility.

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