Sublime Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is one in which I am gaining ground. Mindfulness is for Jon Kabat-Zinn to explain, and I couldn’t convey it as he does. I can only share what I understand for myself.

Do you ever look at others with depression and see that they have a home, a job, a loving family, possibly children, and wonder what it is they are depressed about? I’m sure you accept that depression is an illness and not to be confused with an emotion - but doesn’t part of you wonder why they can’t see they have every reason to be happy, joyful and thankful? I think that too… for people like me, with depression, it is a deep well of guilt. We look at our own lives and cannot justify the way we feel, the sadness and despair and hopelessness. I can explain it away with science, but, what I would rather understand better is how to reach out to all that is around me, all that you can see, all that would bring me joy if only I could see it.

To see what is around me, and take a step towards personal happiness, I needed to step away from my own thoughts. I think of the wiring inside me a little like this: Thoughts are really powerful. Just with a thought I can close my eyes and be anywhere and with anyone. We know this best when we dream. With my thoughts plugged in, I am lit up inside with pictures and sounds, and whatever I see and hear stirs my emotions. I go from thinking, to feeling too. Feeling all sorts of powerful emotions like grief, loss, sorrow and fear, just because of the thoughts inside my head. Depression has this connection between my thoughts and feelings firmly screwed home; it isn’t a feed that is easily broken. But alongside this strong connection there is another, slightly wobbly cable labelled senses. If I could tweak this cable into action I might be able to give my emotions something else to stimulate them; to divert their attention from my thoughts.

In essence, my practicing mindfulness is just that, tweaking the cable that connects me to my senses so that I can appreciate what is around me and be absorbed by it. Like the loose power cable plugged into the back of my laptop, some days I make the connection in a matter of minutes, other days it can frustrate me for some time as it drops in and out of place. It can be exhausting, but it is definitely worth persevering with.

A week ago I awoke and, as has become habit, spent a little while in the quiet company of my own breath, just feeling the air pass through my nostrils and expand my chest. This exercise is helping me to strengthen the connection between senses and feelings. I am, in that moment, not striving for the next or dwelling on the last. I am simply the sensation of breathing, experienced though the senses. The thoughts come but they go again, like the sounds of children in a distant playground. Occasionally they do interrupt and I don’t always notice straight away. But when I do notice, I bring my attention back to my breathing and let the thoughts be, without berating myself for having let my attention wander. On that day a week ago, after this exercise, when I open my eyes, I felt an immovable smile on my face, a peace across my forehead, a compassion in my eyes. It stayed with me all day, a feeling I could only sum up as a sublime happiness brought on by a deep inner peace.

That day, Xavier and I had many interesting conversations, and we played as though nobody else was there to see or judge. We enjoyed everything that we did and gave ourselves to each moment. I realise now that Xavier does this all the time, instinctively. It is why hunger catches him by surprise, why he never wants to go to sleep, why he spends so much time under the shower with his head raised up and his eyes peacefully closed. I suppose we all knew nothing but the moments once, before we started learning to name things, and then learning to judge them… we have all perhaps been mindful children.

Not everyday is like that one, but every moment I have the opportunity to return myself to a state of inner peace and be awake in the moment. That is surely the most uplifting, optimistic, hopeful forecast that anyone with depression, or anyone for that matter, could hope for.



Puppy Training

It has been a while since I saw 8.30am, showered and dressed and ready for the next thing. But here I am, and I’m very satisfied about that. Yesterday was a good day for me too.

My ‘one thing’ yesterday was to walk the dogs, and again this is something I haven’t been able to do for a while – I haven’t really been leaving the house much. Walking the dogs is one of those things that makes me smile; seeing that the dogs are happy. Its funny how dogs are so immersed in their senses; there we are on our walk and the world is so full of interesting sights, smells and sounds that they can barely walk in a straight line. On the other hand, when my own thoughts have tied off the flow of sensations from my senses, I can travel the same walk without any knowledge of where I have really been. They are so in the moment, whilst depression can make me so the opposite. As Ami said so well, my mind is like a recalcitrant puppy that needs frequent tugs on the lead to stop it from wandering. So yesterday I took the lead, so to speak, from my dogs, and each time my mind turned inwards I snapped it back out again. Another act of mindfulness that I am finding is serving me well and helping me heal (there I go again with the puns).

I noticed the lichens growing on the north facing brickwork, the beautiful eggshell cracks in the old signs that mark the street names, the well proportions front doors of Victorian and Edwardian terrace houses. I quite agree dogs, it’s jolly difficult walking in a straight line.

Pearls

These are memories and thoughts, disjointed and hung together here like a string of beads, each with their own fascination.

Alicia’s green eyes. Unusual, unique.

Watching the way Xavier moves, his little body propelled along by tiny jumps. The excitement in his limbs. The sound of his landings.

When Xavier looks at me sometimes I think he can just see how much I love him and his eyes look like they open up.

I once witnessed a ruffled sheet of cloud from above, through the toy window of an aeroplane, lit up by the light of the moon.

When I cook it is very rare for me to follow a recipe. If I’m making something I have never made before I’ll glance at the recipe and then take it from there. Each time I make a dish I tamper with it. I use my instincts a lot and consequently never make the exact same dish twice. To do anything else would, in truth, lose my interest.

Two angel white swans in magnificent, improbable flight passed me one afternoon as I jogged along the promenade. We both travelled a few meters together, alongside each other, before they out paced me and left me in complete adoration.

The first bumble bee of the year, the first ladybird, the first day that twelve daises grow beneath a single step.

Valentine

Do you know what I hate about depression most? It isn't the torture of living in my own head. It isn't the difficulty I have bringing myself to wash and dress. It isn't the fear I feel every time the telephone rings. It isn't the constant feeling of exhaustion. It is that yesterday, when Alicia looked at me, her eyes mirrored mine and I knew she could see and feel the love I have for her. Whereas today, those same eyes reflected back an emptiness. Alicia, the person I love and treasure more than anything,  would find it hard to feel that love through this depression. It is a wall between us.

I don't wish for much, not really. I want to wake before her and walk the dogs. Get the kettle on and cook her some breakfast. She deserves a little breakfast in bed. I want her to see me smiling at her in the morning, the way my heart is towards her. I'd lay her clothes on the radiator to warm, and brush her sleepy locks aside so that her eyes could feel the morning. She is a sleeping princess. We would talk about the day ahead just the way she likes to. It puts her at ease, she likes to know the shape of the day ahead. I want her to hold her close like my life depends on it and make plans together. Dream the future together. Joke about how many children we will have and giggle at what mischievous grandparents we'll make.

I found my Alicia and we fell in love. Depression takes me out of this body far away from her, from everybody. The empty shell left behind looks like me. Sometimes it even flickers back to life. But the rest of the time it is just an immovable weight between us. I am somewhere beyond those dark eyes. Out there somewhere. In distress. And through the windows of those eyes I watch her heart breaking. It breaks us both.

I'm trying to make it back to you Alicia. I'm trying to reach you my love.

When I Click My Fingers

The dots are there to be joined up. Many months ago Jojesek posted a really useful piece on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness principles, listing the attitudinal aspects of the practice; it is well worth a read. Some months later I discovered The Four Agreements through a post by Teresa Evangeline. Again, this post is an interesting read and a good introduction to Don Miguel Ruiz’s tenants. Later still I discovered Les Floyd’s blog and was introduced to the way he was influenced by the book ‘The Power Of Now’ in his own journey.

I could feel some common silver threads were catching the light as I looked at Mindfulness, The Four Agreements, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Paul Gilbert's Compassion approach. All seemed to me to be suggesting that the mind was not something entirely under our control (thank goodness), but that it was also capable of quite unhealthy pursuits, and that we should protect ourselves from its less helpful behaviour.

The sorts of things my own mischievous mind can occupy itself with include: being overly self critical; judging myself and others unfairly; making unlikely assumptions about future events that I couldn’t possibly substantiate; making unhelpful assumptions about other people’s thoughts and motives; and filling my head with expectations of myself and my time. When depression has a hold over me, these are things that I think about and commentate on to the exclusion of all else. It is terribly introspective, but I am not responsible for it. I can’t be blamed for it. I am in the audience watching it all. It is a movie that makes me feel a certain way about myself, and one that makes me fear the world and everything in it. This is to be living in a dream, or rather a nightmare. All these thoughts, the past, the future, the interpretations – none of this is reality.

So I do agree; my thoughts need to be wrestled with. Or perhaps not so. Not wrestled with exactly, not fought until they are overcome…not reasoned away. Instead, my thoughts are something that should be filtered, managed, selectively rejected, at times ignored. Rather than colouring everything and even occupying their own reality, they should be tethered so that my other senses and reality itself has a chance to share the light.

So why is applying this wonderful filter so difficult? It is! It is very difficult for me! The answer would seem ‘pay more attention to my senses’, and yet I am a rabbit caught in the headlights of my own thoughts. I’m unable to move and one after the other they strike me down. I know what it is that needs to be done but I fail at it. Unsurprisingly, the commentary from within remarks that I am failing because I am not trying hard enough.

What I am trying to move towards in inhabiting the present moment. To a place where, when my thoughts wander off, I bring them back, and I am able to continually do that. So that my reality is the one I am actually inhabiting bodily, and not the warped reality I am creating inside. This is not easy. I am a complete novice at this. I am tired from all the thinking and distress, I am sleeping a lot, I am not taking care of myself. I spend a lot of time stuck in neutral. Days end before they have started. Anything unexpected is met with fear.

I am learning from Jon Kabat-Zinn and others that I will need to start my learning in the shallower waters, start small, work hard and practice often. That doesn't sound much like me, but as he says: “Your mind goes off, you bring it back, your mind goes off, and you bring in back, and this happens over and over and something inside you starts to grow that’s a little more interesting than a bicep.”

Out Of My Mind

The first time I had any contact with mindfulness was long ago when a counsellor I was then working with asked me to describe the short walk from my car to her home. As it happened I should have noticed the colour of the leaves on the trees, the freshly mown grass verges, the aroma of the lavender bushes loaded with bumble bees, the soft mats of moss in the cracks between the paving stones. I realised I had noticed none of these things and began to understand how depression had switched off all my senses so completely. My focus, concentration and energy were all expended internally on moments in my past or my future, and there was nothing left to sustain my other senses and take in the world around me.

On my most difficult days, I beg to escape the pressure of thoughts crowding my head.

The first time I tried meditating I used a simple technique that involved focusing on my breath moving in and out, focusing my attention on the feeling of its movement. My eyes were closed; I could feel myself breathing in my stomach and the air tickled gently through my nostrils. I focused on this repetitive and perpetual action. Inside my head a noise grew louder, the clumsy thoughts treading on this attempt at peace, at first just one or two but soon many competing thoughts chattering like an ugly morning chorus, a busy canteen of simultaneous and disjointed communication. This was my first real encounter with the ever present clattering of my busy mind. I am to understand that as we pass into a meditation, we become aware of our minds’ ever present activity and its power for distraction, before it quietens. But it was in that moment, when I was willing my senses to focus on my breathing, that I realised deeply that the mind was ‘other’. That it wasn’t the same as my will. That in that moment I was struggling against its activity. That it did not work for me. Even in the early stages of meditation this conjurer of thoughts was looking to join me. I could hear its incessant commentary, telling me about my breathing, about how I was meditating, about how well this all felt, and how amazing it all was! It is resistant to stillness.

The unruly mind. A mind that has turned on itself. The weight of rumination pulling me underneath the surface. The very hallmark of depression. Everything else, the lethargy, the withdrawal, the fear…devastating but mere side effects.

On my most difficult days, my unruly mind hounds me with a cruel lingering analysis of my every memory.

I don’t know anyone’s depression but my own. I couldn’t know any more. We all arrive in the therapist’s chair with our own pain. Every story is different. I know for me this unruly mind is my true adversary. I forgive myself the depression knowing that my genetics and childhood carved into me its possibility. I accept that it is to be lived with and managed, not overcome like cancer and not made a companion of. When the right triggers set in motion that characteristic rumination, the clouds of depression gather. Left unchecked, those winds gather momentum and strangle the season. And so begins my search into the many ways that generations and peoples have sought to bring the human mind to heel.

Overcoming Depression

When your thinking is bubbling away just below the surface and hasn’t yet congealed into what ever it is destined to become… you can either wait in the hope that it will come together to make something complete and beautiful. Or, if you are a little impatient like me you can just lay all the pieces out and pick over them as they are.

As I read through this blog from the very beginning I am reminded of how so very much I have learned. As I reflect on recent days I am also mindful of how very little of that learning I have been using.

Reading over my posts, old and new, I am taken back into the world inside depression. It is an outwardly static world, where not much seems to be going on but for a few obvious signs of personal distress. Inside however, the wheels are turning at breakneck speed. It is as though the parts of the brain that you once used at school to solve problems in your maths class have turned their attention to your past memories and future hopes. Everything is being picked apart and analysed. Everything scrutinised so closely and relentlessly that the flaws become overbearing and the balance tips towards despair.

When I wrote Breadcrumbs all those months ago I had just started to make sense of that feeling that characterises depression; the feeling of turning on yourself. The act of attacking yourself. I was just beginning to understand fear a little better and comprehend why it was such a difficult opponent.

After that I got down to the heavy lifting of applying some of the cognitive behavioural techniques (CBT) that I had learnt in therapy. In Discipline, and Inside & Out, I recorded exactly what that looked like. It is heavy on the analysis which is an obvious reason for rejecting it. But anyone who is suffering with depression will tell you that the thoughts are already like a runaway rollercoaster… analysing them for myself just gave me a chance to apply the brakes and take back some control. To suggest, as some did, that CBT made me think and focus more on my thoughts to the detriment of my health was ridiculous. Rumination had already hijacked my stream of consciousness and diverted my energies into regurgitating and chewing over my flaws in a never ending cycle. Never ending that is until the part of my brain responsible for all this destructive work would tire and I would collapse into a sleep.

By the time I was writing Liquid Silver and subsequent posts I was beginning to recognise that depression was putting me on a path towards a life of genuine happiness. I know that sounds backwards, but depression had forced my hand. It had made me pull apart at myself until I really began to understand my frailties, bad habits and what really brought me joy. Before depression, I had no idea how to set my life on a course towards happiness… I just thought I knew.

Following a path towards happiness and leaving behind one that is susceptible to depression was full of its own challenges. In Small Change I would reflect on how my old bad habits would still find ways to the surface, even though we had begun radically changing our life. Things would improve and slip backwards. I still had demons to confront. Bad habits were still about because I hadn’t made the necessary changes from within. Sure, I had rearranged life on the outside a great deal. But whatever happened on the outside was still filtered to the inside through the same old cracked lens. In Untitled I was discovering that there was more work to be done and that I didn’t know how to do it alone. I had gone back to Judy for help and she did just that. By the time I was writing Forked Path I could see that addressing my own demons was almost impossible to do if I stayed in the flow of life as most of you lead it. I conceded that the flawed blue print had been put down inside me already… it was part of being human, and part of just being me. Alongside this, I had to deal with fears that had developed in the grip of depression. Despite the improvements, I was still operating with the conditioning of that fear, and that was preventing me from getting on with life in the way that most of us do. 

In The Truth, My Truth and Nothing But My Truth everything came together. This was a pivotal post for me and I’m sure when I wrote it I thought it was my blog’s swan song. All that learning about behavioural evolution, brain architecture, neuroscience, the influence of early childhood experiences and behavioural psychology was woven together to give a deep understanding of where my depression originated from and how to conquer it. I think at that point I felt I had closed my account with depression and had no plans to return. It isn’t that easy.

I think with the help of Les Floyd’s blog, I realised that I made the mistake of living as though I am well again. If you had a heart condition, to keep it in check you would expect to change your diet, may be exercise and medicate, avoid certain activities. I have the blueprint for depression in my construction, and in the same way I need to make lifestyle choices that keep me well. If I allow myself to dwell on the past of look pessimistically into the future I open the door to depression. I have to work on that. I have to work on that a lot.

Intermission

I know that medication isn't the answer but for all its shortcomings it has still helped. So why now am I again paralysed by depression? Has the medication just stopped working again?

In the past crashes were helped by switching to another product... altering dosages. I haven't been long on fluoxetine yet the wheels fall off again. So what next? I've been referred to a psychologist ... perhaps their apothecary cabinet will be more extensive. It will be many weeks before an appointment comes through. Right now life is suspended in aspic. I can hear the clock ticking on the chest of drawers. It's now the afternoon, although indistinguishable from the morning. The bright sunlight at the bedroom window isn't making it to my soul. I can feel another day slipping away.
Still, the evening has yet to start and if the pattern of things repeats itself the prison doors will open and I'll be permitted my daily exercise.
...
Several hours have passed since I wrote this. It is mid afternoon. The world is still turning. It hasn't waited for me. I've been left behind again. I wish I could drag myself from this place. I can't even write today.
...
It's the evening now. I discovered a wonderful blog that you too can find at http://lesism.blogspot.com/. When I couldn't find the energy or motivation to write, thankfully I could still read. I was reminded in reading a few of Les Floyd's posts that there is a way out of this. Anabel and many others did say that I beat this once before, and I can do it again. I have been reading Les Floyd's blog along with some of my own old posts, from around the time I wrote breadcrumbs and things were just starting to turn around. On reading, I began to remember how it was that escaped the last time round. I have made changes, many changes, since then as a consequence of what I learnt but I can also see old habits have crept in once again. On reflection, in all the anguish of today, I have not spent a single minute of today anchored in the moment. At least, not until now. Instead I dwelt a great deal on the past and cringed at thoughts of the future. I imagined other realities that I couldn't know to be true, realities about what other people thought for instance. I was making myself unwell with all that thinking and I couldn't stop it from hurting me. Thank you Les, I needed to realise that again.

I am on my feet again, right now. I feel like I could be on my feet again tomorrow. Before the day ends, I'm going to write a few things down for myself. The fog will be back in the morning and it will be harder to focus without the help of a few words. I think I know what I need to tell myself. See you in the morning.