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.