Depression seems like an addiction for me, though I’m sober for much longer stretches in recent years. The duration of the episodes are no longer close to great enough to be clinically classified as depression (at least two weeks long according to the DSM-5). However, that seems irrelevant when I sense again the gravitational pull of the timeless and all-consuming black hole of self-pity, self-hatred, and above all hopelessness, that is the taste of the beast for me. It is always waiting for me just around the corner: waiting for me to take a sip, and maybe start the whole damn nihilistic machine going once again.
As far as I can remember, negative affect was never really admitted to while growing up. The older of my two sisters was born with a psychiatric disability. My mother was all perky energy and smiles. She still is. Without knowing it, I absorbed the truth of basic okayness unrelated to conditions from her. Still, what of her pain? What of the dumb luck of the draw? What of the comfort of some and the agony of others? What about the holocaust? What about the disappointed look on my partner’s face? What about the real hurt I’ve caused? What about feeling sad, or angry, or even just annoyed for no justifiable reason? I don’t remember anyone ever acknowledging those types of feelings in our house. Ours was a modest household, but I felt lucky to be born at such a time in the history of humankind, and to be healthy; to be born into such relative comfort. I didn’t feel bad but, then again, I didn’t feel very much of anything.
So as an adult, for example, when I find myself hot, angry, having a real fight with my partner, my habit is to understand implicitly, without even thinking it, that something is very wrong with me, my relationship, my life, perhaps even the universe itself. “It shouldn’t be like this.” It’s the worst thing: it’s the feeling of the sustained annihilation of my image of reality as I think it should be; the dreaded nightmare that I’ve worked so hard to avoid acknowledging. “She must be a monster for bringing me here.” Panicking, I might spew some pointed vitriol, certain that I’ll kill the whole context dead on the spot and secure my escape from this bad trip. To my horror, where there was one monster, now there are two. Now my anger gets directed at myself as well. If I pause here I can feel it coming. The pull. Some other old pattern could have triggered it, but this time it was this one. It’s happening again.
The process of artificially maintaining and intensifying
emotional pain with thought is gyroscopic.
If we keep a cycle of thought constantly spinning,
we generate a charge that actively prevents the dissipation
of pain. But without conceptualisation,
emotional pain becomes pure sensation and is
released to dance in the vastness of the open dimension of
experience. Without the strait-jacket of concept, pain ceases to
be pain and becomes a free and ecstatic energy.
From Spectrum of Ecstasy1
I spent my childhood avoiding feeling anger, sadness, and other disturbing emotions. These feelings never had much of a chance to express themselves in the light of conscious awareness and are now queerly formed. Invented to facilitate their subjugation, the resulting patterns and interpretations are compelling, as they have a lifetime of inertia behind them. Pain will always be a potential because unwanted news surely is right around the corner. The ancient vortex will get triggered again and perhaps gyre anew the spinning in circles of emotions and ideas, feeding each other with an erotic conviction that captivates my identity.
Let go of interpretation and embrace the dynamic experience of this embodied feeling without concept as valid and complete on its own terms.
The shame around feeling broken when depressed has been extreme for me. It’s self-perpetuating: I felt shame for disappointing myself, and then because I couldn’t “will myself” out of that state, recursively fuelling the story of my fundamental brokenness. I still feel all of this from time to time — the pull is still there — but the habitual interpretations have gradually become less sticky. There is real pain in this world, but there is also no need for superfluous pain, and there is plenty of room for kindness, joy, even ecstasy.
If you’re a human and you struggle with this stuff, you are not alone: Send me a message. Let’s chat.
Ngakpa Chögyam & Khandro Déchen, Spectrum of Ecstasy
https://vajrayananow.com/spectrum-of-ecstasy