My New Mantra

Live long,

Die fast,

Leave a tasty corpse.

DEPRESSION -- Is It Sometimes a... Misunderstanding?

I was seriously depressed twice, when I was 16 and again when I was 19. Incapacitated by a sense of utter pointlessness and complete dread. As in many cases of depression, mine took the form of an internal dialogue, and the ultimate conclusion to that dialogue was to discover the great void that surrounds us all, all the time, separating each of us inexorably and universally from everything and everyone until we pointlessly die. With each episode I spent some weeks completely derailed, then gradually limped back to faking it until I could make it, then kept limping as fast as possible away from the direction of the depression. I didn't think of it at the time, but depression was definitely a "place" that I would either fall into or avoid.

Fleeing depression took me away from the Academy and into the dance world. Eventually I became a yoga instructor and then an acupuncturist, and now feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing. As an American practitioner of body/mind/spirit medicine, I'm constantly going back and forth in my mind about Western concepts vs. Chinese concepts, literal anatomy vs. energetic anatomy and other puzzles of physical, mental and spiritual existence. Sometimes (more and more) I fall on the Chinese side of things (which includes spirit in its calculations and so seems more complete -- more three dimensional -- than scientific medicine in describing the human condition), and sometimes I fall on the Western (rational, reductive, quantitative) side of things, when it comes to conclusions. However, sometimes I think maybe I have hit on something new, that I haven't seen, heard or read about in either the Western or Eastern literature. About 25 years ago I had an experience that maybe fits in this last category.

[One of the frustrations for a rational person when they read or hear about body/mind/spirit approaches is how vague and uncommitted the language is. There are various reasons for this, but one of my main reasons for being such a hedger of bets is that I don't want to tell a lie by accident -- as far as I'm concerned, every acupuncture treatment is an experiment with needles, and judgment is withheld until the outcome is observed. This kind of reverse engineering of a medical procedure is anathema, even malpractice, from a Western point of view, but is typical of all traditional treatments -- first you reassure yourself about the potential risk, then you take the leap and try, then you examine the outcome. So I will regularly cite my experience as a reason for doing a treatment or suggesting an approach, but always encourage my patients to make their own sense of the situation and would suggest the same for you, my dear reader. I understand that this is frustrating and unsatisfying for a rational person, but it is not accidental, and I don't see an ethical alternative approach.]

In the late 90s I was doing some yoga, not particularly thinking about anything, when suddenly I thought about the anatomy of the brain -- two hemispheres divided by a central fissure. In the stream of consciousness state I was in, I immediately stacked a couple of ideas together: What if my previous depressed internal dialogue was one half of my brain fruitlessly questioning the other? And what if the existential void I discerned was actually my questioning hemisphere's misinterpretation of the gap between the two halves of my brain? And with that, I went to the place where the depression lay (I knew exactly where it was, because I'd been purposefully avoiding it for about 20 years), faced the void and jumped in.

By this point in my career I was very comfortable with using my breath as in internal guidance system -- sometimes anchoring me, sometimes goading me, but always a safe, truthful and consistent physical mechanism to which I could orient myself. So as I dove into the void, I kept my attention on my breathing as a lifeline. It was acutely uncomfortable in there -- I was right back where I had been when I was 16 and 19. But after a minute and a half or two, I was through it, landed on the other side, and in that instant, my latent depression and my fear of my depression utterly and completely evaporated. Since, I have felt very confident in my understanding of my situation -- my depression was not what I thought it was, but was instead a big old anatomical misunderstanding with myself, which my youthful energy, imagination and over-confidence turned into a terrifying and un-approachable monster. 

In preparation for writing this piece, I also realized that each time I became depressed I was in the thick of intense intellectual introspection -- trying to break things down as far as possible to get the purest possible understanding of the nature of existence. That's the intellect talking -- it assumes that everything can be broken down, and that way lies the Truth. It turns out that is only sometimes true. In my case, I would now add to the list of questions that inspired my leap into the void, "And what if, by trying to break things down so far I was actually using fewer and fewer of the neurons in my brain, so that by the time I was depressed it was one tiny neuron looking at the fissure between the two sides of my brain, making the fissure seem that much more enormous, inescapable and overwhelming?"

Not all depression is the same, and I wouldn't recommend my technique to anyone who hasn't spent extensive time working with breath and getting comfortable with using breath as an internal sea anchor. However, 35 years of working in this arena have taught me that our intellects are not as smart as they think they are -- they certainly don't have all the answers. And sometimes their misunderstandings, or incomplete understandings, can have fatal consequences. 

Aimovig, the internet, and the end of the world

Alienation, dissociation, psychopathy. This is a standard progression of a certain type of aggressive and destructive mental illness. It is also now the (un-examined, unexpected and unintended) standard operating procedure for modern humankind.

David Abrams’ mind-blowing book, “The Spell of the Sensuous,” recommended to me by the brilliant writer and my reluctant sometimes-mentor, Ruth Steck, elegantly and articulately lays out the start of humankind’s migration away from nature. However, since its publication in 1996 humankind has continued to churn as fast as it can away from the realities of nature, and with the development of the always-on internet and new drug breakthroughs, we may have passed our children through the sieve of no return. Time will tell.

Old people are always dissatisfied with young people, and part of that dissatisfaction arises from fear, mostly the fear that the kid will crap out and be unable to pass along the family genes and history. My current alarm includes that eternal tendency, but modern conditions expand that fear and make it species-wide – I’m not just worried about MY kids, I’m worried about all of them. I’m not the first to express alarm over the tendency of young people to prefer alternate reality to reality, but I see it as part of a larger tendency of humankind, rooted in Western culture but now a global phenomenon. That tendency, as laid out in Abrams’ book, is to place ourselves outside of Nature, and to believe that separation is always available and is always a reasonable approach. From a body/mind/spirit perspective this is a surrender to the mind – “reasonable” and “logical” arguments always prevail in our current social discourse, and “science” always gets the last word – but from the b/m/s point of view such deference results, always, in an incomplete and unbalanced approach to life. The mind also has this one consistent, negative tendency – arrogance. The mind tends to believe that it knows all there is to know, or at least all the important stuff. Ideologues today, as always, understand this on some level and appeal to the most ignorant and most arrogant, and tend to do pretty good business. For that matter, “business” itself is a weaponized product of the mind, and is all about rationalizing and justifying exploitation, theft and abuse in the name of making a buck. “It’s not personal; it’s just business,” is a lie, and always has been. The lie is now so widespread that it has taken over many people’s entire reality and left us in a state of (a few) haves who are willing to continue to full-throatedly live the lie, and the rest of us have-nots, who aren’t willing to abandon the shreds of our common humanity in order to be a little better off than the neighbors. Still, the lie has the force of a black hole at this point, and we either need to come to our senses and rocket away from the lie, full-throttle, or make plans for our coming annihilation.

Personally I am a dark salmon and, having spawned, my focus is on the next generation. I will continue working for the rest of my life and still engage with the issues of the day, but I am mostly out of ambition, other than to support and protect my children. Along with that, I am not particularly addressing people my age so much as the younger people who will inherit the world we olds hand off to them. We are now, as a species, at a moment of specific and unique peril that we have never experienced before. It has been slowly and then rapidly creeping up on us, and we are now in its jaws. I am not at all sure that our species will survive this moment, because I don’t think our species understands or recognizes the nature of the peril. In fact, our typical response to peril is exactly the wrong thing to do in this situation. When we modern humans hear, “danger,” our defensive response is to run away. If we can’t get away, then we have an internal defensive response called dissociation which is a kind of internal running away. However, WE are the danger, or at least one part of our approach to life is, and we can’t run from ourselves.

The number one mistake people express about the body/mind/spirit concept is a belief in “mind over matter.” This is possible; happens occasionally, briefly; but is absolutely not a reasonable target for a healthy lifestyle, and is profoundly pathological as an expectation of life. This is now pretty much the un-examined expectation of most people in the modern world. “Better thinking” is the answer to every problem, “wrong thinking” will make you sick, and “mindfulness” is needed to overcome stress. And in a larger sense, “AI is the answer to all our problems – stronger, faster and easier thinking is always the answer to everything.” Uh, no. It’s not. In fact, the intellect is the source of some uniquely human pathologies, including the ones listed in the first sentence. Since it tends toward arrogance, it is unlikely to consider some alternative perspective, such as is contained in classical Chinese medicine. The modern, logical world would rather be right than be happy, and hasn’t yet discovered that one can be logical, unhappy, and also wrong.

Some say the answer is to turn back to God, but there’s no going back in this life, no matter what the sci-fi movies say. Some say we should focus entirely on physical health, eating good food, doing perfect exercise and getting weekly massage. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s no solution, either, although it must be said that the physical is typically the starting point for evolving away from a purely mind-centric existence. The actual thing we must do to save all our lives is to figure out how, as a species, we can live a life that is balanced between intellectual, physical and spiritual needs. Various individuals have achieved this state, and aboriginal societies around the world have, too. But no modern society has even attempted to balance these three parts of existence in their culture. The oldest civilizations (Chinese, Hebrew) have an understanding of this concept and contain more than the usual number of seekers trying to live in balance. Europeans, too, especially Scandinavians, are edging closer and closer to this approach, but they’re unafraid of socialism (but also hostile or indifferent to spirituality). However, modernity in general, as represented by the USA, is too busy, too impatient and too greedy to do the slowing necessary to re-orient our society. This imbalance has been the case for some time – a hundred years at least – but has been accelerated by the development of the internet and social media at one end of the spectrum, and may have passed a crucial tipping point at the other end of the spectrum with the recent introduction of Aimovig. 

The internet “puts the world’s knowledge at everyone’s fingertips,” as if that’s going to answer all the world’s questions. It’ll answer, all right, but without context or experience, and will balk if you ask the “wrong” question. AI is even worse, notorious for providing well-crafted lies. And social media! Makes our young people believe they are failures because they don’t have a million followers and a monetized Youtube channel! Easy to see how the internet’s influence could make one pull away from reality, becoming less social and less connected to actual humans in favor of connecting to avatars and other strangers who share your interests. Maybe you’d even start thinking that the answer is to disconnect from the Earth and move to Mars or somewhere else… But this is an accidental side effect of a novel technology being managed by impatient, greedy and inexperienced young people. The truly chilling development is in medicine, where the organic rubber meets the scientific road and we find out whether it really IS a good idea to give thalidomide to pregnant people. 

Aimovig, aka erenumab-aooe, is a medication that aims to prevent migraines, and its mechanism, purposefully and thoughtfully developed by skilled, intelligent and very well-educated people, is a horrifying nightmare to an acupuncturist, and should be a nightmare for any thoughtful person. The scientists who developed Aimovig figured out which peptides are involved in creating the connection between the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. Aimovig interferes with the production of these peptides at the genetic level so that your central nervous system becomes less-connected to your peripheral nervous system. In other words, Aimovig literally disconnects your feelings from your brain. Literally. Physiologically separates you from yourself so you can’t feel things. The main organic illness that causes this dynamic is leprosy, but even without the gory visuals, what person with any experience of life would think that this is a good idea? Separation, the great trick of the mind that allows us to feel superior to animals (and other races/religions/ethnicities), and which, unchecked, leads to the three horsemen of the first sentence, is now provided in pill form, in hopes of preventing migraines. Full disclosure: it is my belief that acupuncture works by re-connecting the central and peripheral nervous systems, so I don’t just see Aimovig as a really stupid and destructive idea, but also as a direct attack on the form of medicine which I practice.

Which brings me to my final observation. That thing about, “rather be right than happy..?” The most heart-breaking thing I have experienced in 24 years of acupuncture practice (and I have experienced it repeatedly) has been provided by those people who have success with acupuncture – their symptoms improve or go away – yet because they can’t understand or explain it, they refuse to believe it and even reject the whole experience. And this is where, with our wonderful big brains and our amazing technologies, we’re dumber than dogs. If you make a dog feel better, it will lick your hand and wag its tail. Only a human will bite the hand that gives it relief because that relief doesn’t fit their preconceptions. And whereas a dog can get smarter, because it’s open to any new experience, humans are fully capable of closing their minds to new evidence, knowledge or wisdom that doesn’t comport with what they already know, and so are capable of limiting their own understanding. One of the main differences between us and dogs? They have so much neural information coming in from their noses, ears and tongues that they have no choice but to stay connected to the world around them, even if it makes them otherwise “dumber.” If our species doesn’t make it, I hope some more doggish creature takes our place, and I hope they maintain a connection to dog medicine, which involves licking it until it feels better or falls off. Almost as effective as Aimovig, and way safer for… everything.