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.
