A little blue

I woke up this morning and I knew something was wrong. I’m down. Most morning I wake up feeling tired, or sore, but I usually snap out of it pretty quick. Once my body gets moving the aches and pains go away and so does the grogginess. But this morning was different. I felt so blue, and what made matters worse was I didn’t understand why. Why? I mean, shouldn’t there be a reason for a feeling? Of course depression uses this kind of thinking as the club with which to continually beat you. So I tried to think of something else, anything else.

I’ve felt down before, so I know how insidious this feeling can be. Unattended, this feeling will turn on everything that you hold dear. Before long I can easily convince myself that friends, family, coworkers, and everyone else have abandon me. My solution? Don’t give it power. The more this feeling pushes, the more I push back. “Shut up” I tell it. Though it never listens.

So I did everything you are supposed to do. I talk to people. It’s hard to be honest about being down but I think it is important to own how you feel lest it begins to own you. I exercised and ate, got a little sunshine, and tried to work and still this feeling persists. That’s when I knew my situation was serious. In the past, any combination of two or three of these activities was usually enough to snap me back to my senses.

In the past my feelings of depression have sometimes been tied to the stories I tell myself, what my friend Stuart lovingly refers to as “monkey mind.” So I listened to my thoughts, scanning them for potential pits falls, but when I realized I wasn’t being pointlessly negative or hostile to myself, I ruled monkey mind out as the culprit.

Aside from the fact that I cam getting older, one of the reasons I wake up sore most mornings is I suffer from back pain. Chronic back pain touches just about every part of your body, and when it flares, which it hasn’t recently, you know to sit up and take notice. There are drugs you can take, but really these only mask the pain for a short time, and if you don’t get ahead of the pain and stay ahead of the pain with these drugs, they are almost completely useless. The same is true of exercise, it is a management technique, but not something that is going to free you of pain if you are hopelessly immersed in it.

One technique I learned in dealing with chronic back pain is mindfulness. Mindfulness isn’t a cure. It won’t make your pain go away, but it does teach you ways of coping with pain when all else fails. As I said before on this topic: As one more closely observes the inner reality, one finds that happiness is not exclusively a quality brought about by a change in outer circumstances, but rather by realizing happiness often starts by releasing attachment to our thoughts and predispositions. Basically I allow myself to be aware of my reality, and by challenging old assumptions and the bric-à-brac of my own mind, and sometime able to make better judgments for myself.

And so, when all else fails, I have fallen to this old stand-by as the remedy dejour for my depression. For as my favorite book, the Bhagavad Gita says, “One must free oneself by mindfulness and never put oneself down, as surely as self is the only friend of the soul, and its only enemy”