Disturbing emotions play a vital part in our lives, energetically signaling to us and perhaps others that we are distressed about something that has happened in our life. One specific common emotion that can be quite difficult to deal with, perhaps to the point that it is paralyzing, is depression. Depression can easily rob us from experiencing joy and lead to despair. Almost 25 million American adults have been taking antidepressants for at least two years, a 60% increase since 2010. One in six Americans takes some kind of psychiatric drug, and 70% take one or more prescription medication.

Many of us do not want to stay on medication indefinitely and when the medication stops, the risk of becoming depressed once again often returns. Some who suffer turn to mindfulness meditation or other mind/body practices like yoga in order to stay well.

Our Bodies Give us Information

Our emotions have evolved as signals to help us meet our basic needs for self-preservation and safety as individuals and as a species. Our bodies function as highly sensitive emotion detectors, providing moment-by-moment readouts of our emotional state via sensations inside our body. Every individual has an ever-changing sensory/energetic/emotional landscape that receives information from the world, makes meaning of it, and provides responses.

Mindfulness meditation allows us is to tune into experiences in a way that negative emotions can wash over us without totally destabilizing us. We can work with these feelings and have kinder and more expansive options for selecting a response.

How we interpret events in our life is critical to our sense of well-being. It is not so much what happens to us, but what we think about what happened and how we react to it that matters. Our happiness or unhappiness is not caused by situations, but determined by how we interpret them, by the story we tell ourselves!

I Want Something Different

In an experience of depressed energy, it is common to get caught up in wondering, “Why is this happening to me?”, or “What is wrong with me?” We search within ourselves for deeper meaning and can easily get caught in a spin cycle of all-consuming frustration and self-judgment. The conditioned mind might say, “Fix this right now!” And if we fail to arrive at “an answer” or “solution” we may become convinced that something is fundamentally “wrong” with the world, or even worse, with us. Here are some of those stories we might come up with when we are unable to “fix it”.

* I’m no good, I hate myself.

* Why can’t I ever succeed?

* What’s wrong with me…I’m a failure.

* I don’t think I can go on.

* I’ll never make it.

* My life is a mess.

* I feel helpless.

Much of our current conditioning has created a habit of reacting negatively to difficult emotions, which may be further colored by a reawakened sense of deficiency or inadequacy based on painful memories. Depression forges a connection between sad moods and negative thoughts within the emotional part of our brain to the point that even normal sadness can reawaken major negative thoughts, along with uncomfortable bodily sensations of sluggishness and fatigue. But what if we were to see the mood and uncomfortable body sensations as simply uncomfortable, rather than “bad” or “wrong”? Suddenly, nothing needs fixing.

Acknowledging and Allowing

Can we let anxiety just be anxiety without having to make it “about something”?  Can we overcome the impulse to get caught up in trying to fix it? Can we generate receptivity to the full range of experiences and emotions, allowing them to just be there – without trying to get rid of our feelings by suppressing them, distracting ourselves, or struggling to think our way out of them? Attempts to think our way out of bad moods, or just “snap out of it”, usually leads to a deeper downward spiral. We tend to dredge up past regrets and conjure up future worries, trying to come up with “solutions” and usually coming away with feeling worse for “failing”.

Finding Clarity

Mindfulness helps us see with greater clarity how we can approach our moment-by-moment experience more skillfully, taking more pleasure in the good things that often go unnoticed or unappreciated, and dealing more effectively with the difficulties we encounter, both real and imagined. Let’s remember, we are human beings, not human doings.

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