DEPRESSION IS PERHAPS the most widespread psychological problem of modern times, afflicting people in both chronic low-grade forms and more acute attacks that are completely debilitating. By framing depression as a “mental illness” to dispose of as quickly as possible, the psychiatric profession and the culture at large make it difficult to approach this experience with curiosity and interest, or to find any meaning in it. While there is certainly a somatic component of depression that can be usefully addressed through drugs, exercise, lifestyle changes, diet, herbs, or biofeedback, the focus on simply getting rid of depression prevents us from recognizing it as a potential teacher that can convey an important message about our relationship with ourselves, the world, or life as a whole. If we want to heal depression, instead of just suppressing it, we need to approach it not just as an affliction but as an opportunity to free ourselves from certain obstacles that prevent us from living more fully.
In the simplest human terms, depression can be understood as a loss of heart—our basic openness and responsiveness to reality. Since this openness to reality, which, in Buddhist terms, is “unborn and unceasing,” allows us to be intelligently attuned to life and grateful for the wonder of existence, it is the basis of sanity and well-being. If we construct elaborate systems of defenses to buffer us from reality, this is but further testimony to the raw, responsive quality of the open mind and heart that lies behind these defenses. The basic goodness of the human heart—in its intrinsic responsiveness to life—is unconditional. It is not something we have to achieve or prove.
The Genesis of Depressions: Bitterness toward What Is
Depression is a symptom that arises when we cannot feel the goodness and aliveness of our heart. It is a feeling of weight and oppression that often contains suppressed anger and resentment. Instead of taking a defiant or fluid expression, this anger is muted and frozen into bitterness. Reality takes on a bitter taste. Depressed people hold this bitterness inside, chew it over, and make themselves sick with it. Having lost touch with their own basic goodness, they become convinced that they or the world are basically bad.
This loss of heart usually follows from a deep sense of sorrow or defeat, which may stem from specific losses: loss of a loved one, a career, cherished illusions, material possessions, or self-esteem. Or there may be a more global sense of defeat that has persisted since childhood. These losses tend to undermine the stable reference points that people count on to provide security, meaning, or support for their lives. Depressed people take this loss personally. They blame themselves for the lack of love in their family of origin, for failing to save their mother or please their father, for their difficulty finding satisfaction in work or intimate relationships, for the way their life has not turned out as planned. They feel a sense of powerlessness, loss of control, and pervasive distrust.
Two elements are at work here: a sorrow that stems from something missing in their lives, and a belief that this is their fault, that there is something basically wrong with them, and that there is nothing they can do about it. When people imagine that their sorrow and helplessness are signs of something wrong with them, it becomes too painful to open and relate to these feelings. So they turn away from their pain. The pain begins to congeal, and this is when depression starts to set in.
The Flight from Emptiness
While depression is an extreme reaction to loss, meditation practice reveals that the stable reference points we rely on for security are actually slipping away all the time. Buddhist psychology describes this situation in terms of the “three marks of existence”—three unavoidable facts of life that shape the basic context in which human existence unfolds.
The first mark of existence is impermanence—the fact that nothing ever stays the same. On the outer plane, our bodies and the physical world are continually changing, while on the inner plane our mental and emotional states are ceaselessly shifting and passing away. Every mind-state brings with it a new take on reality, only to be replaced minutes later by a somewhat different take. No state of mind is ever complete or final.
The second mark of existence, often termed egolessness, follows from this all-pervasive impermanence. Like everything else, the self we consider ourselves to be is in constant flux. While it may be useful to speak of a functional ego structure as an explanatory concept, it is impossible to pin down, locate, or establish a substantial, continuous self-entity in any concrete, definitive way. If we see this as a threat, we may panic, but if we can understand it as a gateway into a larger truth, it can give rise to profound relief.
The third mark of existence is that human life always entails some kind of unsatisfactoriness or pain—the pain of birth, old age, sickness, and death; the pain of trying to hold on to things that change; the pain of not getting what you want; the pain of getting what you don’t want; and the pain of being conditioned by circumstances beyond your control. Because nothing in life is ever final or complete, everything is in flux, and we cannot even control what happens to us, dependable satisfaction remains as elusive as a rainbow in the sky.
These three marks all point to a more fundamental condition of existence, known as emptiness in the Buddhist tradition. Emptiness is a term that points to the ungraspable, unfathomable nature of everything. Nothing can be grasped as a solid object that will provide enduring, unshakable meaning, satisfaction, or security. Nothing is ever what we expect, hope, or believe it to be. We marry the person of our dreams and find out that marriage does not yield the predictable happiness we had imagined. We spend a fortune on a new car, and three weeks later no longer find it all that exciting. We achieve a major career success and discover that it does not deliver the fulfillment we had hoped for. Moreover, we can never get a firm grip on what we are doing here, what we ultimately want, what life is all about, or where it is going. All of these experiences point to the truth of emptiness—the fact that there is no way to carve anything solid out of the flow of reality or pin down any part of it as “just this, only this, forever this.”
From the perspective of trying to get somewhere or establish security, emptiness seems frightening and disheartening. So we can understand various forms of psychopathology as reactions against emptiness and the three marks of existence. The paranoid resents his vulnerability and tries to blame others for it: “Who’s doing this to me? Is everyone out to get me?” The sociopath tries to gain the upper hand over the slipperiness of existence. The schizoid and catatonic simply shut down, as an outright refusal to be susceptible to life’s vicissitudes. Narcissism is a dogged attempt to solidify a self at any cost. And depression results from blaming ourselves for the way things are, for the sorrow we feel when we discover life slipping through our fingers.
Depression starts creeping up on us the moment we imagine there is something wrong with us because we cannot keep pain at bay, because we feel vulnerable or sad, because we cannot rest on our laurels, because we do not achieve total fulfillment through work, relationships, or any other finite worldly arrangement, or because we sense the hollowness of our self-created identity. If we were to look more deeply into any of these experiences, it could help us awaken to the essential openness of our nature, which is the only real source of happiness and joy. But depression takes a different route—blaming and recriminating when we cannot control reality. And this inevitably shuts down our capacity to respond and feel grateful for the beauty of life just as it is.
Emptiness—the ungraspable, open-ended nature of reality—need not be depressing. For it is what allows life to keep creating and recreating itself anew in each moment. And this makes creativity, expansiveness, growth, and real wisdom possible. If we regard our intrinsic lack of solidity as a problem or deficiency to overcome, this only turns against ourselves. We fall prey to our “inner critic”—that voice that continually reminds us we are not good enough. We come to regard the three marks of existence as evidence for the prosecution in an ongoing inner trial, where our inner critic presides as prosecutor and judge. And, imagining that the critic’s punitive views are equivalent to reality, we come to believe that our self and world are basically bad.
Modern consumer culture fosters depression. All our materialistic addictions are desperate attempts to run away from the truth of emptiness by desperately trying to hold on to form for dear life. Then when marriage, wealth, or success fail to bring true satisfaction, depression is inevitable.
One young man who came to me for treatment of a clinical depression had suddenly found that he no longer enjoyed the things he used to: surfing, going out with the guys, chasing women. He was undergoing a major identity crisis, but because he believed in the ideology of materialism so thoroughly, he was ill-prepared for the life passage facing him. Rather than considering that his depression might hold an important message for him—that it was time to move beyond the carefree life of a perpetual adolescent—he only wanted to get rid of the depression so he could go back to his old lifestyle. He regarded his depression as an arbitrary quirk of fate that had singled him out for mysterious reasons. Although he was getting his first real glimpse of the three marks of existence, the only framework he had for interpreting them made them seem like signs of ultimate failure. No wonder he felt so depressed.
Stories and Feelings
Since depression is maintained through stories we tell ourselves about how we or the world are fundamentally flawed, it is essential in working with depression to distinguish between our actual feelings and the stories we tell ourselves about these feelings. By story I mean a mental fabrication, judgment, or interpretation of an experience. We usually do not recognize our stories as inventions; we think that they portray reality.
Meditation is a highly effective method for seeing through our stories. Through sharpening our mindfulness, we start to catch ourselves in the act of constructing stories and can see them as the fabrications they are. We start to see how we are continually trying to draw conclusions about who we are, what we are doing, and what will happen next. With continued practice, meditators can learn to develop a healthy skepticism toward this storytelling aspect of mind. In Buddhist terms, they are cultivating prajna—the discriminating intelligence that lets them distinguish between what is real and what is a fabricated belief about reality, between immediate experience and mental interpretations of that experience.
Underneath the stories that keep depression frozen lie more vulnerable feelings such as uncertainty, sorrow, anger, helplessness, or fear. The stories the inner critic fabricates about these feelings—“I’m no good,” “I’ll never get it together,” “The world is a cold, hard place”—are negative, rejecting judgments that freeze our feelings into a hardened state. And this frozenness is what makes depression a problem, not the vulnerable feelings underlying it.
Any feeling in its fluid state is workable, but when we interpret it with negative stories, it freezes and becomes a roadblock. Frozen fear contributes to the constriction, dullness, and lethargy commonly associated with depression. Yet where there is fluid fear, there is also openness and responsiveness to life. Frozen anger turns in on itself and becomes a weapon of self-punishment wielded by the critic. Yet fluid anger can unlock passion and power we can draw on to effect change. Frozen uncertainty results in confusion and apathy; fluid uncertainty allows for alertness to new possibilities.
In addition to fear and anger, the main feeling underlying depression is sorrow or sadness. What is sadness? The word sad is related etymologically to satisfied or sated, meaning full. So in sadness there is a fullness of heart, a fullness of feeling in response to being touched by the sweet, transitory, ungraspable quality of human existence. This empty fullness is one of the most significant of human experiences. The poignancy of not knowing who we are and not being able to hold on to or control our quickly passing life connects us with the vastness and depth of the living heart. It invites us to let go of the fixed reference points we use to prop ourselves up. If we judge or reject this sadness, then its vital intelligence congeals into the heaviness of depression. In overlooking the opportunity that sadness provides for touching and awakening the heart, we quite literally lose heart.
Thus it is important to help people suffering from depression to relate more directly to their actual moment-to-moment experience, so that they can see through the negative stories told by their critic and contact their genuine heart. When they directly experience what they are going through, it is rarely as bad as they imagined it to be. In fact, it is actually impossible to experience their nature as basically bad. The idea of basic badness turns out to be nothing more then a story told by the inner critic; it is a figment of our imagination, never an immediate felt experience. People can discover basic goodness only through opening to their experience. Unlike their fictional basic badness, basic goodness can be concretely felt—in their unconditional openness and attunement to life.
A Case Example
One of the clients who most challenged my own faith in basic goodness was a successful lawyer in his mid-fifties whom I saw for more than two years. When he first came to see me, Ted had hardened into one of the most unyielding states of depression I had encountered. Growing up during the Great Depression as the son of immigrant parents who taught him to hate and fear the white Anglo-Saxon world, he had fought to get ahead at any cost and had driven himself hard to achieve material and professional success. He had reached the top of his profession yet was completely miserable and desperate. His body gave the impression of an armored tank, and his health was suffering from the amount of tension he carried around. He spoke at a raised pitch, as though he were delivering proclamations.
Ted had a sharp lawyer’s mind that literally attacked whatever he turned his attention to. His mind continually constructed arguments to buttress his dark views of reality. His themes were always the same: his weariness with life, his fear of death and letting go, the meaninglessness of everything, the demands people were always making on him, his enslavement to shoulds and oughts, and the distrust he felt toward everything. His rule of life was “attack or be attacked.”
His life had been a series of unsuccessful attempts to overcome the three marks of existence. The more he struggled to gain the upper hand over them, the more he fell victim to the very circumstances he was trying to avoid. He had tried to escape his fear of his own insubstantiality by climbing the professional ladder, but in the stress of doing so, he was literally killing himself. He desperately wanted to be somebody. Yet in continually trying to win recognition from others, he had become so overbearing that people rejected him—which left him feeling even more like a nobody. In trying to escape the pain of his life, Ted had numbed himself into an profound state of depression. The three marks of existence persistently haunted him in the form of a continual sense of despair, loneliness, and death-in-life.
Initially I felt assaulted by Ted’s manner and presence. To be able to stay present in the room with him, I found that I had to engage in swordplay with his sharp mind during our first few months together. Through these encounters, which involved some intense confrontations, I was eventually able to penetrate his stories and contact him in a more human way. As Ted began recognizing the difference between his real feelings and the rejecting attitude he held toward them, he could see how his negative stories only dug him deeper into his rut. Through developing some skepticism toward these stories, he no longer felt the need to broadcast them so loudly. This helped him slow down, so that he could start to pay attention to what he was feeling in the moment.
The next step in my work with Ted involved helping him recognize and step back from the inner voice that kept telling him what he “should, must, ought” to do. We came to call this voice by various names: “the critic,” “the driver,” “the tyrant,” “the judge.” As we proceeded, Ted discovered that his main aim in life had been to win approval and recognition from others, as well as from his own inner critic. He had pursued the more tangible comforts of recognition and approval as a way of not feeling the vulnerability of his own need for love. Feeling that need terrified him because it put him back in touch with the helplessness and despair he had known as a child. Ted had come to hate his vulnerability so much that he had abandoned his own heart. As he realized this, he began to feel his anger, sadness, and fear more directly, instead of just blaming the world for his condition.
Eventually Ted reached an important turning point that enabled him to start choosing life over death-in-life: Underneath all his compulsive striving and attempts to win recognition, he felt the tremendous sorrow of having lost touch with his heart. It took a long time for him to let this pain really touch him. Yet as he did so, Ted began to acknowledge his desire just to be, without having to be an important somebody. He started to feel his humanness.
Invitation to the Dance
All our reference points are continually slipping away. We can never create an unassailable position or identity that will guarantee happiness or security. Shall we let this depress us, or can we dance with it? The grand cosmic dance of Shiva in the Hindu tradition or Vajrayogini in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition takes place on the groundless ground where everything is continually giving birth and dying, slipping away. These ancient images of the cosmic dance portray egolessness and impermanence as a source of exhilaration, rather than depression.
Depression is the loss of heart that results from turning against the unfathomable flux of life. Yet at the root of this condition—in the rawness, vulnerability, and poignancy underlying it—our basic sanity is still operating. That is why depression, like all psychopathology, is not merely a disease to be simply eradicated. Instead, it is an opportunity to awaken our heart and deepen our connection to life.