note: i edited the above about a gazillion times. if you’re reading along in real time, you may want to reload/refresh the page and read again.
Leaving aside the clinical side of depression in this post. In terms of our daily lives it is natural and normal to not feel happy all the time, it is part of the world of duality. As Kahlil Gibran reminds us it takes great pain to know great pleasure.
Being afraid of being sad or down or becoming depressed can inadvertently create the reality we are trying to avoid. These feelings are also a natural part of human existence and can be great sources of energy for change. Keeping our mind focused on how we want to feel and how we want to be helps make it our reality.
Well said.
But I need to note that there’s nothing wrong with emotion. There’s nothing wrong with sadness. It’s more than normal, it’s required for being human. But fixating on insubstantilal reverie and willfully loading up on negativity is another thing. It’s just a bad habit.
The light breezes I’ve mentioned a couple times in this thread - the seeds of depression before the fixating tendency turns it into a tornado - are sweet. Just so long as you prevent yourself from aggregating sweet little breezes into a fearsome tornado. It’s such a cliche, but…all things in moderation! 
Hey! What happened to all the drugs man? 
You must be feeling good, Jim as you’re using little smiley faces, which I’ve never seen you do. This depression must have suited you. It did me. I like what you’ve written and what Andrew has written as well.
Setting aside indulgence, and going for the direct experience of one’s pain, whatever it may be, is a noble path, IMO. I could busy myself with a thousand tasks which are awaiting me, and indeed a few friends have encouraged me to do so. That would be denial, which is yet another form of indulgence. Pain is a good thing, and is, at the end of the day, vapor. That’s the key - that’s the heart sutra - all form, including feeling, is emptiness.
I’m sure you’ll disagree with most of this. That’s fine - we all have our own methods, and we all know what works for us. Some lock themselves away; some commune with nature and friends. It’s all so good.
ps - Alan, we posted at the same time. Who needs drugs, dude? It’s all here, uncovering itself in the moment.
Meg- I was using some light-humored sarcasm 
It wasn’t lost on me, Alan. But, ya know, drugs can take you there too. The question is, can they bring you back? Or, do their benefits spill over into daily life, once the high is gone? Sometimes they very definitely can bring you o’er the rainbow and back again. Other times they leave you empty-headed and spent. The AYP method is, well, methodical, and slower, but deeper, and with lasting results. The point is that it’s all here ----------> X <---------- and in each moment we can uncover that, or let it remain buried.
Hey, I’m an old pro when it comes to drugs of all shapes and sizes as I posted on the first page of this thread 
In my todays, over-indulgance in an emotional response or a chocolate-chip cookie is a drug…they too can take you ‘there’ and spill over into daily life
There’s nothing like the ‘built in mechanism’ of spinal breathing and meditation…and finding the Self in every Moment in every Self in the Moment of Love 
I will have to drop in more often! This is a fascinating thread with a lot of elements, and I wanted to throw out a few comments.
RE: Drugs. I came of age in the Bay Area during the sixties, the Summer of Love, etc. The Beatles went to India the year I graduated from high school. I wanted to go too, but instead stayed here and took a lot of acid, and most anything else I could get ahold of. I got clean and sober when I was thirty and got involved in SRF not long after, so for me it was a drug->yoga movement. Here’s one thing that may interest the group: with few exceptions I never used narcotics. One of the exceptions, was pilfering some demerol my mother had left over after a surgery. The experience was ecstatic, and I never experienced anything like it until really feeling the spinal currents in yoga. That particular narcotic very closely emulated those moments when the currents feel like Ben-Gay inside the spine.
So I tend to think of most kinds of intoxication as being facsimilies of spiritual experiences. In a letter to Bill Wilson (co-founder of AA), Carl Jung pointed out that the Latin word for alchohol is spiritus, the same word used for Holy Spirit (spiritus sancti), and in his opinion one or the other would inevitably prevail in the life of an alchoholic ( Parabola, Summer 1987 “Addiction” issue).
RE Depression: I’ve probably had the low grade, dysthemia type depression in the background most of my life. Someone said depression is relatively “simple,” and I disagree. Both intuitively and academically. A while ago I got a graduate degree in psychology, and I remember that more than any other diagnosis, recommended treatment approaches were complex and multi-disciplinary.
But without debating that, I think a certain kind of melancholy is linked with spiritual practice. First of all, people do not start serious spiritual practice because life is a cake walk. I got started in a 12 step program, and I didn’t wind up there because I was having too much fun.
Secondly, spiritual literature describes certain “valid” spiritual crisis points that are really hard to distinguish from pathology, especially in this culture. One articulation of this is in John of the Cross. The “dark night of the soul,” and “dark night of the spirit,” with the intensity that he describes, would probably send many of us right to the doctor for medication.
Even the practice of bhakti, which has such a “wholesome” feeling to it most of the time, can suddenly change from a kitten into a tiger, and seem a bit like being depressed. I think I’ve always really had a devotional bias, though I’ve expended energy to convince myself otherwise. Fueled by the AYP practices, there have times when the “practice” of bhakti takes on a life of it’s own. Kind of like an amplified version of unrequited love at seventeen. I remember that in his Autobiography, Yogananda describes meeting a saint he believed was in communion with God, when he knew he wasn’t. He said the experience pierced his heart, and he fell to the floor, “sobbing in agony.” Try that in a public place and see how fast you get some meds!
Anyway, to sum up, one way I counteract depressive moods that I haven’t heard mentioned, is to spend time with two trusted spiritual advisors - my dogs. I’m actually quite serious about dogs. I know an elderly gentleman who has a chihuahua, who confided that after his wife died, the little dog kept him going, and helped him come around to being able to enjoy life again.
enuf.
Hi Ranger,
I enjoyed that…
…so that’s what it feels like
I kinda agree with that… most of us here have had a touch of depression or something similar…
Maybe its bhakti that leads us to depression without us knowing it?
Somewhere carried over from our past lives maybe?
Oh! I agree with that
humm… love my dog… but dont feel a spiritual connection. Sometimes wonder though, if we could be like them, unconditional love towards God… think where we may have been… 
Ranger - I enjoyed your post too. Please drop in more often. Bhakti can have a tinge of darkness (heaviness) to it at times, and it’s a good insight (Shanti) that bhakti may lead us to depression without our knowing it. I’ve said elsewhere that bhakti = misplaced nostalgia. It’s a fine line that we walk: sometimes separated from God, at other times at one with It. The former is bound to be a catalyst for some degree of angst. In any case, I’ve yet to meet a seeker who’s a chucklehead.
I’m most comfortable with people who have some degree of angst and/or depression. They’re so much more interesting.
here is a good list of asanas for depression with detailed pics and explanation.
http://www.yogajournal.com/newtoyoga/864_1.cfm
Once you go there you can scroll down to DEPRESSION SEQUENCE. Good list of asanas for dealing with depression.
Wow. This is a great forum. I did not expect this thread to keep going this long. Jim, your 35 years of depression show in the way you write about it. I didn’t even realize that I was indulging myself with depression, but when I read it here I knew instantly that this is exactly what I was doing. My problem was that I was raised to not believe in depression, that depression was just something that happened to weak-willed, self-indulgent people. Once I realized that I have innate deppressive tendencies I went back and forth between trying to overcome, failing, and then victimizing myself.
Western psychology only works if you victimize yourself. I see a therapist because I am on a medical leave from school. I have to go if I want to return to school and keep my scholarship. I hate it. It is immensly useless to me. This thread has been more helpful to me than my entire time in therapy. Thank you.
See, this is how I can tell that some of you are confused when I use the word “drugs”. LSD does not work like other drugs. There is no “coming down”. You don’t come back. You just stay out there and eventually get used to it. The value of the experience comes from what you do while you are affected, not from the drug itself. With acid there is an intense impulse to hold on to the experience afterwards, and good for you if you can manage to do it. First you need to consciously let the benefits “spill over into everyday life” instead of bottling them up and being cynical and saying “It was just the drugs” like most people do. Doing this could be doing some kind of art or just talking to people about your experience.
For example, I just got done tripping on acid, and I thought of this thread. Since I was fortunate enough that you all carried on the conversation while I was gone, I get to share my thoughts with all you wonderful, open-minded people. Thank you!
tros wrote:
“There is no “coming down”. You don’t come back. You just stay out there and eventually get used to it.”
That’s why you only have to do it once in a lifetime!
Well said
well, I don’t know anyone who could integrate and be transformed by one trip in a lifetime. Perhaps that is an ideal but not very realistic. Was that your experience, Ether?
It’s actually true. But not at all in the way undepressed people express it (e.g. “you just need to perk yourself up, and get going!”, etc etc). That’s an unisightful, unhelpful jackhammer approach to a very small, precise, specific issue. And you only grok the issue if you meditate a lot or if you’ve closely observed your own depression. I’ve done both.
You, very specifically, need to catch your mind early as it starts to drift backward and forward in time, and gently bring it back to where you are now (be it to your silence, to the activity at hand, to motion/action, or to the beauty of the moment…there are many ways of doing this). Over and over. And while it’s easy if you catch it early, you will suffer greatly if you let it escalate. Depressives think they face a tornado. I’m saying the tornado grows on nothingness out of a mere puff of wind…and only if you allow it.
Depression has nothing to do with any sort of bona fide sadness or pain. Depression stems from fixation on the unreal. The only thing that’s real is right now. If, as happens from time to time, one experiences sadness and pain (even extreme sadness or pain) in the current moment (e.g. your pet hamster dies), those emotions are nothing at all like what a depressive feels. You can be sad or in pain without conflating into suffering. Only your mind can make you suffer. And only if you indulge it.
Depressives not only indulge it, but identify themselves with (i.e. fall in love with) their suffering. Which makes them spin further and further from the current moment as they follow their compulsion to steep more and more in the phantasmagorical past or future.
Depressives believe they are feeling life deeply. They are fooling themselves. You can only feel life deeply if you’re actually present for it, rather than receding into a cocoon of fantasy and torture.
Originally posted by tros
My problem was that I was raised to not believe in depression, that depression was just something that happened to weak-willed, self-indulgent people.
I don’t agree at all that depression is just something that happens to weak-willed, self-indulgent people. The meaning of those words is that there is something particularly weak-willed or self-indulgent about all people who get depressed, relative to people who do not. This is just false.
And I believe it not just a wrong idea, but a harmfully wrong one (like, for example an idea like “only weak-willed, self-indulgent people become disabled”).
(I am aware that Jim, BTW, does not mean to approve of these words in the problemmatic meaning I am exposing. – Jim’s message is highly-specific, about certain dynamics of depression. Mine is specific about the dangerous and misleading implications of wording.)
Main reasons for my depression are my introvertive nature, physical laziness which used to cause mental laziness.
I went into depressive kind of thinking since I was around 10 or 11 yrs old. I still remember the time before that when I dint know what depression meant. Initially I used to do think what am I doing? Why am I lazily sitting and brooding instead of going and acting. But I kind of loved this falling down or -ve building up as jim points out. I really used to enjoy that. Rather than going in life in the same mood or same straight road, I used to go down for sometime and then inspire myself to travel with renewed vigour and inspiration. I always thought I intelligently used it. There are times when it got out of control and there are times when because of this depression I underestimated myself and dint attempt goals which I can comfortably aim and reach.
I can relate to that… that’s what made me stay in a depression for 32 years… the most common statement made by family and friends… you have everything a person could want… why are you depressed? And for 32 years I tried to “snap” out of it… for the next 4 I was on medication… the last 2 on meditation… the difference was 1 alphabet… but the effect was immeasurable.
I have one question though… most of us here… or maybe its just me… go through emotional ups and down… what David described as mood swings… and many agreed was purification… how do you know if it is purification going on… and to just let it flow out… or it is a depressive suffering like Jim said…“Depressives not only indulge it, but identify themselves with (i.e. fall in love with) their suffering.”?