Depression

Chronic Depression is caused by a toxic lifestyle and
lack of training in living with mind and emotions. - Kali Ma

Modern culture is tremendous for its achievements in material technology, but in the inner technology it is sorely lacking. It is a culture that mass -produces unhappiness, heart-disease, cancer and depression. The World Health Organization is projecting that by the year 2020, depression will be the world’s second most devastating illness, after heart disease. If a person allows themselves to follow the cultural mandates for what is normal and healthy, they find themselves taking anti-depressants and getting chemo-therapy. We can’t rely on our culture, many of our school-teachers, and even many of our doctors for accurate information on how to live healthy emotional and physical lives. This unfortunate, but things are changing, we are entering new times when medicine, health, spirituality and science are all undergoing major paradigm shifts. Still, unwittingly, because of their unconscious assumptions and beliefs, many of the good people in this world actively propagate confusion and toxic lifestyles. The mass epidemic of depression is only one of these problems.

Ironically, we do everything to avoid the depression in our culture. We spend billions and billions of dollars trying to cheer up, trying to forget. We keep ourselves so busy that there is no time to notice. We shop, we travel, we read magazines, we talk on the phone. We drink coffee, take pills, shop more, watch t.v., and get insurance. Most minds are filled with a discursive traffic jam in an overwhelming compulsion to strategize for happiness. And still depression is on the rise.

Some knowledge outside our own culture, which has failed in the pursuit of happiness and health, must be brought in. We westerners can land on the moon, and build nuclear bombs, but we cannot live with our own minds. Our spouses, and ex-spouses, children and friends cannot either. While Western society excelled at outer technologies to run computers and correct our vision through lasers, the wisdom of the East studied and mastered the inner technologies. These inner technologies explore and reveal the essential principles of life. When Westerners seek this knowledge that is not based on ignorance and confusion, but instead a profound awareness of mind, emotions, and body, we find a fullness that adds to all that modern society gives us. This precious knowledge comes in many forms and many traditions. In the MahaSiddha Tradition we find it in its most un-adorned form, its most simple, direct and accessible form. It is a spiritual teaching that applies in all conditions, in all circumstances. It can appear in many guises. It is about our basic nature, which is sane, awake, good, clear and basically cheerful. In our time this kind of teaching is very precious. It goes beyond the dualistic split between sacred and secular, it is the teaching of how to be fully human.

For depression to be dissolved a new lifestyle is needed, one that is based on SANITY, one that is oriented towards peace-of-mind. In the MahaSiddha Tradition this lifestyle is based on eight aspects of life (the eight sadhanas).

But for efficiency, I will mention a few aspects of these disciplines here. The first comes from our discipline in Ayurveda; a toxic lifestyle causes depression. Secondly, from the discipline of the Dharma Teachings, inability to transcend neurosis leads to depression. Third, our discipline in meditation; lack of training one's mind and emotions leads to depression.

Detoxify Your Way Out of Depression

First we have to disengage with a toxic lifestyle. Without doing this, other inner and emotional work is sabotaged continuously and it is difficult to maintain insight and inner change. The incredibly toxic Western lifestyle must be changed for one's mind and emotions to shift in a permanent and deep way. Though we can shift our emotions without changing the physical elements they are based on, it is much more difficult and requires advanced understanding of the mind. The toxic lifestyle I am referring to includes consumption of all kinds of toxic chemicals in our food which alter our brain chemistry, disrupt our hormone functioning, dry out our nerves and irritate our system at all levels. Eat Organic. Especially if one has tendency to depression, avoid refined (white) sugar and white flour. White sugar and white flour leach out important minerals from the body in order to be digested. Natural sugar and flour already have these minerals, but they are stripped from the refined sugar and white flour in order to be sold separately and used in other products. So your body steals these from its own reserves to process the refined (white ) sugar and white flour. This depletion upsets the brain chemistry and nervous system and leads to depression.

Also it is very important for anyone with chronic emotional imbalances to learn about the right diet for your constitution. Please visit my husbands website at: www.AyurvedicPulse.org for more information about Ayurveda and learning about your constitution. Wrong diet leads to bad digestion which also imbalances brain chemistry, energy levels and depresses the nervous system.

In the MahaSiddha Dharma, this kind of sane lifestyle is integral to the path. It is a path that is completely embodied rather than just intellectual or emotional. All of one's being is addressed. We cannot expect to constantly pollute our bodies and then find our emotions, mind, or meditations to be at optimum clarity. Enlightened eating, enlightened walking, enlightened breathing, enlightened working. It is all the dharma path, true spiritual work. See the Eight Disciplines

Transcend Your Neurosis

Depression is the state where we cannot transcend our neurosis. This is a very un-natural state of being. We are actually capable of generating our own cure for depression. We already have this within us as our basic goodness. We have an innate dignity and creative potency within us that allows us to open up, to move forward, to not shut down to any circumstance for any reason. By connecting with this aspect of ourselves we can find a way to relate with our lives while remaining fresh, open, clear and fully communicating with what is arising. We have in us a basic trust that allows us to relax and refresh ourselves continuously. This is actually in everyone, but most people are very distracted from it. Meditation is about returning to this clear, open space within us. For us to recover or remember this sense of basic cheerfulness, we have to do inner work. This work is about learning to not be distracted from awareness, and it is a work about untying the knots in our mind.

This cheerfulness is not light and fluffy, like pink and blue angels. It is deep and thorough, undivided from our pain and our pleasure. It is the peacefulness and goodness of being that we always have within us if we open, even in the worst situations. If we have lost touch with this within us, we can find it again, if only we are willing to do the inner work of training our mind.

Naropa, a famous MahaSiddha, was once receiving a profound initiation from his Guru Tilopa. Tilopa gave him a long rope full of knots. Naropa untied all the knots and returned this rope. Tilopa asked him, "What did you learn?" Naropa responded that our minds are like a rope tied in knots, and that these knots need to be untied. This kind of wisdom of untying the knots of one's mind is the wisdom found in the MahaSiddha tradition, the inner technology of a meditation path that creates the space where neurosis can unravel. These knots can be untied. We can have certainty to this, but it is the nature of the rope, it is the nature of all life to open. If it does not open, it dies. In fact, this is what depression seems to be about, not living in a state of openness beyond neurosis slowly kills our spirit, until we find ourselves frozen over, shut down, lost to the world, or so complex in our neurosis that we gradually lose a sense of possibility and feel doomed. Untying the knots takes work, but it is good work. It is invigorating inner work that feels good, it feels right and immediately gives results. The MahaSiddha Dharma is a spiritual tradition of untying such knots. Also any meditation in general can potentially be used for this purpose if it is engaged with correctly.

"Never shut down and always move forward- that is enlightened way, sane way, natural way of being." -Kali Ma

Life is actually worthwhile. It is worth it to go beyond negativity. It is worth it to feel and risk and open. It is worth it to move forward. There is so much pain in our existence. We can try to avoid it and we can come up with many strategies to ensure that we do not have to go through it, but all this fails. We cannot protect ourselves from life. Sometimes- times are hard. Sometimes we find ourselves in loss, dealing with death, dealing with tremendous upheaval. Life happens. And we are there either opening to it and moving with it, or resisting and fighting against it. We can shut down to avoid pain or pleasure, but that doesn't solve the problem. It is painful to do so. We cannot experience pain or pleasure continuously. We can try to grasp onto pleasure, surround ourselves with situations and people we can control and predict, but of course, by its nature, this contrivance and strain kills the pleasure. In order to be able to be alive while we are alive and fully experience our life, we must learn to relate peacefully with pain and pleasure, we need to end the war against things as they are. We need to train ourselves to open, to digest experience, to relate with pain when it is there, to nourish and heal ourselves deeply so we don't get stuck. Of course, this is all the MahaSiddha Dharma is about, and what all true meditation traditions are about. Discover the capacity in our mind, in our being to take life whole.

If we try to approach depression through logic and figuring it out, we will stay depressed. The logic and figuring falls into habitual ways of thinking and feeling that lead right back to depression. It is a closed loop. Actually, depression is not that logical. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Most of the time you come up for the explanations for why after you are already feeling depressed. It is better to use some method that transcends the logic that got you depressed in the first place- your logic. Meditation leads us to rely on something deeper than that discursiveness mind, deeper than the rationale we usually work with and gradually also trains us in the proper relationship to mind and thoughts. By proper way , I mean a liberated way rather than a bound, determined and cyclically neurotic way. Of course, covering that topic is the whole dharma and can be found in everything I teach.

We are not stuck in our habitual tendencies. It is possible to get free of poisonous and bound mind-states. That is the point of dharma, opening up our mind; untying the knots, or rather providing the space in which they can unravel themselves. Things are workable. All things. Even the worst things. All of reality is actually permeated with potentiality, an openness, called Shunya in our tradition. This dynamic quality of existence is there, if only you know how to see it, if you can let go of fixed views, reality projections, rationalizations and identity-story-lines long enough to see it. Again meditation is excellent training for this and of course, the whole of the MahaSiddha Dharma path is which all an elaboration on sitting meditation that permeates our whole life.

Because things are workable, you can start with what you have. You can start anywhere. Anything can be a starting point. For someone with chronic depression it is important to not wait until you "feel" like it. Your "feeling" has gone ill, so you will have to learn to not rely to seriously or rigidly on it. Instead, out of discipline, or sheer exertion you must pick your self up and start relating to the life at hand. Brush your teeth, comb your hair. Dress well and then do your chores. Start with one bill at a time. Make one of the phone calls you have been putting off. Do one errand. Smile at least 5 times today, mandatory whether you feel like it or not. Sounds corny, but those muscles in your face trigger the nervous system and change your chemistry. Buy some organic groceries. Water your plants or work in your garden. Do something you love or find the love in whatever you are doing. Things are good if you engage with them fully and openly. Sometimes they are painful too, and you can handle that; it is workable. You just keep moving forward and never allow yourself to shut down. When you forget, use the meditation methods you have learned to return to that basic goodness. You can learn to step right into the goodness of things on the spot. You can learn to relax. You can learn to enjoy. People don't just come happy or else they are sad. Happiness is an art. Enjoyment is an art, they can be learned. They can be mastered. Every year I offer a series of teachings called, "Transforming Emotions," and all the Meditation Trainings in order to address the inner technologies for sane, awake way of being. Any authentic meditation practice and tradition will also do just fine.

"Though meditation we find ourselves thoroughly enjoying experience. Suddenly doing nothing is really something." -Kali Ma

Training one's mind is an art that is seriously missing in our culture. We seem to culturally be clueless when it comes to mind and emotions. We generally only encounter mind and emotions in an abstract way through disembodied and abstract scientific investigation, which seems to be very distant from day to day experience. Or we encounter mind and emotions from a perspective of psychotherapy that locates the cause in our parental conditioning. Though this is a useful insight, it doesn't usually produce much shift or get down to the cause of why that and all neurosis continually manifests.

We understand how gardens go bad when we do not care for them properly. They need sunshine and water. Weeds need to be pulled. Irrigation systems need to be in place. Compost and natural fertilizers need to be added. Of course, mind and emotions are the ultimate garden of our inner landscape, reflecting the blossoming of our experience. Mind needs to be cleansed and cared for daily. It needs the nourishment of attentive awareness and the weeding that takes place when we recognize thoughts for what they are. Meditation is this science of cultivating the garden of mind.

Most people, not caring for their minds, or emotions properly, experience their inner life swinging from one extreme to another. Either people are suppressing their emotions in an attempt to deal with the intensity of life, or people are indulging in them in an attempt to feel alive. Neither approach actually addresses the real nature of mind or emotion, so both are inadequate. The highs and lows of feeling can be trying and tiring. It is understandable why people would want to take pills to avoid it, or adopt strict rules as to what will or will not be felt or looked at. We can develop endless strategies for avoiding the risk of feeling. Of course, what we are suppressing when we suppress, is life itself, life force and doing so leads us into a half-dead and even more confused state. So we may try to let go of such rigidity and instead pursue every emotion that comes up with total fascination and narcissism. We feel we have a right to feel anything we want to and act it out with total drama. But this causes us to collide very heavily with ourselves and others and is no answer either. There is actually a third option, instead of indulging or suppressing, we can develop a direct relationship with emotion that liberates its neurotic component. I give a training on this every year, called Transforming Emotions. But meditation of any kind is an excellent start to developing an authentic, mature and wise relationship with emotions. We can learn to feel fully and authentically express ourselves. Simultaneously we can recognize and liberate neurotic habitual identities and their corresponding thought patterns and emotional patterns.

Breaking free from depression is possible if one is willing to train one's mind and learn to relate in a new way with one's emotions. It is possible if one is willing to train and through this training do the inner work of transcending one's own neurosis. I recommend that anyone with chronic depression create a long-term strategy for learning how to relate with your mind and emotions, how to relate more fully and healthily with life. For most, this knowledge wasn't taught in schools, or by our doctors, or on t.v., or through our friends. You will have to seek it out. If it is not through the MahaSiddha Dharma, then through any meditation path. Especially meditation paths that emphasize engagement with the world rather than renouncing it. An untrained mind is a sick, unhappy mind. Also very important- make an appointment with an Ayurvedic Practitioner to address the underlying physical causes of chronic depression and to begin clearing the toxins that upset your brain chemistry in the first place. Even if anti-depressants change the brain chemistry, they do not address the cause, why the brain chemistry was upset in the first place. Only you can do that, by educating yourself, getting informed and making changes in your lifestyle accordingly.

May all beings everywhere benefit.

- Kali Ma

June 2006 Santa Cruz, California