The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

by J. Mark G. Williams

The beauty of bringing a wider moment-by-moment awareness to an old wound, a current pain, or a difficulty is that it opens up new possibilities for our minds and our bodies. It’s saying: “Let’s come to this afresh. Let’s allow the difficulty to be here—I’ll just be with it now, in each moment, as if it were a sick child in the middle of the night that needs to be held tenderly and reassured.” Radical acceptance can keep us from becoming progressively constricted and diminished in the face of painful experiences. It invites us to fully experience the richness of life even when things seem to be at their worst. In mindfulness practice, a spirit of gentleness and tenderness is combined with a spirit of adventure and discovery: “Let’s see what is in this moment—and this moment—and this moment.” This means that we’ve got only the problems of this moment—and they may not even be a problem in this very moment—rather than piling on all the problems of next week, next year, and the rest of our lives, which we so reflexively fall into doing. If our thoughts persuade us that our lives will always be like this (“This is just how I am”), then what started with pain or tension or sadness is going to give rise to even greater suffering. But if we’re just here for this moment, and in this moment, with these thoughts and feelings and body sensations, and now in the very next moment the mind’s patterns are changed in some way, and now, changed again in the very next moment, events have a c...