The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

by J. Mark G. Williams

There is no such thing as a “good” meditation or a “bad” meditation as long as we are mindfully aware and see clearly what is unfolding in the present moment.

If you find yourself struggling with keeping up the practice, you might like to follow the advice we give to those attending our training programs: just do it as best you can and stay in the process whether you think it is “working” or not. The practice itself winds up revealing new possibilities if you just stay with it.

Even in the very earliest stages of the body scan practice, this alternative to doing mind can have an impact on something as common and mundane as early morning weariness. That sense of heaviness is greatly increased by negative thoughts. But mindfulness in the same situation—bringing a gentle and compassionate awareness to the bodily sensations themselves, without trying to change them, and letting go of thoughts about them or about ourselves, or about anything—can be immensely energizing.

This attempt to avoid our own emotions, our thoughts, our feelings, and our body sensations is called experiential avoidance. Not surprisingly, it can become a habit. Who wouldn’t tune out feelings and body sensations if the news on this frequency had been too unpleasant too often? But pretending some feeling isn’t actually here is like hearing a strange noise from your car engine while driving along the freeway and dealing with it by turning up the volume on the car radio. It works pretty well to blank out the noise, but is not too effective in preventing the engine from seizing up ten miles down the road.

Car analogies always hit home for me.

It is helpful to know that the most easily recognized expressions of aversion in the body are feelings of contraction in the shoulders or lower back, a tightening of the forehead, a clenching of the jaw, and a tightening of the belly. We have these fight-or-flight reactions whether we’re trying to escape from a tiger or from our own feelings. Like John, however, we often stop noticing these aversive physiological reactions when the tiger is inside of us and has been with us for quite some time with no evident plans to vacate the premises.

The body scan made me notice my incredible tendency to tighten my shoulders and other parts of my body. I had no idea I was doing this. Now it is a constant thing to scan my shoulders and force them to relax.

Some years ago, psychologists used a similar maze puzzle in an intriguing experiment with college students. A cartoon mouse was shown trapped inside a picture of a maze, and the task was to help the mouse find the way out. There were two different versions of the task. One was positive, approach-oriented; the other was negative or avoidance-oriented. In the positive condition, there was a piece of Swiss cheese lying outside the maze, in front of a mouse hole. In the negative condition, the maze was exactly the same, but instead of the Swiss cheese feast at the finish, an owl hovered above the maze, ready to swoop down and capture the mouse in its talons at any moment. The maze takes less than two minutes to complete, and all the students who took part in the experiment solved their maze. But the contrast in the aftereffects of working on different versions of the maze was striking. When the participants later took a test of creativity, those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who had helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task.

Think of what this does to children who grow up in a fearful situation. They don’t get to live up to their potential as much as children in a supportive household.

standing in a neutral position with the arms alongside the body, you can play with rolling the shoulders while letting the arms dangle passively, first raising the shoulders upward toward the ears as far as they will go, then backward as if you were attempting to draw the shoulder blades together, then letting them drop down completely, then squeezing the shoulders together in front of the body as far as they will go, as if you were trying to touch them together with the arms passive and dangling, Continue “rolling” through these various positions as smoothly and mindfully as you can, with the arms dangling all the while, first in one direction, and then in the opposite direction, in a forward and backward “rowing” motion.

Moving and stretching, like walking, often provide “louder” body sensations than either the meditation on the breath or the body scan meditation. As such, they can sometimes provide an easier focus on which to gather our attention and open to our experience. Furthermore, the stretching of muscles that may be habitually tensed in a chronic state of aversion can free us from emotions we may not know we are even harboring and in which we have nevertheless gotten stuck.

Notice how much we create “pain” out of discomfort through the thoughts we have about it and especially our thoughts about how long it is going to last.

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So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. —RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

We are not claiming that cultivating mindfulness in the face of a tendency toward sadness, low mood, and depressive rumination is easy. But it is doable.

Bringing a gentle openness and interest to something troublesome is, in itself, an enormously important part of acceptance. It will be invaluable if we can remind ourselves, again and again, of a simple but powerful truth: Intentionally holding something in awareness is already an affirmation that it can be faced, named, and worked with. In fact, it is also an immediate embodiment of facing it, naming it, and working with it.

Whenever something unpleasant arises, the systems in the brain that warn us about potential threats are activated: it is as if a loud alarm is sounded, and the mind gives high priority to attending to whatever caused the unpleasantness. We may do many things to try to distract ourselves—such as turning on the TV—but the alarm is insistent and doesn’t shut off. Worries keep intruding on our consciousness. Sooner or later, with the TV on or off, the disturbing thoughts and feelings come flooding back. Here is that critical moment. If, paradoxically, we can turn and face whatever it is that we are finding scary, difficult, or depressing rather than perpetually distracting ourselves to no avail, we are actually still doing what the brain wants us to do: giving high-priority attention to the matter at hand. It’s just that we are no longer giving it attention in the old “doing” way. We are approaching the moment—whatever it is, however it is—not by reacting but rather by responding, by bringing an open, spacious, and affectionate attention to the feeling in the moment as it expresses itself in the body. Now we are in relationship to the alarm in a new way, one that provides us with a viable alternative to endlessly thinking about it.

The face can be a “weather vane” for the tension that signals aversion in action. Increased softness in the muscles of the face can indicate some degree of mindful release from aversion.

Here we are again, working the edge, gently and lovingly zeroing in on our boundaries and limits by moving into and embracing the sensations themselves, until we sense that we have reached our limit for the moment. Then we intentionally and caringly back off, and shift our attention from the region of greatest intensity, ready to return when we have gathered and regrouped our resources. We might do this in a number of ways: • One possibility is to shift attention within the general region of intensity; rather than focusing on the region of maximum intensity, we focus on an area of lesser intensity. • Another possibility is to breathe with the discomfort, holding awareness of the intense sensations together with awareness of the breath, in the background. • Or, if the intensity is becoming overwhelming, we can shift the focus of attention away from that region entirely and focus attention exclusively on the breath. • And we always have the option of moving the body intentionally, of shifting our posture during the sitting meditation practice if the intensity becomes too great. This is an act of kindness and intelligence in itself and not a measure of failure. And we can be aware of shifting our posture too, so that there is a continuity of awareness regardless of how we are responding to the intensity of sensation.

With the shift from trying to ignore or eliminate physical discomfort to paying attention with friendly curiosity, we can transform our experience.

When we are able to sense in the body that we are tensing up or bracing ourselves in anticipation of something threatening, that is an indicator that the brain is switching into avoidance mode. In response, our mindfulness brings in approach qualities such as curiosity, compassion, and goodwill, and balances out the brain’s tendency to switch into its avoidance pattern with a pattern associated with “welcoming.”

Once your attention has settled on the bodily sensations and they are vividly present in the field of awareness, unpleasant as they may be, you might try deepening the attitude of acceptance and openness to whatever sensations you are experiencing by saying to yourself from time to time: “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me open to it.” Then just stay with the awareness of these bodily sensations and your relationship to them, breathing with them, accepting them, letting them be, allowing them to be just as they are. It may be helpful to repeat “It’s here right now. Whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me open to it.” Soften and open to the sensations you become aware of, letting go of any tensing and bracing. Say to yourself: “softening” or “opening” on each out-breath. Remember that by saying “It’s already here” or “It’s okay,” you are not judging the original situation or saying that everything’s fine, but simply helping your awareness, right now, to remain open to the sensations in the body. If you like, you can also experiment with holding in awareness both the sensations in the body and the feeling of the breath moving in and out, as you breathe with the sensations moment by moment.

Deliberately bringing attention to the difficult with the hope that this will help to get rid of it may simply get us more stuck.

Amanda’s description of her experience with her particular difficulty is revealing. “To begin with,” she said, “it was like a solid mass of rock. It was huge. It was so solid that you couldn’t get around it, but then it shrank to a small stone. It was still stone, but it was small. It’s really good. Because I think probably I have been pushing the issue away, sort of sitting on it and not letting it come up fully to the surface. I haven’t allowed it before to simply be here. I thought it would just overwhelm me. It was too much to let in, and so my natural reaction would have been just to tense up and push it away and not face it at all.”

lack of authenticity. This attitude of radical acceptance is expressed simply and profoundly in the poem “The Guest House” by Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet. This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

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...

Eventually, we may even recognize it simply as a very familiar and frequent visitor: “Oh, here you are again.” By witnessing, over and over again, the effects this visitor has on us, we may begin to see ever more clearly that such visitations do no good at all for us or for anyone else and also that they are nowhere near as powerful as we sometimes think, in spite of all the misery they can carry with them. This realization can help ease us out of the grip in which aversion can hold us.

It also affects our experience of suffering. Whether you will still be in pain after you begin to practice mindful awareness is impossible to say. We can know a moment only when it arrives, only when we look into it. What we can say is that if there is pain and it can be held with the sense of openness that Rumi invokes, it will be more bearable than otherwise. There may still be pain, but there also may be less suffering. Avoiding the difficult is a compelling old habit. But there is an alternative.

By bringing mindful awareness to what is actually unfolding in our experience, we’re not necessarily going to change the rock-bottom sensations in the body. But there is every chance that we will see what’s going on with greater accuracy and precision. And that gives us the power of choice. We can decide to be in an entirely different relationship to old mental habits. We can decide either to open to all the sad or angry thoughts and feelings ...

away of sounds. 7. You might find it helpful to bring awareness to thoughts in the mind in the same way that you would if the thoughts were projected on the screen at the movies—you sit, watching the screen, waiting for a thought or image to arise. When it does, you attend to it so long as it is there “on the screen,” and then you let it go as it passes away. Alternatively, you might find it helpful to see thoughts as clouds moving across a vast spacious sky. Sometimes they are dark and stormy, sometimes they are light and fluffy. Sometimes they fill the entire sky. Sometimes they clear out completely, leaving the sky cloudless. 8. If any thoughts bring with them intense feelings or emotions, pleasant or unpleasant, as best you can, note their “emotional charge” and intensity and let them be as they already are.

Our thinking will often reflect our mood and our mode of mind, not what is “actually” here or who we actually are. Thoughts are not facts.

The challenge is to remind ourselves of this constantly and not buy into the hype sold to us by our emotions and feelings. I tend to think of my feelings being me which is exactly what this warns against.

Intellectualizing and analyzing doesn’t work when low mood has been triggered. Remembering that thoughts are “just thoughts” is a wiser strategy.

It’s always possible to jump to choiceless awareness at any moment, simply by letting go of any and all objects of attention. This sounds easy, but it is in fact a very challenging practice because we have nothing specific to focus on. We rest in awareness itself, without any attempt to direct our attention toward anything other than awareness itself. There is no need even to think that you are meditating or that there is even a “you” to meditate. Even these are seen and known as thoughts by awareness, and in the seeing, in the knowing, they are seen to dissipate, again, like touching soap bubbles.

Then, whenever we feel ready to, we see if it is possible to let go of any particular object of attention, like the breath, or class of objects of attention, like sounds or thoughts, and let the field of awareness be open to whatever arises in the landscape of the mind and the body and the world. We simply rest in awareness itself, effortlessly apprehending whatever arises from moment to moment. That might include the breath, sensations from the body, sounds, thoughts, or feelings. As best we can, we just sit, completely awake, not holding on to anything, not looking for anything, having no agenda whatsoever other than embodied wakefulness. This practice invites us to be completely open and receptive to whatever comes into the field of awareness, like an empty mirror, simply reflecting whatever comes before it, expecting nothing and clinging to nothing; awareness itself attending to the entire field of present-moment experience in utter stillness.

When the pressure is on, when we’re feeling bad, when there doesn’t seem to be a moment to spare, these are the times when being mindful can be a major challenge. They are also the times when we need it most. Mindfulness is at least as much about ordinary daily living as it is about making some quiet time for formal practice. In fact, we could say that ultimately life itself is the practice; there is no waking moment in which we might not be more alive and more in touch if we were more aware. So the real work of mindfulness actually starts with life itself, with all its twists and turns, in all its guises and disguises.

Sustaining this open stance of acknowledging and attending can be very difficult. Old habits of thinking have well-worn grooves that can easily carry us away. So we take the second step, of gathering and focusing our mind on a single object: the sensations of breathing, just this breath coming in, just this breath going out. In this way, we give ourselves a chance to steady the mind and to remain right here, right now.

It might help to think of the path that your attention travels in the breathing space as having the shape of an hourglass. An hourglass has a wide opening, a narrow neck, and a wide base. This image can remind us to open to experience as it is in Step 1, to gather attention to focus on the breath in Step 2, and to open to a sense of the body as a whole in Step 3. Think of your attention during the breathing space as traveling a path with the shape of an hourglass.

Intentionally separating an unpleasant experience into thoughts, feelings, and body sensations allows the mind to respond more creatively than it would to the perception of an event as monolithic, impenetrable, and overwhelming.

Break it down, baby. Look at what you’re dealing with. Things are easier to deal with in pieces than a whole. i.e. how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It is easy to see it as merely a time-out, a brief moment when we can retreat and relax before advancing again into the busyness of our lives. Although it may have some short-term benefits along these lines, the time-out approach is not as helpful in the long run as the shift from doing to being mode because it does not alter our feelings of being under stress and pressure. It is best to see the breathing space as an opportunity to bring awareness to whatever is going on at this moment, to notice and step out of the routine we have become caught up in, so that we might relate differently to whatever difficulty we could be facing.

What is the difference between taking a break and taking a breathing space? An analogy may help. Most of us have at some time been caught in a severe downpour and have had to run for shelter, perhaps in a shop doorway. Sometimes we are simply glad to be out of the rain. We stand for a while, hoping it will stop. We are dry at the moment, but as the rain continues we know that sooner or later we are going to have to face it; the thing we tried to escape is still here. Finally, in one scenario, we go back out into the rain, grumbling, even cursing our luck as the rain drenches us. At other times, another scenario might unfold for us. We may take shelter in a very different way. We stand in a doorway for a while, aware of the prospect of getting soaked and not liking it much. We notice that we are hoping that it will stop but, seeing that it shows no sign of stopping, realize that being upset about it and worrying about how soaked we are going to get is only adding to our discomfort. So we stop clinging to the hope that it will stop raining and enter the downpour, letting ourselves be drenched and accepting that this is what is happening at the moment. Approaching the situation in this way may allow us to experience the rain itself. We may notice that there is something rather compelling about the way it is splashing off everything it hits. The rain has not stopped. We may be getting wetter and wetter. But our relationship to what is happening has changed the whole experience.

If we are motivated to undertake the challenge of waking up to our lives, we only need to remember to take the time to use the breathing space and then to give ourselves over to it, as best we can in any given moment. One way of expressing this is to say that each of us is responsible for the input. We do not need to worry about the outcome, especially about whether it is “working.” The invitation is to be patient and to persevere in the practice and see what happens.

It’s okay; whatever it is it’s already here; let me be open to it.

mantra

With intensely unpleasant feelings, we may find it helpful to use the strategy of “working the edge.” As explained earlier, this means bringing attention as far into the intensity of the experience as we can and then maintaining it with a light touch, as best we can, moment by moment. When the intensity begins to feel overwhelming, we can gently, in the spirit of self-compassion, shift our attention bit by bit toward some other, more stabilizing and benign focus. For instance, we might steady ourselves and regroup by focusing on the movements of the breath until we feel ready to approach the area of greater intensity again. We can do this by focusing on the breath by itself or together with awareness of the unpleasant feelings and sensations in the background (“breathing with”). By testing the water in this way, we can develop a progressively more accepting relationship to intensely unpleasant experiences. This in itself is a path of both wisdom and compassion.

you have the option of opening the Thought Door by making a deliberate decision to relate differently to your thinking. This may involve Writing down the thoughts Watching the thoughts come and go Viewing your thoughts as mental events rather than as facts Relating to thoughts in the same way that you would to sounds Identifying a particular thought pattern as one of your recurring old mental grooves Gently asking yourself: Am I overtired? Am I jumping to conclusions? Am I thinking in black-and-white terms? Am I expecting perfection?

In exploring the most effective way to take action in responding mindfully to a depressed mood, it may be helpful to keep two things in mind. First, low mood undermines and reverses the motivation process itself. Normally we can wait until we want to do something, and then just do it. However, when we feel low, we actually have to mobilize ourselves to do something before we want to do it. Second, the tiredness and fatigue that occur in depression can be misleading. When we are not depressed, tiredness means we need to rest. In this case, rest refreshes us. The fatigue of depression, however, is often not normal tiredness; it may call not for rest but for increased activity, if only for a short while. Rest can worsen the fatigue. Part of taking care of ourselves in such moments is to stay in the flow of life, to keep participating in normal activities, even if our mood and thoughts seem to say there’s no point.

“How can I best be kind to myself right now?” “What is the best gift I can give to myself at this moment?” “I do not know how long this mood will last so how can I best look after myself until it passes?” “What would I do at this moment for someone I cared about who was feeling this way? How can I look after myself in the same way?”

You don’t need to know what the details are this morning—the details don’t matter. What matters is kindness and gentleness toward yourself. A little kindness and gentleness toward yourself is a wiser and more skillful response to feeling threatened than any amount of analytical problem solving.

For David, the realization that he could change his experience by changing the way he paid attention in each moment was immensely empowering. He threw himself into bringing mindfulness to each aspect of his day. Over time he learned to prioritize giving attention to physical sensations as a way to stay connected with the immediacy of his experience. As soon as he awoke, he took three deliberate, mindful breaths, sensing his abdomen rise and fall with each one, using the sensations in his body as a focus to gather his attention before it became entangled and dispersed in anticipating and planning the day ahead. In the shower, he used the first contact of the water as a reminder to enter fully into the present moment, to tune in to the sensations in his body—the tingling on his skin where the water splattered, the movements in his limbs as he rubbed soap over his body.

He no longer flicked through the morning paper, automatically placing food in his mouth, barely aware whether it was toast or cornflakes, coffee or tea, or which of the children it was who was shouting about not being able to find a bookbag. Now he held this time with greater awareness. He dedicated it to mindful presence: David’s intention was to be here for these moments of his morning, for himself and for his family. After all, wasn’t this his life?

Everyday Mindfulness Here are some tips that Peggy, David, and many others in our mindfulness classes have found helpful: • When you first wake up in the morning before you get out of bed, bring your attention to your breathing for at least five full breaths, letting the breath “do itself.” • Notice your body posture. Be aware of how your body and mind feel when you move from lying down to sitting, to standing, to walking. Notice each time you make a transition from one posture to the next. • When you hear a phone ring, a bird sing, a train pass by, laughter, a car horn, the wind, or the sound of a door closing, use it or any other sound to remind you to come fully into the here and now. Really listen, being present and awake.

• Throughout the day, take a few moments to bring your attention to your breathing for at least five full breaths. • When you eat or drink something, take a minute and breathe. Bring awareness to seeing your food, smelling your food, tasting your food, chewing your food, and swallowing your food. • Notice your body while walking or standing. Take a moment to notice your posture. Pay attention to the contact of the ground under your feet. Feel the air on your face, arms, and legs as you walk. Are you rushing to get to the next moment? Even when you are in a hurry, be with the hurrying; check in with yourself to see whether you are “making extra” by telling yourself all the things that might go wrong.

• Bring awareness to listening and talking. Can you listen without having to agree or disagree, fall into liking or disliking, or planning what you will say when it’s your turn? Can you just say what you need to say without overstating or understating it? Can you notice how your mind and body feel? Can you notice ...

• When you find yourself waiting in a line, use this time to notice standing and breathing. Feel the contact of your feet on the floor and how your body feels. Bring attention to the rising and falling of your abdomen. Are you feeling impatient? • Be aware of any points of tightness in your body throughout the day. See if you can breathe into them, and as you exhale, let go of any excess tension. Be aware of any tension stored in your body. Is there tension in your neck, your shoulders, or in the sto...