Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.
Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago.
What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one of the best books about meditation, whether or not someone is depressed.
I've only read a few chapters, but so far I'm anticipating that the reviewer was correct. I'll share a section called "Get Me Out of Here!" that illustrates a central theme of the book: how our efforts to fix ourselves can make things worse, not better.
The fact is that when emotions are telling us that something is not as it should be, the feeling is distinctly uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The signals are exquisitely designed to push us to act, to do something to rectify the situation.
If the signal didn't feel uncomfortable, didn't create an urge to act, would we leap out of the path of a speeding truck, step in when we saw a child being bullied, turn away from something we found repugnant? It's only when the mind registers that the situation is resolved that the signal shuts itself off.
When the problem that our emotions signal needs to be solved is "out there" -- a charging bull or a roaring funnel cloud -- reacting in a way that will allow us to avoid it or escape from it makes sense.
The brain mobilizes a whole pattern of mostly automatic reactions that help us deal with whatever is threatening our survival, helping us get rid of or avoid the threat. We call this initial pattern of reactions -- in which we feel negatively toward and want to avoid or eliminate something -- aversion.
Aversion forces us to act in some appropriate way to the situation and thereby turn off the warning signal. In this regard, it can serve us well, can even save our lives. Sometimes.
But it's not hard to see that the same reactions are going to be counterproductive and even dangerous to our well-being when directed at what's going on "in here" -- toward our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self.
None of us can run fast enough to escape our own inner experience. Nor can we eliminate unpleasant, oppressive, and threatening thoughts and feelings by fighting with them and trying to annihilate them.
When we react to our own negative thoughts and feelings with aversion, the brain circuitry involved in physical avoidance, submission, or defensive attack (the "avoidance system" of the brain) is activated. Once this mechanism is switched on, the body tenses as if it were either getting ready to run or bracing itself for an assault.
We can also sense the effects of aversion in our minds. When we are preoccupied, dwelling on how to get rid of our feelings of sadness or disconnection, our whole experience is one of contraction. The mind, driven to focus on the compelling yet futile task of getting rid of these feelings, closes in on itself. And with it, our experience of life itself narrows.
Somehow we feel cramped, boxed in. The choices available to us seem to dwindle. We come to feel increasingly cut off from the wider space of possibilities that we long to connect with.
Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to "be so emotional," we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn't okay to feel emotion either.
Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises.
When we react negatively -- with aversion -- to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome, eradicated, and defeated, we get into trouble. So understanding aversion becomes fundamental to understanding what gets us stuck in persistent unhappiness.
We run into problems because the unhappiness we are feeling now triggers old, extraordinarily unhelpful patterns of thinking from the past.
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