Life asks a lot of us these days. To take a side. To argue for compassion. To care for strangers when we are in the midst of caring for our own. Civility and cooperation have broken down at the highest levels of our government (though history tells us this is nothing new, we experience this in our time as somehow wholly fresh). The ugly heads of violence, misogyny and racism rear up daily for us to wack-a-mole them down again, and the tension created by the interactions of friends and families of differing opinions and values hits closer to home than ever before. All of this on top of just the normal stuff of life – if we’re not vigilant, it’s easy to allow overwhelm take over; to let rumination, anger or despair have all the snowballing effect they want.
How can yoga help? What makes its particular effectiveness effective?
1. Move.
Any doctor or therapist worth their salt will tell us one of the best antidotes to depression is movement. Regardless of its specific form, exercise stimulates the nervous system to produce chemicals that help us to feel “good,” steady, at ease: endorphins and serotonin. More active forms of asana practice fulfill this function admirably. Think of taking more dynamic holds of specific poses (moving the trunk and legs up and down while in Warrior 2 for example) and of attention to transitions between postures when practicing sun salutations. Any movement that facilitates the natural and full rhythm of breathing is oxygenating for the bloodstream and the brain.
Yoga then, can be as effective a tonic for occasional (but perhaps these days more frequent than usual) bouts of depression* as going for a hike or a swim, two of my favorite other-than-yoga activities. But what really sets yoga apart? How can yoga be something more “medicinal” or therapeutic for these emotionally challenging, if not debilitating times?
In yoga psychology, we view depression as an imbalance. You might recall the gunas as ways of categorizing the qualities of experience in order to help us see ourselves and our relationships and interactions with our environment more clearly. Of the three, tamas is described as embodying the following qualities:
- stability
- stasis – which we need of course, but also
- darkness
- dullness
- heaviness
- insentience
- obstructing
- veiling
Its opposite, rajas, when out of balance we might see as contributing to heightened states, like excitement, but also fear, anger or anxiety:
- activity
- motion
- energy
- movement
- changing
With an understanding of the gunas as a foundation of your yoga practice, you can see how certain styles of asana might be more or less beneficial in terms of how they restore a sense of balance in the body/mind. More active practices balance too much tapas; more calming, gentle practices balance too much rajas. Or so it goes.
What of the overwhelm of being pulled in both directions at once? I’d bet that many of us carry on at low levels of one or the other all the time. We might call it our natural baseline. How to practice when we’re in the midst of both more fear and depression? I would consider pulling toward the middle, away from either extreme. It’s how I most often practice and teach anymore. Can you think of a way to practice that is gentle but also strong? Let your own experience bear this out for you. Let your depression be an impetus toward self-care and your own practice outside of class or private sessions.
2. Sit.
And still, yoga also has this “mind” component – in asana, to be sure that’s where we first begin to learn it and how it sets yoga apart from other embodied movement practices; but it more importantly is the point of meditation practice. We can learn to sort, sift – to discern what is going on “in our heads” when we learn to pay attention. We “know” the difference between a “thought” and a “feeling” – they are defined differently in the dictionary. But do we know the difference in ourselves? In our bodies? We sit and watch, and then notice our minds drift toward “thinking things;” do we also recognize when we feel a certain emotion that a thought can elicit?
When we’re depressed, I believe we go into ruminative overdrive. We connect thoughts to negative feelings over and over and over, without being aware of it. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches patients to identify the “when” of this happening, in order to counteract the “overdrive” aspect of rumination.
The most well-known of the teachings of the Buddha is that suffering is unavoidable; it is in fact, the cornerstone of living a human life. We get sick, we grow old, we die. We lose those we love. We wrong and are wronged by others. Life is hard. If you follow the news, your life might be really hard right now. I would suggest that meditation as a tool for managing depression might give us a very different relationship to recurring mind-states than therapies that seek to “treat,” “heal” or aid us in avoiding it.
I’ve noticed myself in ruminative overdrive not just over the almost daily bombardment of injustice and incivility, but in particular, and perhaps oddly, over the suicide of a celebrity chef. For someone I didn’t know, his death has kindof rocked me. I, like many, many friends and strangers, felt that bond that transcends personal familiarity, a sympathy with him and the intelligence and sensitivity he brought to his work and his own relationships we were privileged to witness. Reading the flood of social media – from literary and news profiles, to Instagram memorials, to the posts from friends who are already re-watching all of the television he ever made – was triggering. It elicited my own sadness and feelings of loss all over again. And yet, nearly two weeks in I kept looking for more. I wanted to feel this sadness in me; I wanted too to try to relate to the depth of sadness he must have struggled with. And it was as if I hadn’t yet been to the bottom of it all yet, and was still hungry to get there. I needed to feel the ache in myself of his departure. And with this recognition of what seems like compulsion (which is also what many of have been doing with the news since November of 2016) is an opportunity to examine it.
Let this work of examination happen with feelings of sadness, rage, anxiety or despair over the events of our lives. When we’re depressed, instead of trying to get away from the associated moods and feelings that arise – whether through turning off the news, or engaging in activity that “takes our mind off” the unhappiness, hold these feelings as witness to them. This is where compassion for ourselves happens. In meditation, we “allow to come up what comes up.” And we’re not looking for answers, we’re not trying to solve the “problem” of our depression. We’re not trying to explain to ourselves “why.” We’re trying not to use rational or intellectual sensibility. We just feel what there is to feel while observing the fact of our feeling state. We can notice the quality of the feeling, much as we practice that kind of noticing with our breath. Is it heavy and persistent? Does it drag our thoughts toward a bereft, empty future? If so, can you notice what the texture of that feeling is like without losing the sense of the one doing the noticing?
Acknowledging and allowing room for these feeling states can also be the impetus toward a deepening creativity. Standing witness to an enlarged capacity for feeling in ourselves often leads us to want to somehow “capture” or express those qualities we’ve observed. This can often be the path for those of us who’ve been through traditional psychotherapy. Perhaps feeling gets transposed into a work of art, or poetry, or community activism and engagement.
Remember the very popular book from the 1990’s called “Care of the Soul” by the depth psychologist Thomas Moore, where he writes about depression as a gift? Depression can enlarge our field of knowing ourselves, the depth of what we can feel, and thus our capacity for our own self-care. When we sit, we are observers of the mental and emotional flux that happens up in the front of consciousness; the events of our lives and our sometimes inevitable responses to them happen “up there.” Then who or what within us is doing the observing? An abiding, witnessing self “back stage,” thought to be eternal and loving and compassionate. In yoga this Self is often referred to as “soul” or “purusha.” (I tend to think of soul as something of an intermediary between the witnessing self and the ego, or between unconsciousness and consciousness. A story for another post.)
Regardless, an expanding sense of soul is at the crux of your own evolving and deepening humanity. Moore’s book is a good jumping off point for exploring depression as necessary for living a more whole and integrated life; as antidote, as balance to our very human desire for happiness, ease and joy.
One of my favorite teachers also pointed us to this article on “Anger as a Sacred Practice” by the Zen teacher Joan Sutherland that talks about anger not as a reactive state, but as a state of “sacred practice to be handled with care” (think about that one and how we tend to push the “negativity” of anger away for the “positive” feelings of calm, peaceful control).
If you are part of a community of faith, do you also have a prayer practice? In periods of depression or fear, does a prayer practice offer you an opportunity to deepen through those very feelings? To bring you closer into relationship with God? I was tooling around looking for writings on the practice of prayer and found this statement to be in such close concert with the practice of meditation or contemplation: “All we are asking people to do is to take a step towards one another and towards God in a way that is intentional,” … “The psalm is right when it says that deep calls to deep. … In centering prayer, silence is the means, the mechanism by which I grow in relationship with God, and it is the relationship with God. It is not an intellectual endeavor.”
The world is a hard place, even under the best outward circumstances. What tools do you have that you can draw on when those circumstances threaten to keep you in the heaviness of tamas or melancholy, depression, or as the case may be, in the “spun out”-ness of too much rajas, anxiety, or manic feelings? Take those feelings as opportunities to practice and reflect on what these mind-states are asking of you. Let them refine and ground a sense of your own subtle, feeling body, your creativity, your activism, your very human-ness.
(As always, the smart yogins at Yoga for Healthy Aging have also written extensively on yoga and depression.)
*I would make a distinction between acute and clinical forms of depression, where the latter is often persistent over many months or years and is sometimes best addressed with the care and attention of a licensed, practicing psychologist or psychiatrist. I am talking in this post acute or situational depression, which often arises as a response to the specific, individual but also more collective stresses in our lives. I write as a practicing yogini and student of the psyche. I do not claim any clinical expertise or authority in this post. Arrange a visit with a qualified mental health specialist if you feel the need for professional intervention.