Various Authors - Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression

Contents

Tami Simon

Reginald A. Ray, PhD

James S. Gordon, MD

Karla McLaren, MEd

An Interview with Mary Pipher, PhD

Robert Augustus Masters, PhD

Amy Weintraub

Michael Bernard Beckwith

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche IX

An Interview with Parker J. Palmer, PhD

Ann Marie Chiasson, MD

Susan Piver

Elizabeth Rabia Roberts, EdD

Jennifer L. Holder

Christina Baldwin

An Interview with Sandra Ingerman

Mark Nepo

Sally Kempton

An Interview with Thomas Moore, PhD

Jeff Foster

Introduction

Tami Simon
Founder and Publisher, Sounds True

About ten years ago, I was participating in an advanced meditation training led by Reginald A. Ray, a pioneering teacher in the lineage of Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche. At the retreat, a participant stood up at the mic and shared quite movingly about her depression and the challenges she was experiencing. After some dialogue with this student, Reggie looked at all of us in the room, about seventy people, and asked, How many of you are depressed? About 10 percent of the participants raised their hands.

He then said, You are the most intelligent people in the room.

This was quite a moment for me, because I wanted to be one of the most intelligent people in the room. But I had no idea what Reggie was talking about. Why would the people suffering from depression be considered the most intelligent people in the room? What was I missing?

A few years ago, my partner was on a trip to Africa for a month, and I had the chance to be alone in our home working on a special project. During this time, I spent an inordinate number of hours not working on anything in particular but instead lying on our upstairs couch staring into space, feeling completely blah. Everything seemed grey and meaningless; I couldnt find anything around which to orient. Why should I change my clothes or be productive or do much of anything? All the projects I was involved in tasted like ash in my mouth; everything I was up to seemed suspicious, filled with some type of inflated ambition, some need to be someone or something in the midst of a universe that did not have a single reference point. How could I have fooled myself into investing so much heart and significance into so many activities that were essentially meaningless?

Lying on the couch in this grey fog, I flashed on Reggies comment about the intelligence of depression and then recalled a statement I had heard attributed to Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche: Depression is the closest conditioned state to the awakened state.

In that moment, I had an inkling of what the intelligence of depression might be. Stripped of illusions and ambitions and the sense that anything I could come up with might ultimately matter, I actually felt... free. Like a balloon that had been punctured, I had fallen without any air to the earth. My experience of utter greyness humbled me and stopped me in my tracks. I had been stripped down. This grey depression helped me see the self-orientation that was motivating many of my actions, and it helped me drop this orientation and fall instead into a wide and open, boundless space.

As you will read in Darkness Before Dawn, there are many different types of depression, with different degrees, shades of experience, and mysterious dimensions. It is important not to lump all types of depression together oftentimes, people use the word depression to refer to quite different states of being, from melancholy to situational grief to chronic despair and more. We need a nuanced approach, one that takes depression out of the purely medical category and enables us to see, each one of us in our own life, what depression is asking of us and, maybe, what it is even offering.

Personally, I dont have any experience with clinical depression or the deeply debilitating experiences that it can bring. What I do have is a desire to open up a conversation in our culture about depression, whatever its form or extent.

If you are someone who is finding themselves at this very moment in a debilitating depression, please know that you are not alone, that the team at Sounds True who created this book is reaching out to you with an outstretched hand. To support you, we have created a resource guide at the end of this book, Resources for Suicidal Depression and Ways to Help Yourself and Others, which we hope will prove useful and beneficial to you.

Darkness Before Dawn was created with a vision of bringing openness and spiritual illumination to the journey through depression. Throughout the process, our guiding principle has been to bring depression out of the shadows and out of a narrow medical model to instead place it rightly as part of the sacredness of the human journey. As this anthology reveals, some of the great spiritual writers and teachers of our time have journeyed through intense periods of depression and have found profound meaning in their experiences. Some have found a deep acceptance of the reality of suffering in themselves and the world; others were able to make friends with a part of their experience they had rejected. A few actually found ways to regard their depression as a signal from deep within, or even to use it as creative fuel or a point of connection with all of humanity. As you will see, the meanings drawn are diverse and individual, but they are joined by the common desire to redefine depression not simply as a disease or a pathological state but as part of the spiritual path.

In creating this anthology, I had the chance to interview several leading authors and teachers about their personal journeys through depression. It was so odd to me that during each of these interviews I experienced tremendous joy and elation. In fact, there were many days when it was totally clear to me that the highlight of that day would be spending two hours talking to someone about their darkest, most depressive experiences. How could this be? My sense is that the joy I felt came from releasing a bound-up cultural energy. Depression has been sealed off, kept underground and undiscussed. The interviews felt to me like a coming out, a liberation of truths that can now shine brightly and light the way for others.

While editing the essays and interviews included in Darkness Before Dawn, I have been thinking of you someone who might be suffering from depression or know someone who is that you care about. This book is designed as an open-ended exploration to help you redefine depression as an intrinsic part of the human journey. It is not meant to fix you, but to inspire you in your own way to find the intelligence in your experience. Feel free to dip into whatever contributions inspire you and read them in whatever order you wish. Darkness Before Dawn is not prescriptive; it is designed to befriend you and accompany you.

Finally, I would like to offer a special moment of gratitude to Karla McLaren for the title Darkness Before Dawn. This is a phrase that comes from Karlas work as an empath, someone who is fluent in the language of emotions. Her work is a great gift in helping people understand the life-changing wisdom that is contained in all of our emotional experiences. Thank you, Karla, for such a fitting title for this book!

And my gratitude to all of the readers of Darkness Before Dawn. In a culture that primarily values what is bright and shiny and glittery, it takes great courage to descend and embrace the value in every state of being. May all of our work together help bring balance to a culture that desperately needs to learn to honor the holiness of what is dark and disowned.