Meditation Can Help Depression

WASHINGTON (AP) People who tend to the elderly, change diapers, and serve up food and drinks have the highest rates of depression among U.S. workers. Overall, 7 percent of full-time workers battled depression in the past year, according to a government report . . .

When we work with old people, babies, or people all day who are stuffing their faces, we are seeing life as it truly is . . . raw. No longer can we blissfully hide in our illusions and fantasies of what life should be; now we are faced with the realities of our bodies.

Whether it is the fact that we will all age, become diseased, and die, or whether we see that a cuddly baby has a lot of stuff inside that isn't cuddly, or even if we see people engaging in feeding frenzies, we begin to see through the illusions of life.

The Buddha was sheltered from these things as well. He was more or less held captive by his father inside enormous castles while he was a young man, his father fearing that if he went outside the structured and protected life of the castles, he would see the realities of life and become a sage instead of a warrior.

Well, the Buddha did sneak outside the castle walls one day, and what he saw disgusted him to the point that he left his wife and new born child, and went on a mission to find an escape from all this suffering that man and woman must endure. He became depressed when he left the castle because when he saw an old, decrepit man, a diseased man, and a dead man, he knew that this would be his fate as well, regardless of how powerful he would become. But then he saw a monk who seemed not the last bit affected by all of this. These four visions changed his life.

The Buddha's depression was not sidetracked as it is now, however. He knew what he was depressed about, and he knew that the depression was normal. Anyone who sees life as it is and doesn't hide from the truth of life will initially be depressed. But if we can somehow understand that depression is normal, that indeed suffering exists for human beings, then the depression can be accepted. And once the depression is accepted, it can be observed objectively.

If, instead, we fight the depression rather than accepting it, then we end up in a battle between titans; our ego versus our illusions of life. Life is what it is in an organic body. The question is; how can we not end up again in an organic body?

This is what the Buddha set out to discover.

But we can discover all of these things in ourselves; all it takes is a different view of depression and an acknowledgment that depression is a normal state of mind. Actually, a bubbly state of mind is more of a false impression than depressed state of mind!

Rarely will you find a meditator who is depressed. Part of meditation is sitting through all the different states of mind that appear, such as joy, happiness, sadness, and depression. The secret that a meditator discovers is that none of these states of mind can continue without the fuel of active thought. Once thought is objectively observed, thought fades, and whatever state of mind was being influenced and sustained by that thought fades as well.

How a depressed person comes to this understanding is not easy however. The mind and thought are powerful things, although they are delusions, but a person not accustomed to meditating will believe all that the mind tells them to believe. The breakthrough occurs when the meditator sees the mind as only mind, then it can be worked with, Then the ego versus the illusions of life, neither of which is real, both get a hit, and eventually lose their power.

Meditation can begin by simply replacing your thoughts with you breathing. When you concentrate intently on your breath, thoughts cannot appear. But it takes some practice.