Some­times another per­son can help disi­pate the stress that seaps into the back

Con­tin­u­a­tion of a one-​​year assess­ment of my yoga prac­tice. You can see the first part of How Yoga is Chang­ing My Life. [Orig­i­nally writ­ten in 2006]

I am “out­ing” myself: I have suf­fered from depres­sion since child­hood, even though I did not know what to call my per­sis­tent, cycli­cal blues until 1993. When I turned 40, the depres­sion started wors­en­ing — in another era it would be called a mid-​​life cri­sis or ner­vous break­down. In a series of melt­downs, I lost jobs and burned through life sav­ings and a home. I lay­ered on mul­ti­ple coats of guilt and shame on top of what was hap­pen­ing to me. The con­di­tion made me inca­pable of writ­ing and crit­i­cal think­ing. For some­one who lived off writ­ing and whose very self-​​definition was based on being a writer, it was a bit­ter real­iza­tion. In 1996, my psy­chi­a­trist told me that he could not promise that I would ever write pro­fes­sion­ally again — time to look for another career.

If it weren’t for my fam­ily, I would have been des­ti­tute. I lived in my parent’s base­ment for 16 months. My kids stopped their uni­ver­sity stud­ies so that they could con­tribute to sup­port­ing the house­hold. [Thanks, Stephanie]

A case of refrac­tory depres­sion is a very hum­bling expe­ri­ence — you can only focus on now. You look back on all the deci­sions and fail­ures dri­ven by your ill­ness, the dis­ap­point­ments and the pain, the suf­fer­ing to your loved ones. You have to release all that because there is noth­ing you can do now to change that. The future becomes some­thing dis­tant, and impos­si­ble to plan because you can­not guar­an­tee that you can per­form. You are stripped down to now, the present. You just have to take one day at a time and try to build on it. It also makes you very self­ish because you have your hands full resolv­ing your own prob­lems, and can’t take on other people’s problems.

Relief, not a cure

Get deep into the pos­ture dur­ing Brian Kest's mas­ter class at Thrive Yoga, Octo­ber 2010

I can­not say that yoga “cured” my depres­sion — relief came from my med­ica­tion and an extended con­va­les­cence that stretched over nearly a decade. I tried sev­eral drugs, trial and error, until my psy­chi­a­trist found the right com­bi­na­tion, and the drugs required years to pull me out of a deep hole. I had also tried other treat­ments, like reg­u­lar exer­cise, psy­cho­analy­sis, prayer. I came back slowly, started a new career, found a new employer, got a grad­u­ate degree, dis­cov­ered that writ­ing was still my call­ing — things that seven years ago I thought unattainable.

But there is always the lin­ger­ing fear that depres­sion will come back. It has scarred my mind and body, quite lit­er­ally: I assume that things will turn out badly or that cer­tain goals are beyond reach. Like a dia­betic or a HIV car­rier, I con­sider myself to be a chronic depres­sive and I can relapse.

Relapse?

Early last year, I felt depres­sion rais­ing its head again. I was close to panic. One night I got on a mat and things started to click. Although I had read Jon Kabat-​​Zinn and Rod­ney Yee, played around with yoga in the base­ment, it had seemed more like a work­out than a response to my prob­lem. Sud­denly, it all started to make sense, and I was at ease. And then I felt the peace of savasana — over­whelm­ing, purg­ing, releasing.

I started a search for help. I read the book, Yoga for Depres­sion: A Com­pas­sion­ate Guide to Relieve Suf­fer­ing Through Yoga by Amy Wein­traub. That lead me to yoga classes, the Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion and a daily prac­tice of pranayama and med­i­ta­tion. In my first, ten­ta­tive classes, I almost felt as if I would break mentally.

What is so good about yoga, pranayama and med­i­ta­tion? They are empow­er­ing and allowed me a change in atti­tude, from vic­tim to war­rior. They give me tools and tech­niques that I can use to help myself. When I had to rely solely on med­ica­tion and ther­a­pists, I feel help­less, at the mercy of an unpre­dictable, faulty, chem­i­cal chain reac­tion under­way in my ner­vous sys­tem. I also learn that it’s the daily prac­tice that gets results; no mat­ter how mod­est at first over time they pay big dividends.

Only my fam­ily and a few other peo­ple know that I have this prob­lem. I never wanted word to spread at my work place because the knowl­edge of my ill­ness might affect the per­cep­tion of my per­for­mance. I hated writ­ing about my depres­sion. I did not want to dig­nify or reward this beast that had soiled my life by let­ting it be the focus of my writing.

A new way of seeing

Open­ing the hips

Yoga has released from my feel­ing of bit­ter­ness and guilt by giv­ing me a fresh, expan­sive vision of my plight and human kind’s. I am not the tar­get of dark forces in my psy­che or my body chem­istry. Depres­sion is just my per­sonal, unique man­i­fes­ta­tion of the broader con­di­tion of human suf­fer­ing. Yoga is about reliev­ing human suf­fer­ing. The yogic sages knew how to trans­form suf­fer­ing into a lib­er­at­ing process by bring­ing mind, body and spirit back into bal­ance. Because I am scarred by decades of depres­sive think­ing, I want to address those issues and rebuild my life on an affir­ma­tive plat­form — instead of a vic­tim, I want to be proac­tive. In order to trans­form myself, I have to face it frontally and work through it, just as we would with resis­tance in an asana.

Why am I mak­ing this pub­lic dec­la­ra­tion now? Depres­sion has defined me as a per­son. In my pre­vi­ous post­ing on “How has yoga changed your life?,” I found myself try­ing to write around my depres­sion in explain­ing why yoga has become so impor­tant for me. This past month, Kelly McGo­ni­gal has had us reflect on purifi­ca­tion. I have come to real­ize that this con­fes­sion is about puri­fy­ing myself and my self-​​perception so that I can move on to heal­ing these scars (sam­skaras in San­scrit) that have been seared into my mind over decades.

Other Resources

When I felt depres­sion com­ing back a few years ago, I started search­ing for infor­ma­tion about how to man­age my con­di­tion through yoga or med­i­ta­tion. I found a cou­ple of books and lots of infor­ma­tion on the Web. I am post­ing the most valu­able links below.

• Emo­tional Alchemy is an inter­est­ing book that deals with using med­i­ta­tion to treat mood dis­or­ders. Tara Bennett-​​Goleman, M.A., is a psy­chother­a­pist who prac­tice Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion and has trained at the Cog­ni­tive Ther­apy Cen­ter of New York.
• Yoga for Depres­sion: A Com­pas­sion­ate Guide to Relieve Suf­fer­ing Through Yoga by Amy Wein­traub: Don’t be mis­led by the title, the book is really about yoga’s capac­ity to ener­gize the spirit and restore bal­ance. Yoga gives you tools to man­age the imbal­ances bet­ter. Other opin­ions about this book from expe­ri­enced yoga teach­ers can be found at YogaLifeStyle.com.
• Yoga Jour­nal The Nat­ural Prozac: The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk ther­apy and anti­de­pres­sants aren’t enough. Amy Wein­traub wrote this arti­cle, orig­i­nally appear­ing in the November/​December 1999 issue.
• Yoga Jour­nal Bet­ter than Prozac?: Yoga and med­i­ta­tion offer some of the same ben­e­fits as anti­de­pres­sants with­out the side effects. Amy Wein­traub wrote this arti­cle for the July/​August 2001 issue.
• Yoga Jour­nal Sit­ting with Depres­sion: Depressed peo­ple think they know them­selves, but maybe they only know depres­sion. Mark Epstein wrote this piece, appear­ing in the September/​October 2000 issue. He has many books.
• Yoga Jour­nal Emperor of Air: Behind The Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, whose fol­low­ers com­pare him with Krishna and Jesus. But Shankar doesn’t seem too con­cerned with fan­fare or for­tune, he just wants to keep spread­ing his sim­ple mes­sage that all you need to get on the path of well-​​being is breath. Allen Salkin in the September/​October 2002 issue of .
• Yoga Jour­nal West­ern Sci­ence vs. East­ern Wis­dom: Some of the most exten­sive med­ical research on yoga ther­apy is being done in India, but will it ever bye accepted by West­ern med­i­cine? By Tim­o­thy B. McCall, M.D. in the January/​February 2003 issue of Yoga Jour­nal. You can also check out his book, Yoga as Med­i­cine: The Yogic Pre­scrip­tion for Health and Heal­ing, which Yoga Jour­nal published.