Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Practicing with Seasonal Depression - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Practicing with Seasonal Depression - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:25
  Jogen: Good evening, everybody. Hello, everybody at home. Happy Thanksgiving evening if you celebrate. There was a request that I talk about practicing with seasonal affective disorder. And, okay, by some faces, I'm getting a sense that that might be a good topic.
• 0:56
  And I'll broaden that to low level depression and also because I think it's helpful to distinguish those experiences from what we might call descents, spiritual descents that are not psychological depression but have some overlap in how they feel. I'll speak to that a little bit, my experience. And this is not a talk about people or maybe not be helpful to people who have severe or clinical depression. Raise your hand if you experience seasonal affective disorder or if you notice that you get kind of low mood stuff when the sun hides from us. Okay.
• 1:50
  Good amount of the room here. Some folks at home. Okay? When you've tried lights and vitamin d and extra coffee and all that stuff, that all that stuff is before the dharma. If you could just take a vitamin or buy a light, then you do that.
• 2:08
  Right? I experience it. I think it would be a fantasy to think that practice, eliminates these kind of things, though you may be able to work with it more skillfully. I do think in doing this practice, there can be, over time, a deeper surrender to just how much we are beings that are taken for a ride by conditions. Just think of your body.
• 2:50
  It's a set of changing conditions, so many of which you have no power over, and it kind of takes you for a ride. You don't get to opt out. It fluctuates. You're not separate from it. You're not completely fused with it.
• 3:07
  It's like a ride. Taken beings taken for a ride by conditions that are hormonal and energetical, as well as environmental and psychological. And I think this is one of the meanings of one of the reasons that Buddhists emphasize suffering. It's one of the things that's meant is this helplessness of being taken for a ride by conditions. The good news is that we're more than the ride.
• 3:42
  We are the ride, and we discover something else through doing this practice. We're a deep exception that the conditioned dimension of our being is composed of shifting conditions and that none of them are something we control. So, we encounter something like a mood shift with less sunlight, and we realize that we want to fight against that. We don't want it to be that way. We wanna antidote it very quickly.
• 4:25
  We wanna brighten it up. We wanna move it along, all of those things. And then in a way, it is, we add is it insult to injury? We make the ride harder. And in a way, we do that all the time.
• 4:46
  Right? We're taken for a ride. We're conducted by life, and actually right in there is a truth to appreciate. You imagine the state of liberation. Let's imagine a a totally liberated being.
• 5:05
  Extrapolate the practice you've done and have imagine it's done very thoroughly, wholeheartedly for a very long time. There's no uncompromisingly. Imagine the absence of resistance in such a being. Right? I remember one, Zogchen master was described as being, like, boneless because he was so fluid with whatever happened.
• 5:34
  There was no separation in his being. I remember Kisei talking about an abbot she met in a monastery she trained at in Japan, and she said, his body was so soft. It was like there was no separation in him, even on a physical level. So we're taken for a ride, we're conducted by life, and actually right there, in a way, that's no self. That's that that, that truth.
• 6:08
  It's so it's so natural. Sunlight diminishes, and my mood shifts. If we didn't fight against it or have some idea that has taken up residence in us that that's wrong or shouldn't be happening, it might actually be kind of beautiful. How much the tides, how much the universe, how much nature actually pulls on us. Right.
• 6:49
  Instead of it being the noonday demon, if we had another way of viewing it culturally. Now when things like this arise, we tend to not have appreciation of impermanence. Not only do we not tolerate or want to tolerate an experience like depression, low mood, if it's not to our liking, but because it's not to our liking, it becomes a very, it almost becomes an opaque object to us because we start relating to our idea about this experience, and we get further and further away from what, in a way, is the specialty of dharma, which is I'm gonna get close to this experience. I'm going to look at it through the eyes of impermanence and really verify its impermanence. We tend not to have confidence in how radically impermanent experience is, and so we react very strongly to even temporary shifts in our mood.
• 8:08
  I don't know if you're like if maybe I'm alone in this or kind of unusual, but there are certain feelings I get very scared of really quickly. Like, I have a boring day or a day I'm not excited by one of my hobbies that have been, like, lifelong. And I think, oh my gosh. What is wrong? Oh, no.
• 8:42
  I don't know if you have a version of that. Oh, no. Or you have an experience of a person and you're like, and you're like, oh, no. It means we have to get divorced or whatever the version is. I think the mind is sometimes that, it lacks faith, and doesn't have the wisdom of impermanence built into it.
• 9:08
  Right? The latest moment of experience kind of occupies our our, view as the way it now is. Right? We lose a bigger, a bigger view of how things are not only fluctuating moment by moment, but over chain over days, weeks, months. So in working with and I think, actually, something like I'm just gonna start I'm just gonna use one word, low level depression.
• 9:45
  Working with something like low level depression like this is an excellent way to start seeing and appreciating impermanence of feelings more deeply because it kind of is steady and it's not that scary. It's one of those familiar enough feeling states that we could bring it into practice in a really curious way. You could definitely keep doing your your zazen if you're depressed. I've done lots of depressed zazen, and in fact, it's some of the best. It has been for me.
• 10:25
  So impermanence as, a way of gaining wisdom for when we are taken for the depression ride is not a concept. As I like to say, it doesn't help you to remember, Oh, yeah, everything's impermanent. It might remind you that this is gonna just move through me, but this is an invitation to monitor what you're experiencing, to actually monitor closely. Stay as closely as possible to the direct raw experience of it. Closer we get, the more space we find in it.
• 11:15
  The more steadily we stay with our direct raw experience, the more fluctuations in it we'll notice. I would actually challenge or invite a challenge that if you experience these kind of low mood states, that if you can really stay with them and monitor it, of course, the best you can, you have to live your life, you will see that what you call a depressed period of your life or day is actually, interrupted by times when there are quite other different states. And if you're, invested in the identity of being a depressed person, even temporarily, you will tend to overlook those interruptions. But those interruptions are important, the kind of the the impermanence of the state. In some ways, everything conspires against doing this.
• 12:25
  Right? People react to the state we're in, And they either are like, ew, you're depressed. Let me not hang out with you. Or they're like, how can I help you? This is so terrible.
• 12:36
  And, of course, we wanna reach for this or that to change our state of mind. People love chocolate. Chocolate is very good at temporarily changing one's state of mind. For some of us, habits, cultural habits, personal habits conspire against just plopping down on the damn couch and being with the experience really directly. Instead, it's an instant monster or instant haunting.
• 13:12
  And then all the things that happen in reaction get us further and further from it. So we tend not to have a deep appreciation of impermanence because it's just a concept. Concept. It is much more than a concept. The, in a way, what I'm talking about, the the Buddha is is well known for, the darts, the dart metaphor or the the dart simile.
• 13:46
  Are people familiar with this? Sort of a really important teaching from early Buddhism. And just to paraphrase, the Buddhist said that there is the experience of suffering you have in some form. Right? And the tendency is to get pulled away from the immediacy of that and add things onto it in various ways that just make it worse, like this shouldn't be happening.
• 14:23
  This is the wrong thing to be happening. Those habits. Why is this happening? Who's the cause of this? Where is it?
• 14:33
  Where is the cause of this? And he likened it to being shot with an arrow and sitting there bleeding and being and and instead of pulling out the arrow or letting someone else pull it out, your main concern is where is the person who shot it? And how can I get them and maybe punish them or put an arrow in them, which is something human beings, actually instinctively want to do? And his simile is it a simile or metaphor? I can never sort those out.
• 15:05
  I know there's some professional writers. Can tell me later. Is that in that way of being with suffering, it's two arrows. There's the immediate being taken for a ride in unpleasant conditions, that is life. And then there's the other thing that, I don't like saying we stick it in ourselves.
• 15:27
  I don't think that's compassionate enough, but, we could definitely bring more consciousness to that second arrow. Yeah. And depression is something that's very easy to get to have the first arrow, which is maybe it's part of your biochemical makeup. Fault is not applicable. Maybe it's part of your genetic heritage that your ancestors are from a sunny place.
• 16:15
  All kinds of reasons. Maybe in a deep way, all the, horrible things that happen in this world tug at your soul. You know, I think, one of the hard things about depression in particular is because the culture has so much fake happiness that it kind of extols. When you're depressed, you think, I'm kind of doing it wrong. Wait.
• 16:36
  Depression means I'm I'm doing the life thing wrong. But actually, it might be quite the opposite. It might be that we're feeling we're attuned to life. So, I think there's, I I earlier, I used the word descent for something that's different than depression. And in descent, I took that word from, some of my reading in the Jungian tradition.
• 17:17
  And in descent is this idea that there are just cycles in life where you plunge into your core wounds and confusion in a kind of thematic way. It becomes a time of life, right, and you don't choose it, and you don't know when it's coming, and it just happens. And there are descents like that that can come from, let's call it dharma sobriety. Sometimes we are seeing the conditioned world, often called samsara, with a certain clarity. Right?
• 18:05
  We are doing this practice whereby we train to really be willing to see as directly as we can and to feel as unfilteredly as we can as appropriate. And we see and feel from this training that nothing is or could be stable as a feature of the universe. We are knowing that directly. Nothing is stable in our lives and nothing could be except for change. We're seeing and feeling that we and other beings go through futile lap futile loops.
• 18:53
  Many of us are caught in futile loops trying to squeeze ephemeral happiness out of ephemeral phenomena. Normally, especially if you don't do this training, that just seems like, yeah, of course, that's normal. But there's something about doing this practice and being really willing to see that whole loop and see the pain and the desperation and the helplessness of it. We see can see it externally. We can see it in ourselves.
• 19:31
  Cycle of wanting the thing, getting the thing, getting bored with the thing, finding a new thing to want, begin again. And this thing that wears on the heart at some level because no matter how much we do it or no matter how we try to not see that we do it or that the world is like this, we can't help but If we're paying attention, we start to notice it more. This is sobriety from a dharma point of view. Dharma sobriety includes, seeing that very few people, including our inner people, wish to own their deludedness and do something about it. That's not a very inspiring perception.
• 20:19
  Or when you see, okay, I'm really working hard to change my own mind, and I'm seeing some progress, but I've been working pretty damn hard. It's taken me all this time not to be a jerk. How in the world are other people who don't have the luxury of doing this practice going to change their jerkness? That's a sobering perception. The the tenacity and the ferocity and the ubiquity of the conditioned mind.
• 20:55
  Or related, seeing that caring for everyone could be simple and that there's actually no reason that we don't have a thoroughly loving world. There's no sane reason except that human culture is organized around divisive identities. And so we draw a line in the sand of who's worthy and who's not. And as practitioners, we see that the whole identity, relatively true, ultimately not. You start to see right through it.
• 21:35
  So this is sobering, and this is often comes out of just doing this practice without even intending to have these kind of perceptions. Although some traditions, they really encourage you to put your nose in it. Like the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you're supposed to put your nose in these truths every morning very very directly because they believe that going through this sobriety is directly connected to having the energy to wake up and step out of it, to extricate oneself from complicity in the aforementioned things. This is not a rainbows and sparkle horse kind of thing to be experiencing. That's different than seasonal affective disorder.
• 22:26
  That's seasonal dharma sobriety. I didn't have anything clever I could say. No no no cleverness. Sorry. Now, we can digest this and I think it changes.
• 22:49
  Just like any of you, and probably everyone has, gone through some betrayal of your ideals or by a person, some major loss. If you haven't, it will happen. And we do metabolize that. Even though it's a mixed bag, we grow from that seeing, or our being is enriched by going through that. It's same with dharma sobriety.
• 23:14
  You come out the other side and you don't you know, I don't have a pessimistic world view, for example, and I've thought a lot about this stuff. I've had my nose rubbed in this stuff plenty. Right? You don't come out pessimistic. But going through it, there can be sadness, there can be powerlessness.
• 23:38
  Out of sadness and powerlessness, we can, if we're not careful, get snagged on those feelings, and the mind makes sadness and powerlessness into things like despair and hopelessness. And I guess in a way, that's like the two darts or like the two arrows. The first arrow, which, you know, we could have another talk about whether one's life has to include sadness and the sense of powerlessness. The Buddha didn't think so. But that first arrow in your heart of sadness and powerlessness, you are training in not making that into or you're learning how that gets made into things like despair and hopelessness by the fixation on it, by what we put on top of it.
• 24:37
  That's where the power lies. Now, I said earlier that I think, for me, times of depression have been some of the richest times in my, spiritual practice. Like, specifically, when I would be hitting the cushion after someone revealed something hard about myself to hear or a relationship ended or just what's been going on in The Middle East or what's going on in Sudan or whatever I really take in and try to, like, be as present as I can with, that heartbreak, you know, the idea is not, like, let's make something out of the terrible things of the world, but the terrible things of the world can catalyze a deeper When your heart is a little broken, you can often let go a little deeper. It's almost as if there's a lubricant in the system. There's some willingness to accept the whole of life.
• 26:15
  Isn't that that's kind of paradoxical. You're taking in something very painful that you don't want to be happening, and at the same time, Za Zen can help you let that be a catalyst for a deeper embracing of what the universe is. Another version of it is you just see how hopeless the ego project is. Trying to be seen in a certain light, trying to sustain a self image, trying to be something that you're not. You see the stress of it because something's going on in your life that's reflecting it, and there's more willingness to put it down and rest into the alternative.
• 27:04
  Yeah. And I've seen that many times. I've seen people come into retreat or come into the monastery at a time when they were going through a major life crisis, and there was a convergence of the practice and positive disillusionment in their lives, and they had some profound insights. There's some there can be a relationship between depression and other heavy human experiences and really coming to know centerless diamond presence. Now, so we are the ride of conditions, environmental, cultural, emotional, physical, relational.
• 28:12
  Right? We are we are the ride. We are taken for the ride. There's more to our being than the ride. And also, when we are experiencing these states, it's helpful to keep aiming at positive causes.
• 28:37
  A way of looking at dharma practice is that we're continually seeding positive causes in the mind through different practices while at the same time accepting and not separating from our immediate condition, Because that not separating from our immediate condition is spacious. So, there are many ways to do this. So, this means you are, let's say, you're depressed. Well, what about a practice like gratitude even then? Even then.
• 29:13
  Maybe that's a when we still do this, we have a real strong faith in dharma. When in the midst of a negative state like that or that we experience as negative, we still are applying the practice to tune our mind. I had a dream the other night that I went to hell, and in hell, it was scary, and, I was doing a mantra. It was kind of a confirming dream about, faith and practice as I got some distance from it. And that's what I chose to do.
• 29:53
  I kind of turned towards the practice. So I want to mention gratitude as a very, very potent practice. I've had personal confirmation of its benefits many times. Like, during COVID, there was a pretty rocky time with my partner and I, sort of living together in all the mishegas and confusion with what was going on and not knowing what was what. And the most powerful thing we did to unclench our minds around the things that aren't working was each night before we went to bed, we would share five things that we're grateful for.
• 30:44
  We had to include a few about the other person. Right. So there are many forms of doing gratitude practice. And if you do if you scratch the surface on the Internet, you can find a lot. And I I think I've shared this, but I'll share it again.
• 31:07
  My favorite gratitude practice is simply to first of all, okay. You're gonna do gratitude practice. Then just say thank you to anything in your life that is there that doesn't have to be, that is of benefit to you. You just look around your apartment, and you say, Thank you, running water. Thank you, clean air.
• 31:33
  Thank you, window. Thank you, cat. Thank you, heat. Thank you, tofu. Thank you, vacuum cleaner.
• 31:41
  And you just keep going all the myriad presences that we can't quite say we deserve, all the myriad things that we know that many people do not have that are a part of our life, And you start out and it's like, okay, God, I'm just doing this thing. This is so fake, whatever. Before you know it, if you want to change your mind, which in a way is everything. If you want to start to bring in some brightness, eventually it will it's like you start the engine of gratitude. I'm not saying be bypass y, and every time you feel down, should, kind of bright side it.
• 32:39
  And it's not even the case that if you do a practice like gratitude, it's gonna sort of push out what you're feeling. It's just, it's more whole. Yeah. It it doesn't feel good to be me right now or some conditions are very undesirable, and yet, what else is true? That is very potent, Very potent.
• 33:08
  Thank you. In the Tibetan mind training teachings, they say that when we are really rooted in our practice, we will even be able to thank people who harm us. We will be able to thank people who cut us off in traffic or take the last piece of cake or insult us or maybe even worse is what they say is possible. Because we'll we we are shifting our mind where we're seeing that this is an opportunity for me to grow spiritually that would not be possible if I was just getting everything that I wanted. Deep spiritual practice rarely happens when things are just going our way year after year, as if that's really possible.
• 34:10
  And, actually, you might even be able to find some gratitude for the condition of depression. Yeah. In some ways, it makes you if you don't fuse with it and get drawn into a narrative about what it means and who you are and all of that, if you don't fuse with it but you let it be just one note in your cord, it can actually really help you connect with people. It can slow you down enough to see and feel more deeply. It can balance out sort of projections on people and things.
• 34:55
  It can really be a bridge to wisdom, even a state like seasonal affective disorder. I've never thanked the gray, rainy sky, but maybe I will. I'm gonna see what happens.
• 35:24
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.