(This article is a continuation from last month, which, if you missed, can be found here.)

5) Graduate School

Deeper and deeper into the subject at hand.  As in literal graduate school, you are focusing in on your subject and seeing both the minutia in greater relief, as well as the more profound levels of reality.  At this level, with depression as a syndrome being essentially dissolved, the process of healing can continue into these subtle realms of more detailed mapping, and more attention to breaking up the fragments of depression (e.g., negative thinking as it is anchored in bodily experience) that are left in one, even though depression itself has been crushed. 

This is the level where the grieving (being defined as, "The emotional process of letting go of that which is already gone") becomes less of something that happens to us than something that we intentionally do.  Letting go, and practicing non-control, becomes finer and finer as we recognize how the belief in futility is encoded in our memories and nervous systems at subtler and subtler levels.  We come to embrace grieving as the actual process by which acceptance is attained, and see clearly how and why that is the only path to a real openness and reception of life as it is.  It's a place where various wisdom tradition teachings are stripped down to their basic realities, and we start seeing their truths at our very funky and unique individual levels.

Another way of putting it is, at this graduate level, we discover, as Morpheus says in The Matrix, "how deep the rabbit hole goes." 

For instance, because we have successfully learned how to manage the overwhelming fluctuations in mood (in high school), and developed our capacity to observe ourselves in process (the mindfulness of college) and our ability and willingness to surrender control, we are able to see such a subtle level of reality as how depression can mimic or be confused for more existential realities. 

One reality is that there is an experience of what the Buddhists
call "emptiness," or the realm of no-form, which can actually be perceived as a tangible experience.  It is an apprehension of the field of potential from which form arises, which is full of energy, full of the numinous, actually, just full.  However, there is also an experience of what we can call "the void," which I think is best defined as "the experience of the presence of absence."  It is the abscess of the psyche or soul.  It is a painful void in what should be there, is the product of a wound not fully healed, and awareness of it is of an ongoing loss and deprivations.

Which might sound heady...but the experience in the graduate level is of such a distinction as a felt reality, as real as the difference between an overcast and sunny day.  Which is also not possible to experience (stably) before going through the earlier grades.  You don't learn calculus before doing algebra.

Another graduate level piece of work and learning is that our nervous systems are a reality unto themselves, with non-negotiable limitations that we either are in combat with, or are elegantly accepting and negotiating.  We come more and more to accept the parameters of human life without feeling the sense of diminishment, which can so easily cascade into futility, and then into depression.  There is an integration of the reality of the world with the incredible joys and potentialities of a human life.  Our developed ability to grieve actually allows us to experience the inherent sadness of a human life, at the same time we experience the incredible expansiveness.  We don't fight against depression, or against suffering or pain-we're less and less moved to or to see such fighting as relevant-while also more and more vigorously and creatively engaging our life as is, which we see includes amazing spaces of growth, healing, and creative engagement.

Identification, at this graduate level, shears away from the level of ego, and certainly away from the experience of depression or it's fragments, and becomes more identified with the whole paradox of life.  As a result, our very human endeavors and relationships become genuinely richer and more stable, because, not in spite of, the awareness of the reality of the pain that, as depressives, we've always known but have not been able to tolerate.  There's a wisdom at the heart of depression which starts being embraced and integrated at this level, which was not possible before.

For example:  Sarah came to me at the junior high level of her depressive education, and stayed through to the graduate level.  We did the appropriate work of each grade, building awareness and understanding, strengthening and installing coping/management skills, solidifying her ability to practice self-regulation, exploring old stories that kept producing depression.  Then we worked through the work of surrender, of learning to feel safe with letting go (a long-ish process), especially safe in her body.  Old memories and traumas arose that, while less and less identified with, needed to be healed and integrated.  Depression itself broke apart as she realized it wasn't, and never had been, who she was at essence (i.e., she stopped identifying with it).  This solidified, became an obvious truth, clear in her experience, and the shards of depression stopped constellating as depression.  It's reign was broken.  And as part of her college graduation, she moved through the awareness of both the necessary value of her "seeking," and the need to let it go as an identification in order to continue the path of growth and transformation that her seeking actually had started.

Which brought her into the graduate level of her depressive education.  She began deeply settling into her spiritual practice and the deeper logic of mindfulness work.  Pieces of identification began dissolving, not through heroic or aggressive effort, but simply in the light of her own clarifying awareness, and ability to closely examine herself and reality as it came to her.  She touched into deeper levels of grief, not associated with her particular life so much as with her humanness, and was able to maintain composure (as it were) in the face of this unavoidably painful level of existence.  She more and more did not flinch or defend against her experience, whether pleasant or not, whether enlightened or neurotic.  She also became more and more productive in her work life, able to clearly identify and notice what she was uniquely tuned for, and surrender to that "pre-programming" without a sense of loss or manipulation, i.e., dismal fate.  Also, her relationships to others became filled with more ease and openness, because she was able to tolerate the inherent highs and lows of fellow humans, without becoming overwhelmed with disappointment of self-blame. 

In a very real and verifiable way, she was cured from depression, because she saw that her life, in its unique qualities and impersonal realities, was inherently meaningful, and that she was an agent of her desires, rather than always subject to the screeching survival demands of depression.

6) The Post-Graduate Level

But it doesn't stop there.  What happens in this last (because essentially this level is the rest of your life) stage of education isthat the elements of the previous stages become self-sustaining, implicit, self-reproducing, and glaringly obvious.  It's a bit like the chicken is fully hatched and that which it has been hatched from is totally consumed and transformed, from confining shell into vibrant and vigorous life.  Depression has this transformative, "transphilic," quality:  that which is so confining and messy provides the material that can then be, alchemically, transformed into something radically different.  The depressed self becomes the Alive self. 

In finer and finer ways, at this post-graduate level, depression is thoroughly disidentified with.   You can tell because when you ask yourself, "Am I a depressed person," the answer comes back as a big robust laugh.   The absurdity is so obvious.

So too with futility, that core and fulcrum point of depression.  "Is life futile?" draws a booming, hearty, and profoundly non-bitter laugh.   You don't even engage in the rationalization or argument;  it makes no more sense than looking out the window at a clear, hot summer day and asking, "Is there sunshine?"  You couldn't have arrived here without moving through the grades, and by doing so, those questions so alive and real, and desirous of attention, become unsprung through seeing so clearly through them.

Grief continues, as fine levels of attachment to ideas of reality are burned away, transforming into acceptance, but experience of overwhelm recedes.  We have learned to ride our bike and we simply don't wobble, not through huge effort and strain, but because balance has more and more become who we are. 

Actually, what naturally unfolds is that we come to see that our identification is with the process of life itself, just like all the wise folk have said.  But unlike in earlier grades, where we diligently (and necessarily) studied the wisdom literature, here all that wisdom is being translated into our lived, visceral, embodied experience.  The first noble truth of the Buddha, that "Life is suffering," becomes, again, obvious.  "Oh!  He was just describing what he saw!"  In the same vein, we see that the logic of depression, that life is overwhelming by nature, unsafe, uninterested in our unique selves, is profoundly and absurdly wrong.  Not dogmatically, not because of our clever arguments, but because that's what arises as we have clarified our ability to perceive our own experience of reality.

So essentially the post-graduate level is the complete cure of depression, because it is the complete dis-identification from depression, and very fine and subtle levels of the self, and the complete perception of the inherent mismatch between depressions logic and the nature of observable reality.

Really.

Conclusion

No one has to go further with their education than they want.  Some people are genuinely, observably happy to study through high school, or part of high school, and there is a contentment that arises which can carry them through a life.  If they are genuinely a depressive, then they carry the vulnerability, but there may not be a need or desire to dig into the tiny roots of depression.  Management may be, really, enough.

Others, particularly those I've called seekers, seem to be unable to be content stopping at a certain grade.  They are partially pulled, partially running, towards deeper and deeper levels of "education," out of deep desire, and also out of deep pain.  For them, the pain is so deeply rooted that it's only by going to those roots that the underlying gnawing unhappiness can be transformed.