In my teen years, I started having extreme depressive episodes every spring. It got worse when I went to college, and culminated ten years ago in a Really Terrible Realationship Cataclysm. Which I will not discuss here.
Suffice to say, in the intervening years--and thanks to a great deal of assisted insight and precise inner observation--I have come to understand depression as a complex phenomenon, having to do in part with unaddressed truths and the imperative for personal transformation.
Can you imagine a crocus unwilling to grow, trying to fight all of Nature to stay in the soil? Not a winning game. And so when the deepest parts of myself start to stir, I now listen. Or try to.
I've been sick in a special way that I have. It feels like a retreat: I spend hours lying there calmly, grounding the mind in the lower body, just...existing.
I emerged from this strange state just in time for a Corvallis Zen Circle zazenkai, or "day of sitting." I got up early so that I could have as much time on the cushion as possible.
I sat very steadily, casting off personality and focusing on cutting anything that was not the immediate present.
That night, I was eager to sleep. I knew there would be good dreams.
To have this fear of betrayed trust so beautifully transformed and integrated feels deeply therapeutic. And it comes directly from practice.
In a subterranean tunnel/parking garage, I'm helping the distinguished "Doctor General" (a cabinet-level bureaucrat) to her car, when she turns on me. I am gripped by fear, or something like it.
I ask her what part of me she represents, being a dream figure and all.
Her distorted face opens in a giant scream. It's primal, beyond concept, absolutely terrifying.
I try to match it. There's no room for melodic variation, but if I throw everything into that scream..something works. It's glorious and chilling, a joyful leaping out of the fearful pact of the dream, and into the quivering. oddly-painful, body that lies twisted in my own bed.
I fall asleep again with relish.
What happened next is particularly meaningful for me because I have such a history of nightmares. I still remember ones from when I was a child. As a young woman I would awake exhausted from dreams-- first, of being chased; and later, of turning and brutally killing my assailant. There's no worse feeling than to wake up from a dream of murder..except perhaps to not wake up.
I am led to an examination room by a darkskinned man whose touch incurs great warmth and trust. I, and another patient from a long line of American Indian boys who have climbed up to this clinic, find the room filled with beds, looking messy and vaguely unhygenic.
A boil in my back in lanced. It's painless, although I'm bracing and grimacing in anticipation of the scalpel.
A great deal of pus and blood is showing up on the bedclothes. The medic turns evil. There is the hint of some sort of sexual abuse.
"But you're in my mind," I cry. "How could you hurt me? I could ...make you have horns!" And a giant rosy crystal of a horn sprouts out of his forehead. The other man is growing a whole clump of crystals, too.
It's ludicrous, lucid, free from terror.
In yet a third dream, I comically deprive a male assailant of arms-- they just melt away into his body. And the woman--she's harder to disarm. (Maybe she's too similar to the "me" of the dream.)
But..wait, I can give her blue lips! Some garish paint distracts her pretty well. There's great befuddlement in the evil characters.
The mind of zazen marched smoothly into these dreams. That minute attention to the present, without analyzing the past or trying to plan to the future; disregarding the drama of the the various voices that arise, and attending instead to the underlying feeling. Contacting the basic human creature, the one so prone to wants and fears and hates, and slowly turning it toward some greater awareness.
This may never happen again. It's great good fortune, the karma of this moment. But things will never be completely as they were before. And I am so grateful.
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