Bleeding out our Reflections

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Preface:

This document was written for friends and family as a way letting them know about my experience in the last year. Without the support of my friends and family, full healing would seem almost impossible. Their presence reminds me to not give up myself even when I feel like doing so. There are many folks who have known me through the past several years that I have not kept in touch with and who might have had no idea what I have been up to or my experience has been like. This document is written to rekindle that connection and remind them how important they are to me in my happiness, and how much I want their happiness as well. Remembering the love I have shared with friends and family has been without exception the most important healer, perhaps only a close second to remembering my connection with myself and the god within. And my biggest motivation to heal is to be able to fully show up for my friends and family, to have my presence enrich their lives as much as possible.

And finally, perhaps this document can be of some benefit to those who have or are undergoing similar experiences. I would die to give even an ounce of pain for anyone who is experiencing any pain, loss, or heartbreak.

And lastly, feel free to laugh as much as you want at this story. I certainly laugh at it all the time. Humor is really the last saving grace. HAHAHAHHAHA !!

Introduction:

So it feels like I made it through hell and have come out the other side, gasping at the fresh air. The war is over and the amount of joy and relief is overwhelming. Is the nightmare finally over? Will I go back to sleep and go into another nightmare, or is this finally it… I can see the horizon, the setting sun… I have charted my course, and weary from my long journey, I’m ready to sail home.

It’s hard to believe the war is over. I almost want to crawl back into the violence because it’s what I’ve known.. because this beauty I’m confronted with.. the colors of the world, the green trees and children is the unknown.. I don’t know how to react, it doesn’t seem real to me after being in a haze of believing that the only real thing in this world is pain.

I have believed that if I’m not feeling pain I’m not feeling alive.  What’s worse than actually feeling the pain is the paranoia that the pain is right around the corner. So I might as well do what I can to stay in the pain because it’s staying in the known… believing in the reality of  love… now that’s quite a leap of faith. Are you telling me the war is really over? Are you telling me I don’t have to fight anymore?

But I’m always wincing, ready for more pain.. War doesn’t make you tough, because you never really get used to pain although you being in pain can become all that you really know. War makes you a scared wounded animal.

Yeah I’m tough. I can handle all the darkness in the world. But when a beautiful blond haired child comes up and hands me a flower I break down sobbing because I can’t believe the fucking beauty of the flower and the child. It tears down my facade, rips me open to that place of heaven and beauty inside of me. I’ve avoided seeing beauty for so long because beauty reminds me of me of my ugliness.

During my depression I lived in my imagination. I would imagine myself throwing my arms around those I love whom I haven’t seen a long time and crying tears of joy… and my friends and family are carrying me away on their shoulders…to feel safe again, the war is over… lay me down in bed I want to rest and dream pleasant dreams for the next month. I lived in my imagination; those memories of myself back with my loved ones were my only solace. I would imagine my friends and family coming to rescue me, taking me away to a better place.. The look of love in their eyes, mirrors, reminding me of who I was.. my facade, the armor I put around my heart would crumble under their gaze. They would come, calling me back to join them and the web of life again.

I have faith that  daily life will resume, and I can begin to piece together my life again one day at a time. Now I’m looking at old photos. Seeing my old self give me the sense that I have been somebody in this world, that I have history, and that time passes on… this phase of my life will be only one phase out of many phases that I will experience in my life. Looking at these old pictures, I literally hear the voice of my old self unmasking me, reminding me of who I am: “What happened to you, dude? Chill out, you’re worrying too much, you’ll be fine…” Thanks old self!

Along with pictures, I listen to music that I used to like, art that I used to enjoy…Old memories come forth, of the time before the war began.. of my old self… with old lovers.. it makes me sob to think about who I was, how unprepared I was for this… this restructuring.. this revisioning,  reassembling a shattered self, a mishmash of pieces from my past and pieces from this present.

I’m home again…… yet the demons aren’t all gone. There’s this deep well of disbelief and rage over all the loss I have felt this last year.

I curse at the people I love inside my head for not saving me from all of this. FUCK YOU DAD, I imagine myself clawing at him, raging at him for not saving me, like parents should.. but I know really that no friends or family can save you from journeys you may need to go on. Oh Well…

Really who I’m mad at most is myself. I’m mad at myself for accepting anything less than what is really true. What the FUCK Tully? How could you possibly even for a second pretend like things are OK when they’re not?

At this point, I cry and cry and cry so much I become a baby, infantile..life is tough! I’m not ready to grow up! I still have a lot of child hood to live…

This infantile state I go into is a return to innocence. At some point we are innocent. Inevitably we learn and really experience everything that is bad about the world. But you can’t get stuck in that either, you have to  return back to the innocence again.

At some point the pain can seem unbearable. I think we all need to go through this. I remember being in really deep pain one night where it was literally painful to be alive. I was sitting with myself.. resisting all life, wanting to die…I then felt this painful sob break through my body… I felt as if the last bone in my body was broken. I felt utterly defeated by life… , and I went to my mom and I felt this instinctual longing for her to take me back, to unbirth me. Thinking about this experience is really intense actually, I feel this wave of nausea and feeling radiating from my solar plexus. It’s deep pain in motion. 

This kind of trauma comes back every so often, it washes over me, makes me shudder, makes me feel this incredible sense of vulnerability and sensitivity.. at moments like this the world seems so intense for me, kind of scary… I almost jump at every car that drives by. (How can the driver drive so FAST like that? are people insane?) every noise.. how can people become accustomed to this world, I ask myself? so much pain and death everywhere, I can almost feel the bugs dying under the sidewalk, the families losing their homes. tohe terrorists coming in and murdering all their children in Sudan… fuck.. at the same time, I can feel all the pleasure going on everywhere.. all those bursting orgasms of people fucking, this very second. What a circus…

I calm down soon… sometime I feel like that that my mind could just collapse again at the blink of a hat and all the pain could come rushing back and I’d have to be put in a mental hospital.. I am slowly rooting out that part in me that still wants to die. Once it’s on the ground I will crush and smear it on the pavement, and never looking back.

It’s like I’m always on acid and everything is amazing and beautiful… but at the same time one worried thought and it could turn into a night mare again. bad trip… well I know I don’t want to go back into that nightmare.. I will do anything that’s needed to not go back there. I will stand in the fire… and get burned and laugh at every second of it if that’s what I need to do.

Coming back to life is beautiful.. The small things… the texture of a friends face..beautiful people.. how beautiful her smile… feeling the warmth of another body, touching each other rubbing each other where it makes us feel good, feeling the hot breath of another man, another woman. We all came from the same womb, birthed from the same plasma, the same ocean. Comparing hand sizes, comparing dick sizes, pushing each other, wrestling each other.They way my breath moves in and out of my belly, the blood flowing through my veins.  I love looking at the people at the grocery store, the kids, the adults, I love how they look out for each other, I love seeing them smile and be happy.

Animals seem to know me, they give me compassionate looks… animals seem to recognize the conflict I have been carrying in my soul, while other people have no clue..

I’ve been away from this place for awhile. I see that life has gone nicely on without me.

————————————————————-

What I’ve learned from the experience: pt 1

I’ve been clinically depressed. It lasted from the months of October 2007 to June of 2008. I am now attempting to move away from this phase of my life. I believe I am stronger now after having encountered some of the pitfalls of the spiritual path, mistakes that I trust I won’t have to repeat again.

A diagnosis sounds cheesy to some, but I felt ill for months without any real context as to what I was feeling. Getting a diagnosis, even a western medical one, is helpful in understanding in seeing that what I’m going through is a disease and not some fundamental weakness in myself that I’m completely alone with. Also, it is a convenient way of communicating my experience to others.

Mental illness is not a disease as freely understood or as talked about as something like cancer is. People who have survived cancer are seen more as innocent victims of a disease, whereas people with a mental illness might be looked at with some suspicion, as if they might be making up their condition, or perhaps even over-dramatizing.

I could see my depression as “growing pains, something that I could have or should have snapped out of easily”. I could say well “everyone goes through hard times”. I could tell myself to “just get over it” and “see the sunny side of life”. I could push it all under the rug and develop a false happy face. I could not admit weakness and I could also say “I wouldn’t have gone through this if I had just been stronger”.

Depression is a disease that affects millions of people. It’s more than just a string of bad days. Often it’s a string of bad months or years. People with depression should take the opportunity to tell their story as often as possible, not only for their own healing but other’s awareness.

Depression is rampant in the U.S. because our society creates senses of disconnection, isolation, and confusion. People need to know what signs to look for in depression. I was an emotionally intelligent person who still failed to recognize the signs. People need to watch their loved ones for signs of depression and act quickly to get them the help they need.

I’m not trying to just move on and forget that it all happened. And instead of a bad thing that happened to me because of some flaw in myself, I now see it as something that can happen to anyone with the right circumstances. Instead of a miserable thing that has slowed me down and stopped my development, I see it as giving me a chance to help others not go down the same path I did, and to help bring awareness to this rapidly growing state of spiritual emergency we are in on planet earth.

As a teenager, I loved the wilderness. I thought joining environmental groups might be a way I could really serve, but it wasn’t how I wanted to create. I came out of college with this vague sense of wanting to make a difference, of wanting to help people. The problems were out there but I knew that until I felt personally involved and affected by them I’d never feel that potent urgency to act. So many issues to choose from. Yes, I could go to a third world country and help them build compost toilets, or I could go help mothers who have had abortions.

But I could never quite decide on an issue.  Looking back all I really want in life is to be at my maximum potential, so whatever brings me there. Having gone through a spiritual crises or emergency, I want to serve others who are going through such an emergency. Many feel very alone in their illness. I hope to get the message across that such an illness is not a permanent identity that will always separate a person from society. Such an illness can actually be a sign that a larger transformation is under process, personally and globally. It is all those uncomfortable feelings we experience when our old illusions can no longer persist and our true self emerges as the key to our survival.

What led me to the experience: pt1 Summer 2007

This summer I thought of myself as an artist. I have always thought of an artist as anyone who looks into his own soul and inspires others to do the same. I came home to Nevada City to focus on developing my music, my writing, and my meditation. This was a plan I had several months before leaving school.

I played guitar and meditated with discipline everyday.Looking back, a certain sense crept in: the need to be making myself better, to always be making the world “better”. If I wasn’t improving upon myself, then I was wasting my time. I lived on the satisfaction of self improvement, of expecting new and profound results in my art.

That satisfaction didn’t last long. In my effort to improve upon my art, I forgot a sense of balance. I played guitar all day but after awhile I felt my music wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t have a portfolio of pieces I knew and could play. My music wasn’t reaching an audience. I wasn’t meeting other musicians. Many times I would be playing and get discouraged with the question: “where is this leading?”

Even if I ignored that critical voice and kept playing, another one would arise that would tell me that I was wasting my time, merely spinning my wheels around in my own head. Not listening to that voice was difficult. After all I didn’t want to keep following some path of music that wouldn’t take me anywhere. At this point I lost trust in the sense that my intuition would guide me as to whether I was wasting my time or not. I worried that if I kept playing and just stayed alone in my room, I was afraid I’d become disconnected. I became afraid that if I were to stay in the room I wouldn’t be “developing myself”.

I began to question my art… I had the idea I wanted to write a novella, there was fear there that spending so much time alone and with my thoughts would disconnect me from other affairs. I started questioning the sense of my own productivity. Maybe the satisfaction in coming to some answer or some new conclusion about something, maybe that feeling like I was “going somewhere with my art” was illusory?

The idea that the world was one big philosophical problem to solve was a fascinating idea that motivated me. I wanted to create that piece of art that would sum up the entire universe and the entire human experience. For awhile I felt a great about my ambitious goal. But as I narrowed my life towards this “one noble pursuit”, I became more convinced I was missing out on other life experiences… adventure, new relationships, and the simple enjoyments found in this world. I began to feel isolated. I began to feel like there was a whole world out there that I had no idea about. I began to feel uncomfortable with a sense that I was naive, not competent, not becoming a part of the social world What if I was just fooling myself making shit that nobody was going to see or like anyways? Maybe I was wasting my time? What were other 21 year olds doing?

I had started the summer with the mission to explore the frontiers of the inner world, but these intense doubts began to come up. Maybe I was going the wrong direction?

So then what should i do? Should I go travel? Go find a job? I had friends that had meditated in a monastery for a year and seemed to gain so much power in it. But I began to feel like I was losing energy. In my quest to go inside, it seemed that I no longer had things in my life to look forward to. In certain social situations I began to feel self conscious about how quiet I had become, how uninvolved I seemed. Oftentimes I noticed my mind would often just completely empty out and I would became uncomfortable with the feeling that I had nothing say.  At times there was this sense that whenever I was with people I was really only with myself, that that was the only “true” reality and everything else was an illusion. Maybe a narcissism, it was as if I was always noticing myself in the mirror. “Who is that?” Maybe we are all alone, but if that’s the case then at least we are all together in that aloneness

I began to question my childishness. My naiivete now keeps me fresh. But I kept expecting myself at some point to become established in the world, to know the world and to lose this “childish” feeling of always questioning my own existence. I thought I needed some kind of training so I could feel competent and secure in myself. There was the belief that there were just some things that I should just “know” and be able to talk about. But it seemed that no matter how many books I read, I never ended up feeling knowledgeable about any subject. It seemed like the more time I spent reading books the more I experienced a sense of “spacy-ness” of “not-knowing”, of doubt, of always asking questions.

In retrospect:

It wasn’t really until I tried to change who I was and miserably failed that I started to really appreciate who I was in the first place. “If I only knew how much I had” I would often lament.

Upon reflection, the journey into the soul is a dangerous one, and almost impossible without guidance. Perhaps ultimately I would have saved myself a lot if suffering if I were able to get past that feeling that I wasn’t going anywhere or improving myself. But it was like journeying into a scary and unknown place without telling anybody where you were going. I had no community that I connected to. I remember joking with my friend Minh that if I died he would be the only one in the world who knew of my life and only he could really cry for me because only he really knew me. His memory of me would be the only marker of my existence. I remember always joking about what wanting to disappear, wanting to go sit on some bench for several years and do nothing but sit in quietude. Yet, as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Now I was faced with the opportunity to disappear, and the decisive question: What if I didn’t make it back?

And a lot of stuff came up I wasn’t prepared for: loneliness, sadness, disillusionment, fears that I was losing my mind, fears that I was losing my grip on the world. I had no one to counsel with about these feelings, no one to guide me through them and help me make sense out of them. No one to urge me to keep going, or no one to suggest to back off and incorporate more balance into my activities.

Inundated with these feelings, I began to run… and run… and run…..but I could never escape them and the more I ran the stronger they got, until my reality turned into one of those nightmares where something is chasing you, where every room you enter there is something horrifying waiting for you, where there is absolutely no rest, where you scream and yell and beat your hands against the wall hoping there must be some way to wake up out of this. But the relief that you get after waking up and realizing it’s all a dream never comes.

Yet I became at a loss for new avenues to grow into. I felt stuck in what I perceived as a small town with few opportunities. I saw no open doors I could step into. A worry that I was not moving forward creatively and emotionally crept up upon me, leading me to feel like I was constantly “searching” but never quite finding what I wanted. I needed new outlets in which to express myself, new situations to take charge in and grow into. I wondered if it could be a job. Yet the opportunities seemed limited without already having set a specific direction, and my degree in art history made me feel more unprepared.

I worked hard at the outlets I had: meditation, music, farming. The sense that some needed new direction was not coming compelled me to work at these outlets even harder, to the point where I felt as though I could never relax, that I always had to be working at finding that thing that would make me feel like my life was moving toward what I saw as a “success”. I never allowed myself let go and relax. I always felt that with what I was doing I had to be going somewhere with it, whether it was cooking, farming, meditation, or music. A kind of existential urgency motivated me… I felt there was no time to waste.

This is a valid sense that can be taken too far. Along with it came a fear of stillness, because stillness seemed to only contain more of the stagnancy that I already felt. I doubled my efforts to avoid this stillness, this “stagnancy”. But of course what we run away from always follows us, and I felt like I was constantly followed and haunted by a lonely stillness. I feared death, I feared letting go into this stillness…I wanted to have all these varied experiences: traveling, working, having intellectual conversations. Yet wherever I turned there loomed a sense of vast space over me.

A few times I was cornered by this stillness, where I could no longer run. One such opportunity was working by myself at the farm. This day I showed up… Tim and Leonard the farmers were gone. There seemed to be no one around for miles. I questioned whether my work was valuable without guidance. But again there was no one around to relate to- only the serenity of nature and my own thoughts. Here I was up against that which I had been trying to ignore. I was face to face with stillness, with the vast space, with uncertainty and not knowing, with the prospect of the purposelessness and absurdity of my existence. Chaos seemed to penetrate every attempt I could to maintain structure and order.

I could not let my world fall apart. Though I knew it might afford peace, surrendering to this chaos seemed to be giving up. This conflict swirled in my head and zapped my energy, compelling me to lay down in confusion. There was a sense I could give in and find peace….

But i I resolved to keep working, to keep being useful. I pulled weeds in a desperate attempt to assure myself I was purposeful, useful, worthwhile in the world. By the time Tim and Leonard came back, I was recovering from a slight sense of panic that ballooned into an obsessive searching outside myself that continued for the next winter.

This experience at the farm marked my first depressive episode. It planted a seed of unrest in my being that over the months grew into a suffocating vine that kept me feeling stuck and powerless.

Depression marked a vast alteration of my everyday reality:

Standing in my room I am doing yoga postures. At this point exercise is very uncomfortable… my body feels extremely heavy and there’s a deepset nausea in my body that makes me wince at every exertion. My body feels chemically imbalanced, my mind feels sick and on tilt. Those positive sensations, those “endorphins”, are nowhere to be found. I feel ungrounded, unbalanced energies acting in my body. My mind feels scattered, confused, unable to focus or concentration. I feel scared as I am alone with this feeling, no one to check in with about it. Yet I continue the exercise because I know will be the only thing that will bring temporary relief. And it does. I meditate afterwards but there is still the feeling that my head is spinning and that I have not found any concentration. I feel betrayed by my spiritual practice. Perhaps meditation is not always the proper solution to life’s problems. It empties me out, but will it take afford me new inspiration?

Sometimes I would spend all night sitting. But it always came with the nagging feeling of being out of balance. Though I would spend nights cultivating what seemed like power and peacefulness, my days would be chaotic and weary. While I could still my mind to great lengths these nights, it seemed to only work within the confines of my own house and my own mental world. I started to distrust that it was real spiritual development seeing that I was having trouble applying it to my experiences among the outside world.

I started noticing that while I felt anxious and chaotic in the outside world, when I entered back into the safety of my house these feelings would temporarily be pacified. This duality was created, with the scary and oppressive world “out there” and my safe zone in my house. I distrusted the comfort brought by the bare walls of my house, and a conflict still raged within me, and I told myself I shouldn’t be so attached to home. Sure I was safe now, I thought, but if any challenges came I would be done for.

This led to a fear that I was developing a “spiritual ego”, that I could feel OK within a constructed illusory realm but I was powerless outside. Therefore I feared I would be stuck forever in my house as a kind of disconnected spiritual ghost wandering in the fragments of his own inner world, forever astray from connection with earth, the world of action, and other beings.

Though these worries came up, I cherished my nights because they were my periods of peacefulness. It seemed that bedtime was the only time I could lay down and feel apart from the world and its worries, like a child again. I felt aware that I was in a cocoon. But I was content to feel safe in my alone world.

I desperately needed help and perspective from someone who knew about such things. I wasn’t aware of the darker places in which I was heading. If I had known, I could perhaps have steered the ship into another direction. But I suppose I was not prepared to know and I had to reach bottom before I could begin my ascent again back towards the light. It was an unfortunate journey into the “heart of darkness”, into the “dark night of the soul”. Traveling in a dark tunnel with only a small flame as a guide, any attempts to find my way out only led me deeper into the maze.

Some of the physical symptoms of depression:

Depression comes with a deep nausea and fear in the pit of your stomach that makes the mere experience of being alive incredibly uncomfortable. With this feeling in the body, movement itself is uncomfortable. With this feeling in the body, your limbs feel like lead weights, and exhaustion is quick to come.

Depression makes one feel as stiff and as immobile as an old man. When I would use muscle force, a sick feeling would course through my nerves a long with a sensation of wanting to cry but not quite being able to. From this experience I figured there must have been layers of trapped emotions in my body. But at this point I was clueless as to how to access and heal them.

Depression is incapacitating. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to do much more than just stand, peer out, and breathe. It’s cliche, but each day seems like a week when it is spent in a constant state of discomfort. I remember one time going on a walk where I ended up merely being able to lean onto a car and stare at the sun, the sunlight giving me a slight boost of energy.

Some energy came from exercise. I would have to go running a few times a day just to get energy boost from the endorphin buzz. Times like this led me to question whether I could go on at all. Many days were a teeter totter of feeling hopeless about life and then finding some inspiration that gave me a surge of hope again for a better day tommorrow. It was exhausting. At one point I seemed on the brink of collapse, but the one time I contemplated suicide I freaked myself out- it just seemed too extreme of an act.

My depression overwhelmed my life: barely a minute passed where I wasn’t thinking about it. I felt helplessly ill. Being sick in Santa Cruz, I had few friends, no family, no job, and was uncomfortable in my living situation. Yet every morning I would continue to get up and do yoga postures and my chanting meditation, two things that would help me feel better for a few hours. I was stuck in a hole, with no light shining in, no one or no thing to help me out of my situation. Scared to death and trying to get some grip on my situation, it seemed necessary to establish a sense of normalcy and daily routine. At the same time, life seemed to be slipping out of my hands.

I became scared that I was losing my mind. My short term memory started becoming completely absent. I would misplace something and spend 15 minutes looking for it only to find it was in my pocket. My verbal skills began to diminish and it became hard to hold and follow conversations. Interacting with others became awkward, with long silences and frequent forgetfulness. I felt bound by a stifling fear of expressing myself. A sense that I was not right in myself haunted me. There was a heightened self consciousness of my own oddness and insecurity. The stillness that I had been trying to run away from now consumed me and a strange vacancy and absence took over my personality and covered up my spirit.

One time, in a doctor’s office, I was waiting for the doctor to come in and it dawned on me after a few minutes of sitting there that I hadn’t felt or thought anything in the last few minutes. But it wasn’t a kind of peaceful stillness. It was an empty, dull mood, the feeling of being empty shell, with an empty body devoid of spirit or life force. With this empty mood, feeling anything involved an effort of concentration. Many emotions were lost to me… from those things that would usually evoke emotion in me, I felt no response. There were many moments I could recognize “this is where I might feel love”.. but no feeling would arise. There was a flatness, a dullness, a gloominess, my world visually lost its vibrancy. Buddhism talks about emptiness, but when they mean it they refer to that vibrant open energetic dance of reality. When someone is depressed reality seems truly empty. It felt it as if it had been ages since I had really laughed. It was only during bouts of crying that I could perceive that subtle dance of energy that defines awakened consciousness.

Much of my personality, my normal idiosyncracies and facial expressions seemed taken over by a dull vacancy. Instead my body became rife with small aches and pains everywhere, in my joints and in my head.  With this, a strong fatigue ensued. In There were many times I could literally feel the energy draining out of my body. With this, doubt about all action in the world seemed to take over my mind. I felt a nagging sense that anything I would say or do would be futile, for no purpose or reason anyways. If this reality was illusory, was there any reason to act at all?

Questioning the meaning of action marked a major spiritual crises within me. I no longer wanted to be a part of the world. Was there any way to escape, to run away? In my pain, I wanted to be rid of taking any responsibility toward this world and my own life. There seemed kind of a perverse satisfaction in the idea that I could escape and be taken care of, to be an infant again.

This sense came to a head vividly one point in winter. It was January and there was a beautiful snowfall in the sky and on the ground was a blanket of white. At this point, it was painful to get out of bed. The only painless state, the only peace I could afford was to sit in bed and absently watch the snow falling. At this point my only goal was to numb the pain. I felt completely absent from the world, not quite dead but certainly not alive. I knew I couldn’t stay in this state for an eternity… eventually I would have to get up and create some movement in life. In that disconnection was kind of a strange peace, and it felt for awhile I was able to achieve what I wanted to achieve: freedom from the responsibility of life. Again, it was an absence, an absence from life, perhaps even an absence from God. But in that state of stillness there was a kind of mute sacredness and my mind seemed to rest in an ancient stillness. I remember my mind carrying a few symbols: they seemed alien, and other worldly, deeply sacred symbols older and more ancient than human consciousness, whose meaning somehow pointed back to lost histories about the origins of time itself. (I may just be waxing poetic here

Day to day I was aware that I existed in this cocoon, stuck. Though I tried to hold onto some semblance or normality, whether it was through attempting to study spanish or continue playing music, I could barely concentrate. My mind was constantly overwhelmed by the worry over my situation.

I felt alienated from my true joy and potential, completely alone, as if in some foreign country where no one knew my name, my history, or my identity. At times I would find peace in my aloneness, a night or two spent with the stars, though often it was tinged with a kind of lonely bittersweetness.

Still, it was comforting to know that there was a place I could go to in my mind that was beyond this worldly reality, a place where my soul could always rest and belong, even when the story of my life on earth was chaotic and sad. The peace I found in these times was a solitary peace, and the only way to break through the sadness seemed to require complete acceptance that I was a lonely soul, meant to die an early death to God.

My life became simply sticking to places and routines that provided some level of basic safety. Sitting in my car, putting on warm clothes to face the cold at night, or eating a meal gave me a next task to work on. Before I had dreamed about being homeless, I had dreamed about surviving in strange and unfamiliar places, and living on the fringes of society, being “free”. I had dreamed about facing and going through the “heart of darkness”. Yet now living like this I did not feel free, and I did not feel like I was being guided or that I was learning from the experience. I felt scared and sick, baffled at how I could have fallen into a pit like this after feeling joyful and happy in life. I felt lost without my sense of spiritual focus and discipline. My entire life felt uncertain, and the continuity of my existence was brought into question. My most valuable resources, my mental and physical health, seemed robbed from me. My bright future seemed to be waning, in danger of being entirely dashed. My life felt completely derailed: What would become of me?

The transition to Nevada City:

The fall passed like this, and at the start of the new year I was back in Nevada City. Now I was in a place that at least felt safe, like home. In Nevada City I began to focus on working with my pain and finding paths towards healing. But healing as still a ways off.

There was one particularly bad night in January. I was exercising that night in my room attempting to do my yoga postures, a difficult set. I tried to stretch my will as far as it would go, yet at some point it stretched no farther and I felt like I had no strength or motivation left. It felt as though I had failed at my last opportunity to battle my depression. I collapsed on my bed, and thoughts of failure swirled like a tornado in my head I could not stop.

In the darkness of my room, a kind of nightmarish drama unfolded in my head:

My life began to flash before my eyes. As Tully on planet Earth, my 22 years of life were over. I felt blessed that I had so far lived a good life, but it seemed that my story on Earth was to end here. I mourned all the things that I would miss out in life, my marriage, a career, my children, traveling, art… The world was going on without me- I thought of my friends who were all beginning new phases of their lives. I thought of the collective hope of the human race for a better world. Yet I seemed apart from it all. I rationalized that there were many on this planet who don’t make it, in whose lives only a few chapters are written and then are forgotten. I reasoned I was one of the weak, with a faulty will, who didn’t manage to survive the great struggle of evolution, where only the strong and fit survive.

Before, life seemed like something that was going to be a given. Since I was born to nice and healthy parents and I was young and middle class, it seemed that I would always be healthy and happy and provided for. All of this seemed to come crashing down on me, seemingly a lie and illusion. My situation seemed to scream that life was undependable and MY plan for MY life didn’t seem to matter. Life seemed to be going by its plan for me. At this point, a real sense of hopelessness and despair set in. This night my entire will to live and belief in my self seemed to crack. I laid in bed, unable to muster any energy to stop my mind from spinning thought after thought. I remembered my spiritual quest, the first joy and bliss I had discovered through meditation. I remembered my first Buddhist teacher, Raoul Birnbaum. His teachings resounded throughout my mind. To be free in this life, one had to have will, concentration, determination… yet my mind told me I was a person that had lost all of these completely.

It seemed resoundingly clear that I had failed on the Buddhist path. I felt that I had failed my teacher, Raoul Birnbaum. It seemed profoundly clear to me that the Buddhist path was a dangerous and difficult path, with many opportunities for failure and insanity. At this point I deeply doubted that I would be able to recover from this major loss of self and will. As I laid in bed this night, my breath almost came to a standstill. I barely had the will to breathe or to lift a finger. I was a defeated samurai, who had failed in battle and whose honor had been broken. I now could comprehend a samurai’s heartbreak, and could understand why the honorable option was to commit suicide altogether.

Most depressive episodes usually end with succumbing to intense feelings of failure and grief. Even though that night was a strong feeling of personal and spiritual death, my body of course did not die. Of course, I woke up the next morning. It was hard to recover from nights like this. The next day I would be with even less motivation, less energy, and I would feel a nervous tension in my body and an inability to focus on anything. I would spend the next days trying to meditate in order to gain some relief from the pain. Again, I would feel that meditation would be ineffective and I would end the sitting feeling like my wheels were just spinning. In a way I was hoping that meditation could be a tactic to escape and not feel anything at all. I was hoping that instead of grounding me more in this realm, meditation could take me to another place.

A similar episode repeated a few weeks later… only this time my wish for death also came with a letting go. It was a dreary day and I came home to an empty house. I barely had the energy to do my exercises and I ended up lying in bed. It seemed like the challenge I was up against was immense and I resolved that I was going to give up on life. My mom came in during this and sat with me and I told her my wish of wanting to die and that I felt like I couldn’t go on. But I also told her that I felt that God was with me and that I felt peaceful about letting go of my life. I came to an understanding of what the Buddhists say when they say “die at every moment”… I was ready to give everything up at that moment and though it was sad, it was also peaceful. At this point we both cried together, it really broke my heart to see my mom cry like that… my life ending would be a big loss for her as well… and I thought about that. She told me that the reason to live was to experience more of the divine connection… Well, the pain was bad but suicide still didn’t seem an option so sooner or later I had to get back up and start making slow steps back towards life…

January and February were the worst months of this. It was very disappointing to me to be losing a sense of my integrity as a person. But there was a sense that the miserable person I was was not the real me. Still, I was dealing with a shattered self image. I remember closing my eyes and looking inward and seeing my own face staring back at me, an image of a broken and shattered person. It was my face, but with an empty grimace, a sad expression. I tried to talk to this shattered person, to give love to him but it was as though he didn’t hear me. He was in the grip of a strange absence, a despondency. He was traumatized from that experience in Santa Cruz where his breakup with his girlfriend was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Feeling like his world had been torn apart, he let himself slip away as well. Disillusioned, disenchanted, wounded. I called inside to myself “What happened to you buddy? Where did you go, did you get lost? Are you in there”?. Sometimes I would cry at this questioning, other times it was just an sleepy echo.

There was a few images I would work with to try to bring myself out. While exercising, I would picture myself in a cage, shoulders slumped over, hopeless. Then I would imagine this person getting up from his seat, going over to the bars and with all his might bending them so he could step out. I pleaded with this person to try with all his might… sometimes he would be close to success.

I had a lot of fear to work with. Day to day I felt an undercurrent of fear. When I would look at something black, it would remind me of fear and I would get afraid. When I would look in the corners of the room it seemed that there was something sinister about them and I would try to look away. One particular night the fear was so intense that everywhere I looked there were literally shadows crawling along the walls. The room seemed frightening, sinister, and shadowy and I only became more afraid from the thought that my mind was in such a dark place. Do you remember the phrase “there’s nothing to fear but fear itself”? The fear that we are losing our minds makes us lose it even more.

As I began the journey towards healing, I began to put together the pieces of my past. I needed to remember and understand who I was, and why I had gotten lost in order to find my way back onto my path and move on with my life.

Looking back, I feel that all the decisions I made throughout the summer and the fall were made with the best intention I could have had with the information at hand. I believe I made no decision knowingly sacrificing my integrity or knowingly in order to serve myself. This is not to say that I don’t take responsibility for my decisions. I recognize that many came out of ignorance, about not discerning accurately my needs. I have no regrets really, since there’s this feeling, especially concerning last fall, that in each decision I always tried my best. In that sense perhaps failure was inevitable, but since failures can be such valuable learning experiences, maybe I have been given a great opportunity? I have asked the Universe several times about its plan for me. I never quite received an answer, but there was a great kind of power in asking the question itself.

I suppose I had to learn the hard way. Sure it would have been nice if I had more help and perspective in a few areas, but I suppose this was not my karma. On the other hand, if I had to learn these lessons the hard way I would rather learn them earlier than later. I have and am currently aware that I have been given quite a challenge to face at this period in my life. Looking back, I would have wished in the last year I could have had a more even gradient of personal growth and challenges. But I’ve never been a real organized or always rational person anyhow.

I forgive myself for my mistakes, ignorance, and any harm or chaos I have caused. My compassion for myself understands that even in decisions made out of ignorance and frustration I was always seeking a sense of well being (even when I knew the decision would probably cause me unhappiness, even if I knew the decision might destroy myself!- these are still decisions made in vain towards producing happiness). Even the ego is deserving of compassion because it is really just concerned for its survival.

This compassion and self-love naturally transfers for others. I have shed more tears than I thought were possible in the last months. Many times during fits of sorrow I was able to connect profoundly with all the sorrow present in the world today. There came tremendous feelings of empathy for others after experiencing first hand the dark side of my life. Mankind’s search for the light has always been undertaken in the prospect of the dark. Without pain and suffering, man would not be motivated to search for the light.

Without pain and suffering, we would not recognize how precious our joy actually is when we have it. I strived to be grateful for those simple moments when the pain would clear away and some of the vibrancy and joy of life would come back into me. It made me appreciate how much of the joy of being alive is founded on the small sensations and thoughts we get to experience: the pleasure of seeing an especially vibrant color, the sense of a cool breeze on your back, the soothing brightness of a well lit room, the pleasure we get in walking. For awhile I lost these basic sensitivities: the sights, smells, and pleasant memories. When one would make it in I would be grateful, and I found that my mind constantly wanted to reach back into my best and dwell in those happy moments and sensations. Now I realize more that our basic sense of being satisfied in life comes from the chance to experience what really is a simple sense of well being.

I think every human being, no matter how privileged, will face some painful loss or experience in their lives. Challenges if used rightly can impel us to embrace life more fully. There was one night where I shed tears of grief over every painful situation in my life… I felt the pain my parents must have felt from their divorce, I felt the pain my sister and I felt from the divorce. I felt the pain of feeling separateness from my peers as a child. Too, I not only felt grief for the sorrowful times in my life, but I felt grief for the happy times in my life too. Happy times are precious moments of love, but I realized that even in joyful times there is kind of an undercurrent of bittersweetness, because they too must eventually end and change. So enjoy the happy times while they last, and endure the sad times while they last. In this way, all human experiences are prone to this cycle…so as it is foolish to expect happiness to last forever, sorrow doesn’t last forever either.

During this experience, I happened to be out in nature at night… and in this I felt some fear. I then grieved for all the humans who can’t walk out in nature at night, who don’t feel that they are at home on their planet and just as much as a part of nature as the trees and birds are. At this moment, I felt some of my victim role shed. “If I’m a part of nature, I thought, then what is there to be afraid of? I AM nature!” My step quickened as I started to reassert my part and role in nature. I had a great time screaming, grunting, and thrusting my pelvis as I reasserted my role as a powerful and primal force to be reckoned with! I was fiercely potent, ready to fight to protect the sanctity of my home and ensure the continuation of my species

After this expression, I began to feel at home on the earth. No longer was I so opposed and resistant to being alive. The world no longer seemed so strange to me. And even if it were strange, I knew that I was equally strange along with it, that I belonged in its strangeness. Hell, I could walk a funny walk and it wouldn’t be much stranger than the next thing.

We humans are blessed with the awareness of how incredibly ridiculous and amazing we are, giving us the incredible ability to see that on one hand life is a very serious thing, with laws and will and intent and energy, and another hand life is an incredibly absurd, humorous thing that makes almost no sense but is amazing! Within certain guiding rules, we have incredible opportunity for creativity and innovation, a blank slate. This sense of the cosmic joke has saved me many times.. sometimes my emotions well up and seem so serious, and when my life seems to come to these seemingly life or death choices, I can take a step back and start to laugh. Afterall, my emotions are as weird as any other creation in the universe. Hahaha, oh there goes my mind again wanting to kill somebody, hahaha, oh there goes my mind again wanting an ice cream bar.

Even now I look at my five fingered hand: how strange and miraculous this hand is, how strange and miraculous that the Earth could start out as nothing but a molten rock and out of that could come this living breathing functioning hand! Certainly I seem of a different breed than these rocks and trees, but perhaps the differences are mostly cosmetic anyways! (But oh how the human mind loves to dwell on differences in form). So I not only forgave God for creating me, I thanked him for creating me. My attitude began to shift from considering life to be a hassle to life being a gift.

During that experience, I was ready to shed this identity as some “crazy fucked up human mistake of evolution”. It was time for humans to realize that we aren’t just bugs crawling around in the dirt of planet Earth, but that we have the gift of consciousness, the ability to acknowledge and appreciate the miracle of creation both in ourselves and the universe around us. Since we can be aware of the gift of life, since we have a more developed consciousness than plants and animals, this comes with the responsibility to serve and protect them. And we must protect ourselves too (ironically, from ourselves!)

As humans, we don’t always need some explicit usefulness. I think what we really need is just to be acknowledged and recognized for our inherent worth. So we love ourselves, we open ourselves to other people’s love. Then we can exist without being confused as to why we are here. When an individual is in a loving family, he doesn’t question why he is there. He just feels the love, a natural sense of belonging.

I have since learned that oftentimes human life happens in these cycles, as life circumstances change, as loved ones die and loved ones are born. This has allowed me to adopt the perspective that my period of sadness doesn’t indicate some inherent fault in me that can never be remedied, but that instead it is part of a natural cycle. Hopefully in the future I won’t have to dip this low.

Before this period of my life, I had this sense that I wasn’t connected to the world, that I was shielded and protected through where I was living and the people I hung around with… and I didn’t think what I was looking for would come from reading the newspapers. I thought it might come from traveling to another country, I thought it might come from getting involved in social work. I haven’t done either of these- yet.

But after feeling mentally ill, I know what it is like to feel so helpless, so crazy, so out of sorts. At times I would feel so confused, so crazy with my thoughts that I wanted to implode. During these moment I would try to gain control over my mind, but it just seemed impossible, so I just let the chaos ensue. Times like these actually were times when the layers started peeling off… these moments of desperation leads one to shed any falsities and sincerely cry out to God, Jesus, Buddha or whatever for help. These times again connected me to all those other people in the world who feel tormented by their mind and out of control.

The gulf between me and all those “crazy” people disappeared. I was now one of them, and I realized how their confusion and madness also contained a deep humanity inside of it, that same deep longing for happiness that all humans share. There are so many in the world who feel alienated from the socially accepted norms… this can create painful and separate identities. I know that there are many in society who if they knew about me, might not accept parts of me or my experiences, but this has made me feel closer to those others who also have not been accepted by society. I am less willing to take advantage of those parts of me which society does accept: my whiteness or my maleness for example. I no longer see people with weird behaviors as somehow different from myself…they are people that have just not been able to come to terms with their pain.

In the Months between March and June I stayed at a Yoga Retreat center called Ananda Village. During my stay, I did a lot of dishes, often two shifts of it per day. One day while I was cleaning the pans my mind was producing negative thought after negative thought. For awhile I resisted these thoughts, trying any method, a mantra, my breath, to clear my mind. After while I just gave up and started following the thoughts to their natural conclusions. “I am worthless”, the thought said. “Ok I’m worthless you’re right, thought”, I would say back and then say “I guess that means I should kill myself then!”. What I found is that taking these thoughts to their natural conclusions would often end in quite absurd statements which then made me laugh and feel a sense of joy.

After while I decided to experiment with something spontaneous, so I went to the bathroom and started to stare in the mirror. For awhile, my thoughts continued spinning. Soon, however, the stories started to melt away. At that moment, however, without the stories, it wasn’t some divine being or some magical christ-god looking back at me. Instead the person in the mirror seemed to be the most regular person ever, an ordinary doofus, a dishwasher, nobody special. Just a person, just me! This was a decidedly non-exceptional person who wasn’t going anywhere in particular.

Yet in this moment this alienated worker, this “average joe” discovered his power. It was a chameleon -like power- “in the system, but not of the system” I looked out the window and felt that sense that I was surrounded by the mystery… those in touch with the mystery are “free spirits”, and can skate along it, wherever it takes them.

I think we feel free when we feel that where we are and what we are doing is a conscious choice and that if we could change it if we felt the need to. As for me, I believe I am a soul as old as this Earth, completely at home to wander the universe and bring good will to all… I believe as humans we are both masters and servants of the universe. Masters in the sense that we are channels of God, and when God sees through us he looks upon his own creation with love and pride. Servants in the sense that we ourselves are also creation, and must treat the world, ourselves and each other with the same love we would give to our children. I would like to see myself as a spirit who doesn’t see himself as separate from the larger spirit. Therefore, the whole world is my home and all people are my people… Perhaps my rightful place is to be wandering under the stars, skipping along the rocks of the rushing river… Perhaps it is right here writing this sentence.

Without this view point, the world is so bewildering for most people, especially those without any spiritual knowledge or guidance. Even if you are really messed up, if you have any idea of spiritual direction you are better off than many. I have tried to not let the turmoil soil my belief in my inherent potential, my buddha-nature. Though it is a great source of sorrow to be creating actions you know are not right. It can be a challenge to have a sense of confidence, esteem, and worth even when it seems like you have had a lot of personal failures. But it has taught me even more to rely on the inherent value and potential that does not rely on conditions and circumstances. We don’t have to rely on big accomplishments to find happiness and self worth.

I recognize that I not always shown courage and many times have tried to run away… yet really there’s no where to run to- you’ll always find yourself back to God. The fact that a fresh glimmer of hope always appeared even after the lowest spots gives me some faith. Truly all is never lost, and although many times I angrily mourned my separation from God, it seems that separation is always a temporary state. I don’t believe in eternal damnation.

I believe consciousness has a natural tendency towards waking up to God, even despite our tendencies to latch onto our misery. I believe all the courage I need is inside of me, and I do acknowledge that I have made considerable progress in the last months, thanks to intention, time, and grace. And in the process of healing, we mostly owe thanks to that higher power which nourishes us and feeds us… it’s really only up to us to be willing to receive it.

At this point in my journey, I feel as if I am reentering the world after having been absent from it for a long time. I remember one experience in the midst of depression when I was playing music with a few friends and felt elevated in higher consciousness. It was as if I had gone to heaven and was watching my life story play out down below. I saw, from the viewpoint of love, all that I had been through until that point. I had that image of me at the farm, collapsed in the bench, mired in sorrow…

From the viewpoint of love I felt so much compassion, sadness and heartbreak for this person… in this higher reality I knew that life is amazing, vast and beautiful, that consciousness is as wide as the universe. Yet here was this person, me, trapped in the drama of his own heartbreak… such a juxtaposition… such is the tragedy of delusion, of suffering, for human beings to miss out on how amazing life is…in this way it was an illustration of the principle that we can be both involved in and fully experience the drama of our lives… in this moment I really connected with a sense of profound despair in my life… but we can also take one step back and watch our lives as if it were a movie that we watched, felt, and enjoyed, but at the same time weren’t quite involved in.

Creative expression is so important because when we are able to tell our stories, we take a step back from them and we don’t get caught in them. During that moment, I began to tell my story musically, and I could work with it and see how poignant it was, but I didn’t have to personally get wrapped up in it. So if you are feeling unwell, describe how you feel through doing a dance about it. You will get more in touch with how you feel. If you feel like a lost and scared child inside, act it out, become that lost and scared child and you will be honoring that emotion without becoming a victim to it.

Summer 2008: Carving out a path towards healing

It’s kind of ironic. I’ve spent so much time in my mind’s eye climbing mountains, achieving my purpose, being with friends. Now it’s hard to believe I’m actually doing these things. I don’t have to imagine myself climbing the mountain top that is my life anymore, I’m climbing the mountain top as write this sentence.

We often read stories or watch moves like “Lord of the Rings” and the Matrix, and while we get lost in the story for awhile, we think the movie ends. Well these stories of expanding consciousness we call science fiction aren’t just escapes from daily life. There is no separate “daily life” from the world of fantasy and fiction. We are so involved in our human world and our human concepts, but we don’t know a lot about the greater cosmic forces at work that we are involved in. Who knows, a few years down the line we might be heralding the arrival of a new race, we might experience a massive global awakening, we might get a message from the center of the universe that changes the way we will conceive of ourselves and the planet.

Last summer I determined that creating a piece of art that would open the minds and hearts of people was the most noble mission I would have on this earth. So I began to write a science fiction story. After awhile I felt as though I wasn’t writing fiction. At certain points I felt as if I were channeling real facts about the nature of the universe. I would feel waves of energy bubble throughout my body during these moments.

That summer, however, I stopped reading and I stopped writing because I felt that reading and writing meant indulging in the “realm of fantasy”. I became paranoid that books and writing were just entertainment… but now I believe that when an artist creates a piece of work, through his mind he is literally opening a channel from the cosmic center to Earth. When each person does any spiritual practice, he or she is contributing to the movement of this Earth to become a paradise fully connected with the divine source of the entire universe.

My previous viewpoint of life was some mishmash between Buddhism, and Existentialism, and Humanism. I believed that spiritual practice was a psychological thing that someone did to make themselves feel good and be happy. I believe this is partly true, but now I do believe in “God” in the sense that I believe there is a great loving, aware energy that created everything and that sustains everything. I used to read the big bang theory and think that the universe was an accident, created for no particular reason or created without any specific intention in mind. Now I believe that the entire universe was created out of love, that there is a loving creation energy/entity who created everything with a loving intention. I have reason to believe that this might become more apparent to us in the coming years.

I knew that Buddhism talked about not meditating too much on questions of the origin of the universe. But I think we are reaching a point where these questions are beginning to be answered anyways. And in a sense my belief how the universe originated is directly related to my daily experience. I believe that I am an emanation of this central loving energy and my only job in life is to remember that, period. When I remain in remembrance of that, I will always feel loved and provided for because that really is the truth. God is always loving us. Before I might have told you that this belief is just a psychological belief that we tell ourselves to keep us happy. Perhaps I was a materialist, but now I believe that this is really what is going on the universe. I don’t know. I used to think that when you thanked God, you were thanking something inside of you. Now I kind of believe that when I thank God, I’m thanking something outside of me, though it’s in me as well. Though I’m certainly open to my beliefs changing

But every story needs a happy ending, right? I’m ready for that happy ending, I’m ready to reestablish my sense that what I truly want is to be one with God. I’m ready to believe that for those who truly want God, a way through challenges will always be found for them and that blessings will serve them along their way.

Signed,

Tully Walker

HAHAHAHHAH!