The LoveWisdom of Anxiety and Depression: Entering the seamless unseen luminous living web of what is
People at various times have lived in an age of anxiety and depression. We live in one today—an especially gratuitous one. We may have accomplished the golden age of anxiety and depression, the zenith, the tragic pinnacle.
What could rival the combined nuclear and ecological threats—especially with the latter now including a potential era of global pandemics? We needn’t bother mentioning the growing inequality, the massive prison industry, and other issues—and anyway, these go altogether with the militarism and technological “progress” that has given us the nuclear and ecological threats to our survival. No other humans could have so rightly feared the end of the world as we have known it.
All of that may seem too political. After all, when we suffer from anxiety and/or depression (they tend to go together to varying degrees), we mainly want it to go away. We can transcend or break through anxiety and depression, but wanting it to go away only makes that harder to accomplish—a kind of spiritual irony.
But we do want to end our suffering, don’t we? How can we accomplish that?
Working with the guidance offered here, anxiety and depression will lessen and, with practice, may disappear altogether. Taken as a bag of tricks, the ideas and practices here may offer some benefits. But, if we relate to them more holistically, and practice with consistency, astonishing changes can arise. Practice these things, and healing will happen.
This may seem like a lot to read given the predominance of listicles and tweets, but it’s shorter than a book, and it contains the essence of what can function in our lives, in a way that dispels anxiety and depression. Some of it may sound like precisely what we don’t want to hear. That’s how it goes with dangerous wisdom: The ego feels the danger and reacts, telling us to escape, avoid, dismiss. If we can sit through the reactions, great boons may come.
Though it may at first seem indirect, let us begin rather directly: It can help us to first understand that, in an important way, anxiety and depression come with the system we call civilization. While we may, in our time, encounter wild animals who exhibit signs of anxiety or depression, such a situation likely arises because human presence permeates every square inch of the globe. While anxiety and depression may have existed in wild animals throughout the long history of the world, it seems far more likely to find it today, as a consequence of “civilized” human activity. Moreover, if we want to find anxious animals, we can most readily find them in zoos, stables, or other ecologies of bondage connected to “civilization”. In the wild, beings have an easier time releasing themselves into their own nature—a nature we share with them.
Again, this may at first seem indirect or abstract, but we have just begun to expand our sense of intimacy, and we have begun here to suggest something uncomfortable, something that goes against the self-help catastrophe: Your anxiety, is not your fault, and it comes about in large part because the world you live in arises from and as a pattern of insanity. We want to free ourselves from anxiety, but that ultimately indicates our desire to free the world from this pattern of insanity. We don’t seek peace in ourselves; we seek peace for the world. We experience this yearning for peace as anxiety, and we experience our sense of the suffering of the world and our doubts about our capacity to help as depression.
If we could go back in time a few millennia, we could more comfortably emphasize the individual aspect of anxiety, neurosis, and suffering in general. That’s what the great sages did. They encountered the soul-sickening aspects of what we call civilization, and they realized they could liberate individuals from the delusions that produce that soul-sickness, allowing them to heal in the process. They also realized that, if enough people became liberated and healed, civilization could become sane, could become rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, rather than in ignorance, fear, and aggression. We could have a sane and healthy civilization. We currently do not.
Once upon a time in the west, a person would experience anxiety or depression and they went to see a therapist. The “individual” appeared in the consulting room. Eventually, therapists ran aground, and they realized something else was in the room—something at first invisible. They started to say, “Bring your spouse in here next week.” Eventually, family systems therapy arose. “I” am suffering, but the whole family has to come in to work with it.
We have run aground again, have been aground a long time now, because it was always a larger problem than “me” or a little “us”.
We have come to a point of such catastrophe and crisis that we can no longer emphasize the individual, or speak mainly about and try to deal with “my” anxiety, with the anxiety of I, me, mine. We can no longer avoid the interwovenness of things as part of the diagnosis of our situation. We have to face the fact that what we call civilization creates the conditions for anxiety and depression, loneliness, isolation, atomization, and fragmentation. If we didn’t live in a fragmented and fragmenting culture, if the culture didn’t atomize us, and if this fragmentation weren’t an essential cause of our anxiety and depression, we might find it skillful to emphasize our individual effort. If we lived in a culture of peace-loving sages, a culture attuned with a sense of interwovenness—a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty—and if in that culture we counted ourselves among a very few anxious and depressed people, then we might imagine the problem as having more to do with “me,” with each of us as individuals.
Of course, a society of sages would be a society of wise, loving, and beautiful people, whose compassion and care for us, along with their insight into mind and world (and the interwovenness of things, including the interwovenness of mind and world), would prompt them to take our anxiety as “their” problem too, and it would lead them to help us in empowering and transformative ways. In other words, a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty would see anxiety as we have begun to try and see it here: As something that transcends “the individual”. Our anxiety and depression come interwoven with a culture and with nature. The patient is the world, not the individual.[1]
This may feel like a hopeless suggestion. Our first reaction might go something like, “Great, so now I have to change the whole world in order to experience peace?!”
But, it has always been like this, and even popping a miracle drug won’t change the basic facts (the drug functions by artificially changing the world—just a temporary and fragmented approach that leaves the deeper causes intact). We can only experience anxiety in a world that provokes it. We cannot change our anxiety without changing our world. LoveWisdom always means the end of our world—because we always inhabit a smaller world than the one LoveWisdom will help us discover and create.
Consider, for instance, a few of Buddha’s statements related to the end of our world:
“I say it is not possible to know or see or reach the end of the world by traveling. But I also say there is no making an end of suffering without reaching the end of the world.”
A more expansive but anxiety-focused rendering might go like this:
“I do not say that one would know, see, or reach the end of the cosmos by traveling. But I also do not say there is putting an end to the cycle of stress and trauma without reaching the end of the cosmos.”
The end of the cosmos. Here’s another line from the great philosopher-psychologist known as Buddha:
“In this very one-fathom long body along with perceptions and thoughts, do I proclaim the world, the origin of the world, the end of the world and the path leading to the end of the world.”
It may help to consider the fuller passage, from which this quote comes. But first, let’s slow down and get very deliberate here . . .
It has become a commonplace for teachers of spirituality and psychology to effectively ignore the political, social, economic, and—perhaps most importantly—the ecological context of anxiety and depression. Too many of them bring us to a place at which we think the thought, “There is nothing to be anxious about,” and even the thought, “There is no one to be anxious.” Such spiritual truths matter a great deal. But they remain fragmented and often fragmenting.
We may say, “I don’t need to think such a thought. I just want the anxiety gone.” But here, too, we encounter a basic incoherence. We forget that psychology has its roots in philosophy, and that philosophy is therapy for the soul. The narrowing tendencies of “scientific” psychology don’t change the facts of our existence. Our “mental health” problems have an unavoidable philosophical foundation and context. We cannot avoid philosophy, and, if we truly want to heal, we will have to address philosophical questions.
Spiritual or philosophical practice has to put us into more intimate contact with reality, and it must sensitize us to context, or else our thinking becomes fallacious rather than truly liberated, creative, wise, loving, and beautiful.
A skillful spiritual or philosophical approach to anxiety and depression, in today’s context, might very well begin like this:
“I feel anxious and depressed.”
“Excellent! Your soul wants to tell you there is something gravely wrong, and you have received the message! You feel the message. Now begins the creative work of responding to it, so that you feel healed and whatever wound the soul now senses can heal as well.”
In other words, we might go so far as to suggest we bloody well ought to feel anxiety and depression given the political, social, economic, and ecological state of affairs. What kind of sensitive being wouldn’t experience distress and concern right now? The air, water, and soil have never been so degraded. Human beings have wiped out entire species and ecosystems. We have established mind-boggling levels of inequality. Institutionalized prejudices continue on a massive scale. We can’t go anywhere at all without directly encountering the negative side-effects of what we refer to as civilization. Our bodies carry the toxic load of it everywhere we go, and we of course drink the water, see the trash, touch the plastic, walk the pavement. We have made the world unhealthy, so how can we feel surprised that the soul sends out signals for both alarm and mourning—a message to act with urgency, along with messages to STOP?
Moreover, the culture tells us again and again that we are not enough. The culture has turned the problem of true happiness, love, peace, and joy into a material problem, when in fact it is a spiritual one, and thus totally unsolvable by material means. We get driven from all sides to solve this problem by the very means that make it impossible to solve. No matter how immune we think ourselves to that kind of situation, our anxiety and depression reveal the truth of the matter. We thus face a crisis of meaning, with a general dearth of truly vitalizing roles for us, and frustration at every turn if we want to fulfill a purpose that does not accord with current political, economic, social, and ecological insanity.
We cannot speak honestly and coherently about anxiety and depression if we don’t begin to acknowledge these facts. Now, our conscious mind can come up with all sorts of reasons why the anxiety and depression “belong to me”. If we can blame our anxiety or depression on things like hating our job (which we blame ourselves for taking), feeling unsatisfied in our relationships (which we blame ourselves for being in or for making bad), getting into debt, being a bad person in countless ways, and so on, then we localize the problem. We may, in various ways, actively resist or avoid thinking of our anxiety and depression as part of larger political, economic, social, and ecological systems. This is in fact integral to how our kind of neurosis perpetuates itself—by keeping us in fragmented and fragmenting patterns of thought, speech, and action, and by getting us to blame ourselves and other individuals for systemic problems. We can naturally come up with all the narrative and analysis we need to explain the reasons for our suffering or the suffering of other individuals, but we have gotten to a point at which we need to let go of those habits.
We of course walk a razor’s edge. We cannot simply blame “the system,” and then throw up our hands in despair and resignation. Nor can we easily drop everything and change “the system,” for we are embedded in it, and every notion we have about fixing it comes from the style of consciousness that created it. We require relative freedom from that style of consciousness and from the anxiety and depression that arise from it if we will ever fully heal ourselves and our world.
These things go together. The style of consciousness that created the ecological catastrophe and the political, social, and economic ills we see is the very same style of consciousness that gives rise to anxiety and depression as we modern humans experience them. Changing our spiritual world goes together with changing our political, social, economic, and ecological world. We have to work on all of these things together.
We thus need good philosophy. The social, political, economic, and ecological realities we find ourselves in the midst of arise from philosophical notions. Clearly, we see very bad philosophy at work. We have to get in touch with something more skillful. And we will have to end the present world, which means ending the delusions of bad philosophy.
That bad philosophy has infected us, and it prompts us to dismiss ecological thinking as defective in some way. Any suggestion that we should locate the cause of our suffering “outside” of us provokes criticism of varying kinds, most often in the accusation that we are trying to shirk responsibility. But this suggestion comes with the application of discernment, and not blame. When we apply our discernment, we will likely find that, far from shirking responsibility, we would have to embrace a much greater responsibility, to a degree the ego finds just about terrifying, or at least disconcerting, daunting, and confusing. Instead of following the dominant culture’s view that we need only take responsibility for ourselves, we begin to sense that we have to take responsibility for the rivers, the forests, the mountains, the honey bees, the butterflies, and all sentient beings; we must take responsibility for violence committed with our tax dollars, for institutionalized racism our culture teaches us to ignore and even deny; we must take responsibility for injustice and conflict that arises as an essential feature of the present cultural ecology; we must take responsibility for meaningless jobs that disconnect us from our ecologies and degrade them, for economic inequality, for countless sins and stupidities of the political and economic ecologies.
With discernment, we begin to sense as the poet-farmer Wendell Berry did, that,
it is impossible for material order to exist side by side with spiritual disorder, or vice versa, and impossible for one to thrive long at the expense of the other; it is impossible, ultimately, to preserve ourselves apart from our willingness to preserve other creatures, or to respect and care for ourselves except as we respect and care for other creatures; and, most to the point of this book, it is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.[2]
In other words, whereas the dominant culture drives us toward “self-help,” we have to realize that self-help, to have any real meaning, means other-help, and even means Earth-help. This orientation differs from some currents in nature therapy or ecopsychology that would turn nature into a kind of medication. Self-help remains self-help, but we go out and do it “in nature”. Berry presents a more radical view. Want to help yourself? Help the land, help other humans and non-humans.
The Dalai Lama has said something in the same vein, further highlighting the radical nature of this suggestion. In a book appropriately titled, A Call for Revolution, we find him saying,
I have been inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution that were adopted as the motto of the French Republic: Liberté, équalité, fraternité. I adopted the same motto. As a Buddhist, the aim of my spiritual quest is to free myself of the fundamental ignorance that has led to the notion that there is a division between people and the natural world, which is at the root of all our suffering. (2017: 36-8)
Trying to accomplish a revolution that overturns this kind of separation, we naturally encounter all sorts of difficulties with language and terms, with habits of thinking, speaking, and acting. When we enter a more discerning and expansive way of thinking, words like anxiety and depression take on a new meaning. Even words like “knowledge” and “culture” take on new meanings, to speak nothing of notions like “self-help”. As a concept, we may have to abandon “self-help,” or at least reject it in its current form, using care and discernment to establish more skillful and realistic meanings for the term.
This means we have to actively renounce the self-help catastrophe. So many self-help gurus convince us that our anxiety and depression will go away when we become “successful” and so on. They inevitably pull us further into a psychotic situation of trying to solve a spiritual problem by material means. They make sure to dress it up, to rationalize the whole thing so well that it seems like we can act in alignment with our values. But they never ask us to go into the soul and find out what the soul thinks of the whole game. The self-help industry tells us we feel anxious and depressed because we want to win in this game. The soul may send these feelings because it rejects the game altogether.
How could the soul not reject this unethical and incoherent game? It’s unethical to have such a tiny number of people with such incredible wealth while so many suffer in poverty. The U.S. has entire “sacrifice zones,” places of such misery we would think they belong to a so-called third-world country. People live in fear of the police. The police, caught up in the ignorance of the culture, kill innocent people with a consistency that chills the blood. While tens of millions of people lost their jobs during the pandemic, a small minority made $485 billion in just the first few months of the tragedy. While a clear majority of people in Wisconsin approved of the continuation of the shelter-in-place orders there, the state’s rigged supreme court overturned the order, putting people at risk.
Incoherence refers to the internal contradictions in the system. For instance, the wealthiest get wealthier in an economic crisis. The biggest corporations get bailed out, while the system as a whole perpetuates delusions about “capitalism” and “self-reliance”. We find inherent contradictions between economic theories and practices on the one hand, and ecological and human realities on the other, such as the contradiction between labor and capital (the capitalist wants to keep as much profit as possible, but optimizing this makes the labor market unable to consume—the foundation of the system), or the contradictions between private capital (not privacy or private property, but capital in private hands) and the common spaces of ecology (in other words, we have to see the river as something that belongs to all of us, but the capitalist seeks to use it and pollute it for profit). How could the soul not experience this incoherence as something unacceptable? And yet the self-help catastrophe seduces us into ignoring the basic incoherencies of the system. We thus ignore our own souls, and anxiety and depression appear either continue, or appear in other forms, or get pushed off onto other beings.
The self-help catastrophe seduces us in part because the industry takes advantage of the fact that we do value our lives—and we value life. Anxiety and depression arise in part because we want our lives to go well, and we fear mediocrity, failure, and lack of purpose. But we also value the world and its beings. We can’t really feel fulfilled if it comes at the expense of other beings. We feel anxiety and depression as part of wanting our life to go well altogether with the life of the world. We want the world to thrive, not merely our business. We feel stuck precisely because we must think of something genuinely new, a new world, while the self-help catastrophe offers us only the possibility of novelty. The difference may be unclear at the moment, but it comes to the need for a radical change in how we live. We cannot live in a sustainable and Rejuvenative way in the present system, and doing so will require creative visions not possible within the present system, which only tolerates novelty as opposed to big, ethical shifts. The self-help catastrophe inherently narrows our creative intelligence.
Psychologists get pulled into the self-help catastrophe as well, even though it constrains our soul. Psychologists either go along with it by teaching us various hacks and tricks for mindfulness and productivity (including such things as habit hacking, leadership hacking, and so on) so that we can “feel better,” or they try to address deeper issues, at times entering quite clearly into spiritual and philosophical territory, all the while ignoring the incoherence of the culture as a whole. They seem to either accept the culture’s incoherence as coherent, or they somehow imagine that, if we heal our own personal incoherence, we will begin to heal the incoherence in the culture as a whole. This project has so far failed. It seems untenable in its dualism (e.g., how can “I” be truly coherent in a “culture” incoherent at this scale?) and in the blind eye it turns to systemic incoherence.
A psychologist may fail to ask if we should make a radical break with our current way of life. They may focus on trying to reduce our symptoms, trying to apply techniques they think will help us feel better. We want to feel better. But LoveWisdom has typically involved a rupture with habitual life, a renunciation of all the neurosis that causes our suffering. This has never meant running away from our problems, because running only expresses the neurosis itself, and we take that neurosis with us when we try and escape. Wisdom is no escape.
But the many forms of LoveWisdom have included basic forms of renunciation, in which we leave what we know in order to discover and create what we are. Students of LoveWisdom have joined monastic and spiritual communities, they have at times changed their clothing, altered their diet, shaved their head, taken a new name, gone to far away places, and even lived in wilderness.
Such things are not necessary in this or that particular form. But we do need to look at the ecologies of our life and ask if we need to change them. We might need to change elements of our social circle, we might need to read different kinds of books, eat different kinds of food, and even live in a different kind of place. Though some of these elements may seem difficult to change, we must seek out the ones we sense most need to change. This goes altogether with the question of how we do things, how we live. Philosophy or LoveWisdom is just how we do things, and changing how we do things demands careful ethical inquiry.
The psychologist may fail to ask ethical questions about our way of life. Just as we may experience anxiety or depression when we live in certain circumstances, we will almost certainly feel anxious and depressed if we do certain kinds of unethical things. Some of those things we may keep from the therapist—for instance, not admitting to them that we are having an affair, or that our job involves lying to people, or that we feel haunted by very old ethical failings—not simply mistakes, but unethical behavior that we haven’t made right. It’s important for us to recognize that we can atone for past wrongs, but we have to face them.
Even if we don’t purposely hide things from our therapist, other aspects of ethics may remain hidden to the typical psychologist. With all the news and information available to us—to speak nothing of the ways of knowing in the collective psyche—most of us realize at some level how much the lifestyle of the dominant culture relies on the creation of suffering. Something in us may, for instance, see the U.S. as the leading terrorist state, or feel compunction over the suffering that goes into our cell phone, or feel anxious about the pollution of the air and feel our ethical burden as we contribute to it. We may feel unethical, even if we don’t directly commit any wrongs. We may feel this in part because the soul wants us to do more to right the wrongs now in motion, at the very least by minimizing our complicity in them.
Spiritual teachers make this error as well. Quite a few spiritual teachers say little about grounding our practice in ethics. They begin with meditation and nondual philosophical notions, where historically sages have begun with teachings on generosity, living an ethical life, practicing an ethical livelihood. If you went to a psychologist or spiritual teacher complaining of anxiety and you received teachings on generosity and ethics, count yourself ahead of the curve.[3] Some sages of the past might even have said, “Until you stop raiding people’s pension funds, we cannot have a serious talk about your practice.” These days, not only do such things remain unsaid, but many spiritual teachers leave neoliberal policies totally unquestioned, as if critical thinking had nothing to do with spiritual practice.
If Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Rumi, or the Peacemaker suddenly appeared today, and we went to them for teachings, they might say to us, if not initially then perhaps at some point, “Stop polluting the world, and then we can speak about wisdom, love, and beauty, we can speak about sacredness and liberation.” We might reply, honestly and sincerely, “I cannot stop. This is how the world functions now. There is no way to live sustainably.” And they may respond, “Yes. And this is why you feel anxious and depressed, and why neurosis appears as it does all over the world.”
Especially at this historical moment, when so many gurus emphasize the “present moment,” they can lead us to ignore the fact that right now there are wars going on, wars our culture has helped instigate and/or perpetuate (using our tax dollars and our other material and intellectual “resources”). Right now, systemic racism has people of color in its clutches. Right now, Black and Brown people in the “justice system” feel the burden of injustice. Right now, a Black person feels afraid because a police officer has approached them. Right now, a woman feels afraid because a man has approached her. Right now, a species is going extinct. Right now, we have toxins in our own body. Right now, we find ourselves in a culture that forces us to figure out our “retirement plan”. Right now, minerals and others “resources” are being forcefully extracted from the Earth in the ugliest ways. Right now, billionaires are making money off of nothing but money—not by growing food, healing ecologies, or increasing the vitality of the world, but by simply having money in a bank or hedge fund, and/or by degrading ecologies and living beings. We can find all of this in the now.
Of course, we also find flowers blooming, the Earth working at healing itself and us in countless ways. We find the presence of sacredness. We find children laughing and playing. We find the peace, love, healing, and joy filling the cosmos. The point is that we have to practice the holistic vision, and not allow spirituality to seduce us away from the insights of the soul, and the realities of our ecological life together.
Given a choice between investing our time and other material and psychological resources into a self-help program of whatever kind—under the guise of business, psychology, or even spirituality or some kind of “nondual” teachings—or getting together with friends who want to practice philosophy as a way of life while growing food and building a new culture, we should choose the culture creation, rather than what ultimately amounts to a perpetuation of the pattern of insanity. Even going to a protest or a soup kitchen with friends who want to practice philosophy as a way of life might be a far better choice than the self-help route. In any case, we have to see the end of the world as the end of the personal, political, economic, social, and ecological world we now have stubbornly in place.
We can note the presence of ecology and culture in the above suggestion. We have gotten hoodwinked into thinking we can spiritualize the dominant culture, whose track record for ecological degradation will long remain unsurpassed. And, in one of the great swindles or enchantments of that system, we call this degradation “development”. It’s all “development”. The self-help industry comes along to seduce us into personal development—in the context of this cultural development. How will we avoid perpetuating the insanity? And what if the insanity is the source of our anxiety and depression?
We think we can have a spiritual approach to our business. But “business” in our culture means degradation.
What is our purpose in a world falling apart? To heal that world? And what will our activity actually do to heal it? Do we grow food? Do we rejuvenate ecologies? Do we save sentient beings—not on the side, not as a big donation we give after making money in the system, but as integral to our work?
We may imagine that if we just behave mindfully, the world will change. We may imagine that someone in the oil field will look at the oil rig mindfully and decide, “This is a stupid idea. We shouldn’t drill this well.” But that worker needs a paycheck. And, since some executive at Exxon wants that freaking well drilled, if the worker responds to their soul, someone else will fill their place. Why?
In part because, as we mindfully engage in our spiritualized “development” of the world (we always develop the world, never only our “self”), we demand that bloody oil well. Some part of us wishes that a savior would arrive so that we can have our coffee, our laptop, our internet, and our vacations without the oil. We long for technological fantasies—because we cannot stop burning oil NOW. That does not seem part of “the power of now”. And any replacement will leave the whole system in place, unless we end that whole world . . . which requires renouncing our techno-fantasies and collaborating with each other and with nature to discover and create a sane culture. The birth of the sane culture means the end of the insane one, an end to the world as we know it. And we may feel anxious and depressed because something in us knows this, and we won’t let that part speak—for so many reasons, including fear of the alternative, and not knowing how to move our life forward in a new way.
The LoveWisdom of anxiety and depression means turning toward the love and wisdom our anxiety and depression may hold for us. This marks a radical shift. Typically we want only to get rid of anxiety and depression. A philosophical orientation to life can help us to sense how everything rouses us to wisdom, love, and beauty—even our supposed “enemies,” including anxiety and depression. This doesn’t mean we can’t heal anxiety and depression, or that we would let them fester. It means accepting that the wisdom and love they have to offer us might include the need to end the pattern of insanity that grips us, a need to end our world of suffering and conflict.
Ending that whole world would mean finding ways to return to the landscape of the soul, as we find in “inside” and “outside” of us. That’s part of how we move forward too, onward to a better world. Returning to the landscape of the soul means returning to mountains and rivers. The easiest cure for anxiety and depression would be to go someplace with as inclusive a group of family and friends as possible, live a philosophical life, grow food, tell stories, sing songs, dance together, create together, be at one with nature and nature’s inherent creativity and wisdom. We have enough junk lying around to build earthships and live in relative comfort. But in one way or another we must tap into our fullest creativity to think far more impossible things than the self-help catastrophe tries to lure us into. We have to find a way to create a new world, a world rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty. (Burning Man is an incoherent and rather poor substitute for this kind of culture creation, but we can sense in it the soul’s attempt to help us open to possibilities. In the end, the event seems unjustified.)
The LoveWisdom of anxiety and depression has to do with letting the world be meaningful and sacred again. We can feel so stuck in our lives, and that stuckness feels like anxiety ad depression. We can begin to let the world flow us onward. The world wants to support us out of our stuckness, and anxiety and depression come as a calling. In all the noise of the modern world we can’t hear a more subtle voice, so the soul speaks in ways that grab our attention.
So, with all of that in mind, and returning to that longer passage mentioned above, we find there a divine being who actually tried to get to the physical end of the world, and this being questions the Buddha:
...at Saavatthi... standing at one side, Rohitassa, son of the gods, spoke thus to the Buddha:
“Venerable one, where is it that one does not get born, nor grow old, nor die, nor pass away, nor get reborn? Is one able, sir, by walking, to come to know that end of the world, or to see it, or to get there?”
“Friend, the place where one does not get born, nor grow old, nor die, nor pass away, nor get reborn, that end of the world, I say, you are not able by walking, to come to know, or to see, or to arrive at.”
“Wonderful is it, venerable sir. Marvelous it is, noble gentleman, how well it is said by the Buddha: ‘Where, friend, one does not get born... or to arrive at.’
“In times past, sir, I was a seer, Rohitassa by name, son of Bhoja, gifted so, that I could fly through the air. And so swift, sir, was my speed that I could fly just as quickly as a master of archery, well-trained, expert, proficient, a past master in his art, armed with a strong bow could, without difficulty, send a light shaft far past the area covered by a palm-tree’s shadow. And so, venerable sir, was my stride that I could step from the eastern to the western sea.
“In me, sir, arose such a wish as this: ‘I will arrive at the end of the world by walking.’ And though such was my speed, and such my stride, and though, with a life-span of a century, living for hundred years I walked continuously for a hundred years, save the while I spent in eating, drinking, chewing or tasting, or in answering calls of nature, save the while I gave way to sleep or fatigue, yet I died on the way without reaching the end of the world. Wonderful is it, good sir, marvelous is it, venerable one, how well it is said by the Buddha: ‘Where, friend, one does not get born... or to arrive at.’”
“But neither do I say, friend, that without having reached the end of the world there could be an ending of ill. In this very one-fathom long body along with perceptions and thoughts, do I proclaim the world, the origin of the world, the end of the world and the path leading to the end of the world.”
Ne’er may world’s end be reached by walking
No release is there from ill, till that end is reached,
Therefore that wise one, the knower of the world
Is the one who has reached the end of the world.
Consummate in him is the holy life.
Knowing the world’s end that sage serene
Yearns not for this world nor for the other.
— SN 2.26[4]
So, this fellow tried to escape the world—or, more expansively, the cosmos. He wanted to test out Buddha’s wisdom. Buddha lets him know that our suffering only ends with the end of our world—the world of suffering we create for ourselves. We have to let go of that limited, limiting world. Countless philosophers, mystics, and now even scientists would agree. Many political and economic thinkers would agree as well.
Imagine living in a world you perceived and deeply understood as thoroughly non-anxiety-provoking and non-depressing—a world you intimately experienced as peaceful and joyful. Imagine a world that feels fundamentally like home, a world in which you feel a participatory connection, a world that feels immediately meaningful. Anxiety and depression have no foothold in such a world. Passing experiences might give us a warning of potential danger. We might experience all sorts of call to caution and care, and we might experience moments of sadness, even intense sadness. But anxiety and/or depression as the chronic condition people experience in the dominant culture would likely not arise.
The spiritual, philosophical, and religious traditions offer us a path of peace, love, healing, and joy that leads to, becomes, and reveals a world of peace, love, healing, and joy. It’s not a hippy-dippy, airy-fairy sort of thing, because that very world is this very world, a world of wildness and passion—non-aggressive, non-attached passion. LoveWisdom leads us to liberation. But we have to muster the courage to let the world we think we know come to an end. We have to get to the end of the world.
That means something political as well as personal. Our culture gives us ways of knowing ourselves, each other, and our world. If we do not challenge those, we do not get fully enough at the roots of anxiety and depression. Things will continue to get worse. Working on ourselves must arise at the same time as we help others and help the world—and at the same time as we allow the world and other beings to help us, to work on us. We have to listen to the world, listen to other beings. Only then can we fully heal. Anxiety and depression are a problem in the world, not a problem “in my mind”.
How can we begin to do this work, in the midst of anxiety and depression? One of the biggest things we can do for ourselves involves letting go of the duality between the path and the goal. If we think, “I will begin,” then we think we have to get somewhere. We find a razor’s edge here.
On the one hand, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up when we start practicing a new world and we feel like that new world hasn’t arrived. We start to work with anxiety and depression, yet we may still experience anxiety and depression. We have to make inclusiveness (a.k.a. patience) integral to our practice.
On the other hand: The moment we raise the sincere aspiration to practice a new world, and then we engage in that practice, the old world has totally changed. In the old world of our anxiety and depression, we lacked the practice we have today. Life consists of many profound subtleties. We do not readily see how things fit together, and we do not notice at first how our actions in this very moment shape the future of everything. It’s easy to think our practice makes no difference—but that thought keeps us from noticing the difference it does in fact make.
In any case, it makes a big difference if we don’t practice to specifically end anxiety and depression. We most effectively end the world of anxiety and depression when we immediately allow our mind and life to expand out of the delusion that ensnares us. Anxiety and depression exert a narrowing, arise as a narrowing, require narrowing as a condition. The first act of ending that world comes with a broader, more cosmic mindset—even if we can only manage the most shaky-tender gestures at first. Those first gestures already begin to dispel the world of suffering.
In order to begin our practice of a new world, we open that world with the skillful intention to see the true nature of self and reality, for the benefit of all beings. We don’t practice for ourselves, but for everyone; we don’t practice to get rid of something or gain something, but to see what is. We cannot do anything skillful in any domain if we don’t ground our actions in reality. Without knowing the true nature of self and reality, we may still achieve incredible levels of fragmented or partial success. But we will also create negative side-effects, unintended consequences for ourselves and others. We can, for instance, bring to mind the neurotic and unethical millionaires and billionaires in our culture who have achieved fragmented and fragmenting success, without any great wisdom, love, and beauty—but with many negative side-effects, including their personal and professional transgressions (and even crimes), as well as the negative effects they have wrought in the society and the world at large. Many of us would like to quickly rid ourselves of anxiety and depression, and to hell with understanding reality. But methods of this type always come with negative side-effects, including the ways they ultimately limit our potential, limit the richness of our experience.
So, step one: Set cosmic intentions. To put it in archetypal terms, we can see ourselves as following the path of cosmic superheroes, facing anxiety and depression for the sake of everyone who suffers from anxiety and depression, and also for everyone who suffers because of our anxiety and depression. If we can face our anxiety and depression, and learn anything at all about it, we could then show up better for the world, and we could far more skillfully realize our life purpose and potential. One day, we will encounter someone struggling with anxiety and depression or some similar kind of challenge, and they will ask us, “How did you deal with this?” and we will be able to smile and say, “Are you ready for a new world?”
That’s no small question. And as we go along, we will begin to notice the ways parts of us cling to the old world. We have a lot of nostalgia for our suffering. Once we see through that nostalgia for our old world, we can gracefully renounce it, let go of it. So, step one includes this ongoing step of really allowing ourselves to let go of the old world and enter the new one.
Step two: Apply the four core skills. Human beings can learn to speak many languages, we can learn to cook many kinds of food, we can learn to play musical instruments, we can learn advanced mathematics and science. What is it that must already be in place to make that learning possible?
In other words, we must have a set of skills that bear the same relationship to learning, knowing, thinking, creativity, communication, and insight that these in turn bear to all our activity. We can call these skills our original mind. Original mind bears the same relationship to life and to all the minds that arise in our world as those minds themselves bear to all their activities.
An intimate and most skillful approach to working with anxiety and depression relies on a set of skills that make anxiety possible in the first place, a set of skills that make mind and life possible, and thus make peace, love, healing, and joy possible. Working in this spiritual or philosophically informed way involves transformation at the base, far deeper than many learning and therapy techniques tend to go, and so it influences everything else—thus placing us in a new world.
This marks off a revolutionary-style approach: Instead of working with some technique or set of tricks to alleviate anxiety and depression (or to build a company or create a personal brand), we work with the basic stuff of life. As we get more skillful at life itself, as we improve the basic quality of experience itself, we naturally enjoy a more consummate kind of experience. By opening up experience itself, anxiety and depression—which are only experiences, after all—naturally change. There is no deeper transformation.
The four core skills are—skills. Seeing their names can fool us into think we understand them, or that they are simplistic. While they are easy and simple in a certain way, they also involve an extraordinary profundity and subtlety. We should note that there are two additional core skills, for a total of six. But we can start working with just four, to make things simpler and easier to start with.
Here are the names of the four skills: Awareness, acceptance, connection, and nondoing. Again, we must take care not to think we know the skills because we know the names. Familiar words in particular present extra challenges.
The first skill is awareness. We develop a general habit to relate to awareness in a somewhat disengaged way. We take much of our experience for granted, and we don’t tend to work with perception as a matter of skill.
In practical terms, developing awareness as a skill demands that we make use of biological inhibition. Loosely speaking, a neuron can either fire or not fire. Learning fundamentally involves neural connections and neural tuning, so that a set of neurons become excited while others get inhibited, so that they don’t fire. Right now, if all your neurons fired, you would go into terrible paroxysms or convulsions. Imagine every muscle, every memory, every thought active all at once. It would kill you. Likewise, if all the neurons became inhibited, you would collapse into a heap and never get up again. Human life depends on an interplay between inhibition and excitation. Skillful living depends on a graceful dance between them.
Cultivating our natural awareness doesn’t mean we do anything to awareness. We cannot add anything to awareness. So, this skill relates mainly to inhibition. It means pausing and perceiving, stopping and sensing. Awareness as a practice means the ongoing process of releasing our reactivity, as part of a path of liberation. We transform fixed habits and views into the responsiveness inherent in our sentience. We move from encumbered ignorance, confusion, fear, anger, aversion, and craving into clear insight, calm abiding, balance, joyfulness, discernment, and gracefulness.
When anxiety or depression arise, we stop and sense them. We may think we already sense them, but we in fact react to them. When we really practice awareness, we treat anxiety and depression as if they were tiny flames in the space of awareness, and we wanted to become totally still so the flame didn’t flicker or move at all. We rest as awareness, touching the incredible stillness that is the deeper nature of our mind. Again, it is an ongoing practice of releasing and renouncing our reactivity.
It helps to initially practice inhibition in a deliberate way using something not too triggering. Thresholds can prove enlightening. Any time you come to a door, try and stop. Notice how you were going to grab at the door handle. Notice the habitual way you relate to doors. We tend to have so much excess neural excitation. We don’t tend to approach doors feeling totally present and at ease. We don’t tend to enjoy and appreciate our physical contact with the door handle—heaven forbid we enjoy our lives, especially the little things that make up the majority of our experience. We open doors. We wash dishes. We type, walk, pick up books and apples, breathe.
In order to let the joy in, we need to inhibit that which inhibits joy and ease. We have to DO something to cover over our natural awareness, our natural peace, our natural joy. When we pause and perceive, we interrupt the habitual reactions to everything—including our habitual reaction to anxiety and depression.
And, of course, anxiety and depression have themselves become habitual reactions to life and to our own activity in life.
That latter point is an interesting thing. For instance, anxiety often goes together with avoidance. We feel anxious, and we try and avoid certain kinds of activity, especially ones that may involve potential conflict. But conflict is not the only thing we seek to avoid. Anxiety makes us feel the energy of needing to do something, but the fear of taking action, coupled with confusion about what counts as the best action to take. Thus we avoid.
But, avoidance creates karma. The things we avoid start to catch up with us. Then we feel depressed. We feel depressed by the weight of the karma, and depressed because of how much we hate ourselves for the avoidance that got us into the karmic mess.
By means of inhibition, we can interrupt the habits that make our anxiety and depression. Inhibition feels like the moment when we have grabbed a doorknob, and then we just relax our hand. Or, the moment when we are about to grab a doorknob, and we stop and just let go of the idea. We can feel all the excitation come to rest. It’s a hiatus, a pause.
Let’s say we feel anxious. We stop. We try to feel our whole system stopping, pausing, taking a hiatus from habit.
We perceive the anxiety. We say a gentle, life-affirming “no” to our reactivity. We sense it, and we say, “It’s okay. This is just anxiety.” It’s like looking at a tea cup and just seeing the tea cup, before thinking, “Oh, what a lovely tea cup! I wish I had one like that!” or, “What an ugly, chipped-up tea cup! Someone should throw it away!” If we start judging the cup, we smile and relax, and return to seeing the cup.
Just see the anxiety (or depression), without giving in to it, and without bracing against it. It can’t hurt you in this moment. It’s just energy in the body and mind.
Now, we can remind ourselves that awareness is a skill. Every great sage displayed the skill of awareness, and with it came a kind of unstoppable presence—immoveable but unfixed. For instance, someone once described the modern sage Thich Nhat Hanh as a cross between a cloud and a Mack truck—gentleness and responsiveness crossed with stability and strength.
Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and countless other forces of nature were known for the clarity of their minds, for their capacity to be aware of things most people aren’t aware of. We can live more as they lived if we develop the awareness they developed. Just as they did, we can cultivate a healthy mind.
Initially, we can use objects of awareness to help cultivate our awareness. It’s like using a handrail to steady ourselves.
This opens up the possibility for immediate transformation of our anxiety or depression. For one thing, the anxiety or depression become objects of meditation, tools for practice. We could have a little religious icon or statue, and we might relate to it as an object of art. We have it as a kind of decoration. We may appreciate its beauty and its symbolic significance. But, if we relate to it as an object of meditation, our relationship to it changes radically.
The relationship changes in two ways. For one thing, we can now welcome anxiety or depression as a powerful ally. Stabilizing our awareness can seem a daunting task for most people. The mind tends to get distracted. While other people must struggle to stabilize their attention, the LoveWisdom of anxiety and depression contains a great deal of energy, and so anxiety and depression naturally command our attention. This means their arrival can serve as a support for concentration and focus. They can become empowering if we do nothing more than allow them to bring us back home to our natural awareness each time they arise.
When we come back to our awareness, several things will happen.
First, we can allow ourselves some spaciousness by noticing how much bigger awareness is compared to anxiety or depression. Anxiety and depression can feel big. They feel like oppressors, and we feel incredibly burdened and bound up by them. But this experience depends on a kind of mistake and a kind of unconsciousness.
When we look with more care, we notice that anxiety and depression can only arise if awareness is already there to hold them. They depend on the spacious awareness that also holds many other things. We feel anxiety or depression, but we also see our hands, we sense our breathing, we feel the soles of our feet, we notice the space in the room. We notice that awareness has no limits, so that if we look outside our awareness can hold trees, birds, grass, flowers, bees, the vast sky, the glowing sun. The sensations of anxiety or depression arise as once small part of a total, ultimately cosmic situation. We can release the anxiety and depression into the vastness of the sacred whole, and we ourselves can rest as the whole, embraced by the whole because we are at one with it.
We begin to release into this sacred creative wholeness by at least letting ourselves enjoy the spaciousness of awareness, the spaciousness that allows everything in the cosmos arise. We can rest as the awareness, knowing clearly that awareness itself is not anxious or depressed, but is the open and knowing space in which anxiety or depression arise. As we say the life-affirming “no” to our reactivity, we relax into that spaciousness. That spaciousness was there before the anxiety or depression came, and it will still be there when anxiety and depression fade away. Importantly, this spaciousness is not the three-dimensional space of the Newtonian mind, but an aliveness. It is not space we are inside of, but a seamless unseen luminous living spaciousness that we are.
Once we allow ourselves a little more spaciousness, we can then turn awareness more toward that “anxiety,” and we can notice it doesn’t come as a monolithic thing, but rather as a clump. Everything we experience, including our self, arises as a clump. When we look at the anxiety carefully, as an object of awareness, we will find thoughts, sensations, feelings. We may find tensions in the body, the sensation of energy, a beating heart, held breath, voices in our minds telling us critical or fearful things. Now we see that “anxiety” has a lot of nuance.
As we then turn toward some of the aspects of the clump we called anxiety, we may find them much less intimidating. It’s like seeing how a magic trick us done. We say, “Oh! I thought you really cut that lady in half! But it was just an arrangement of the table, the saw, a mirror . . .” Where before we naïvely saw a man cutting a woman in half, we now see an assemblage or confection of elements—including, quite essentially, the directing of attention, in order to create the experience of seeing someone cut in half.
Similarly, we can begin to see that what we took as a real thing we called “anxiety” amounts to a kind of illusion. It’s not a real thing we can ever find, but a bunch of things arranged, a confection (how does it taste?) that gives rise to experiences we label as “anxiety”.
Magicians know that, for some magical illusions, learning the secret of their performance immediately dispels the illusion. One can no longer see magic, but instead one sees a constellation of often graceful actions that give rise to an illusion in those who don’t know the secret. In the case of other illusions, one can still experience the magic, yet without reifying it at all. One both experiences the illusion and also experiences that it is an illusion. Depending on the spiritual/philosophical tradition we consult, and also depending on the level of practice we inquire into within that tradition, we may find either of these situations as analogous to waking up. In either case, one experiences a release from bondage in the sense of experiencing the illusion as real, and having no sense of how the magician accomplished it. The spiritual/philosophical traditions invite us to find the magician of mind.
As a further medicine to take the edge off our anxiety or depression, we can focus on the elements or ingredients of the confection. In the case of watching a magic show, we might realize the magician will try and misdirect us away from their left hand, but ahead of time we decided to remain focused on that hand. With careful attention, we see the left hand doing something crucial to the illusion, and this helps free us from the spell.
Similarly, “anxiety” misdirects us. So, we can stay focused on the elements. We may find thoughts about what we should have done, or what terrible thing may happen. We may find physical sensations, such as tightness in the body or alterations in breathing. If we look at one of those elements of the illusion and stay with it, we won’t get misdirected. We know that our beating heart can become an ally in cultivating a healthy mind. Remember: It’s like turning the heart into a handrail to steady ourselves and stabilize our awareness, get in touch with a clarity and stability of mind that naturally belongs to us. It would be as if anxiety or depression convinced us that we had to live in abject poverty, and this beating heart—racing with anxiety or heavy with depression—becomes an ally who will eventually reveal to us that we have inherited a jewel of priceless value. We can live in abundance, thanks to our heart . . . or our breathing, or our thoughts, or our sensations.
Something important we may notice in the clump we call anxiety or depression is a nostalgia for suffering, a self-cherishing that comes with an attachment to how things are, and a fear of letting them go. Because we would rather hold on to the suffering we know than let go into an unknown joy, we cling, we sabotage, we avoid. The suggestion that we hold on to our suffering might seem offensive to some, but human beings have long recognized this fact. The poet W.H. Auden captures some of the basic spirit of it in these lines:
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
He touches on the end of our world here. Can we let our illusions die if we have consciously and unconsciously identified with them? We end up facing challenging questions: Who would I be without this anxiety and depression? Do I think I get to be “me,” just free of anxiety and depression? Or does “me” have to end in some significant, and potentially scary way? Spiritual practice changes us, and so it demands softening and letting go. It demands renunciation of our delusions and our habits of suffering. Awareness can help us bring to light the ways we cling to our suffering, and the subtle ways we bring that suffering about. Awareness helps us to see the nature of anxiety and depression, and the kind of mind that gives rise to it. It arises from/as a kind of mind. Seeing the true nature of this can bring profound healing and even liberation.
Awareness also brings to light our basic goodness. In some sense, this is the whole of the practice: To become intimate with our basic goodness. That basic goodness is like a world in which anxiety and depression have no hold. It is not nothingness, but our active, mysterious participation in life, the basic goodness of a participatory cosmos, the basic goodness of wisdom, love, and beauty. As we practice awareness, this becomes increasingly real.
As we work with awareness, one of several equally auspicious possibilities occur. Of course, the most auspicious possibility might be that we experience some major, transformative insight. Once we begin the sincere practice of LoveWisdom, insights will come, and transformation will happen. But we mustn’t turn it into another game for the ego. It won’t help to start chasing insights and thinking ourselves sophisticated. Rather, we just become more intimate with our own experience. It’s like gifting ourselves a life. Instead of thinking our life can really begin after we overcome anxiety and depression, we find life already happening, richly and miraculously, right now. We touch a magic that has always been directing our lives. We realize that someone trapped in a hell realm or a purgatory realm, or perhaps trapped in a kind of coma, would gladly take our existence, finding it perfectly workable. We can begin to appreciate our life, mind, and world because we give it care and attention. That already changes things.
As far as the “anxiety” and “depression” go, generally speaking, with the practice of awareness, we will find that they begin to fade, seem to intensify, or appear to stay the same. Some of those might not sound auspicious, but in fact each indicates that “anxiety” or “depression” have begun to lose their grip on us, and we can count each possibility as a success.
In the case of lessening, we must look carefully, so that we see how the magic of lessening happens. We may notice that the elements upon which we concentrate shift. The thoughts or sensations change, and we find that the object of focus keeps vanishing. We can smile and say, “Ah! The practice works! I am beginning to see that anxiety is not some solid rock, but a confection made of elements that have no permanence, no enduring reality!” Just enjoy it. Each time the elements shift, the anxiety shifts, and begins to loosen its grip. During the time that the anxiety felt strong, we turned it into an ally in helping us learn about our own mind, become more intimate with our own experience, and gradually become more free.
In the case of intensifying, we may at first feel averse to such a circumstance. But here too we find an ally, appearing in one of a few guises. The experience of anxiety or depression may only seem to intensify, when in fact we have consistently avoided the intensity of these experiences. We have had intense anxiety or depression all along, and now we finally faced it—which means we can begin to heal it. The experience becomes an ally for the practice of compassion. We turn toward something in us that has been suffering. It is not, “I am anxious” but, “There is anxiety here, there is a pattern of suffering . . . something in the soul has gotten trapped like this,” and we breathe, turn toward it, and say, “Hello. I see you. I am here for you.” We notice the spaciousness all around that anxiety or depression, and we relax into that spaciousness.
Alternatively, the experience may seem to intensify because turning toward it and paying attention allowed the psyche to finally sense that it could release some deeper issues. Or, we may sense at some point that the experience intensified because part of us didn’t want us to let go of the anxiety or depression—as if the anxiety or depression had a self-defense mechanism, or a kind of immune system. It tries to throw us off the track. If we feel safe enough, and we have good guidance from therapists and spiritual teachers, we may decide to proceed. Here too we can relate to the experience as an ally, as something appearing in order to help us become truly free. If we let go of conflict, we might find ourselves able to rest in awareness, in mindful caring presence, in the same way we considered above: Not, “I am anxious” but, “There is anxiety here, there is a pattern of suffering . . . something in the soul has gotten trapped like this,” and we breathe, turn toward it, and say, “Hello. I see you. I am here for you.” We notice the spaciousness all around that anxiety or depression, and we relax into that spaciousness.
We can recognize that everything rouses us to practice, everything comes as an emissary of the divine or the mystery of life to wake us from our neurosis. Everything is already wisdom, love, and beauty, and if we change our relationship with it we may arrive at an immediate liberation. Something intense may arise precisely so as to bring our practice to a better place, to bring our whole life into greater clarity and coherence. The extra energy may come in order to show us the edge of our own practice. It may even come to prompt us to seek help and guidance, and so we needn’t beat ourselves up for wanting to get help. We should not force our practice, or try to go it alone—for our “alone” is not really alone anyway.
If we have no help or support, an intensified experience may indicate we should find some. Professional help can work wonders, and in any case we should at least have spiritual guides who have learned how to navigate the landscape of the soul. It’s okay to back off. In some cases, it’s the wisest course of action. And there is no reason to think we have to do this kind of work alone. Community is a cornerstone of spiritual practice.
In a famous case of spiritual common law, Ananda, one of Buddha’s foremost students said to him, “Good friendship is half the spiritual life!” Buddha said, “Not so, Ananda! Not so! Good friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!” We needn’t face our demons “alone”. And professional help counts under the general rubric of what Buddha and other teachers had in mind when it comes to support for a healthy way of life.
Here we should also at least mention the crucial importance of two basic medicines: The medicine of the breath, and the medicine of the immeasurables. We will speak about these in a bit, but for now let us keep in mind that we should not try and push ourselves too hard, and that we can apply various kinds of philosophical medicine to ease our suffering any time it gets intense. LoveWisdom as therapeia, as therapy for the soul, means our practice should feel healing—even if at times we face the choice to enter into something that frightens the ego. We walk a razor’s edge with our practice, and we must use discernment.
On the one hand, anxiety and depression cannot actually hurt us. If we give in to them, they may drive us to do something harmful, but the experiences themselves typically present no harm. Our fear of them means we may experience a new sense of courage if we simply stay with them. In some sense, spiritual practice means renouncing all our habitual attempts to escape our own lives.
Nevertheless, people who have a high degree of sensitivity and have experienced a lot of anxiety, as well as those who have experienced trauma, may need to take special care to relax, and keep a steady eye on healing. It behooves us not to do anything extreme in our practice, all the more so if we start out practicing more or less without an experienced guide and, if needed, a professional therapist (again, find these helpers as soon as possible), and we must allow the practice to offer us something rejuvenative.
We covered the case of anxiety or depression lessening, and the case of a seeming increase. In the third possibility, the anxiety or depression seems to remain the same. In such a case, we may feel like the practice has failed. But in fact we can turn this into a great benefit, for as long as the clump of sensations, thoughts, and so on remain clearly present to us, for all of that time they remain a steady handrail for us to stabilize ourselves in awareness, clarify our experience, and gain intimacy with the nature of our own mind. Anxiety and depression then continually rouse us, continually help us to focus for as long as we experience them.
Again and again we remind ourselves that we tend to miss out on a lot of our own life, our own experience. Life unfolds in the present moment, and anxiety and depression distract us from the present moment. As we turn them into allies, they will instead draw us more intimately into our lives—something so antithetical to the nature of anxiety and depression that they will eventually destabilize.
This marks a radical shift. Instead of treating anxiety or depression as an enemy, we allow them to function like guides from the land of wisdom, love, and beauty, sacred emissaries sent to take us home. Anxiety and depression rely on conflict to appear as enemies and oppressors, and ending our conflictual relationship with them destabilizes them as they accomplish their mysterious work of bringing us home. They do their job and vanish.
We can also recognize that anxiety and depression have the same nature that we have. This is how they can appear in our experience, and they could not appear without this shared nature. We can greet them like friends, family, even honored guests, or at least provide them with unconditional positive regard, since they appear in our own mindstream. We already share an intimacy, even if they have so far felt like invaders or oppressors.
We draw close here to the second core skill: Acceptance. Acceptance, like awareness, has a rather physiological aspect. It relates to the excitation that goes together with the inhibition present in the first skill. That in turn means awareness and acceptance go together. All the core skills go together, appearing in every action as the ground of possibility for that action. Without all six of the skills, we don’t have meaningful activity. But, we still tend to work with them individually at first, and even sequentially at first, so that we may repeat to ourselves, over and over, “Awareness, acceptance, connection, nondoing.”
Acceptance reflects a basic opening. With awareness, we soften, and we already begin to open to what arises. Acceptance continues the opening—as if we feel each thing has come from the mystery to reveal the mystery, as if each thing carries a direct and intimate message from the divine, and in fact is itself divine.
This may sound like too much. It may seem a grave demand that we cultivate a spacious mind, a joyful mind, and a nurturing mind in relationship to our anxiety and depression. We can at least begin with the common sense that allowing the psyche to heal does not differ as much as we may think from allowing the body to heal. Indeed, body and mind arise in nonduality.
Imagine you cut your finger, and you begin to freak out over it, despairing that it will never heal. A few minutes pass, and it still seems quite the same. Do we gain any benefit from hating the wound? Does it help at all to act as if we will never heal?
If we cut the left hand while cutting vegetables with the right, we allow the right hand to relate to the left hand as part of a whole. The mind and the body coordinate, the right hand brings care to the left. The right hand washes and bandages the left. The left hand, feeling part of the whole, and feeling a compassion so intimate and immediate—not mediated, but as a wholeness—participates and accepts the care.
And then we wait. We know cuts take time to heal. We can use various forms of healing meditation to optimize the process. These are rooted in awareness and acceptance (as well as connection and nondoing). We will need to keep the wound clean. We will need to offer ongoing care. But our left hand still belongs to the body. Healed, it will feel no pain. And sometimes, “the broken part heals stronger than the rest.”
We can relate to our anxiety and depression in a similar way. Unfortunately, people tend too readily to claim they do accept their anxiety and depression. In truth, we tend to only pretend at acceptance. One mark of acceptance: We stop complaining about it. Have you definitely gotten than far?
How about this one: We find it interesting. Or this one: We got to a point of sensing extremely subtle wishes for the anxiety or depression to go away, and now we know those wishes have vanished, and we can treat anxiety and depression as friends.
At the very least, we can begin to notice that fear or hatred of our anxiety or depression themselves make things much worse. So we can begin the practice of acceptance by turning our awareness to the fear of the anxiety, or the anger about it, or the sadness, or whatever. Here awareness and acceptance go very much together. We let go of the anxiety or depression itself, and we get even more insight into the nature of our experience as we give our attention to the fear or other emotion that reacts to the anxiety or depression. We become clearer about our own experience, and we make room for the anxiety or depression to arise with our total acceptance.
We may also find that, instead of fear or along with it, the psyche harbors a basic lack of confidence. We may find the thought, “This will never work,” or, “Maybe someone else could heal anxiety and depression like this, but I cannot.” We may discover all sorts of thoughts and feelings under or around the anxiety and depression that help keep them stable. As we turn our practice to these elements, the anxiety and depression weaken.
Even noticing something as basic as tiredness or hunger can change the situation rather significantly. Some people with anxiety and depression simply need a significant amount of rest. The majority of people don’t have the means to go on a healing retreat, but recognizing a need for rest could allow for changes in the rhythm of our day, week, and month so that we can make space for that rest to happen. It can take some joyful perseverance, but we have far more creativity than we realize, and it’s surprising how much we can accomplish. Of course, we needn’t endorse a “life-hacking” approach. But if healing becomes a priority, we can find ways to take better care of ourselves. Our culture and our karma tend to collaborate to make us put off our healing and the healing of the world. Sometimes, acceptance crucially means accepting the need to give our healing the time and attention it needs.
In any case, we mustn’t fool ourselves about acceptance, especially as it relates to accepting anxiety and depression in the moment. We mustn’t pretend acceptance has arrived when it hasn’t. We just keep practicing, knowing that even the briefest moment of genuine acceptance has changed everything.
People with anxiety may experience something like this: They wake up in the morning, and within minutes (if not immediately) the anxiety comes creeping or charging in, so that they feel tension and agitation. They feel exhausted by it. They feel that if they sit with the anxiety and do nothing, it will wear them out. They want to do something, go someplace. But they don’t know what to do or where to go, because a million thoughts race about the various possibilities, and anyway they feel exhausted at the thought of doing anything. They feel damned if they do something, and damned if they don’t.
They may claim to have accepted the anxiety, because they don’t fear it. But this would require them to practice relaxing and moving on with their day—while the anxiety seemed to rage. If we feel tense, our practice involves or becomes turning toward, open up to, embrace, or moving into that tension. We begin to relate to it the way we would relate to a puppy. That may sound absurd. If so, that very barrier of absurdity stands between us and transformation. We can move through it, or we can remain as we have become.
When we realize, even for a moment, the acceptance, the joyful equanimity that allows us to feel profoundly okay, whether tension has hold of our stomach or not, immediately the tension must change, even if only a little. If we can at least stop the conflict, stop minding so much that we feel anxious or depressed, things begin to shift. The excited neurons that produce the tension or the heaviness or whatever begin to become inhibited. In many anxious people, those poor neurons feel fried. They don’t really want to keep firing. As we more fully accept each moment, we allow our system to regain its balance. We allow a new world to emerge.
We should remind ourselves again of the interwovenness of things. Those who have had experience with or have heard about the intense experiences that come from medicines like LSD may have heard the phrase “set and setting”. This means that experiences with LSD and other holotropic medicines depend on the intentions we set and the ecology (setting) we establish. The LSD experience only brings out in bold detail the facts of reality itself.
All things arise dependent upon causes and conditions. All things. No thing can arise and continue unless it has the nutriment it requires to arise and continue. Our anxiety and depression have always depended on our intentions and our ecologies. As we shift our intentions toward a more spiritual intention for our life, we change the conditions, and the anxiety and depression must begin to change.
The ecology for our anxiety and depression include all sorts of incredibly important factors, such as the friends we have and how we relate to them, the foods we eat, the amount of sun we get, the place we live, and more. One of the easiest ways to change our mood is to get our heart beating by doing something active that we naturally enjoy. Given a choice between 15 minutes of meditation and 15 minutes of running around in the woods, the latter might well do more for improving mood and well-being than the former. We should not, however, put ourselves in the position of having to choose between them. We need a healthy lifestyle, a healthy way of life, and our sedentary, indoor version of civilization contributes to countless ills. An improved ecology of mind means an improved way of living overall.
The ecology of mind also includes our basic attitude toward experience and toward ourselves. Acceptance involves a shift in our basic attitude. Our anxiety and depression may have some stores of fear and loathing upon which they can draw. We have habit energy built up from struggling with anxiety and depression. But the energy of struggle will eventually run out, and the energy of acceptance will increase. Like a cut that takes time to heal, the ecology of mind, in a relative sense, needs time to grow differently. But it will. And thus new fruits will appear in the garden of the soul.
Connection has to do with the fact that, as D.H. Lawrence put it, “we are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” In order for anxiety and depression to live themselves through us, they must connect to us. Skillful living means allowing wisdom, love, and beauty to live us. When wisdom, love, and beauty live us, then what we do presences wisdom, love, and beauty.
Connection, then, in some sense means communion with wisdom, love, and beauty. We feel that anxiety and depression want to command our activity. We use the life-affirming “no” of awareness to interrupt their commands. We use the life-affirming “Yes!” of acceptance to begin to activate ourselves in a better way. And we use the skill of connection to magnetize the sacred powers and inconceivable causes that want to live themselves through us in place of the encumbered feelings of anxiety and depression.
We have many encumbered emotional experiences. Each one reflects an energy of wisdom, love, and beauty that wants to live itself through us, but which has gotten encumbered by our confusion and neuroses. Connection involves an active invitation—not a reaching out to anything, for the thing we would reach out to would already be in the reaching itself. We somehow magnetize the sacred powers, and they immediately support us. This will get clearer after we discuss nondoing, and then consider an analogy for the process as a whole.
First, let us consider, in a basic way, how we can begin to connect with wisdom, love, and beauty. These three go together, totally interwoven. Still, in a moment of feeling anxious or depressed, we can begin by asking about one of them.
How do we connect with wisdom?
Speaking generally, living a philosophical or spiritual life puts us in touch with wisdom, love, and beauty. So, the first answer to a question like, “How do we connect with wisdom?” comes to, “Live a philosophical life.”
In the context of experiencing anxiety or depression, connecting with wisdom can happen in many ways. First, we might turn toward the anxiety or depression and find out if it has any insight to offer. Two basic insights can come from anxiety and depression: We can learn about the nature of mind by studying the experience itself, and we may also learn about some unthought known, something the soul knows, but which the conscious mind has not registered at all or not registered fully.
To arrive at the former kind of wisdom, we apply the techniques already described above, and we may also need to go to spiritual teachers to learn more. In general, we should practice under the guidance of experienced teachers.
To arrive at the second kind of wisdom, we apply various techniques of dialogue with the soul. Dialogue means “the way of meaning”. It does not mean “talking”. But, some versions of soul dialogue do involve treating parts of the psyche sort of like communication partners. We allow those parts to speak in whatever way they need. Some of the best approaches to this include focusing, feeding your demons work, art therapy, and internal family systems work. We can learn some of these techniques via their mainstream presentation in books, but, again, it can prove valuable and wise to find an experienced guide.
In working with the soul, we can also relate to the soul of the world. We can move away from the fragmented notion of listening “inside” ourselves. If we don’t think the mountains and rivers might be calling us, if it wouldn’t naturally occur to us that Wolf, Raven, Coyote, or Dolphin wish to speak with us, we might have to sit a very, very long time with our self-help guru or even our perfectly lovely spiritual or psychological technique before we could hear them. The likelihood remains so low we must consider our approach unethical, unskillful, and unrealistic. We need to listen to the Earth, listen to sentient beings, listen to the sacred powers and inconceivable causes. This requires, for us, a deliberate ecological turn. Approaches that focus “inside” us have become increasingly untenable, and now we must become much more skillful, graceful, and reverent (without getting precious about it). And we must actively resist spiritual materialism and the countless ways the pattern of insanity will try to co-opt our efforts.
A few other ways to connect with wisdom include the wisdom of planning ahead. When we find ourselves in a more relaxed or joyful mood, we can notice things that bring us peace and joy, and we can set the intention to return to such things when we feel anxious or depressed. It can help to keep a gratitude list for just 7-10 days (go longer if possible) to write down things that bring peace and joy. We only need to write down three things we are grateful for each day. Just three. It’s so simple our skeptical mind may think it cannot bring much benefit, but countless people have found this simple practice transformative. In the case of those experiencing anxiety and depression, one can try to look specifically for at least one thing each day that brought peace or joy.
Of course, when anxiety and depression arise, we may feel caught by them, unable to connect with peace or joy, uninterested in moving toward things that have brought us peace and joy. We may even think that such things will not bring peace and joy now. To connect with wisdom, we remind ourselves what we have direct proof of: Anxiety and depression arise inside of awareness, and so they do not have to total grip on us they seem to; we can make a conscious a deliberate decision to do something that will at least orient us in the direction of peace and joy. More on this a bit later. The main idea comes to this: We know we can experience peace and joy, and anxiety and depression depend on keeping us away from that capacity. They alter our perceptions and our thinking. We can, however, remind ourselves of a better kind of thinking and perceiving, distant though it may seem, and we can begin to return to it.
Another aspect of planning related to connecting with wisdom has to do with planning our daily practice, so that, for the first two or three hours in the morning, we don’t have to think about what to do, and we can connect with wisdom through practice. The planning is itself wisdom.
Right away we need to acknowledge that many people cannot manage even a full hour in the morning. In many cases, a significant commitment would make this workable. If we had cancer and had to get daily treatments of one hour in order to heal, we would make that time. It’s worth reflecting: Can I in some way explain to the people closest to me that I need one hour each morning to heal—or, if “healing” sounds too airy-fairy, at least to nourish my philosophical/spiritual life, to mature as a human being? Maybe we could make that hour or two happen.
It may help here to consider the extreme case of a monastic setting. Countless spiritual and philosophical traditions have found it valuable to set a schedule for practitioners, so that the student of LoveWisdom has no “decisions” to make. All the energy that goes into, “What shall I do today?” in all its forms gets released into the possibility for insight and healing. In the dominant culture, we have incredible propaganda around freedom, such that we have gratuitous confusion about its meaning. We have so many stupid decisions to make, and very little real freedom. We can begin to find that freedom in spaces of reduced decision-making.
Planning itself offers wisdom because we can reflect on the wisest pattern of practice, and then let go of deciding. Planning also puts us into contact with wisdom because it makes space for practices of healing and insight. So: We can plan for practice, and stick with it. It may even take habit hacking to get the practice started, but habit hacking in the context of a holistic matrix of practice, a wholesome philosophy of life, can become a useful thing.
We can also seek to learn—about anything. It can feel impossible to sit still and learn. Here too we may need to make a list of things that we like to learn about. In general, it helps to connect with wisdom in the manner of a way of doing things: When we cut our finger, we don’t sit around wondering what to do, but instead we have a little routine we know to perform, which includes getting a bandage, washing the cut, applying a salve to the wound, and then dressing the wound and letting time pass. Everything changes. Cuts don’t last. We take care of them—and, again, we can enhance that care by means of our attention, and the healing practices that make use of attention—and they change in a good direction. Connecting with wisdom here and now, we can plan the routines of care that will help us to connect with wisdom when anxiety or depression arise.
We should rely heavily on the wisdom traditions. Getting in touch with wisdom means getting in touch with the teachings of a tradition—not self-help books, but books by experienced spiritual practitioners. Self-help books have their place, and many of them have provided succor to suffering people. But we serve ourselves well to go to the source. We will never find something in a self-help book that doesn’t have precedent in the wisdom traditions—not only precedent, but a more nuanced and holistic understanding and presentation. Again, we needn’t dismiss all self-help out of hand, but we must make sure to include plenty of mature insight and guidance or the kind we find in the traditions of LoveWisdom around the world.
All traditions of LoveWisdom have ways of teaching us to commit the teachings to heart, so that we can bring them to realization in our lives, when it counts. It’s like having a life preserver: If we don’t have it on, then, when the disaster strikes, we need to be able to reach out for it, but so often we grasp around desperately and find nothing; if we already have the life preserver on, we find ourselves stabilizing right away.
In the dominant culture, we have historically used writing to aid memorization. In certain other cultures, outright memorization has played a significant role. For instance, in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, a person may memorize literally hundreds of pages of text, or memorize and visualize at will sophisticated and highly complex images. These texts and images can then help in the process of connecting with or presencing wisdom, love, and beauty.
The Stoic philosophers would use writing as a way to work with the mind and connect to wisdom. The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius did not take the form of a book he wrote for others, but from a book he wrote to himself, as notes of encouragement on his own path of wisdom, love, and beauty. He was not a sage, but a student of LoveWisdom, doing his best to practice even in the midst of the difficult duties of serving as Emperor of Rome—during an epidemic no less.
Marcus knew that we have to let go of our habitual mind, that it has a hold on our thinking, so that we will default to bad thinking, especially when we feel sad, afraid, stupid, or powerless. He knew that ignorance gives us unskillful perceptions of the world—systemic and active misknowing of ourselves and the world—and by rehearsing more skillful thinking, that thinking gradually becomes our default.
Marcus wrote to himself,
2. Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.
Cold or warm.
Tired or well-rested.
Despised or honored.
Dying . . . or busy with other assignments.
Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life.
There as well: “to do what needs doing.”
3. Look inward. Don’t let the true nature or value of anything elude you.
That seems to be a good way to sum it up: To not let the true nature or value of anything elude us. A great sage used to call out to himself again and again:
“Oh, master!”
He would answer himself, “Yes?”
“Are you thoroughly awake?” he would ask.
“Oh yes!”
“Do not be fooled at any time by anyone!”
“Oh, no. Never.”
We can call out to ourselves like this, practicing so that anxiety and depression—and the world that gives rise to them—don’t lead us into self-deception.
Marcus also gave himself very human kinds of encouragement. How touching to think of a Roman Emperor experiencing the impulse to just stay in bed, curled up in his blankets . . . And so we can be kind to ourselves for sometimes wanting to just stay in bed. Maybe with today’s incredible pace and burden we actually need it even more than Marcus did, and there are times when loving ourselves means—and thus, when wisdom, love, and beauty dictate—that we get some extra rest.
But we should also hold in our hearts the encouragements he gave to himself to love ourselves enough to throw off those blankets and follow our inspiration—or find it again if we need to. This has to do with loving ourselves and also loving the world. The world depends on us to follow the soul’s purpose—not our ego’s purpose, but the sacred purpose of the soul. Again, we are lived by powers we pretend to understand. We have to make ourselves available to them.
Here is Marcus, encouraging himself to get out of bed:
1. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?
—But it’s nicer here. . . .
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
—But we have to sleep sometime. . . .
Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.
Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?
This is the heart of LoveWisdom: To get out of bed for the benefit of all beings, to realize our true nature for the benefit of all beings, to realize the meaning of life for the benefit of all beings. It’s about loving ourselves and our nature enough to cultivate the world onward, even if we “don’t feel like it”.
The secret is joy. The Path of LoveWisdom is the Path of Joy. This is what naturally holds our mind-heart-body-world together. We can always touch the joy at the center of each moment. It’s there. But, even if we feel distant from it, we can let go into the moment, and connect to the sacred powers that can live our lives and the world onward.
It does take practice, and staying in touch with the traditions makes our practice effective. When we experience anxiety and depression, we need to already have in place the practice of writing advice to ourselves, of bringing the teachings to mind, of turning to the teachings, of reading them out loud to ourselves and our loved ones, of copying them down and committing them to heart.
Among the teachings are the preciousness of a human life. We have to already have in place the habit of saying to ourselves,
This human life is so precious, and this world is a miracle, a priceless oasis in the cosmos. I am so fortunate to have a body that keeps me alive, a body and mind with capacities that allow me to learn spiritual truths, capacities that allow me to create, to love, to laugh, to perceive and play with the world and other beings. I don’t know how long this life will last. Death is inevitable, and also uncertain. Every day I get closer to it. I need to learn how to work with this life, because I know everything I do matters. How I live affects everyone, even if I cannot always perceive those effects. If I don’t learn how to work with this interwoven miracle, I will suffer. I know I want to fulfill my potential, a live a meaningful life.
If we already have the habit of thinking like that, then, when depression and anxiety come, we can continue:
Since I know how precious this life and this world are, naturally I feel great urgency and great tenderness about it. I don’t want a mediocre life. I don’t want a life lacking in purpose. I want to fulfill my greatest potential and help the world. I want to experience real love. I want to experience great insight. I want to know who I am and what reality is. Since these things matter so much to me, my soul sometimes bursts with energy that can feel scary, or it mourns for the ways I may have, out of ignorance, wasted time and possibly put my potential and the potential of others at risk. My soul wants me to stay engaged with the work of realizing myself and helping the world. What can I do today that will cultivate my soul and the soul of the world? What can I do to help someone today? What can I do to listen to the world right now? Who can I reach out to in order to collaborate and co-discover, co-create a better world?
These thoughts become possible as we shift. They depend on ongoing practice.
We should note here that we have illustrated a key issue in our practice with anxiety and depression: We establish a radically different world when we eliminate the difference between practicing with anxiety and depression and practicing with peace and joy. We should presence no fundamental difference in practicing when depression arises, or practicing when joy arises, practicing when facing our life, or practicing when facing our death.
Death, too, shows itself in these contemplations. LoveWisdom is training for death—which, as we just noted, means training for life. We will never touch the full healing of anxiety and depression if we do not face our own death and resolve the puzzle that death presents to the human ego.
How do we connect with love?
Connecting with love can also happen in many ways. First and foremost we may find compassion practices, including tonglen, very healing and empowering. We will touch on those again, and the reader can find further guidance for those in other writings.
We can also reach out to loved ones, or go to those in need. Loneliness and isolation make things worse. If we experience anxiety and depression as calls to connect, as calls to practice our love and connectedness to the Earth and to other beings, we again turn anxiety and depression into allies, into guardians of our being. Making a phone call to a friend or family member, or inviting someone for a walk, or going to an animal shelter, soup kitchen, or other place of refuge for human or other kinds of beings, and helping them, can bring us so much peace and joy. It may also evoke a need for compassion practice, as we see that, “Just like me!” others suffer, and their suffering may even seem worse than our own.
We cannot possibly overstate the importance of connection. Perhaps the single best thing we could do to end the world of anxiety and depression is to call friends and loved ones, get in touch especially with anyone who has been on spiritual retreat, or has engaged in peaceful protests, even anyone who has been to Burning Man, been in a band or artists’ collective, or in some small way touched the promise and potential of a new world, and say to them, “Haven’t we longed for a better world? Can we start a serious conversation about how to make that real?”
We have become so cynical that we can get quite reactive about such a suggestion. We think of it as utopian or hippy-commune thinking, that we may as well pass around the Kool-aide and sing Kumbaya. How remarkable—but perhaps unsurprising—that an African American spiritual became a meme expressing cynicism about our capacity for connection, communion, and compassion. These spirituals have long carried the energy of resistance against oppression, and the ongoing cultivation of perseverance in the face of adversity, the broken-open movement into the light when we find ourselves in darkness. It’s as if the toxic culture’s defenses specifically chose a threat, making fun of it in order to defuse it. Will we allow this sort of propaganda to control us, or will we reach out to people every bit as passionate about a better world, and begin to enter into dialogue about following a good path, a new path to the end of the world of delusion. How do we want to live? What does a realistic life look like—a life in which we can enjoy beauty, connection, community, and meaning, but not at the expense of the suffering of others (others who might be far away physically, but who suffer no less for the apparent distance between our way of life and theirs)? What steps, now, can we take toward a better way of life?
How do we connect with beauty?
We need to see that the mind of beauty is the mind of meditation. The simplest way to connect with beauty is to meditate, no matter how daunting the thought of meditation may seem when anxiety or depression arise. We can also integrate the practice of mindfulness into every activity, which means that a mindful walk can become an empowering and healing practice of connecting with beauty. Mindfully walking, mindfully breathing, mindfully eating, mindfully cleaning, we change the whole world.
We can also make art or engage with art—of any kind at all. We can listen to music, walk in nature, make a mandala, take pictures, do anything. Ideally, we engage in these activities with a meditative mind. This amplifies the aesthetic experience and activates its healing potentials.
Dance can become an empowering and healing practice of connection. Buenos Aires once had the world’s highest number of psychotherapists per capita than any major city. But this statistic set in during a time when the dictatorship there effectively outlawed tango dancing. Once the government changed, and people began to dance again, many ended their therapy. Now an international organization of tango therapy helps to spread information about how to work with tango as a practice of connection and healing.
As part of the practice of connecting with beauty and the general practice of connection, we can also make a garden, plant trees, work with the land. Growing food, and any skillful eco-psychic practice, gets us in touch with wisdom, love, and beauty all at once, as we learn about ecology, practice care and compassion for plants and other beings, practice attention and mindfulness, and appreciate the beauty, abundance, and inherent creativity of the world. We should engage with our practice in a way that is inherently ecological—and, if that needs spelling our, eco-social, eco-political, eco-artistic, and so on.
Certain practices of connecting with the flow of energy help not only with the skill of connection, but also the next skill, nondoing. We could hardly overstate the empowering and healing potential of something like Qigong, which has its analogues in Indian and Tibetan culture. A daily practice of qigong can work wonders. Among other things, certain streams of non-western medicine view anxiety and depression as a disturbance of the air or wind element in our system. Certain qigong practices involve stillness, in which the agitated wind element can gather into the central channel of the body and become naturally calmed and purified (when we maintain good posture in meditation and daily life we also allow this to happen). This happens in a nondoing way, and so we can segue here to our final skill, but let us do so with a strong recommendation to try a practice like qigong, and to work consciously with the breath and with the wind element so that we can allow our anxiety and depression to receive care from this dimension of our being.
The final skill is nondoing. In a certain sense, we must “do” our anxiety and depression. We know how to “do” anxiety and depression. We’ve gotten so good at it, we do it without having to think about how we do it. It’s quite automatic.
But the experience of nondoing feels easy and joyful. And this joy and ease dispel the heaviness and tension of anxiety and depression.
Nondoing is a spiritual concept. It’s something like a paradox: If someone asks us, “Are you doing something?” we would say, “No,” but if someone asks, “Are you doing nothing?” we would also say, “No.” Not doing something, not doing nothing. Not passive, but not active in the ways we typically practice.
When spring comes, we don’t hear any groans from the trees, flowers, grasses, birds. We see a flowering cherry tree, and we can find no one “doing” the flowering. As the old poem goes:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes, the grass grows by itself
Spring just happens, joyfully, in color and fragrance. And life goes along like that, without anyone needing to “do” anything.
We come closest to an awakened nondoing in moments of creativity, in which, for instance, the music comes through us, rather than feeling like something we “did”. We understand this as a liberating and empowering experience, not as something deterministic.
The experience of nondoing feels so wonderful that depression and anxiety have no foothold in them. Thus, if we can practice the skill of nondoing, we practice the natural absence of anxiety and depression.
This may relate to taking a step away from anxiety and depression, or it may even relate to taking a step toward them. In awareness, we turn toward anxiety and depression. As we noted, the feeling of anxiety or depression may end up increasing. We face a choice: Can we muster the courage to stay with it, or does it seem more healthy to let go and do something else?
If we feel our well-being could be at risk, we can focus on not “doing” the anxiety, and focus instead on the nondoing of something fun and familiar, like a nondoing walk in the woods. We focus on each step, and try to let all doing fade away.
Alternatively, we may stay with the anxiety or depression, and do so in a nondoing way. We don’t want to force anything, and we want to renounce conflict. We just relax, but without becoming passive.
One thing we might do: When we feel anxiety or depression, we just acknowledge them, and keep nondoing our lives onward. We live like a river, and just keep flowing, even though we have come to some rocks and we started making rapids. We know that a bend will come, the landscape will change, our flow will feel gentle and clear again.
But nondoing is a skill, a challenging one to explain in words. Yet all the traditions of LoveWisdom value it. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi gave a lot of attention to explaining and expressing it. Here is one of his most famous passages:
YOUR LIFE HAS A LIMIT but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain! If you do good, stay away from fame. If you do evil, stay away from punishments. Follow the middle; go by what is constant, and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, look after your parents, and live out your years.
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee - zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now - now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room - more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until - flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”[5]
How marvelous that Lord Wen-hui hears a lesson in carving an ox and receives it as a lesson in how to care for life. When we practice nondoing, we practice caring for life—not merely caring for our anxiety or depression, not caring for our personal brand or our political party. Once we deviate from caring for life, we deviate from true nondoing, and we create negative side-effects.
It’s natural to encounter tough places. It’s natural to encounter challenges, difficulties, pains, setbacks. We can hack and fight our way through them, relate to them dualistically, but this only dulls our own edge. Instead, we can relax even more, ease the sense of duality between us and the apparent barrier, open up the hundred sacred senses, feel the spaciousness of life, and allow wisdom, love, and beauty to function.
The power of nondoing can seem magical. Darlene Cohen wrote an essay about her journey working with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that became crippling for her, so that, until she discovered the core human skills, other people had to brush her hair for her. But, through spiritual practice, Cohen learned the skills of awareness and nondoing, such that she regained a high level of functioning.
She shares that she began teaching arthritis workshops, and at those workshops she would bring out carrots and a cutting board. In the bodies and minds of those watching, this immediately provoked the ideas of carrot cutting that people do instead of just cutting carrots. Those people would know their arthritis prevents them from cutting carrots. It cannot be done! Yes, that was Cohen’s point in bringing out the cutting board: It cannot be done. Cohen writes that,
when you actually hold the knife in your hands, feeling its wooden handle and sharp, solid blade and you touch the vulnerable flesh of the carrot on the cutting board, your wrist goes up and down, up and down, and the orange cylinders begin to pile up on the board, and you realize: “I can cut carrots. Tears come to people’s eyes.[6]
Similarly, we can feel so oppressed by anxiety and depression that we know we cannot do this or that. But when we actually make contact with our experience, and we just let things begin to flow, we find our life moving forward rather effectively.
The philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh expresses an experience of nondoing this way:
Last year I visited Korea, and there was one moment when my group was surrounded by hundreds of people. Each of them had a camera, and they were closing in. There was no path to walk, and everyone was aiming their camera at us. It was a very difficult situation in which to do walking meditation, so I said, “Dear Buddha, I give up, you walk for me.” And right away the Buddha came, and he walked, with complete freedom, and the crowd made room for the Buddha to walk; no effort was made. If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow the Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you. This works in all situations, I have tried it.[7]
A key issue here: Our lives transcend our ego. Why walk if you can let wisdom, love, and beauty walk for you? Why compose a song if you can let the divine compose it for you?
We can find a kind of analogy here in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). We can think of AA as a program for giving ourselves a better way of knowing ourselves and our world. It’s an attempt at what we might call an upgraded way of knowing and being, living and loving.
In some sense, alcoholism amounts to a way of doing our lives, and thus simultaneously a way of knowing ourselves and our world. Because it comes with all sorts of negative side-effects, it seems like an unskillful way of knowing and being, living and loving. But, what counts as more skillful?
Well, for one thing, a good way of knowing always acknowledges that “we are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” A good way of knowing ourselves and our world liberates us into nondoing—the height of skillful, graceful, wise, loving, and beautiful activity. Skillfully connecting to the powers of wisdom, love, and beauty helps us to recover from unskillful ways of life.
Anxiety and depression similarly amount to ways of knowing ourselves and our world, ways of knowing and being, living and loving. We already tried to imagine a world we knew very differently, a world we perceived and deeply understood as thoroughly non-anxiety-provoking and non-depressing—a world we intimately experienced as peaceful and joyful. We know differently in that world. The process of knowing arises differently. We can only have a better world when we have a better way of knowing ourselves and the nature of reality.
Consider the first two steps of AA:
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
This already has a better epistemology in it than we find in the dominant culture—even if we don’t consider ourselves particularly “religious”. Nevertheless, we can rewrite these with a little more of the traditions of LoveWisdom in them, and they can become quite helpful in working with anxiety and depression:
1) We admitted that our lives had become unmanageable—that life cannot be “managed”.
2) We came to sense that we are lived by Powers we pretend to understand, and that letting ourselves be lived by Wisdom, Love, and Beauty could restore us to sanity and heal the world.
Caught up in anxiety and depression, our lives can become unmanageable, and we fritter away so much energy trying to manage them that we feel frayed. However, further insight indicates that life will refuse all attempts at management—hence the incoherence of the self-help catastrophe and the dominant culture in general, as both tend to apply “management” theory and other “bag of tricks” approaches to solve our problems.
We can begin by admitting that we suffer, and that we don’t really know what to do. What a relief! Just to admit the suffering, and to admit that we don’t have all the answers—because we live in a seamless unseen luminous living web of what is. What is includes the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious. We cannot simply “know” what to do, as if the world or the self were an object.
We live interwoven with everything, so that everything we do matters. Our life matters. Our mind and our life transcend the barrier of our skin. Thus, what we should do does not come skillfully from our narrow conscious purposes, but comes from the larger living web of what is, the sacred creative ordering.
We have to acknowledge that we are lived by powers we pretend to understand—and then stop pretending to understand, and instead let them live us, in the most graceful, wise, and loving ways possible.
We can rewrite the other steps as follows:
3) We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of wisdom, love, and beauty—over to sacredness or the divine as we understand this.
4) We made a searching and fearless ethical inventory of ourselves and our world. This included becoming more intimate with our own experience, and also becoming more intimate with political, social, economic, and ecological realities.
5) We admitted to the world—to the divine, to ourselves, to other human beings, and to non-human beings—the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) We were entirely ready to have wisdom, love, and beauty (aka the divine or the sacredness of life) remove all these defects of character.
7) We humbly asked wisdom, love, and beauty to live themselves through us, to remove our shortcomings and empower us to fulfill our potential.
8) We made a list of all persons we had harmed, all beings we had harmed, and all the inherited trauma and karma from our ancestors, and we became willing to make amends to them all, to make things right in the world, to bring forth a new world, rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.
9) We made direct amends to such people, such beings, and even such places wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) We continued to take personal inventory, continued to gain intimacy with our experience, with the nature of mind and world. When we were wrong promptly admitted it, and we practiced again and again letting wisdom, love, and beauty manifest the right things for us and the world, moment to moment.
11) We sought through prayer, meditation, and creative action in the world to improve our conscious contact with sacredness, with the divine, with wisdom, love, and beauty as we understand them, praying insight and inspiration, praying for peace, love, healing, joy, wonder, and trust for us and for all beings, praying for the skill of letting go of our narrow will and narrow purposes, and instead for wisdom, love, and beauty to will themselves through us.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others trapped in the pattern of insanity, and to practice these principles moment to moment, in every thought, word, and action.
Again, part of our shift in perspective on these steps has to do with the fact of nondoing as the only realistic and skillful sense of agency, and the fact of interwovenness as the nature of things.
We can turn to Marcus again, because he tried to gain intimacy with the interwovenness of things, since that intimacy is so essential for living well, and for experiencing well-being:
38. Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.
39. The things ordained for you—teach yourself to be at one with those. And the people who share them with you—treat them with love.
With real love.
40. Implements, tools, equipment. If they do what they were designed for, then they work, even if the person who designed them is miles away. But with naturally occurring things, the force that designed them is present within them and remains there. Which is why we owe it special reverence, with the recognition that if you live and act as it dictates, then everything in you is intelligently ordered. Just as everything in the world is.
41. You take things you don’t control and define them as “good” or “bad.” And so of course when the “bad” things happen, or the “good” ones don’t, you blame the gods and feel hatred for the people responsible—or those you decide to make responsible. Much of our bad behavior stems from trying to apply those criteria. If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.
42. All of us are working on the same project. Some consciously, with understanding; some without knowing it. (I think this is what Heraclitus meant when he said that “those who sleep are also hard at work”—that they too collaborate in what happens.) Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things—they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well.
So make up your mind who you’ll choose to work with. The force that directs all things will make good use of you regardless—will put you on its payroll and set you to work.
But make sure it’s not the job Chrysippus speaks of: the bad line in the play, put there for laughs.
Here Marcus touches on many central points. For one thing, our life is perfect and complete, lacking nothing. We touch this bare sacred fact in the present moment, and if we truly enter this moment—completely and intimately—then we have touched infinity, we have touched everything—because everything is interwoven. There is nothing more. We can add nothing to the perfection of the present moment, nor can we take anything away.
We can look now at the nature of our own mind and ask, “What could I add to this awareness, this clarity?” Awareness is aware. It is already perfectly aware. Our mind may seem dull or sleepy or angry or fearful, but each of these states of mind arises as an expression of the inexhaustible nature of mind, arises as the spontaneous dance of awareness itself, as the mystery itself, as the sacredness of life itself.
Marcus reminds us that we are lived by powers we pretend to understand. The self-help catastrophe and the larger pattern of insanity lure us into thinking we control our lives. But we are lived. We are lived by the mystery, and everyone knows this in their heart. Not only do we all know it, but we revere it. Ask any artist who has truly entered this mystery and let it enter them. They will say, “I did not do it. No. Something came through me.” Inspiration is always like this. And at such moments, even though we are not “in control,” we feel most alive and most in tune with our true nature.
LoveWisdom only means being lived by wisdom, love, and beauty, being lived by inspiration and liberation, in mutuality with all beings. The powers of life will live us. If we practice well, if we keep our hearts open, then we will be lived by wisdom, love, and beauty. Otherwise, we may be lived by folly and ignorance, and even by evil—and even by anxiety and depression.
The importance of nondoing cannot be overstated. Here are a few more passages to invite a deeper understanding:
from Kodo Sawaki Roshi:
Zazen [meditation] is not the life of an individual; it is the universe that is breathing.
Our bodies do not belong to us. They are the true activity of the life of the great universe. That is to say, our bodies are the great universal life. The proof that this body is the life of the universe is in zazen. In zazen, you place your hands like this and cross your legs and do nothing at all with regard to yourself. By doing zazen in this manner, your body will become the reality of the great universe.
This passage invites us to consider: What if anxiety and depression don’t really “belong” to me? What are they? We speak about “my” nightmare, “my” panic attack, “my” trauma and suffering. What does it all really mean? What is the true nature of self and reality?
from Rumi:
Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
or the ball can guess where it’s going next.
from Nietzsche:
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. –– If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation––in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down––that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form––I never had any choice.
. . . . Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.—The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (“Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you; for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth…. Here the words and word-shrines of all being open up before you; here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak”).
from Martin Buber:
Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by him that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. But this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals the mystery to me . . . he that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance––this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of his freedom. It is not his limit but his completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate––with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light––looks like grace itself.
In addition to these—there are many such passages—the Apostle John gets at it quite directly: “Everyone who lives by the truth will come to the light, because they want others to know that God is really the one doing what they do.” (John 3:21) It is the easiest and hardest thing in the world to function like this, and a deep-seated ignorance interferes with its fullest realization, even though nothing we “do” actually occurs other than by means of nondoing.
At the same time as we contemplate the above, we must also contemplate the following passage, from Sodo Yokoyama, echoed countless times in the spiritual/philosophical traditions of the world:
All the troubles in this world, political, economic and so forth, are created from situations in which the awareness of one’s ordinariness is absent.
. . . . My teacher said, “Don’t spare any effort.” People always hold back something when they make any kind of effort. When you hold something back, no matter what you are doing, your effort never amounts to anything. You are holding back when you say, “It’s no good” or, “I can’t do it.”
When you say, “This is it!” exerting the effort required to make nine times nine eighty-two, there is nothing you can’t do. This is because we humans as primates are supposed to be able to exert effort beyond our normal capacity. In Buddhist terms we would say that the secret of whether one has awakened the Buddha mind is a question of whether one has the will to act.
Sodo Yokoyama brings out the ordinary-extraordinary nature of passion. Skillful effort is neither doing something nor doing nothing. It is not passivity, but it is not conflict. At the beginning of our practice, it can actually require a significant amount of energy to get us out of the rut of our habits, but eventually the energy of a well-put-together mind becomes far more efficient than our neurotic mind. We become coherent, and we enjoy the basic quality of serenity and wonder.
In our neurotic activity, we can tend to get stressed out, overloaded, overwhelmed, and this shuts down our capacity for wisdom, love, and beauty. We behave as if convinced we need to “do” our lives, to “do” our success. It is an utterly tragic mindset, because any success we have on the basis of doing carries negative side-effects for ourselves and others, and so we congratulate ourselves all along the road to hell.
As a final aspect of nondoing, we can return again to the notion of simply not doing our anxiety and depression. Instead we can nondo the medicine of the breath or the medicine of the immeasurables.
The medicine of the breath works in two ways. First, it takes our mind off the anxiety or depression, thus interfering with the habitual ways we do our anxiety or depression. We will see this principle again, in the fourth skill. In short, we simply become aware of the breath, and remain in contact with it, in a nondoing way. This will naturally calm and heal us.
The second aspect of breath has to do with the psychophysiology of our embodiment. When we regulate our breathing rather than observing it without any change, we can help our system shift into a mode of rest and repair—a kind of relaxation response. The key to helpfully regulating breath in a basic way centers on the outbreath. If we make sure to breathe out, gently but with a deliberate effort, then we can more fully empty the lungs. It can help to conscientiously blow air out, or count as high as possible out loud (the talking expels air). We expel all the air, consciously drawing the diaphragm upward, and allowing the ribs to collapse downward. We gently but deliberately go as far as possible, and then we gently go further. When we know we can no longer empty any more air, and can no longer keep from breathing in, we relax and release as fully as possible, and allow the in-breath to function all by itself. Then we breathe normally. After a few breaths, we can go through the conscious exhale again. We can repeat that whole process several times.
We must always use grace, dignity, and clear thinking. This practice is not about forcing things or pushing aggressively past perceived limits. It has to do with tuning the vagus nerve, and shifting our system into a calmer state.
In terms of nondoing, we engage with a more energetic and deliberate emptying of the lungs because we tend to do our breathing, and this creates problems. When we fully empty the lungs, we can become aware of the ways we hold, tense, brace. We can sense how we interfere with the natural, fluid nondoing of the breath. Our lungs and our breathing do not “belong” to us. Rather, “They are the true activity of the life of the great universe.”
We must emphasize discernment with the medicine of breath in another way too: Some people may actually find mindfulness of breathing rather challenging. In extreme cases, a person may find it too uncomfortable. Mindfulness of breathing in fact falls under the more general heading of mindfulness of the body. This means we can receive the same benefits of this medicine by working with other aspects of the body. Ultimately, we need to engage the whole body, and so, even if we focus on the breath at first or from time to time, we still need to practice mindfulness of the body in an ongoing way. This means mindfulness in walking, sitting, standing, and lying down. In short, it means mindfulness in all thought speech, and action.
But, it helps to have something to work with in times of immediate stress, anxiety, depression, or anything intense. We can begin with anything related to the body that feels neutral. For some people, the soles of the feet function quite well. We might also choose our hands, or our neck, or the hara. If we bring our awareness to the soles of the feet or to the neck, we can rest there. We notice. We sense that we can relax. We sense that there is more in the cosmos than just our catastrophic thoughts, memories, fears, cravings, and so on. Staying at ease with the soles of the feet, or with a freeing-up neck, our system will begin to self-regulate in a healthier direction.
The second medicine is the immeasurables. Buddhist psychologists have found that the mind cannot simultaneously produce a negative and a positive state. Similar to the medicine of the breath, the immeasurables work in part by getting our system to nondo something other than what it’s doing.
Traditionally there are four immeasurables, but we can follow along with Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition and suggest a total of six—though our extra two differ slightly from theirs:
1) Peace (equanimity)
2) Love
3) Compassion (healing)
4) Joy (importantly including sympathetic joy)
5) Wonder
6) Deep trust (confianza . . . a spiritual confidence)
The reader can find instructions for working with these elsewhere, along with some basic meditations. These immeasurables involve practice, and we do not understand them by knowing their names.
To bring us back again to where we started, the immeasurables have to do with coming to the end of the world. In the passage below, Buddha describes how the immeasurables reach all the way to the end of the world, in this case focusing on equanimity, but his words apply to each and all of the immeasurables:
“That disciple of the noble ones — thus devoid of covetousness, devoid of ill will, unbewildered, alert, mindful — keeps pervading the first direction with an awareness imbued with equanimity, likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth. Thus above, below, & all around, everywhere, in its entirety, he keeps pervading the all-encompassing cosmos with an awareness imbued with equanimity — abundant, expansive, immeasurable, without hostility, without ill will. He discerns, ‘Before, this mind of mine was limited & undeveloped. But now this mind of mine is immeasurable & well developed. And whatever action that was done in a measurable way does not remain there, does not linger there.’
“What do you think, monks: If that youth, from childhood, were to develop the awareness-release through equanimity, would he do any evil action?”
“No, sir.”
“Not doing any evil action, would he touch suffering?”
“No, sir, for when one does no evil action, from where would he touch suffering?”
“This awareness-release through equanimity should be developed whether one is a woman or a man. Neither a woman nor a man can go taking this body along. Death, monks, is but a gap of a thought away. One [who practices this awareness-release] discerns, ‘Whatever evil action has been done by this body born of action, that will all be experienced here [in this life]. It will not come to be hereafter.’ Thus developed, the awareness-release through equanimity leads to non-returning for the monk who has gained gnosis here and has penetrated to no higher release.”
AN 10.208[8]
These immeasurables may seem like a “meditation” practice, but they go further than that. For one thing, we must engage with them in the context of a holistic matrix of practice and realization, as integral to a whole way of life, a spiritual/philosophical life. Thus, practicing them changes our way of life in a holistic way, and this concretely changes the world.
Such a practice must ground itself in ethics. To say it again: If we have any ethical reservations about our way of life, they may begin to manifest in all sorts of negative symptoms and painful “coincidences”.
Most importantly, the above passage would hold for all the immeasurables, and the energy of working with them comes with an inspiration to share them. For instance, compassion comes with the inspiration to take action to alleviate perceived suffering. We do not merely send a “mental” energy into the five directions of the cosmos and leave it at that. Rather, as far as possible, we take wise and skillful action to alleviate suffering. Indeed, people in brain scanners practicing compassion show activity in brain areas associated with taking action, even though they are sitting in a brain scanner. Compassion comes with the energy of engagement, and it naturally guides us to find wise and beautiful ways to help beings and help the world.
Similarly, love as an immeasurable teaches us that love means wanting the person we love to experience happiness. This naturally attunes us to seek ways to help them experience happiness, from making them a cup of tea to taking a stand for them when they need us. The immeasurables have to do with a skillful attitude of action—that our action comes with an energy, feel, and expansiveness. They go to the end of the world and transform it with the empowering, healing, liberating energy and insight of wisdom, love, and beauty.
In ecological, political, social, and economic terms, the immeasurables inspire us to dispel the delusions of the pattern of insanity that has invaded the soul like an ideological virus. Practicing the immeasurables gradually increases our passion and courage for making the world a better place, ending the unethical systems and structures that give rise to anxiety and depression, and all manner of suffering. They give us the strength to venture into the unknown world of wisdom, love, and beauty.
The LoveWisdom of anxiety and depression rouse our wisdom and compassion. They always reveal how much we care about this life and this world we share. If we relax a little and open up to the wisdom, love, and beauty in each moment, we can touch our basic goodness, the basic goodness of the cosmos.
These sorts of things can sound airy-fairy, and we may harbor all manner of skepticism about our spiritual/philosophical potential, which means our potential for this very life. But the only difference between us and the saints, sages, and other great beings of all times is that they carried whatever doubts they had into the experiment of practice. If we practice as they did, we will experience what they experienced. Our life and world is the experiment. We must perform that experiment, and find out things for ourselves, beyond our hopes, fears, beliefs, and doubts.
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The present material has more detail than the blog posts and medium/hub/narratively articles and listicles we have become accustomed to, but it’s still incomplete. Do your best. Get help when you need it.
You can also schedule coaching sessions through wisdomloveandbeauty.org
[1] James Hillman, among others, made this very clear. See, among other things, Hillman’s The Thought of the Heart, and, The Soul of the World, and his collaboration with Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse.
[2] Berry, Wendell (2002). The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Berkeley: Counterpoint, p. 118.
[3] For an inclusive discussion of ethics—a discussion that finds common ground for all religious, spiritual, and philosophical orientations—see Thich Nhat Hanh’s, For a Future to Be Possible, or the Dalai Lama’s, Ethics for the New Millennium. Only by reflecting carefully on ethics can our work with anxiety and depression escape the fragmented and fragmenting approaches that characterize the very context that gives rise to so much anxiety and depression. In short: To truly heal anxiety and depression, we need a more skillful and realistic ethic. Even if we consider ourselves very ethical people, a skillful ethic deepens our understanding of ourselves and our world, and clarifies the nature of reality.
[4] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nanananda/wheel183.html
[5] Translation by Burton Watson, available online: https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html
[6] From the book, Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment
[7] From his book, Buddha Mind, Buddha Body, excerpted online: https://tricycle.org/magazine/walk-buddha/
[8] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an10/an10.208.than.html