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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Meditation and Depression

Its the middle of the winter. Many people are experiencing cabin fever a term which sometimes means depression.

I ran across this article by a Buddhist Lama, Ven. Traleg Rinpoche, on meditation and depression.
Depression is something that we all experience. It does not make any distinction in relation to people - young or old, rich or poor - and cuts across cultural and racial boundaries. Depression is also something that affects both religious-minded people and non-religious people. Practically every one of us, at some point, has had to deal with it. We may experience depression in many different ways. With some people, depression will be mild, while with others it will be very intense and debilitating. For some people it lasts for a short time and then disappears, while for others it may persist over many years or occasionally an entire lifetime.
Modern western psychology and psychiatry make a distinction between what is called 'indigenous depression' and 'reactive depression.' Indigenous depression is treated medically whereas the reactive type of depression is treated with psychotherapy and so on. I am not going to go into that however, as there are people more qualified than I to talk about depression from the medical and therapeutic points of view. Instead, I will talk about depression in the context of meditation practice and in the context of Buddhist spirituality.

To read the rest go here.

2 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

Interesting article. I suffer from bouts of depression. I'm better able to handle it lately. The hardest part is the feeling of isolation and alienation that comes over u when it's at it's worst.

Jim Sande said...

oh yes, just about everyone I know, myself included has had or is having depression of varying degrees.

When you take the percentages that we read in articles, you know like 25$ have this thing, 15% have this, 30% have this, 40% have this etc etc, it adds up to around 600% or so! So everybody has something and lots of times a few things.

I do meditation practice because I tend to go more in the direction of anxiety than depression not that depression doesn't come around. It helps me be a little calmer and man are these depressing and anxious times, cripes.