This week I encountered a piece of apparent fluff from The Stranger, Seattle's edgier (or maybe just more sophomoric) alternative newspaper. And as often happens in The Stranger, it turned out to be hard-hitting insightful fluff.
A Playlist for the Brokenhearted is a Valentine's Day laundry list of good hurtin' songs for the damaged, courtesy of Sean Nelson. (By the way, Sean, if you see this: pretty much the entire Magnetic Fields catalogue. Not just Smoke and Mirrors. I Don't Want to Get Over You. I Don't Believe You. You Must Be Out Of Your Mind. I Don't Believe in the Sun. Seriously. Throw a dart.)
Seems like a throwaway premise, until you start the half-page preamble, which turns out to be an extended Zen contemplation on a "little morsel of non-insight" that crushed people are often thrown:
"The past is past. Nothing you can do about it now."
Regular readers know that facile responses to suffering are one of my detonators. And the writer goes on to vivisect this one with literary power, even citing at one point an early work by Alan Watts. (Is Nelson a Zenner? He writes like one. Not a Baby Boomer Western Zen "When Things Fall Apart" mandarin, but a gritty younger guru-sceptic "Hardcore Zen" type, from our invisible-but-still-next generation.)
The text amounts to a didactic consideration of the philosophical ramifications of love – something the Buddha suggested we'd be better off just not doing. But we're gonna do it, since it's our nature. It's also about forgiveness – of others, of ourselves, of love itself. To which end he offers his mixtape, as a means to revisit and reanalyse the reader's specific train wreck.
So I'll just let you savour it yourself. There's much to appreciate, even if the playlist itself turns out to be beyond your tastes or knowledge. (Again, you'll find the Stranger article here.)
In the meantime, I'd like to drop a bomb of my own:
You damn well can do something about it.
As William Faulkner famously said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
Yeah, the events – and often the people – that hurt you have fled into the past, where you can't reach them.
But the suffering is right here and right now. Where you can totally kick its butt.
The fact that Zen is all about here and now leads some to imagine it means ignoring the wrongs and wounds of the past; to insist they're not alive, not important, not still banging around out there causing suffering in all directions.
If that were so, Zen would be a pointless New Age pipe dream.
So let me be perfectly clear: you damn well can do something about the pain, regardless of what caused it or when. You can make it bearable, which is the same as declawing it. You can even turn it into insight, forgiveness, fulfilment, contentment. And in a very concrete sense, you can go back into the past, to the place where the past lives, and pull it out by the roots.
Many paths will take you there, but I advocate zazen as a good start and the foundation of a lifetime practice.
I also advocate Zen and Buddhist insight into the origin and nature of emotional pain.
Most of all, I advocate awakening to the fundamental nature of reality and our own existence.
It works.
Peace and progress to all brother and sister seekers.
(Art from Sean's article in The Stranger.)
"We are all surprised when when we read a story about two people who fall in love and marry even though one is terminally ill. It seems to require great love and courage to risk such a frightening and painful journey, to decide to love someone who you know will be taken from you soon. Yet isn't that what all of our lives are? We live day after day, and love other human beings with a tenuous hold on life. Doesn't this require great courage and love?"
Philip Martin
Depression is the elephant in the meditation hall. Virtually all Zenners suffer from it; nobody becomes a monk because he's happy. But Zen has a macho tradition, and since depression is an illness without visible wounds, the old right-wing arithmetic applies:
machismo + (unauthorised suffering) = rejection.
Thus the institutional response to depressed Zenners ranges from supportive assistance, to conditional acceptance, to outright insult. Students are as likely to be told that they're "attached," that they have the "wrong perspective," or that they're just plain lazy, as to receive useful, scientifically-valid teaching.
In short, depression is our evolution, and our response to it sometimes amounts to creationism: a crap alibi against having to admit that our founders didn't fully understand something.
Fudo-esque confrontation of that heritage is just one strength of Philip Martin's The Zen Path Through Depression. In sensible, measured tones, he accompanies the reader, in the Franciscan sense of the word, through the myriad symptoms of depression: disabling lack of energy; paralysing panic; rumination; pointless rage; guilt and self-recrimination.
Physical symptoms of a disease as physical as diabetes, albeit not yet as well-understood.
I should say that I approached this book with trepidation, and wouldn't have approached it at all if I hadn't been desperate. I had beaten depression with Zen seven years before, and been a monk ever since – it was the first thing I found that could bully the bully.
But two years ago I got nailed again, and this time my Zen practice wasn't up to it. Even admitting that took months. When I finally ordered Martin's book I was afraid I'd either get a pop-psy puff piece with some trendy Zen around the edges, or a traditional Zen treatise that flipped a few koans at me and said, "Stop being depressed."
Happily, what I actually received was a scholarly catalogue of the medical symptoms at one chapter each, along with what modern science knows about their origins. Just that helps a lot, to put things in context and demonstrate that you're neither crazy nor irresponsible. This is followed up by square, monastic-grade Zen analysis of the case.
In essence, Martin says, "This is your mind. This is your mind on depression." And that was as effective as the medication in retuning my mind.
Depression is a lonely hell; shame and embarrassment convince you it's all your fault. Martin proves that it's not. "In our depression," he writes,
…we can start to heal by accepting that a great part of our becoming depressed, as well as much of getting over it, may not be within our control. In doing so, we can let ourselves off the hook, and stop taking the blame.
The next move is genius: once his orthodox Zen prescription to accept what is takes the pressure off, he scratches a few questions on the last page of each chapter. You don't have to consider them; only if you want to.
Dig:
Examine your beliefs about suffering. Do you believe it is inevitable? Or that it builds character? Is suffering connected with struggle for you? Would there be no life without suffering?
Seems pretty anodyne now, but at the time, with my brain freshly stabilised by a few pills and recharged by Martin's explanations, this stuff was Drano. Note again his classic Zen: no answers. There aren't any wrong thoughts, you just have to be aware of what you're thinking.
Doesn't seem like it would work, but it does. The questions, as much as the teaching, flushed out my system.
It would be hard to imagine a writer better qualified for the job. Martin is a long-time student of Zen; a certified and experienced therapist; and most important, a sufferer of hardcore depression.
This guy doesn’t have a condescending bone in his body. He's a brother.
As the practice began to take, The Zen Path Through Depression felt so good that I started rationing it because I didn't want to run out. When I got low, I would ask myself, "OK, I feel bad, but is it Path-worthy?" And that alone motivated me to endure, to find the strength in my backbone, to haul myself up by my sandal straps.
And pop went the depression.
In the end, with a supportive family, coöperative doctors, my monastic practice, and Martin's book, I got back on my feet. I was even able eventually to stop taking the meds. (But if the depression comes back, I'm back on. Like, now. Don't be afraid of meds, brothers and sisters. They're undramatic drugs, no scarier than aspirin, for a sickness no more imaginary than migraines.)
And while you're up, get a copy of The Zen Path Through Depression. When I needed a lot of help, this book was a lot of help.
