Prison of Thoughts

How I Ended my Chronic Anxiety and Depression with Buddhist Practice

Part I

In my early thirties, after having spent years exploring which spiritual path I wanted to pursue in life, I decided to ‘piss or get off the pot’ and went to the Karma Choling center in Vermont for a meditation retreat with a nun and teacher in the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Named Khandro Rinpoche, this nun is said to be one of many embodiments of Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal, one of the few females among the founding figures of Tibetan Buddhism 1300 years ago. But when I went to Karma Choling for the first time, it was around 1993. I was having a hard time with a relationship, and my mind, and teetering on the edge of what they used to call a nervous breakdown.

Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. Swayambunath, Nepal. November, 2016.

As much as I dislike how the term is used to belittle the efforts of good people who set out to make this world a better place, I myself could only be called a social justice warrior. Needless to say, the inspiring examples of the Bodhisattvas—out to save all sentient beings—were right up my alley. But, although I did indeed set out to help everyone else, I have to say that Buddhist practice has done wonders for my own mental health along the way. To start to talk about how that happened, though, I have to go way back to before Vajrayana, even before a single mindful breath.

At the first weekend retreat in Vermont so many years ago, I learned the basics of Buddhist meditation, a breath-centered Mindfulness/Awareness (Shamatha/Vipasyana) practice, for the first time. Also, getting away from my life situation—as it was—was illuminating. I was a rigid, intolerant, politico— very judgmental about others. Quite fragile, really, looking back on it. In a world divided into victims and perpetrators, one lives on a precipice. Variations from the script one has written about reality (to mix metaphors) are perceived as threat and this causes a constant state of free-floating anxiety and intermittent grief-filled depression.

When I got home, from practicing the most basic of practices for a couple of days, my perspective had shifted from having slowed my overactive brain a bit. Until them had always been perpetually loaded with three or more layers of thought simultaneously. The tiny windows that were created between thoughts allowed me to touch base with something new to me, and yet familiar. The unfabricated state of simply being that underlay all the dramas I had been habitually creating through my own thoughts. I got a hint that my cherished world of brilliant ideas and insights was really a prison of my own creation. This shift soon led me to end my relationship and continue to change the way I looked at the world. My life was torn asunder.

I was astoundingly immature, with a grown up facade. I possessed few tools to work with life’s inevitable suffering—the suffering that takes place when change occurs, when things end. I remember the chair in my bedroom. I challenged myself to sit in that chair and meditate for five minutes. Then ten. The torrent of feeling bashed back and forth inside my body as I perched there.

Now, I’d like to say I abided in peace and ever-growing bliss from then on. But that was far from the case. Panic attacks started every morning. I lost forty pounds from being unable to eat during the first half each day. My stomach and guts were full of air from the nervous gulping I was no doubt doing, but was unable to detect. I was not longer teetering, I had fallen. If I’d seen a psychiatrist, I certain would have entered the mental health system and who knows if I ever would have left.

I enrolled in classes at the local Shambhala center. The support of group classes there helped nail me to the cushion for fifteen minutes… then twenty. Then, I remember after six or more months of trundling myself to Northampton, Mass, for the weekly classes, my meditation instructor told our little group that Trungpa Rinpoche, the late founder of their centers, had asked his people to meditate for one hour each day.

An hour! That was shocking news. How in the world could one sit there doing nothing for a whole hour? But, karmically perhaps, I trusted Trungpa Rinpoche’s advice. I did as I was told, and I also memorized the Heart Sutra and other short prayers and recited them at the beginning and end of each practice session. I burned candles and lit incense, and bought a meditation cushion and a Tibetan shirt.

Now, looking back on it, I realize that Trungpa Rinpoche had passed away only six years before. The little group of his senior students there in Western Mass were certainly still grieving the loss of their teacher, as I am my main lama, Tsedrup Tharchin Rinpoche, who passed three years ago now.

These students could not move me to the next level of practice, crowning the teachings of the Bodhisattva Way with the Indestructible way, the Vajrayana—as kind as they were to me. That would require an enlightened spiritual mentor. In terms of my personal mental health, the practices they taught, Mindfulness/Awareness, tonglen and the writings of Pema Chodon and Trungpa Rinpoche himself, powerful as they were, could only pull me up of the worse of my breakdown. They planted the seed for a saner more realistic view of the world, but I was still unstable, not resilient. For me, it was Buddhist tantra that cut through the thinking patterns beneath my anxiety and depression.

On Wednesday, Jan 11, 2016, I will share what happened next in my next blog post.