The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself From Chronic Unhappiness by Mark Williams

Author:Mark Williams [Williams, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health; Fitness & Dieting, Alternative Medicine, Meditation, Mental Health, Depression, Psychology & Counseling, Pathologies, Professional & Technical, Medical eBooks
ISBN: 1593851286
Amazon: B007T9FZRS
Publisher: The Guilford Press
Published: 2012-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

Maria’s Story

Maria was cleaning up after a visit from her two children. They were in their mid-twenties and had left home for work and college some years before. Many of their possessions were still around the house as reminders that they would always be welcomed here. They had left that morning to get their train after a weekend celebrating her fiftieth birthday; their noise and laughter faded as they disappeared around the corner of the road. Maria would have to set off for work soon, but she thought she’d start a bit of laundry and clean one of the bedrooms. As she went into her son’s room, she felt a sense of sadness and loneliness. “No,” she said, “I cannot be sentimental; I’ve got to be strong. It’s silly to feel sad.” The moment passed; she took the sheets off the bed, picked up the wastepaper basket, and went downstairs.

Maria had gotten into the habit of dealing with any difficult emotion in this way; it is the way she had coped with a great deal of stress in her life. This strategy had seemed to work well, but it now meant that she was cut off from her feelings. She was afraid of experiencing any emotion lest it overwhelm her. She had begun to feel that she lived “in parallel” to herself and to those she loved. She always felt a little cut off, never really engaging with others without being self-conscious and feeling that she was acting out a part. What she noticed most was that she was constantly tired, exhausted for no good reason.

At some level she felt that, if she ever started crying, she wouldn’t be able to stop; that she would cry for the whole world, for things and for people she had lost in her life, for her wrong decisions, for her lost children, for her unfulfilled ambitions. She would embarrass herself and let herself down; it would be shameful, uncontrollable. To enter the dangerous, uncharted territory of emotion was something she had learned to avoid a long time ago.

Some weeks earlier, Maria had enrolled in our mindfulness program. She had enjoyed the body scan and the yoga, though she found the meditation on the breath very difficult. Her mind kept wandering, so she did not feel settled in the practice and didn’t think it could be doing her any good.

Then came Session 4. The instructor was leading a meditation practice that began with focusing on the breath and then expanded the field of awareness around the breath to include a sense of the body as a whole. At first Maria was not aware of any body sensations. Then she registered a sense of something unpleasant, a slight sensation around the top of her stomach, just below the ribcage in the middle of her body. It was not strong, nor painful, but it was there: a sort of empty feeling, a slight stretching at the edges, unpleasant to focus on, but interesting in that she had never noticed it before.

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