The Zen Path Through Depression (Plus) by Martin Philip

Author:Martin, Philip [Martin, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00

You Are Enough

All people have enough and to spare:

I alone appear to possess nothing.

What a fool I am! What a muddled mind I have!

All people are bright: I alone am dim.

LAO TZU, TAO TE CHING

We all know the feeling of being insufficient, of not being enough, of not mattering, of not deserving to be here on this planet.

Depression often engenders or accentuates those feelings. We are awash in a sense of worthlessness, convinced that we mean nothing to anyone. Those feelings can make it easier to take the next step of suicide, and leave this world that we feel we don’t belong in, and that doesn’t seem to want us anyway.

When we feel this way, the Buddhist teaching that we have everything we need, and that we are already perfect as we are, can be hard to swallow. To think that we are already Buddha, already enlightened, already who and where we need to be, seems a cruel joke. If this is so, why do we not feel enlightened? Why do we suffer? Why must we work to uncover this enlightenment?

Yet even in the midst of these feelings and questions, it is possible to find the seed of our awakening, the seed of our Buddha nature within. We see it in our not giving up, in seeking after truth, in offering our unhesitating help to a friend. Like a seed in the soil, this one is buried deep within us, far from light, and it needs nourishment in order to grow and come forth.

Meditation is one way of nourishing this seed. Other ways include laughter, and working with others, and making our best effort in each moment. Also acting in a way that acknowledges our connections with others, and the sacred nature of all beings.

In these times, and in this culture, it is not surprising that so many of us see ourselves as valueless. Many of us have been raised to believe in an innate sinfulness in each of us. In addition, in America we believe in the supremacy of the individual, that all of us can achieve anything we want to—and that if we don’t, it is because there is something lacking in us. New Age thought further encourages us to think that everything that happens to us is due to our thoughts, dreams, and beliefs. And even American Buddhism has taken the concepts of karma and reincarnation and wrongly distilled them into a Buddhist Puritanism, where our joy or sorrow in the present moment is supposedly the result of whether we have been good or bad in the past.

Depression gives us the opportunity to see how strongly these feelings of being worthless, of not belonging, may lie at the bottom of our beliefs about ourselves. Yet simply seeing these beliefs directly for what they are, without fighting them, challenging them, or running from them, can help the feelings to dissolve.

We begin to do this when we simply let these feelings and beliefs be there with us, not driving them away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.