Depressed: Unhappy; despondent.
I'm sure glad I don't get into these swirling anxiety shitstorms too often. They're very uncomfortable. Profoundly uncomfortable, as my friend from Massachusetts would say, describing a panic attack. It's as if I'm in a whirlpool being sucked further and further down into the vortex. It's gentle at first but becomes more frantic and maddening the deeper I go until I feel like there's never going to be a way to get out.
Passages from the Dali Lama:
The application of Buddhist meditation to aging is another application of the ahimsa spirit. Our increasingly fragile and infirm bodies and minds are sacred, and worthy of the greatest kindness and care. To respect our aging at every stage is the greatest kindness we can offer to ourselves and those we love.
(The ahimsa spirit is a Hindu principle that literally means "non-injury." It contains the principle of not causing harm to other living things.)
I do not refer here to the promise of perpetual youth peddled by golden oldie consumerism. Those of us who are financially comfortable and live in prosperous high tech cultures have access to so many external fixes that we tend to develop a “fix it” mentality. We become totally dependent on external solutions and feel particularly frightened and vulnerable when these are not available or do not work any longer. Awareness practice is learning to open up to powerful emotions without either letting them discharge themselves (as anger or self-pity, for example), or suppressing them (perhaps by trying to rationalize them or otherwise get them under control).
For older generations people could frequently appeal to a secure belief in the God in heaven and the promise of an afterlife. While such a belief is still available to many, for most moderns, those distant gardens of the skies have faded. Instead, for most of us today, the search for relief from our common condition has shifted to the fantasy that through vitamins, health practices, cosmetic surgeries, right thinking, and right conduct, we can prolong life, avoid aging, and perhaps cheat death itself. The avoidance of our mortal, transient condition is pathological. To be mindful of our fragile fate each day in a non-morbid acknowledgement, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.
We are implicitly asked: How am I to enlarge consciousness in this place; how embrace life here amid peril; how find the meaning for me in this suffering? Identifying and accepting this task contributes to the enlargement of soul; flight from this task perpetuates our sense of victimization and keeps us on the run from the gods and from our own larger life.
When a human is stressed it produces a hormone called cortisol. This substance is used to help us quickly respond to an external threat - such as a monster or an angry wife or a huge monstrous being - by increasing the supply of glucose to your brain and activating chemicals that can repair damaged tissue. Your thinking quickens and your body prepares to repair injuries. But chronic stress causes the cortisol levels to remain high instead of dropping after the threat has passed. If cortisol is constantly coursing through our bodies all kinds of side effects can occur because it is meant to activate a quick, heightened response and not to maintain a normal steady-state equilibrium.
I spoke to a neighbor yesterday who has a husband suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, one of the lovely aftereffects of a lifetime of smoking. The previous night he had an acute episode of shortness of breath, despite the supplemental oxygen he uses. The inability to breathe resulted in anxiety and then a series of panic attacks which makes it even harder to breathe. Six hours later they finally got authorization for a larger dose of morphine to calm him down.
First of all, this put my achy back in perspective. Secondly, her perspective on this trial and tribulation was great - she opined that she had led a charmed life, by and large, even though the last several years had been a pain in the ass. Finally, I felt like I was of service to someone else. She seemed disappointed when I got up to leave so I wondered if maybe she needed to talk about this. I'm always trying to make myself available to help.
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