Spiritual Practice and Mental Illness OR ‘This’ll go away once I’ve practiced enough, right?'

I’m often questioning the relationship between my mental illness and my practice path.  Sitting here I’m at the end of a pretty intense week.  On Tuesday I was sobbing like I’ve never sobbed before.  On Wednesday I was mostly anxious, Thursday I was getting hypomanic and I don’t know what’s been going on today.  I would say hypomanic because I woke up about an hour before my alarm, but I had to take a nap because I was so exhausted this afternoon.  So something other than hypomanic.  Maybe today was a transition day.

Why am I writing about this right now?  Well, my mood has been as the forefront of my awareness, clearly.  The second thing is that I just read a sort of micro-memoir of a pretty famous dharma teacher in which he talked about experiencing clinical depression, viewing medication as the last resort, and left it ambiguous whether practice was sufficient treatment for his depression.  The feeling I got was that he did not in the end ‘resort’ to medication.  When I use the word ‘resort’ it carries a quality of desperation that I find to be characterstic of my ongoing experience of mental illness (I made a conscious choice to call it an illness, because at this point it seems to impair me as other chronic illnesses might.  I don’t wholeheartedly buy into the implied value-judgment.)

But back to why I’m writing this.  I need medication.  Maybe not forever.  But definitely for the rememberable past and for the foreseeable future.  The main magic sauce for me has been bupropion (Wellbutrin).  But I’ve also had a lot of benefit (and side effects) from Seroquel (quietia-something-or-other).  I’ve gone off my meds multiple times, some intentional and some not.  In my late teens I was on and off more times than I can remember, which may say more about my memory than anything else.  Anyway, every time I’ve gone off my meds in the last 10 years, I have ended up stuck in a depression that lasts weeks, or seems to.  To be fair we’re only talking about 3 times here.  Each of those three times, once I went back on my mood and life improved immeasurably.  I want to emphasize that meds do not stop my mood swings, but make them manageable.  Less sticky. 

For all of those ten years I’ve been a meditation practitioner.  There’s actually a practice in the Shambhala tradition called ‘raising lungta’ that is said to dispel or overcome depression.  Does this apply to my depression?  If I try to raise lungta or (insert any practice you can think of) and I’m still mired in depression, does that mean it’s not working?  In the depressed state of mind,”Does that mean I’m doing it wrong?  Does that mean I’ll never be able to do it right?  Does that mean I’m worthless and flawed?”  Now as I write this I actually see how engaging the practice can bring you face-to-face with  the reality of your depressed experience, which for me has ever been the only way through.  Unfortunately, when I'm in a pit, I usually don’t have the awareness and insight to see what this practice is showing me.  I just buy into the feelings of worthless.  

As I write this, a teaching in traditional buddhist philosophy (madyamaka for the dharma nerds out there) is coming to mind.  ‘Freedom from the four extremes’.  The nature of reality is said to be free from the four extremes: being true*, being not true, being both true and not true, being neither true nor not true.  Now that’s some heady shit.  I’ve been rolling it around in my noggin for years now and I still don’t grasp it.  But I do have a feeling for it.  Can buddhist (or any) spiritual practice can be sufficient treatment for my mood disorder?  For others mood disorders?  I have a hunch that the answer is free from the four extremes.  

Buddhist practice is sufficient treatment for mine and others' mental disorders.

Buddhist practice is not sufficient treatment for mine and others' mental disorders.

Buddhist practice both is and is not sufficient treatment for mine and others' mental disorders.

Buddhist practice neither is nor is not sufficient treatment for mine and others' mental disorders.

Now I want to say something here.  This mode of inquiry is intended to get at the ultimate nature of reality.  But the question of whether  practice can treat mood disorders is pretty clearly about the relative world in which people seem to exist and seem to have real experiences that are called mood disorders.  I say this because I aspire to avoid 'spiritual bypassing' this question.  Spiritual bypassing where you or someone else uses an ultimate truth to deny or negate a relative problem.  So I’m going to try not to do that.  In the Shambhala tradition, our view is that the ultimate and relative natures are inseparable.  It’s not like the relative (the way the world appears) is ‘less true’ than the ultimate (the way the world really is).  So I’m going to try out exploring these 4 statements in the next several blog posts.  I’ll be upfront: that’s an optimistic projection.  I’m moving and trying to finish a dissertation over the next 2 months.  But this is a topic that has been close to my heart for a long time.  

*Rather than being true, what is usually at stake is the existence of something.