The Cycle of Chasing and Collapse
El ciclo de perseguir y colapsar
A question about the connection between anxiety and depression and the cycle of chasing and disengaging, and whether being present in the now is the way to find peace.
The Cycle of Chasing and Collapse
A question about the connection between anxiety and depression and the cycle of chasing and disengaging, and whether being present in the now is the way to find peace.
I have a question regarding the chasing and the dark night, in comparison to what they would call in psychology anxiety and depression. I experience a lot of this chasing, and I'm just now making the connection. There's this constant chasing, and then when I disengage from it, there's depression. They say anxiety and depression are two sides of the same coin, and I'm starting to realize it's like the chasing, and then when you decide not to chase, it's the depression, the stillness where everything feels not right. It feels so cyclical for me. You point to the cause of that, and I knew it had something to do with my mind. Is being present in the now a kind of anchoring, finding some peace, some neutrality? No chasing, just accepting the moment? You speak of non-duality a lot, and intellectually it makes sense, but I have no experience of it. It's so mysterious to me.
That will clarify over time. It's about recognizing the nature of experience, and it can happen gradually as we glimpse it more and more deeply.
The basic practice of presence
But a few things about what you're describing. When you say "being more present in the now," notice that, traditionally, when meditation is taught as "being present," what that means is not being immersed in thoughts. We can have the experience of being completely immersed in thoughts. We're aware that there's a surrounding, but we're not very in tune with it. We're completely in the future or in the past. Then we can come into the present and be more aware of sensation, perception, and so on. That's a basic, fundamental meditation practice: to notice thoughts and move into sensations in our awareness so that we become less contracted and less focused on the mind. That's what you're describing.
There is only this moment
But there's a deeper seeing, which is that there is nothing other than this moment. You are only ever present now, because all of those thoughts, all of past and future, all of it is only now. It is impossible not to be present now. There is only this.
What I'm pointing to as the cause of anxiety and depression is that we don't like that there is only this. We want this to be different, and we try really hard to change it. We will fail miserably at changing it, and that's anxiety, depression, anxiety, depression, anxiety, depression. It's a never-ending cycle. We can work on it to alleviate it, make it a bit less difficult, but it's not going to get resolved. That work is valuable, it's helpful, but it's not going to get resolved until there's a deeper transition, which is the work we're trying to do here.
There are times when I feel like I'm in the now and it just feels off, like there's something wrong. I think, "Why am I so miserable right now?"
Two causes of suffering
There are two causes for that. One is that there's a way of living that we're not living, because we are in so much friction with reality. We're not very aligned, and so we're not flowing in life. We're not doing what we really want to do. That causes pain. There's a lot of fear, and that can be addressed.
Then there's a second cause, a deeper cause. They both work together, but the deeper cause is that we hold extremely false beliefs about what is real, about what reality is, and then we base our experience on those illusions. We relate to what we take to be reality, but it's founded on illusions, and we don't know that. We're attached to those illusions.
The rhythm of tasting and losing
So there's always a bit of a back and forth. We taste something, we have glimpses, we do a meditation, and there's a moment that feels better than anything we've ever felt before. Then it goes away. But that's enough to tell us something is there. So we come to this group, do another meditation, follow whatever is giving us that taste, specifically when it is about presence. That's going to keep us coming back. Something goes away, something is tasted again. Something goes away, something is tasted again. And then we're going to start to see why we are escaping that all the time. What we find is, very generally, fear and pain. When we go into our strategies of thought, we suppress the fear and pain. That's what we're really escaping from.
Those are two ways of living. Go into the mind, escape, seek in time, avoid what is scary in this moment, avoid what could be painful in this moment. That often doesn't work. Or we can come to this moment, taste some fear and pain, and we oscillate between the two.