UK author and long-time meditator Jim Green has worked for many years in the field of mental health, including at the Open University and the BBC. Here, in this extract from his latest book Giving Up without Giving Up – Meditation and Depressions, he draws on his extensive experience in both the Buddhist and Christian traditions to explore the relationship between Zen Buddhism and Christian meditation, and how meditation can be both crucifixion and resurrection, especially for those suffering from depression.
LEARNING TO BEGIN
LOS ANGELES, 1992 – ZEN AND NOW
I was very excited. On my two previous trips to California I had been to San Francisco and other parts of the West Coast, but I had never made it to L.A. – mythical home of angels, starlets and the dreams of all the world. Now I found myself at a hill-top Catholic convent with views over the seemingly limitless, sun-parched sprawl of Los Angeles. The city of stars shimmered below me in its wispy shroud of smog. I was here for a Zen-Christian retreat.
That was the initial reason for my excitement. Since being given my first book about this manifestation of Buddhism (birthday present, 1977) I had instinctively known that the meeting between Zen and the Christian contemplative tradition was the place where I was going to find – and then repeatedly lose, and then find again – my path. The immediacy of Zen, its startling directness, its readiness to dissolve all forms and formulations appealed to me, but so did what little I then knew about the Christian way of contemplation. Zen was attractive, because it was exotic and other – much more so then, only twenty-five years distant from today. It was counter-cultural, it broke all the rules, it was what your mother and father had no chance of understanding. But there was also the pull of my own tradition, the lightly-worn, almost accidental Anglicanism of my parents, to say nothing of the entire Christian heritage of the West. I didn’t want to leave my cultural and emotional home that irrevocably. As D W Winnicott, the celebrated child psychotherapist, said of children (and all of us), ‘It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found’. I may well at that time have been seeking to hide in Zen, but I secretly knew that I wanted to find, and be found by, ‘my’ Christian tradition. And after all, hadn’t His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama encouraged people to stay with the religion in which they had been raised?
The second reason I was excited was that the retreat was to be led by Jim Finley, a former monk, now turned California-based psychotherapist. Another of my key meeting-points was catered for: that between the monastic and the therapeutic. But far beyond all this, my excitement resided in the fact that Jim had, many years before, been a young monk at Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where his novice master had been Thomas Merton. It was this connection, this prospect of direct transmission from the man who, through his writings, had been my teacher since 1977 (that birthday present had been Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite) – it was this that had brought me to be present Now, slightly elevated in the sunshine above the L.A. of 1992.
This was the Merton who had turned away from a predicted brilliant literary career (as well as an enthusiasm for women, drinking and jazz) to embrace the Roman Catholic Church and soon afterwards to enter the monastery in Kentucky where he was to live and work for twenty-seven years until his death in 1968. There he heard and followed the growing call to solitude. Drawn to the source of all prayer via a deep connection with his earliest forerunners, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, it was Merton who seemed to have rediscovered and re-embodied the hidden practice of contemplative prayer: meditation. And it was Merton – along with others such as Bede Griffiths and John Main – who was at the very forefront of the world-changing meeting between East and West which accelerated and deepened throughout the 1960s. In 1968 the meeting became a physical reality for Merton when he was granted permission to leave the monastery and travel to Asia. His journey took in Japan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India where he met and practised with the youthful Dalai Lama on three occasions. In Bangkok his life on earth ended because of faulty wiring in an electric fan. His last recorded words, captured on a film at the end of a talk he had just given on monasticism and Marxism, were, ‘So, I will disappear from view, and we can all have a Coke or something’.
In the cool rooms of the convent Jim spoke to us from his own love of Zen, sharing some of its simple, earthy, bewildering stories about oxen, rice and monastery latrines. And he began to teach us the practice of meditation. At that time he was recommending that we keep our attention on our breath, and on nothing else, by simply counting each inhalation and exhalation as it happened, from one to ten and then starting over. I remember being struck later in the weekend by the startling courage of an American woman who asked, ‘What if you don’t get to two before you’re distracted?’ And I recall now being arrested by sudden joy and fear as Jim reminded us that, no matter how long we lived, the difference between the number of in-breaths and out-breaths in our lives would never be more than one. It was a koan that changed my experience of breathing for good.
Jim also taught us to sit simply, in stillness and in silence. When sensations and thought arose, to notice them and let them go. ‘If you feel a real need to scratch your nose’, said Jim, ‘just experiment with not reacting, not scratching your nose. Just slowing down, noticing and deciding that, after all, you don’t need to scratch your nose, might just be the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life.’ I thought I knew what Jim meant. I definitely knew what he meant when he gave us the shortest version of his teaching on meditation, just before the bell was sounded to signal that we were entering the silence and the silence was entering us: ‘Just sit, and experience your own crucifixion.’
LATER
Many years later I retold this story when I was at an Easter retreat on a small island off the coast of Cork. I shared with my fellow retreatants the huge expansion that Jim’s words had brought to my understanding of what we were doing – what we were participating in – when we sat to meditate. At this point a long-standing meditator from Italy (long-sitting is probably better) offered his response. ‘That’s not how it is for me at all’, he said, eyes shining with a calm joy. ‘When I sit in meditation, I’m not experiencing crucifixion. I’m experiencing resurrection!’
Who’s right?
Neither. And both, of course. The mysterious paradox at the heart of reality is that you can’t have one without the other. All the wisdom traditions there have ever been point towards the truth that our world is being destroyed and remade moment by moment. Fullness can only come from emptiness; loss makes space for the arrival of the next unknowable gift; dispossession clears the way for an enrichment beyond our capacity to imagine - unanticipated and completely unlooked-for. ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (John 12:24).
Brahma the creator and Vishnu the sustainer would produce nothing without the joyful annihilation that Shiva brings to the dance. Theoretical physicists have been telling us the same for many years in their counter-intuitive descriptions of quantum mechanics. The languages of myth and of science offer us some truths, but in the end the only truth that transforms is the truth that we live. Being told that the crucifixion of death and the resurrection of birth aren’t so different after all - in fact are inseparably intertwined – may begin our process of waking up, but it is only information until we consciously choose to live that truth in our fully embodied being, here and now.
Which is why some of us find ourselves meditating. In the shade of those convent rooms in California and in the Atlantic-battered retreat-house clinging to the cliffs of Ireland, we were discovering something within our individual and shared experience. With each in-breath and each out-breath we were discovering that every giving is accompanied by a letting go, a giving up. Each gift is only truly received when we are equally content to give it away. That is the simple, startling and life-changing lesson that we are all being offered as we continue to breathe. Not just, of course, if you happened to be present in the heat of California in 1992 or all those years later in the mist and spray of the Irish clifftops. But also, and always, in the very place where you choose to meditate – if you do – with others or alone, in a shrine room or a chapel, in your bedroom, in an airport terminal, on the bus, in this eternally present moment, Now.
Whether we make any ‘discoveries’ or learn those ‘lessons’ is much less important than our fully embodied participation. This is a far different form of discovery – it’s how we come to know with our bodies (breathing in and breathing out) that there is no resurrection without crucifixion. And no crucifixion without resurrection. And that by opening to this ungraspable truth we can rest with equanimity in the full acceptance of Being.
Those are just words. The real meaning comes when we live it. If we choose to meditate, what we will eventually come to know, either quickly or somewhere along the faithfully (perhaps intermittently) followed path, is this: that meditation is not what you think.
Depression is not what you think, either. (Though in one specific and crucial sense it is very much what you think, as we’ll see later on.)
BEYOND DESCRIPTION
Depression and meditation have some surprising territory in common. If the practice of meditation can put you in touch with an experience of agonising surrender as well as one of astonishing freshness (crucifixion and resurrection), then there are plenty of witnesses (myself included) who will assure you that depression can also embrace the whole of that transformative mystery. It is clear, in any case, that this is what the healing force disguised as depression wants to do - and is capable of doing. Our task, or our invitation, is to work and play with depression so that we don’t waste what it has to teach us. We have to build a relationship – perhaps what the Buddhists would call a right relationship – with depression. Only connect.
The experience of meditation and of depression both hover on the threshold of what cannot be described or even said. The ineffability of what is being experienced or what is found (if anything - and even that has to be let go of anyway), is the central theme of teachers in all the contemplative wisdom traditions. The very first lines of the Tao Te Ching mysteriously tell us that the name that can be spoken is not the real name, just as the way that can be followed isn’t the real way. It was this very unsayability that oppressed the Buddha after his awakening. He hesitated for a long time before he was persuaded to teach. He must have felt the truth of the later Buddhist story which illustrated this conundrum with the tale of the fish asking a turtle what it was like to walk on dry land. With only the wet, the wavy, and the rippling to refer to, the fish can’t make head or tail of this ‘dry land’. She concludes that it must be a kind of nothingness. (But it’s not that either).
It’s the complaint - and the celebration – of every contemplative and mystic that the ‘experience’ she has had simply cannot be described. Whatever ‘it’ is remains stubbornly resistant to capture by language or image. It’s a blessed resistance. What we encounter in the practice of meditation is a release from the limits of what can be said or represented in any other way. We are liberated into what one meditation teacher has described as ‘infinite expansion’. In depression, the un-sayability of our experience has exactly the opposite quality. Here, the absence of words or images or gesture is the lock in the heavy door that keeps us in the dark – imprisoned, disconnected and mute.
In Darkness Visible, one of the classic accounts of depression, the celebrated American author William Styron also comes up against the frontiers of language, as we all will when we recollect or try to communicate the most deeply registered, yet most stubbornly fugitive experiences of our lives. He talks of what he went through as being ‘so mysteriously painful and elusive’ that it is ‘close to being beyond description’. Anyone who has walked a long time with depression – and/or its non-identical twin, anxiety – will immediately recognise the truth of Styron’s hard-won characterisation. As soon as we try to say it, we find ourselves saying too much, or too little. We are fish talking to turtles, or turtles listening to fish.
And yet the attempt keeps on being made, as it must be. Depression – or rather the voice hidden in the depression – must find a way to say what it needs to say. Thomas Merton was a graceful and eloquent poet. Whether There is Enjoyment in Bitterness is not one of his most accomplished poems, but it may be one of his bravest. Depression accompanied him both before and during his long monastic vocation. To anyone who has known the feared dark joylessness in which we are shorn of all relief, there will be something uncannily familiar in Merton’s cry here:
This afternoon, let me
Be a sad person. Am I not
Permitted (like other men)
To be sick of myself?
He catalogues his overwhelming sense of hollowness, of being broken and caught in a trap of his own making, and carries on bleakly addressing an imagined, unknown listener:
Do not forbid me (once again) to be
Angry, bitter, disillusioned,
Wishing I could die.
Yet Merton didn’t become a contemplative simply ‘to deal with’ his depression. He practised the silent prayer of the heart because he found it was the best way to listen and be listened to – even through those times when it seemed that no listening at all was going on.
The trouble with trying to describe the experience of meditation as indescribable is the unavoidable implication that it is, in the end, simply another experience like all the other experiences of our day or of our life that we take possession of and catalogue. Even more misleadingly, it also suggests that there is something to be gained, some esoteric wisdom to be achieved, even a magic cure to be pulled off. But the practice is not a means to this kind of end. We all yearn for that which we can’t express or describe - our mute agonies and our unspeakable joys - to be known, honoured and met in some way, without them being somehow stolen from us. There are, if we are blessed, people who can do that for, and with us. There are also animals, in the quiet glory of their non-judgemental presence, who can do it. Or wild, natural environments, or works of art that seem to know something that we didn’t know we knew. Meditation, too, can become an embodied language in which we acknowledge, welcome and release that in our experience which is fearful of being captured or distorted by images and words. That’s not a cure, but it can be a healing.
Depressed or otherwise, we are sure to find out for ourselves that meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. Only practice will make that an incarnate reality, something that we truly know and understand. But if we do respond to the call of this daily practice in our lives, we might find that the bitter paralysis, the absence of communication, the agitated complexity that all writhe through Merton’s poem, can be transformed in the stillness, silence and simplicity of our practice. How long will this take? One of the great twentieth-century teachers of meditation, John Main, answers this question (and many more than just this question) from a place of profound wisdom and psychological insight. It takes, he says ‘just as long as it takes to realise that it takes no time at all’. Another life-changing koan, if you hear it exactly when you are ready to hear it.
Saint Thomas Aquinas says that contemplation is ‘the simple enjoyment of the truth’. That sounds wonderful. But when our current ‘truth’ impresses itself on us as something terrifying, overwhelming and toxic, enjoyment sounds like the least simple, and the remotest, of possibilities in our imprisoning world. But meditation is simple and – perhaps its greatest virtue – it is simplifying. Simple, but not easy. Nevertheless, all we have to do is begin to learn it, and keep on learning it, as beginners.
BEGINNING AGAIN
At the still point of the turning world…
The simplest and clearest description of meditation is that it is the state of being truly awake.
Or - even more accurately perhaps - the never-ending process of choosing truly to wake up. In committing ourselves to this practice, we agree to keep on letting go, at this very moment, of the thoughts, the day-dreams and the preoccupations that shrink and control our lives. As we sit in stillness, simplicity and silence, we give the compulsions and beliefs that run our days, our minutes and our years a chance to let go of us. All day, every day, the internal running commentary that seems to be in charge of everything we do, drags us back and forth, away from what we fear and towards what we desire. It keeps us on edge, it pulls us to the edge of our lives, sometimes to what seem like the very outskirts of life itself. In meditation we return again and again to the centre.
The centre is that place in each of us that is free of all conditions and conditioning. It is in each of us and each of us is in it. It is the peace at the heart of a reality that is constantly arising and falling away. It has been called Buddha-nature or Christ-consciousness. Jesus himself called it the kingdom. And he was at pains to make it clear that you can never pin it down or take possession of it, saying, here it is or there it is. All he said was that it is in you and between you. At the centre of everything.
Meditation is our return to, and our expression of, this shared centre. In sitting to meditate we are choosing the middle way. Not some uneasy compromise between conflicting distractions or even beliefs, but a practice which is rooted in the heart of what is. In the middle way we dispose our bodies to help us to wake up. We are neither standing nor lying down but sitting with restful attention. We are not just aware that we are breathing in or breathing out, but are gently poised at the still point of breath being given and breath being taken. We are receptive, and we are letting go of everything we receive. It all comes from, and takes us to, the centre, where there is nothing but loving, attentive wakefulness.
That is the invitation. It’s up to each of us whether, and how, we respond. One of the glories of meditation is that it is free, and that we are free to do it - or not. Compulsory contemplation doesn’t really work. It may be that you’re at a point in your life when meditation (whatever you think it might be) has caught your attention, perhaps for the very first time. Or it may be that you have been meditating for years, faithfully following the teaching of a single tradition, or perhaps travelling between different forms of practice: Buddhist Vipassana, Sufi Dhikr, Quaker silence, Mindfulness exercises … And/or you might be feeling overwhelmed, terrified or deadened by depression (whatever you think it might be), or by the thought of its return, or your distress at its impact on someone you love.
Given all of those variables – and many more – it’s good to know that meditation is not something you can get good at. If you feel yourself becoming accomplished, then you’re definitely not good at it. The unchanging gift at the heart of this practice is one that will always gently and lovingly outwit the games that the mind wants to play. Especially the mind that is relentlessly down on itself in the crush of criticism out of which depression is made. ‘I can’t do it’, ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m too stupid’, ‘I’m bound to mess it up’, ‘Everyone else is going to be better at this than me’ – the destructive mantras of our everyday thoughts are endless. But these are the very thoughts that meditation disarmingly welcomes (and some version of them will always occur). Unless they are first acknowledged and welcomed, we won’t be able to let them go as they keep on returning. The essence of meditation is not to succeed but to steadfastly return to the simplicity of the practice, time and time again after every one of our self-described failures (and successes). It’s a way of learning to keep ourselves open to the presence of effortless forgiveness – the true work of love. In meditation we cannot fail to be good enough.
Whether we are ‘experienced’ meditators or not, and whatever state of mind we might be dealing with, it is always time to begin again. Depression will argue against that, being the very embodiment of everything that wants to oppose this truth. Locked in that state of being, we can feel overwhelmed by the crushing illusion that there will never be another beginning, nothing will ever be new, because everything has come to a full stop. And there will be times when we are incapable of practising meditation, just as we might be temporarily overcome by the impossibility of going for a run, meeting a friend or even getting out of bed. Nevertheless, the practice itself is infinitely patient. It will wait for us. When we are ready (and sometimes we are surprised to find that we are ready before we feel ready) we can begin, or begin again, to meditate. It is our opportunity to join in with the truth (which has no opposite) simply expressed by the Zen insight that everything is always just beginning.
Giving Up Without Giving Up: Meditation and Depressions by Jim Green is available from:
Medio Media - mediomedia.com/collections/recent-titles/products/blgvn2
Bloomsbury - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/giving-up-without-giving-up-9781472957443/
Bookstores worldwide.