Tag: depression

Previously: I said too much.

I was re-reading earlier entries and noticed that, way back when (I started writing this in 2011… that’s pretty wacky, right?), I called my depression “largely situational and self-inflicted.” That may have been true at some point, but these days it seems definitively chemical. I’ve seen studies to suggest that depression medication may in turn cause deficiencies in serotonin, etc. in the brain: in effect, the meds take a bad situation and supply the chemicals you need, but leave you incapable of ever producing what you need on your own. Maybe? I don’t know. Did events cause my depression? Did depression bring about the events? Am I chemically depressed now because I treated that depression? Or, was I always chemically depressed and it was just waiting for a decent confluence of events to bring it out?

There are certainly times when I feel like I live in the grand age of leeches when it comes to psychiatric care.

The period after coming back from Peru was really terrible for me, and it started before we even got back home. We were there for another week or so after the ceremonies. We left Iquitos and went to Cusco to see Machu Picchu, which we never did. It’s high altitude in Cusco and it was really hard to adjust to it. Mostly, though, my depression was back and it was worse than before I had gone. What it boiled down to was… imagine you saw god. Imagine you saw god and felt absolute joy. In effect, imagine you went to heaven. And then, it just stopped. It was awful. It was just gone, and worse… it was turning into just a memory, one I couldn’t have faith in or feel. It was just another memory, just an illusion.

How did I get back to it? More desperation, honestly, I think. The experiences I described last time helped, but they wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t been trying so hard to find ways to reconnect to the whole thing. I had a therapist who supported what I was trying to do and tried to help me find my way without going back on meds and then, when it became clear it wasn’t working, helped me find new meds to try. Luckily for me, this time they worked, and without the various side effects I’d suffered on them before. They didn’t create happiness chemically in my brain, but they left me somewhere above “barely perfunctory” that I hadn’t been in a long time.

But I also don’t think it was the meds. I think the aya altered my brain chemistry. Rewrote sections of my brain. Allowed me to spend the time afterwards to try and figure some things out. Hell, I cared enough about my life to TRY and figure them out. I talked a lot of stuff through, I wrote a lot of stuff down. They said it would take a year to try and unpack everything ayahuasca shows you in the ceremonies, and I think it was true for me.

It’s not just that I’m a different person than I was in 2010, I know you can pretty much say that about anyone, really. It’s that I’m on a different path than I was. I don’t know where I was headed before, I let that cynical voice, that base, lizard brain make a lot of decisions and pretended I was just along for the ride. Now, I like to think, I’m actually trying to actively create a path, to head towards being something better.

Next: Okay, so what, exactly, did I learn?

Previously: How Six Flags and Disney on Ice can totally scar a kid for life.

Hi, there. I’m going to tell you some things that I don’t normally say outright. If you’ve come this far in this story then I think I can assume you’re willing to at least grant that the things I say are true for ME, if nothing else.

So, I’ve been going to a Buddhist temple on Sundays. Well, okay, not as frequently as I used to, with all the crap that’s come down the pike in the past year or so. But for a while I was going pretty regularly (and would like to get back to it). The temple I go to is the Drepung Loseling monastery. It’s the American seat for the Dalai Lama. Actual classes in the Tibetan faith and the serious pursuit of their particular brand of meditation cost money, money I don’t have right now, but on Sundays they offer free services, where they lead a beginner’s meditation. Basically, the geshe talks for about 20 minutes on a particular topic and then leads the shamatha meditation practice for about 20 minutes. I am at a very basic level of meditation, it’s not something I do very well at all, but I like it most of the time. I don’t do it on my own, not yet anyway, though my practice space downstairs is a really nice place for it and I intend to try. I have trouble sitting (at the temple they have some spaces for sitting, and then folding chairs in rows behind that), it makes my back hurt and my legs go to sleep, and my always-racing brain is distracted enough without also fighting that.

I started going there for two reasons, apart from the general idea that it would be a good place to try and keep exploring what I’m trying to learn and discover about myself. Firstly, the fact that so many of the things that I saw in Peru were so heavily influenced by Tibetan-style buddhism, with a healthy amount of Hindu thrown in. I didn’t know it was Tibetan-style at the time… I recognized the Hindu-style stuff, but there were other things, though similar in style, that I didn’t recognize. Sarah was actually the one who was able to pinpoint what I was describing.

The other reason I started going was that I had what I can only describe as a religious experience. And I say that as someone who, before Peru, had never had any kind of experience like that, of any kind. I was not very spiritual at all, because it required faith and faith is something I’ve never had in really much of anything. So, when I talk about Peru, and when I say later I had a second religious experience (as I certainly consider Peru to be one as well), you’ll know where it comes from.

We bought a book a few years ago, before ever going to Peru or considering it, called Goddesses of the Celestial Gallery. It’s one of those picture books they used to always have on clearance at Borders. It’s huge, like, two and a half feet tall, full of Tibetan art. Sarah bought it because she liked the art, nothing more. So I was sitting in my chair one afternoon, months after Peru, and I decided to look at it. I never had before. I sat there, flipping the pages (it really is a beautiful book), and I just… even more than Peru I don’t really know how to explain it. It was like what I imagine serious Christians must feel when they look at Christian art. I entered the paintings. Not just one but a few of them. I was staring at them and it was as if they began to move, ever so slightly, but more to the point I could feel them. Which doesn’t express what I’m trying to express. I connected to them. I felt like I had been in those places before. Seen them first hand. And I could feel the air of the place. I entered them.

I’m not really close to where I was going. And I could sit here for another hour trying to explain it. I had a religious experience. Does it mean that I think, therefore, that Tibetan Buddhism is the true way to go? No. But that’s why I decided to go there and learn about it.

(I had an experience, too, during one of the meditation practices, that was a little different. It was about a month or so into going, and at the end of the practice the geshe who was leading it sang a short chant, and I experienced the same sensation of moving through rooms – or again, rooms moving through me – that I had on ayahuasca. Not the rooms themselves, but the sensation of moving. I’d had it one other time, the first time I saw that video that I included a while ago. I don’t consider either of those as religious experiences, oddly, they just felt like I reconnected to a bit of the experience that I’d originally had. But it was a really good feeling, and made me feel like I was exploring what I was supposed to be exploring by going there.)

Look, I’m just going to jump ahead and hope there’s enough context above for it to make some kind of sense. Because this is where I say the thing that I think makes me sound kind of crazy. I learned a lot of things after Peru, about me and about life, I think. They feel true and they play a big role in how I’m trying to live now, and in staying relatively happy these days (and not artificially happy). But mostly it’s about what happened to me in Peru that second night. That’s what it all boils down to for me. Philip K Dick had what he considered to be a religious experience in the seventies. I’m not going to get into it now because it would take some describing, but the experience lingered for him and became part of a larger exploration for him. And when he talked about it afterwards, he would describe that first experience and the ones that followed as literal events. He would describe them and say, I believe this happened, what I experienced was real, it exists. I know that what I’m describing is also a perfect description of a schizophrenic break. And it may very well have BEEN a schizophrenic break. I don’t know. But I choose to believe it was real, because everything it’s led me to since has been nothing but positive.

That’s what happened to me. I know there are probably plenty of explanations for that second night. I’ve thought of them myself. How the brain can manufacture these things, how it could all be a constructed metaphor for myself, a representation of my own mind. Or hell, maybe I had a break, too, who knows? And I entertain all of those thoughts and suggestions, and even grant that they are all entirely probable. But I believe in the experience. Not metaphorically. I believe it happened. I believe that I was in those rooms, that I was operated on by whatever they were, that a consciousness so far above me that I can’t even conceive of whether it was separate from the other beings that were operating on me or not communicated with me as best it could, and told me that everything is love. I know that I am probably full of shit and that I am probably choosing a fantasy over the obvious reality of the situation and at the same time I know it isn’t bullshit, it was all real and I have total faith in it, even though I can barely understand the scope of it.

It was reality. It wasn’t a drug trip. It happened to me.

That’s what I haven’t really told people, up until now.

Next: We may be heading for some kind of resolution, here. Please stow your tray tables.

Previously: I made a stupid choice.

One of the requirements at Blue Morpho was that you took part in the first ceremony, and you could opt to not take any more of the drug beyond that. But they preferred that you still participate in the ceremonies. They said that aya stays in your system for days, and that, for some people, it can still affect you in a ceremony even if you haven’t taken a dose. That wasn’t true for me. I lay there on the mat for the whole ceremony, in my head, and it was horrible.

Once, when I was maybe six or seven, I was at Six Flags and I rode the Spindle Top. Basically it was a round room that spun really fast, everyone stood against the wall and the floor would lower out from under you and everyone would stay fixed against the wall from the force of the spinning. Which was like magic to a six year old. So I rode it. The room spun, the floor lowered… and I went down with the floor.

It was like that. I kept waiting for the mareación to sweep me up, I listened to Don Alberto’s icaros and hoped and hoped and nothing happened. My brain churned it over and over; my depression, what I’d felt the night before and that day, and how it was all gone now, lost. The depression won and everything was hopeless. It was a pit, as dark as any I’d been in. And while sometimes I wonder if I DID have an experience that night, and it was just a bad one, the truth is there were no hallucinations. It was just me, in that room, on the floor, crying, because I could hear everyone around me, swept up in the moment, and I was just on a mat in the dark.

And ceremonies last about three hours or so.

Because it was the final night, it ended with a process where the shaman comes to each participant and performs an icaro specifically for them. The aya “opens” a person up to the world, totally exposed, so once the ceremonies are complete these songs are meant to sort of stitch a person back together. So they can go back to the real world and function. Based on where I was laying, Hamilton was who came over to me. He asked me how I was doing and I told him I wasn’t doing well, that’d I’d made a huge mistake in not taking aya that night. He said something to the effect that it didn’t matter now, there was no point in focusing on that decision, it was past me now. I mean, it made sense, but it was not at all what I needed to hear. He performed a brief icaro over me and moved on. I felt so despondent. I didn’t trust him any more, and I sat and wished that Don Alberto had come over instead.

Another story of my childhood: when I was about five years old, I think, I was taken to see “Disney on Ice” at the Omni. At one point during the show, an usher came over to me and asked me if I wanted to be part of the show. I was an incredibly shy kid, but even so I said yes, and so I followed her down the steps to the side of the rink. We stood there, waiting for whatever it was I was going to be part of, and I was so nervous and uncomfortable. Finally, I timidly asked if I could go sit back down until they were ready for me, and she said yes. I walked back up the stairs and sat back down. When the next section of the show started, clowns came out onto the ice pushing giant brooms, and each one had a lucky kid riding on top of the broom head.

Just like when I was five, I’d said “no” to something, out of fear, out of nervousness, out of uncertainty, and I’d missed the ride again.

Next: What little framework this story had completely breaks down.