Why I turned to meditation instead of medication

Greetings and Salutations!

Most of my students are in a condition that’s far better off than the one I started in—they’re simply stressed out.

When I first took up meditation, I was deeply depressed and had been for a long time.

I did therapy which helped me immensely. But after a few years I grew tired of sifting through my childhood.

I was also on antidepressants. They helped to take the edge off of things.

For some people, I know, medication a necessity. But I became desperate to find another way. I tried to go off of my pills a number of times but when I tried, I bottomed out and came back running to the meds.

Why did my mind have so much power over me?

Gradually the depression itself caused a different sort of probing: why did my mind and emotions have so much power of me?

The short answer to that question is that our care-givers’ nervous systems are like the scaffolding we use to build our own. We internalize their dysfunction and perpetuate those ways of being because that’s how we learned to exist in the world.

That is, unless we do the hard work of re-wiring ourselves.

So my childhood trauma had a lot to do with my challenges. But was my trauma so intense that I couldn’t break free from the inner chains?

I also recognized that I was part of a broader problem.

This was in the mid-nineties when we had just entered the “Prozac Nation” status. I wondered what it was about our society, our collective ethos, that resulted in such high rates of depression.

Still, each morning when I took my happy pills I couldn’t help but wonder, why is it that I’m unable to simply be with myself? How long I would be dependent on medication to get by? How long would I be a victim of my own psyche?

I had to find another way. I had to find something more.

Finding something more

Like many seekers in this country, I made my way to California where I ended up in an ashram (a Hindu spiritual community). This was long before the internet brought the world to your living room.

The more that I found was meditation.

I fell in love with meditation almost immediately. I was among monks who practiced a minimum of two hours of meditation a day so from the start I sat for long stretches of time. This immersion gave me powerful experiences quickly.

While I may not have entered nirvana, per se, I saw that if I wrestled with my psyche in meditation I could make myself, well, high. Research has shown that meditators experience something similar to the runner’s high.

When I wasn’t able to get to that elevated of a state, I found that at least I could bring myself to a better place than when I started.

The illusory nature of emotions

Meditation gave me a way to take the reins of consciousness into my own hands. It helped me through the suffering. In the process, I also discovered something incredibly important about the illusory nature of emotions.

When negative states come over us they have an air of inevitability to them. The seem to be unavoidable.

It’s easy to see with anger. Think of the last time you got upset. Did it sweep over you like a storm cloud? Did you feel powerless to stop it from emerging?

Who among us can stop the wind?

Longer, more enduring emotions like depression have a similar grip on us, though often not so sudden.

But the power emotions seem to have over us is illusory, as I’ve said before. With practice you can see them coming from a distance and—while most emotions may need to be experienced to be released—you can learn to process emotions without being overwhelmed by them in the process.

There’s a second important way emotions are illusory: when emotions come over us we tend to identify with them profoundly. The anger, the hurt, the pain, the fear—when you feel them, they seem to be intrinsic to you.

In meditation you learn to experience yourself in a new way and one of the main components of this is that you become what has been called “the observer.” This is something like balancing a bicycle in that I can’t explain how it happens exactly. You have to work at it and experience it yourself.

When you lift yourself into the state of being the observer, however, you break away from the state of intense identification with your thoughts and feelings.

The Self Salutation

I share a lot about the danger of using meditation as a means to avoid feelings by lifting up to a happy place as I did during my years as a monk.

But I’m certainly not against traditional forms of meditation. Far from it. Meditation brought me from the state of being a victim of my own mind to a place where people sometimes write me off as a person born lucky to be happy.

Furthermore, I still meditate in the way I did as a monk. That meditation has a central importance in my life.

The difference between the Self Salutation and classical forms of meditation is that in the Self Salutation process, you use the distance created by becoming “the observer” to process and resolve emotions, rather than simply rise above them.

Peace,

Simon

P.S. If you’re on X (formerly Twitter) then connect with me there! Here’s a link to my profile. I know social media sites have challenges but I enjoy interacting with people like you who are on the inner journey — and I think it’s an important place to put a positive message into this troubled world.