Paweł K:
Could you give more details about event which made depression go away?
...
Do you know what you did and what happened? Care to share it?
I'm trying to piece it together based on my memories and my notes from that time (I journal everything, but in a kind of fragmented way).
The depression going away seems to be based on a set of realizations I made. So there were "click" moments. I'll try to summarize these realizations now:
1) Whatever the emotion, however strong it is, if you "find" it and "enter" it in your mindbody field of awareness, it will not hurt any more.
So let's say it's excruciating sadness. What I did was turn my "vision" down into my body. So, I actually imagined I was "looking" into my body, from my head downwards, kind of like shining a searchlight into the body cavity, sweeping it around, looking for the emotion. At this point, the experience of the emotion becomes a combined visual and feeling -- in other words I can
literally see it as well as feel it. So it is in two modalities, "visuo-kinaesthetic", instead of just one, "kinaesthetic" (= movement = feeling). In this split modality, "looking into" my body, I can find the exact location of the source of the emotion -- it's like a pocket, or a bubble, inside the "whole" of the mindbody. Picture it like an air bubble in syrup or similar. I enter that "pocket". Pain stops. I am now one with the emotion. I suppose in dharma terms, the emotion is now the "object" of my jhana, but understand that I knew none of these terms back then.
When you are "in" the emotional pocket, it doesn't hurt. I consider it like being in the eye of the storm. If I am in my normal head space, the storm (the emotion) is battering me, demanding my attention. By entering the emotion, it is like standing in the eye of the storm. It's completely calm. It takes a LOT of concentration to stay here, but you can learn that -- most likely standard first jhana stuff. When in the emotion, it doesn't hurt. Now, I just STAY here. For how long? For how long it takes. Inevitably, SOMETHING happens. Typically it was after around 30 minutes. I would get a "pop" and a flood of images/other sense data, then relief. Sometimes I would fall asleep and enter a dream/vision revolving around, what I believe, to be the kind of "mythical" constructs concerning the source of the emotion -- followed by awakening and relief. So you can get some very early memories arising and dissolving as a result of this. But, sometimes, none of that happens -- you come out and something's changed but you're not sure what.
One of the major points of this realization is that I can be free of the suffering of an emotion if I enter it fully in this way. So that realization kind of filtered down into the rest of me, and it meant that I no longer feared emotions. That fear has never returned. I believe a lot of depression is actually a feedback loop that starts with one sad thought or concept which then self-references and amplifies into despair -- the amplification is something like
fear of depression which makes you depressed, and so forth. Take away the fear of any emotion and it no longer extrapolates itself into the future endlessly. Depression is, in my opinion, basically just a painful state logically extrapolated into the future infinitely by the frontal lobes. I am sure this is why lower-IQ people (less frontal lobe capacity) are less inclined towards depression.
2) "Invalid attribution". This is my name for a process whereby some body pain or discomfort you would have had ANYWAY is linked to the "depressive" thoughts and starts to build that chain or feedback loop which quickly becomes a depressive episode.
So you have two modes of thought/feeling going on at any one time: 1) Your body and its inputs, 2) Your "checklist" of thoughts you are working through all the time, e.g. "Got to get up and do work" (and the more emotionally-weighted a concept is, the higher up on the checklist it moves in terms of priority and therefore the amount of attention you give it).
Invalid attribution is when a random feeling in the body gets "invalidly attributed" to a thought cycling on the checklist. E.g. you wake up feeling dehydrated, but you think about going to work. You link the body pain of the dehyrdration to the concept of going to work. This can EASILY become a feedback loop and depressive episode if you then ruminate on all the problems associated with going to work -- which also become unconsciously attached to the dehydrated feeling and, by now, the cortisol/stress response caused by all the fear of the future you have projected. A feedback loop started from something silly and which quickly got out of hand.
Realizing this by seeing it happen directly (perhaps this is "Cause and Effect" ñana?) allowed me to break these loops before they even started. It became automatic very quickly. This also led to an automatic improving of general lifestyle, e.g. I'll get up and immediately drink a pint of water these days and start feeling good within about 20 minutes. Obvious to some, maybe, but I was not drinking enough water on waking prior to this.
Another example is effect of food on body/emotions. If I ate a curry I would get bowel irritation. I would then unconciously link this irritation to various concepts on my "thought checklist", so I would link that irritation to general things going on in my life. Again, this can very quickly become a depressive episode via the feedback loops which can be invoked. Via the method in point #1 above, I can now simply "enter" pain from bowel irritation and will find that quickly moves it along = bowel movement = relief. (I found I could alter many of my body's functions in this way.) So instead of getting all these ideas tangled up, I now have them more automatically split, perceptively, and this came from the insight of being with emotions, and the insights occurred quite by themselves, really.
Another hugely important "invalid attribution" that takes place within a depressed person is the confusion of tiredness with depression; the two states are physiologically identical, except depression has unpleasant additional cortisol/stress effects coming purely from the projected pain-futures. Other than lingering cortisol, depression = tiredness. This is important to understand because energy levels ebb and flow naturally throughout the day. After a heavy meal, for example, energy dips. The depressive person will sense that dip and invalidly attribute it to their life in a very general way, and say things to themselves like "I'm so fucking depressed" or "It's all pointless". This came purely from eating a meal though! Similarly, genuine tiredness towards the end of the day can result in internal dialogue such as "I want to die" when it should in fact have said "I want to rest." The depressive thought habit becomes a lens through which perfectly normal bodily events are seen as negative, which creates far more unpleasant bodily sensations and thus feedback loops. The body has no concept of wanting to die; it is always to rest, if anything. Concepts of death are purely learned things.
So I broke into all these things via insight, and they weren't really planned; they just happened.
3) Divorcing emotional response from concept/story.
Being able to do the stuff in #1, and also recognizing the inclination towards fallacy where emotions are involved as described in #2, one can deal with the emotions directly and mostly ignore all the concepts/storylines that get written about them. This represents a significant gain in freedom. I think of it like digging underneath enemy lines and planting explosives underneath the whole lot, rather than fighting them in the field (which just becomes a war of attrition, concepts vs. concepts, which basically cannot be won on the same level which created them).
It meant instead of trying to "figure things out", if I caught myself in those kinds of thought loops I would just go and lie down and enter the emotion as per #1 and it would resolve itself and I'd get some sort of insight about it seemingly "for free".
I think
really realizing that 99% of my thoughts were completely pointless and based in fallacy, and were reactive to various emotions and body sensations, meant I could, for the first time, seriously let them go.
SUMMARYI'm going to wrap this up now. I think depression is really just 1 or 2 things which interplay then get projected unto infinity by the frontal lobes.
You don't always have to figure out "where" sad thoughts (or whatever) come from. You just have to realize that they don't control your timeline. This is why talk therapy has its limits. The "why" doesn't matter all that much. In reality, if you are going out and living life, and meditating regularly, you will uncover all those "why"s anyway, and be like "ohhhhhh!

".
What matters is the cause and effect of certain mental processes or "processing styles" which can turn singular thoughts into loops, which then become lenses, and which are all based in fallacy.
I never felt this has been a "fight". It has been a realization that let that old paradigm simply fall away. Since that realization, this all just became "obvious" and the behaviours I do in the betterment of myself feel like common sense as opposed to something I'm "trying" in order to "fight" or "flee" something else. It just became an obvious A -> B thing.