Paul, spiritual urgency is a good thing, but it can add a lot of unnecessary pressure to your practice if you focus on making "very rapid progress". It then sets things up as a battle/conflict. You can see it in your expression "conquer the depression"... 

Both modern psychology and traditional buddhism talks about stuff "bubbling up" when you meditate. Basically, we seem to have a natural instinct to control/contain the messy aspects of our mind by kind of putting them aside and not thinking about them. When we relax the mind through meditation, these incomplete thoughts and feelings --- even "vile and depressive" thoughts and feelings --- will bubble up into consciousness.

The interesting thing is while this seems like it will open up an endless flow of more suffering... actually we only have about ten or twenty thought patterns that give us problems. There are a lot of variations to those patterns, but our mental problems are really pretty basic, childish in a way, and not very complex once you see the pattern. We basically make odd assumptions about ourselves and life and then create odd stories that we completely believe, without question.

Whether it is worth it or not is ultimately a choice, but progress in meditation necessarily means sitting with and experiencing all the dark aspects of our minds. Anger, greed, fear, lust, ambition, and pride is going to come up. Depressive thoughts like "i'm flawed", "i'm not safe", "i'm not worthy of love", "i'm a failure", "i didn't reach my potential" are going to come up -- this is the normal human mind. Given your age, all the normal age-approriate thoughts are going to come up associated with mortality: depression, regret, fear of death, doubts about various things we're told about life and the afterlife. It's normal.

My hunch is the only way you will make progress is if you can learn to accept and be interested in all the vile and depressive stuff that comes up. Basically becoming a detective, your own psychologist, and getting very interested in how the mind works. What is true and untrue about the vile and depressive stories you tell yourself? How can you accept and live with your past, yet see everyday as blank slate? 

The problem with pure "mindfulness" practices is they tend to open up the mind, but they don't really give people any tools for working with the dark stuff. Normally that's fine, because most of the time we can just explore our mind and a kind of natural intelligence leads us along... but if we are hitting roadblocks, then we need the help of a professional psychologist and/or meditation teacher to help us see that these roadblocks are >very interesting!< and worthy of investigation. Usually the roadblocks have some "message" within them that we are failing to see -- and that's why we keep hitting the roadblock. It is as if the mind is saying: pay attention to this first. 

Hidden in almost every problem is some piece of wisdom that is being overlooked. Meditation involves a lot of just sitting and exploring all the variations of greed, aversion, and ignorance. The wisdom is usually in the form "I can't believe I was thinking about X in that way! I thought X meant I had this problem, but actually X was pointing me toward the solution. I just wasn't seeing it."

And it's funny, most of the time the solution is to just >let things be<. A lot of the time, we're just making things into a bigger problem than they actually are. Sometimes the problem is in the past, which we can't change. Sometimes the problem is in the future, which we can't know. When we're sitting in normal meditation practice, we're safe and have nothing else to do... so any so-called "problem" that comes up is just the part of our mind that seems to make problems in order to feel busy and protected. That's the part of the mind that we can learn to calm down, simply by >letting it have problems<. We don't need to do anything, except notice them and welcome them and not push them away. Just let it bubble up. Simple.

You might also like the book "Wake Up To Your Life" -- it's a book that contains a lot of different meditation practices that are more detailed than just "be mindful". I'll bet at least one of them will inspire you.

Best wishes Paul!

Paul, my friend shargrol gave you a very cogent and thorough answer to this question so I don't need to add anything to this other than to say, "Please listen to shargrol."

Hi Chris.
I think you have mixed up the two experiences. What I described in my original reply to you concerned my 40 year old experience with Transcendental Meditation. What I was describing in reply to Anna L was my more recent experiences with meditation in the way of the Therevada Buddhist tradition. Anna L Makes the distinction herself in her question to me and I make it in her quoted text, but I understand what you're saying nevertheless. Paul.