"Will getting help stop my awakening?"
You may have felt low for months. What you used to love leaves you cold, your mornings feel heavy, and your sleep no longer rests you. Someone who cares about you suggests, gently, that you see a doctor. And a quiet voice inside you answers with a question of its own: what if getting help stops my awakening?
You are far from alone with that question. Google's suggestions for "spiritual awakening depression" include "spiritual awakening feels like depression", "spiritual awakening vs depression" and "does spiritual awakening make you depressed". Whoever types them, I imagine, would like the heaviness to belong to a bigger story, one that a doctor might spoil.
The answer is short. Getting help for depression does not affect your spiritual awakening.
In this post, I would like to explain why, so that, if you need help, nothing keeps you from it a day longer.
Depression, some say, is a door to awakening
Many web pages say that depression and awakening are closely linked. The psychologist Lisa Miller, of Columbia University in New York, gave a talk titled "Depression and spiritual awakening: two sides of one door". One book's subtitle presents depression as "a call to spiritual awakening". Blog after blog offers home-made tests to tell the two apart.
When you have been low for a long time, a door sounds far kinder than an illness, because doors lead somewhere.
But is depression really a door? Here I can be brief, since I have answered a very similar question before. On whether anxiety comes from spiritual awakening, or points towards it, my answer was no, because awakening is not among your experiences. Depression is one more experience, so my answer for it is the same. The last section of this post shows what awakening is.
What I would rather explore with you is what happens to you once you believe those pages.
Call depression a spiritual sign… and you leave it untreated
Once you see depression as a door, getting treatment starts to look like closing that door. You may never say this to yourself in so many words, yet the reasoning is quiet and persuasive: if your low mood is taking you somewhere sacred, a doctor seems to stand in your way.
So you wait. You tell yourself that this is a passage, that it will open when it is ready, and that all you need is patience (and perhaps a little more courage). Weeks pass, then months, and in all that time no doctor looks at what is happening to you.
You see, a spiritual name changes what you do about your depression. The word "illness" sends you to a doctor, while words like "door" and "call" ask you to be patient.
As I have argued elsewhere, waiting for awakening brings a pain of its own. Waiting for your depression to turn into awakening adds that pain to the low mood you already carry. Anyone who treats depression for a living knows this kind of delay well.
Many people wait (far too) long to see a doctor
Britain's National Health Service (the NHS) has a page on depression in adults. Its short part on when to see a doctor begins: "It's important to seek help from a GP if you think you may be depressed." (A GP is a general practitioner, the family doctor you see first.) The very next sentence speaks to you: "Many people wait a long time before seeking help for depression, but it's best not to delay."
Nobody expects you to diagnose yourself first, because finding the right name is part of a doctor's job.
So if your low mood has persisted for too long, see your doctor, and do it soon.
Tell them how long you have felt this way and what has changed.
In my post comparing the dark night of the soul (a time when life seems to lose its meaning) with spiritual awakening, I suggested letting a doctor check whether depression is part of a dark night. A long low mood deserves the same check, by any name.
If you ever find yourself thinking about ending your life, please speak to someone now — a friend, a doctor, or a free helpline: 116 123 (UK and Ireland), 988 (US and Canada), 13 11 14 (Australia). If you ever think of harming yourself, call your local emergency services straight away: 999 or 112 (UK and Ireland), 911 (US and Canada), 000 (Australia).
Losing all interest is not detachment
On another page, the NHS describes what depression can do: "If you're depressed, you may feel sad, hopeless and lose interest in things you used to enjoy."
Now compare that with a popular wellness website's list of 21 signs of a spiritual awakening. Its first sign is feeling "disconnected and detached from the things and people you used to enjoy".
The same loss of interest, in nearly the same words, becomes a symptom on one page and a sign of awakening on the other.
But detachment, as I understand it, leaves your love of life intact. You can enjoy a piece of music, a good meal or a friend's laughter with all your heart, and still let each of them end without clinging. Your life keeps its colour, and only your grip loosens.
Depression drains the colour itself. The music, the meal and the laughter no longer reach you, however much you miss them. If you have lost interest in almost everything, that loss deserves a doctor's attention much more than a spiritual label. Even a doubt about whether you are living with detachment or depression is reason enough to see a doctor.
Spiritual bypassing: John Welwood's name for sidestepping your wounds
Reaching for a spiritual label when something hurts is an old habit, and John Welwood, a pioneer in relating Western psychotherapy to Buddhist practice, knew it well. In a 2011 interview with the magazine Tricycle, he explained that he coined the term "spiritual bypassing" for a pattern he saw in the Buddhist community he belonged to, and also in himself.
He described that pattern as a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices "to sidestep or avoid facing" unresolved emotional issues and "psychological wounds".
People who bypass in this way, he said, often use "the goal of awakening" to rise above the raw, messy side of being human before they have faced it.
He noticed something else, too. One-sided spirituality, in his view, favours "detachment over feeling". And people prone to depression who already find it hard to value themselves may even use the Buddhist teaching of no-self (the idea that there is no fixed, separate self) to sink lower in their own eyes.
His book Toward a Psychology of Awakening explores where Buddhism, psychotherapy and personal change meet. By his definition, reading your depression as a door to awakening is one more way of sidestepping your wound.
Are you blaming yourself for not awakening yet?
The first cost of bypassing is the time you lose waiting. The second shows itself later. If your depression is a door, it should open one day. What happens, then, when month after month goes by and nothing opens?
You may turn the question against yourself. Am I meditating the wrong way? Am I too attached, or too stubborn, to let my old self go? Why do other people seem to wake up while I stay stuck?
The spiritual name that once promised you meaning now hands you a verdict, and the verdict is about you.
Self-blame feeds on exactly this kind of story, and it piles fresh weight onto your already heavy mind. (The NHS even lists "feeling guilt-ridden" among the symptoms of depression.)
So if you have been asking yourself what is wrong with your awakening, please hear this: a low mood that lasts is a reason to see your doctor, and it tells you nothing about your worth, your practice or your progress.
In my own life, hopelessness once had a plain, everyday source.
In 2005 and 2006, my job made me hopeless
In a personal essay, I wrote about my employer at the time: "My working there was a key reason for me having two of the worst, most depressing and hopeless years of my life (2005 and 2006)."
The company was badly organised, its chief operating officers seemed to come and go within three months, and the drive to its headquarters took me between 45 minutes and two hours. In 2006, I left for a better job, yet my hours there were very long.
As that year drew to a close, I was feeling "a numbing current of hopelessness crawling all over my body, my mind and my soul, as I was mentally fast-forwarding, extrapolating myself in my 40s and 50s, still entangled in the spirit-crushing, corporate rat race".
I never took that hopelessness for a spiritual sign. I could name the causes: my work, and the life I saw ahead of me.
A name that points to a real cause lets you do something about it. My own way out happened to be a new job in 2007. Yours may look different, and if you have felt low for most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, the NHS advice is simple: see a doctor.
Getting help takes nothing from what you ARE
So, will getting help stop your awakening? Here is why that cannot happen.
A doctor can look at your mood, your sleep and your body. A therapist can listen to your story and help you treat yourself more kindly. (Any questions you have about medicines belong with your doctor.) All of this help acts on what you go through, day after day.
And who goes through those days? You do, aware of each one. That awareness is what the word "awakening" refers to. Awakening, in this sense, does not lie somewhere beyond your depression, and no treatment can push it away.
You need not wait until you feel better, then. My invitation to you is to be what you already are, as you are, today (heavy mornings included, if you have them).
Getting help for depression does not affect your spiritual awakening, because what you ARE is aware of both your depression and the help you get for it. If your low mood has persisted for too long, talk to a doctor or someone you really trust as soon as possible.