The Zen Path Through Depression

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by D. Burns and Philip Martin's book are the most important books I have ever read to deal with profound depression. I have been hospitalized for depression and now live a healthy, happy, successful life with a challenging career, good friends, and liesure activities I love and enjoy. Moving INTO your depression, instead of escaping from it, is the most important thing you can do to heal. You must practice Zen in order to build the habit of doing this. It is challenging. Pema Chodron's book "When Things Fall Apart" was a very comforting book, but did not offer the strong medicine necessary to deal with serious, profound depression. Philip Martin's does.

This book doesn't deal with the psychiatry of the mind in traditional terms. Any person suffering from depression will immediately realize that the FEELINGS they have and have experienced in the past are not unique. The triggers might be unique, but the loneliness, the sense that time has slowed down, the sensation of being stuck in the thickest of mud, those feelings are not unique. This book helps a person understand how to use the experience in a positive way instead of becoming lost in the psychobabble that traditional psychiatrists use to explain why a person becomes depressed. Most people suffering depression want to find a way to feel better--immediately--not sink deeper into a state of melancholy while reading a medical thesis. The chapters are short and to the point and offer a person an opportunity to think about the triggers in their lives which have brought them to this same point again and again. Once a person knows what has made them sad and depressed, they can recognize it in the future and deal with the triggers as they happen and not later on when they feel the worst.

This book came to my attention just when I really needed it.Don't confuse this volume with the fuzzy-minded dreck filling the shelves of your local New Age bookstore. Martin's writing is simple and lucid, tempered by years of zazen under the guidance of an authentic master of the Soto school. He invites you to recognize your depression as an opportunity to grow, and as a teacher. The modest exercises offered at the end of most chapters cannot fail to help a sincere student.Non-Buddhists will discover much of value here, but Zen students will find it especially rewarding. Many passages earned the approval of my day-glo hilighter. I will return to this little book of wisdom again and again.

I have found his book very helpful to me when I am awake in the middle of the night and focused on my depression. The exercises at the end of the brief, useful chapters are a calm voice leading me back to letting me relax again. The table of contents allows me to look for the topic that strikes the most immediate note for me. I love this book and recommend it heartily, whether you take medication for depression or not.

Finally, something helpful for that interminable time when you're in the middle of a six-month bout of severe depression. It helped me to minimise the fear of long-lasting depression and the thoughts that maybe it will never pass. Maybe it won't (though we all know depressions usually eventually lift, but it's impossible to believe this at the time), but at least this book says: "Hey, there are some good things about being depressed." And it tells you what these are, so you can appreciate this awful state of mind for a few moments. Much easier to digest when you're depressed than those useless and offensive "Think Bright And Happy Thoughts"-style of books.