I’m reading Zen Path Through Depression.  At the end of each chapter it has a suggested meditation to follow.  I haven’t had the space to do that lately.  It’s not like my Simply Being App which is just sitting and listening to the woman talking, which is simply easy, has done me a world of good when I remember.  It requires the listener to blank out ones mind and focus on the moment.  If thoughts creep in, let them creep out, notice everything around you (with your eyes shut, of course).  I’m not ready, I don’t think, to not have a guide with me to keep me on the path of meditation and not getting snarled in a bunch of dark and spiky thoughts which are always toed-up to the line to jump in and distract me. 

What I found really interesting was that Zen requires a focus spot and to imagine yourself up on a huge hill, feel the air and the freedom and the expanse.  Then you invite your depression into the meditation and take a good look at it.  This is where I’m lost.  I have no idea what depression looks like.  I thought it was like a big sucking black hole of hopelessness or some sort of snarling animal that wants to, at any weak moment, devour me whole.  I realize I have to identify it, name it and then tame it into a space where I retain the lessons learned from it but our of the way and reach so  it can no longer leach time and bar my talents from expression.  I’ve been a firm believer that if you don’t learn your lessons from life you are doomed to live the same trial over and over again until you master it.  I feel like I’m finally pushing through.

There’s this story that I know that gives me hope that my trials will be for good:

“Once there was a man, thin, weak and penniless.  He pled with God to help him.  God responded with “My son, push on this rock,” So the man set to the task of pushing the rock every day.  He would get up push on the rock, go home, eat and get up and do it all over again.  After a while the man is no longer thin or weak but he had huge muscles on his arms and abdomen and chest.  He threw his arms up to go and said “Why do you have me pushing around this rock when it’s too heavy for me to move by myself.  God responds back with “Oh, my son, I never told you to move the rock, just push.  Now you are ready to do that which I have chosen for you.”

I know that Heavenly Father has a plan for each and every one of us, and it has a lot of trials in it.  One way to look at it is the greater the trials the greater His love and the greater good you are meant to do in the world.  He never forgets us, never throws us under the bus for a greater person because we are His, and He loves us each unconditionally and individually.  I don’t always feel that in my life, but it helps to know it’s true.