Hi
@nicoleclark 🙂Interesting question! Even though I'm in the thick of it as a person with bipolar who has years and years of real lived experience with depression, I still feel lost and unsure and deeply troubled when a friend or a loved one is suffering from depression. I have even felt impatient about getting the "old them" back to the "normal" world from their depressed state. I miss who they are when they are "normal" (hah! Whatever that means...
🙂 ). I worry deeply for their safety and wellbeing...
It's a very difficult thing to be going through depression. What us "sufferers" often forget though, is that it is also a living hell for our loved ones who patiently nurture and worry and wait for the depression to hopefully lift, sooner rather than later...
At the moment, I have a very close friend whom I love deeply. She is one of the warmest and most caring and articulate people I know... when she isn't depressed. Unfortunately she suffers from lengthy depressions of a year or more sometimes, and retreats totally from contact and communication during these times.
I haven't heard a peep from her in just over a year. It tears me apart. I keep sending warm, caring, loving, understanding messages, and I keep being gentle and supportive... and I keep hearing nothing...
I'm good friends with her neighbours, and they keep an eye out for her - the bins still go out on bin night, and that sort of thing - the occasional short furtive chat over the fence - so I know she is still with us.
So,
@nicoleclark - I understand the impatience and desire to get someone back from the clutches of depression. Even with meds and therapy and all the right stuff, it can take months, even years. But I want my friend back now!
😞And that is where Mindfulness comes to help me. As
@plasmo said, it builds tolerance and patience. It calms you down. It allows you to feel all of these intense feelings - impatience, grief, guilt, anger, fear, and all the others - without getting swept away by them.
You learn to observe the feelings inside you, without reacting intensely and strongly to them. It's like being hit by a ton of bricks, but you step aside at the last moment and observe the bricks crashing down on the spot where you were just standing...
Mindfulness is about the Now moment - not the fears and problems and intense feelings of the past or future. It is about accepting "what is", and about seeing a deep insight into what you have the power to change, and what you have no power to change. Having this insight, there is no uncertainty or anxiety or fear or pain - you apply action to change the things within your power to change, and you patiently accept the things you have no power to change...
It removes a lot of pain and conflict from our lives, by coming to the understanding that much of that underlying pain and conflict is generated by ourselves, within ourselves as a reaction to outside events - and that inner reaction is something we have the power to control...
Mindfulness brings about a great sense of peace, and vastly increases our resilience and ability to cope. It is not just for people with mental health issues. It can help every human being to greatly improve the quality of their lives.
To me, Mindfulness is not a structured form of meditation where you sit down cross-legged and try to empty your mind. Mindfulness is a different way of viewing the world and of reacting to it. It is a way of life that stops you being a slave to the psychological concept of time - with all of time's inherent worry and doubt and guilt and fear and frustration and anger and other emotional turmoil...
Quite simply, Mindfulness is life, with all of the silly harmful stuff we normally project onto it removed...
