What does it mean to you to be depressed? And how would you compare that to the experience of being joyful? For most of us the experience of being down is one to be avoided and the experience of being up is one to hold onto for as long as we can, often keeping ourselves “up” long beyond the passage of the joy inducing stimulus. To be down is to be down on ourselves, and it’s best endured alone, away from the judgment of others. We seek diagnosis and definition for the state of depressing, but we don’t seek the same for joy – it just is.

The quality of depressing is as much a part of the human to human dialog as is joy. It has many faces and sometimes they are present all at once. It can arise out of a situation of loss, it can be related to the seasonal shifts, and it can be a background mood that has followed us through our lives. It has its darker side – called black depression or melancholy – if you have experienced this it is natural to fear its return at any hint of sadness. But just as the music and rhythms of our body are many and changing, the sound of depression is loud and vibrant. It is the sound of the longing for something we have lost or for something we have never had. It is the sound of our emptiness – a vibration inside of a space – and has as much power to speak for itself as the space between the stars.

This is the time of year we run from our “greys” if we can, and it is also the easiest time of year to stay attentive to this lower range of our soul’s music. Too often we can’t find a friend to tune their instrument to depression so that we can resonate together. Too often a friend will take out a sunny instrument and try to motivate us to a discord. Then they get frustrated with us and we renew our choice to isolate.

Our ability to feel sorrow, longing, is related to our openness to joy and hope. The same heart knows all of this intimately, and pulling away from one makes us less likely to open to the other. The art is to hold ourselves with caring, as a parent would hold a newborn in the palms of their hand, or as the earth holds a buried seed in darkness. When we hold ourselves with caring we are able to share our music and thereby transform these labels to a deeper knowing of life. The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote: “Life is a rainbow that has black in it.” Rather than turn away from our darkness we can choose to look towards it as another form of light.

Jay Tropianskaia, Director of Training
Copyright February 2018