Too Overwhelmed to Move
Shrinking my bubble. Building up energy. Beating Depression.
Maybe our depression has something to do with the dreary, over-industrialized dystopia steadily draining us. Maybe Aleister Crowley was right and masturbation can be used to cast spells… if so, what spell are we casting through the mental (and literal) masturbation we do while staring at our phones? Do these symbols of impressive yet misdirected, tech bro futurism collect our spunk like thirsty sigils and use it to fuel the murder machine?
Who knows?
I feel like the wing-nuttiest news anchor ever… “More at eleven.”
Let’s set metaphorical wackadoo conspiracy theories about the occult and socio-economic origins of depression aside.
When I find myself in the paralytic Bad Place, a major lesson I always relearn is around my need to shrink my bubble of exertion and concern to the size of the energy reserves that are all depression allows me.
When I’m expansively manic, I have all the energy I need to fuel messiah fantasies. I’ll save all beings from the degrading doom we’re on track for. When I have less energy I can save fewer beings.
Sometimes, all I have energy for is my coworkers or my friends. I’ve been told I’m a good listener. I can play therapist. I can help people sort through their drama, through their trauma. I can help them pick up the pieces and do better tomorrow.
Sometimes, all I have in my tank is enough energy to be a present, engaged dad and husband. Maybe the only thing I can fit in my bubble and nourish adequately is my family.
There’s times I don’t even have that available to me. Times I have to focus purely on self care. Put my own oxygen mask on first. Recharging my battery by listening to Kirtan while doing Wim Hof breathing exercises and taking cold showers definitely helps, but sometimes I don’t even have the energy for that.
In my darkest moments, I barely have the oomf to reposition my body on the couch so that I’m not scrunchled uncomf. Sometimes the best I can do is make sure that I’m not presently experiencing physical pain.
It’s easy to overlook when the emotional pain is so overwhelming, but that gnawing hunger or prickly thirst never does my bounce-back any favors.
At these times my bubble is so small, I’m little more than a houseplant…
But recuperation is vital.
Gaining energy through the yogic practice of yamas and niyamas.
As a two-year student of Raja Yoga, I’m somewhat confident endorsing the following legend: it’s a spiritual discipline that, according to some sources, was promoted to get teenage boys to stop masturbating.
Raja Yoga is different from the Hatha Yoga with which you’re probably familiar. When someone says “yoga” you probably picture an overly sexualized form of slow motion breakdancing. In the original Sanskrit, “yoga” meant “to yoke yourself to divine will,” or to “achieve unity with God.”
Those who practice Raja Yoga might be quite likely to agree that samadhi is better than a post-masturbation orgasmic trance. According to Jason Birch,
Raja yoga is declared as the goal where one experiences nothing but the bliss of the undisturbed, the natural state of calm, serenity, peace, communion within and contentment.
Abraham Maslow would recognize this samadhi or “superconsciousness” as the self-actualization at the top of his pyramid of needs. It might also be comparable to the blissful ego death delivered by Molly to those who follow the credo of “better living through chemistry.” Perhaps it's even analogous to the hypnagogic state that Law of Attraction practitioners cultivate to manifest their wishes, if they have fallen down the Neville Goddard YouTube rabbit hole.
I don’t have time in this short essay to explore the Eight Limbs without lying through oversimplification but let’s just admit for argument’s sake that the final limb is that rapturous state of samadhi, and the other seven are a progression from grosser to subtler behaviors that will enable it.
Now, let’s look at the first Limb, the ethical rules known as Yamas.
Patanjali lays them out as follows in the Yoga Sutras:
Ahimsa: Nonviolence, non-harming other living beings
Satya: truthfulness, non-falsehood
Asteya: non-stealing
Brahmacharya: chastity, marital fidelity or sexual restraint
Aparigraha: non-avarice, non-possessiveness
Taking care of these basic ethical concerns is a kind of investment. I’ve observed that investing energy into remaining truthful or being generous yields more energy (prana) in return.
Sometimes I have to shrink the sphere of my concern—my “bubble” of exertion and ambition—to just these ethical rules. No matter how horrible I feel, I can get a little juice from choosing not to kill the spider hanging out in my bedroom.
Tying it all together with the physics of Bipolar Disorder
A decade after my diagnosis, I think I’ve finally figured out the physics of Bipolar Disorder. (Hah! I bet you thought I’d start this section with a joke about masturbation too!)
I still forget about Bipolar physics from time to time and, to paraphrase Jung, my mood states “stop believing in each other.” That’s a lot of suffering. To cling to hypomania, believing that you’ve finally cracked the code to stable energy and bliss. To be depressed and believe you’ll never rally out of it.
The reality is that it’s an unstoppable sin curve spiraling through space. The half of the curve above the midline is mania, the half below is depression. The vertical axis itself represents energy level.
Mania is high energy, depression is low energy. Energy in a materialist sense is simply the oomf you need to think and move quickly. Once or twice I successfully—albeit temporarily—caffeinated myself out of a mild depressive episode.
One Woo alternative is to think about the energy poles as Lightness and Density.
To have the high energy of mania is often to feel so Light—so bright and weightless you might detach from earth.
To be bed-locked with depression’s low energy is to feel Dense, like a viscous sort of slow moving dummy.
But, for me at least, the disorder isn’t just about those two poles. Along the horizontal axis, there’s another pattern: repeating intervals of Bliss and Fear that drag me from one energetic pole to the other.
The upward climb of Bliss and Light that the Girl Scouts attempt to invoke in song: ”alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic!” is when I’m at my most creative, my most extraverted, my most engaged.
Everything is in metaphor when you’re riding the Light part of the cycle.
But the same high energy in the Fear state becomes anxiety and my rapid generation of rapturous metaphors becomes a factory for terrifying paranoid narratives. This transition from Bliss to Fear is like milk spoiling on the counter: something that is nourishing and refreshing, when left out too long, inevitably goes bad.
And that anxiety exhausts me. With Woo framing, my vibration slows down. In default reality, I run out of the neurochemicals like dopamine and adrenaline that are keeping me elevated.
That means I’m in the despair part of the spectrum. Fear and Density. It’s cold. Dark. But eventually the chemicals start building back up like a field left fallow for a growing season so that it can recharge its minerals and nutrients and grow a better crop.
Particularly if I allow myself to shrink my bubble. Once the sphere of my concern is appropriately calibrated to the amount of energy I’m able to muster, I can make investments to inject some juice back into it, provided the initial seed energy isn’t so much that it has me feeling overwhelmed.
That’s where the Eight Limbs of Yoga show up. Moving through the precepts of yoga, from ethics, through posture, breathing, meditation and deeper meditation, my energy can build and build. It’s a model for how to invest back into yourself so that you can slip the surly bonds of neurological wiring.
That’s the revitalization part of the spectrum that always comes next: Bliss and Density; a relaxed recovery from Fear that thrusts me back into Bliss. Into Love. Into the Divine. Into Kether.
Back to the beginning. Back to Lightness and Bliss.
And, given rhythm compensates, it seems that will be the structure of my spiral, forever.
All so familiar.
We could talk for days on just this.