So I’d fill the long hours of darkness with glowing screens, consuming mass amounts of articles and social media, binge-watching Netflix, and guzzling think pieces till I collapsed into a fitful sleep. When I tried to stop, I’d sit instead in the bare night, overwhelmed and afraid. Eventually I’d begin to cry and, feeling miserable, return to scree

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First, meditation practices that aim at cultivating samadhi, or states of clear, thought-free concentration, all too often end up fostering emotional dissociation and avoidance. Thus, rather than engage and work through the manifestations of fear, anxiety, anger, and self-centeredness as they emerge, meditation can create an oasis or bubble of clar

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Jamey: Exactly. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Our moods do not believe in each other.” When you’ve coped with depression, you know how enveloping it can be, and how seductively it can convince you that the darkness which it discloses is the sum total of reality. Then it passes. Andrew: Yep. Been there enough to know that. Jamey: I figured. Andrew: Go

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My depression had everything to do with the way I saw the world—with my judgments of it, with my beliefs about it, with my demands about how this moment should be. Underneath my attempt to control life through thinking was my fear of change, of loss, and, ultimately, of death. My resistance to life took me to the extreme—suicidal depression—but we

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