Radio Interview About Depression
“Vinyl Thought” Interview on Depression and Obsession
Here is an interview I did with the good people at the Vinyl Thought, a radio program here in San Francisco. Originally slated as a short talk on depression, we ended up talking for 45 minutes about depression, medication, and regulation versus healing. Then we explored the nature of obsession, as they had earlier interviewed a journalist who was connected to an OJ Simpson interview that is now being released. So, a wide-ranging conversation.
This is the link to the Vinyl Thought’s webpage, and to get to the recording you click on the icon labeled “Audio MP3”. My section begins 45 minutes in.
Some additional thoughts:
I’m told that the missing piece in this interview was about meditation, so here’s what I would have said about it had I been thinking about it. When I talk about the need to regulate the nervous system in this conversation, I also mention that when one does so, then there’s the possibility of getting into the roots of what is causing the depression. Meditation is the key tool in that “getting in there”.
You can’t meditate when you’re overwhelmed, any more than you can go for a jog if you can’t keep your balance. So the self-regulation is essential in balancing one out so you can meditate…which begs the question about meditation.
Meditation is essentially the practice in looking clearly and directly at what reality actually is, rather than what we’d want it to be, or what stories we tell about it. It’s a microscope rather than a TV show. And it’s necessary because depression creates so many distorted and distracting stories about one’s reality (“I’m horrible, life is horrible, it’s all pointless”), that we need a tool to cut through to what the actual, real, observable reality actually really is.
So, that’s what I would add to the interview, and to hear a fuller take on these thoughts, you can listen to my recording, entitled, “Depression and the Fundamentals of Healing”: Click here for recording.
