(This article is a continuation from last month, which, if you missed, can be found here.)
5) Graduate School
Deeper and deeper into the subject at hand. As in literal graduate school, you are focusing in on your subject and seeing both the minutia in greater relief, as well as the more profound levels of reality. At this level, with depression as a syndrome being essentially dissolved, the process of healing can continue into these subtle realms of more detailed mapping, and more attention to breaking up the fragments of depression (e.g., negative thinking as it is anchored in bodily experience) that are left in one, even though depression itself has been crushed.
This is the level where the grieving (being defined as, “The emotional process of letting go of that which is already gone”) becomes less of something that happens to us than something that we intentionally do. Letting go, and practicing non-control, becomes finer and finer as we recognize how the belief in futility is encoded in our memories and nervous systems at subtler and subtler levels. We come to embrace grieving as the actual process by which acceptance is attained, and see clearly how and why that is the only path to a real openness and reception of life as it is. It’s a place where various wisdom tradition teachings are stripped down to their basic realities, and we start seeing their truths at our very funky and unique individual levels.