The Tools

“Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things are passing. God alone is unchanging.”

— Teresa of Ávila

“There is no creation that does not have a radiance, be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty.”

— Hildegard of Bingen

“Worry never did help anyone and it never will. Rather, it puts one in a still more negative condition and depletes one’s energy.”

— Maharaj Charan Singh

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A note before we begin: This piece includes personal reflections on depression and anxiety, including my own experiences and some of the spiritual and practical tools that have helped me over the years. Please take care of yourself as you read, and if you are struggling in a way that feels overwhelming, reach out to a qualified mental health professional or someone you trust.

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There is rarely a week that goes by when I don’t talk to several people who are struggling with some level of depression or anxiety. This week was no exception. The circumstances are different, and some situations are obviously more serious than others, but I know the territory well. Depression and anxiety have been in my own campground for most of my life.

The first time I remember feeling anything like depression or existential dread, I was probably five or six years old. I was standing in the kitchen of my grandfather’s house in Northwest Washington, D.C., watching the adults run around trying to get out the door for work. Everyone was late. People were yelling and stressed and rushing, and I was just standing there watching them when this terrible feeling came over me from the top of my head all the way down to my feet. I remember realizing, in whatever way a five-year-old can realize something like this, that they thought this whole thing was real. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling. I certainly didn’t know anything about mysticism or illusion or the mind. I just knew something about the whole scene felt deeply wrong.

By the time I was twelve and puberty hit, I ran full speed into a wall of anxiety and depression. I have been figuring out what to do with both ever since.

I’m glad we talk about mental health now. When I was young, we really didn’t, at least not the way we do today. At the same time, I sometimes wonder what we are doing to ourselves. We carry the news around in our pockets all day. We wake up and look at it. We go to bed and look at it. Social media gives us an endless stream of other people’s tragedies, arguments, fears, disasters, and carefully edited lives. As I write this, a New Mexico court has just ordered Meta to put $567 million into mental-health treatment and prevention after a case involving harm to young people, along with requiring changes to its platforms. Meta is appealing the ruling. I don’t think social media created depression, obviously, but I do think constantly pouring frightening and upsetting things into our minds has consequences. That is why one of my newer tools is a thirty-day social-media and news detox. I also stop watching anything depressing, violent, or frightening. There are times when I need to get out of the stream altogether.

The Tools themselves started long before any of us had social media. Sometime in my twenties, I read an article about a woman who had created rules around her depression. She allowed herself to have a bad day. She could be depressed. She could cry, stare out the window, journal, listen to sad music, or do whatever she needed to do. But at the beginning of the day, she had to take a shower and clean her house. Then she lit candles, put on music, and ate food that comforted her without making her feel worse. There was no demand that she cheer up or immediately find the lesson in whatever was hurting. She gave sorrow some room without handing it the keys to the house.

Years later, in my thirties, I took that idea and made it my own. I have always been a list person. There is something about putting things on paper and checking them off that settles my mind and reminds me that I am actually getting somewhere, especially when my brain is telling me otherwise. So I started writing down the things I already knew helped me when I was struggling, partly because those were often the very things I couldn’t remember when I needed them most. Over time, that list became The Tools.

I divided the list into spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental tools. Meditation is there, of course, along with the Names, Satsang, listening to Kathy’s Satsangs and music, and reading Sant Mat books. There is therapy and journaling. There is yoga, weights, walking, water, and taking care of my body. There is time with family and friends. There is painting and music, reading and writing, museums, opera, and ballet. There is play, which I apparently thought important enough to put on an actual list so I wouldn’t forget to do it. Work as seva is on there too, as a reminder that I have a huge “why” every day when I work.

Some versions of that list have been through hell with me. There were times when the paper was worn almost threadbare from being folded and unfolded and carried around. There were times when I pulled it out because I was so overwhelmed that I honestly could not think of one thing to do to make myself feel better. That is one of the strange things about depression and anxiety. You can know perfectly well what helps you when you are feeling fine and completely forget all of it when you are not.

I used to wait until I was basically at DEFCON 5 before I pulled out The Tools. I don’t do that anymore. I know the signs now, and frankly, after all these years I pretty much have the list memorized. If I feel myself beginning to slide, I start doing things earlier. Sometimes that means meditation. Sometimes it means getting outside or going to the gym. Sometimes it means turning off the news, calling somebody, cleaning my house, getting a massage, or going somewhere beautiful. And sometimes it means admitting that what I need is professional help.

I’ve seen spirituality used in ways that I think are harmful, particularly when every emotional or mental struggle gets turned into a spiritual problem. Depression is not proof that somebody isn’t spiritual enough, and anxiety does not mean you have failed at meditation. Hormones are real. Illness is real. Trauma and brain chemistry matter. There are times when a therapist, psychiatrist, or physician is exactly where someone needs to be, particularly when depression or anxiety becomes serious or overwhelming.

Kathy understood that. She encouraged people to get outside help when they needed it and worked with therapists treating people in our group. I have certainly never been shy about trying things myself. At this point there is very little in the way of therapy that I haven’t at least explored. I have cried through individual, group, and couples therapy. I have done twelve-step work and inner-child work. I have tried antidepressants. I sat in actual seminars with John Bradshaw back when inner-child work was everywhere. Some things helped enormously and some helped a little. I’m still open. I don’t believe God gave us therapists and doctors so we could prove how spiritual we are by refusing to use them. But I also don’t believe the whole story of depression and anxiety begins and ends with the brain. My spiritual path gives me another way of understanding what happens inside me, and that matters just as much to me.

The mystics have been telling us forever to know ourselves. It sounds lovely until you actually start doing it. Knowing myself has meant finding things I would have preferred not to find. It has meant seeing where I am afraid, attached, angry, controlling, dishonest with myself, or hanging onto some version of who I think I am. The ego does not generally volunteer to die quietly. I think there can be periods on a spiritual path when getting closer to the Light actually makes things feel darker because suddenly you can see what was sitting in the shadows all along.

In Sant Mat, the Maha Sunn is an actual region on the inner journey, a vast darkness encountered after the soul has already traveled through very high inner realms. It is so dark that the soul cannot cross it alone and must be guided through by the Master. There is something important in that for me. Darkness exists even this high on the journey toward the Light, and encountering it does not mean the soul has lost its way or somehow fallen from the Path. The darkness is part of the journey, and the Master knows the way through it. I think about that when life gets dark here, too.

Kathy often talked about anxiety coming, at its deepest level, from the mind believing that we are separated from God. She would remind us that we aren’t ever separated from God. None of this is what we think it is. Maharaj Charan Singh was wonderfully practical about worry too. Worry, he said, doesn’t help. It uses up energy that could actually be spent doing something about whatever is in front of us.

It has been a tough season for me. That is true. It is also true that I have a great deal to be grateful for. I have a beloved family and extended family. A house fire ended, bizarrely enough, with a completely remodeled home. It is summer and the trees around my house are enormous right now, green and towering over everything. I have my dogs. I have a spiritual path that I have followed for many years, and I have my beloved meditation. There is an enormous amount of good in my life, and sometimes I can know every bit of that and still have a hard day.

That is where The Tools come in. Maybe I need to take a shower and wash my hair. Maybe I need to drink water, get outside, walk, turn off my phone, clean the room I am sitting in, call somebody I love, make something, read something beautiful, or sit down and do my meditation. Maybe I need to stop trying to figure everything out and let myself be sad for a while. Maybe I need help.

The point of The Tools was never to make sure I never felt bad. I don’t even think that would be healthy. Some things hurt because they hurt. Some losses need to be grieved, and some feelings have to be felt all the way through before they loosen their grip. I think this is part of how we grow emotionally and spiritually. We learn something about ourselves by staying with what is uncomfortable long enough to understand what it is showing us. The Tools aren’t there to help me escape that process. They help me take care of myself while I’m going through it, so I can come out the other side having learned something rather than simply finding another way around it.

The little list I still carry is there because when my mind tells me there is nothing I can do, I have decades of evidence that this isn’t true. There is almost always something I can do to participate in my own healing. I may not be able to change what happened or make a feeling disappear, and sometimes I’m not supposed to. The Tools give me something to hold onto while I do the harder work of figuring out what the darkness has come to show me.

What I understand now, after all these years, is that darkness has been part of my journey too. Every Hero’s Journey has a descent, and there is a reason for that. We are changed by what we are willing to walk through. Even the Maha Sunn lies directly on the soul’s journey toward the Light. The soul does not go around it. With the Master’s guidance, it goes through it. That has always meant something profound to me: darkness is a crucial part of the Path itself.

When I first made The Tools in my thirties, I thought I was making a list of things that could help me feel better. I know now that I was learning how to walk through difficult places without abandoning myself, my Path, or God along the way. The darkness has taught me things the easy stretches never could. It has stripped things from me, shown me myself, deepened me and, over and over again, driven me back toward the only Light I have ever really been looking for. The darkness was never in the way. It was part of the way.