Giving Up Without Giving Up: Meditation and Depressions
Ebook
'What if the suffering that we call depression contains experiences and lessons without which we cannot be fully alive?'
This is one of the many startling questions that Giving Up Without Giving Up invites us to ask ourselves. Depression seems to be a contemporary epidemic, a condition understandably feared and avoided by all. Yet this book explores the possibility that we have much to learn from the desert times in our lives, when it feels as though we are losing everything, most of all any sense of who we are.
Drawing on his extensive experience of meditation within both the Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, as well as his own times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers us a moving account of just how this wisdom practice can accompany each of us as we make 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery' He guides us through 'the invention of depression' in the mid-twentieth century, questioning the increasing tendency to medicalize human suffering.
Based on the insight that 'Life is the Treatment', he offers a thorough and practical approach to our times of personal desolation, showing how we can learn to treat ourselves and each other with care and compassion. At the heart of this approach is the practice of meditation, learned from the Buddha, The Desert Fathers and Mothers and from Jesus himself.
It's a practice which, this heartfelt book insists, can help you 'to be depressed – which might mean in mourning – for exactly as long as you need to be, no longer and no shorter. Then, changed, you are brought back to life, which is change itself.'
A moving account drawing on Christian and Buddhist traditions of how the practice of meditation can allow us to accomplish 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery' from depression
Straightforward and original guide to dealing with anxiety, mental illness and depression
Draws on Christian and Buddhist teachings and gives practical examples of how to meditate effectively
Author with a background in developing and delivering mental health services
In the dark
Welcome
Learning to begin
Beginning again
How to meditate
Meditation and Depressions
Meditation: Nothing to be done
By any other name
Meditation: I will give you rest
Loss, grief, mourning and birdwings
Meditation: 'A Moment in each Day'
No self/no shortcuts
Meditation: With the leper and the wolf
Life is the treatment!
Meditation: A perpetual surprise
Into the desert
Meditation: We do not know how to pray
Before You Die
Community
Another Beginning
Meditation: The general dance
Postscript
Notes
Select bibliography
Recommended reading
Organizations and resources
Acknowledgements
Permissions
Notes on the Author
Jim Green has described a new approach to the corrosive suffering of depression … His special gift is shown in connecting to the sources of healing found in literature, faith and contemplative practice. Anyone suffering from depression who reads this book will feel both understood and gently guided forward.
Might “depression” be, not a cold, deterministic diagnosis, but a call to spiritual awakening, to a graced construction of self? Jim Green says it may, and presents his case persuasively.
If it is true that all human griefs have their roots in our inability to sit quietly in our own company for five minutes, this spare, candid and calm introduction to meditative practice will be a life-saving gift for many living in or on the edge of the darkness that regularly overtakes us in this uncontrollable world.
The beguiling title of Jim Green's book both conceals and reveals its revolutionary nature. In beautifully crafted prose, he challenges his readers to let go of their pre-suppositions, habitual attitudes and conditioned responses to life's existential sufferings. Above all, he offers a path out of the prison of dualistic thinking. Meditation, he suggests, leads into the heart of paradox where nothing gives access to everything.
- Title: Giving Up Without Giving Up: Meditation and Depressions
- Author: Jim Green
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781472957467, 9781472957450, 1472957458, 1472957466
- Resource ID: LLS:9781472957467
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-15T04:30:05Z
Jim Green has worked for many years in the field of mental health with both local and national organisations, the Open University and the BBC. He describes his decades of meditation practice as 'always learning to be a beginner'.