4 Eye-Opening Mindfulness Lessons I Learned from a Depressed Buddhist Monk

How to make peace with your mind?

After being a Buddhist monk for 12 years, Gelong Thubten became depressed. It was a shock for him. And for me, too, when he shared his story. I thought monks have it all figured out.

When we think we have arrived, we are stuck. We can always learn something new about ourselves wherever we are on our journey.

Gelong joined a 4-year retreat on a Scottish island, cut off from the outside world. No news, no internet, no meetings with people outside the retreat location.

He describes the first two years as “falling through space with nothing to hold him”. Gelong thought this retreat is gonna be a piece of cake, and then he found himself depressed and anxious.

When he reached rock-bottom after half of the retreat, something changed and made him overcome his depression.

What is it that can even make a monk with 12 years of meditation experience depressed? Do you recognize his situation? Have we not also been locked away, cut off from the people we love by the pandemic.

Since March, I barely left the house and only met very few people. For normal humans, the pandemic is like being on a retreat for monks.

The next months are going to be tough with corona cases increasing everywhere in the world. Let’s see how Gelong Thubten overcame his struggle. What can we learn from him to get through this winter happy and energetic, instead of depressed and anxious?

How to Make Peace with Your Mind?

Our mind is the perfect storyteller. It loves to weave us in a set storyline. Everything must be judged and figured out. We all have a clear picture of ourselves. We all have a story we buy into.

I am good at this and bad at that. I am shy; I am energetic; I am an over performer. I am better than my colleague Dave. I don’t like sports….

We have a fixed mindset about ourselves. If something does not fit in this construct we have built for ourselves, it shatters us.

This happened to Gelong when he started the retreat. He felt superior. He thought with his seniority and experience of being a monk for 12 years, he will wing this retreat.

And when he felt the discomfort of being in there, it didn’t fit his ego’s storyline. What followed was depression and anxiety.

Drop the Storyline

When we are caught up in our mind-made story, every tiny deviation from it makes us suffer. We need to face every situation with an open mind. We need to be ready for everything.

Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or a person instead of adopting one limited perspective. — Eckhart Tolle

What we tell ourselves in our mind is not the reality. It is a story. We are J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter at the same time. Our mind is a superb storyteller and makes up a fictional character which we believe is us. It makes little sense for J. K. Rowling to believe she is Harry Potter, so does it make little sense for us to believe we are this fictional character in our mind.

Only when we drop the storyline, we can experience a situation with an open mind without expectations.

Practice Unconditional Love for Yourself

We all have feelings, even Buddhist monks. When Gelong’s ego was hurt by his feelings, it started to fight against these emotions. He wanted to be a wise monk who enjoys the retreat. The last thing he wanted was to be depressed.

When you push your feelings away, then they are amplified. What we focus on becomes stronger. So the more he tried to resist the discomfort, the worse he got.

2 years in the retreat, he noticed that the resistance is bringing him nowhere. That’s when he changed resistance for compassion. He describes it as becoming one with the pain.

There are always two things. The difficult feeling and me. There is the subject and object. If you become one with it, who is bothering who? How can it hurt you if there is a oneness?… Compassion is oneness. — Gelong Thubten

Notice the feelings which come up in you. Don’t judge them. Face them with compassion and curiosity. Where are they coming from and why? In every tough situation, give yourself some credit and love like you would do for your child or best friend.

Be the Sky, Not the Clouds

Imagine your mind is the vast sky and every thought you have is a cloud. Clouds pass by, they come and go without changing the sky. Some clouds are puffy and beautiful, others are dark and scary.

This is life. If we can accept this and identify ourselves with the sky, we know the sun is always coming back. Clouds don’t influence the sky in its being. They just cover the sky on bad days.

You can train your mind to accept the clouds and always find your way back to the sky.

During meditation, your mind wanders, and this is natural, like clouds passing by. But still, we feel we have failed. We should realize that every thought we can let go of is the perfect mindfulness training. When you find your way back to awareness, this is a moment of success.

When you realize this, you make peace with your mind. Clouds will never stop coming. When they don’t distract you anymore and you can endure the discomfort some of them bring, then you escape suffering.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is. — Eckhart Tolle

Stop Searching for the Next Bliss

What are your expectations when you meditate? Are you looking for this special blissful feeling?

Meditation is not about searching for something, it is about accepting the present moment.

Gelong Thubten didn’t feel blissful during meditation, he was looking for more. A supernatural feeling of joy and contentment. Instead, he got depressed from meditating. So he went to his mentor another Buddhist monk and asked for advice. And he answered with this quote:

We are mentally very rich when we desire nothing. — Buddhist quote

When we are searching for happiness, we tell ourselves that we are not having it. But we have happiness and joy at every given moment if we chose to.

Letting go of any desire is the key to happiness and the only way to increase joy without focusing on the lack of joy.

A way to practice this is to keep your eyes open during meditation Gelong Thubten suggests. And it makes sense. Meditation is about accepting this moment, not shutting it down, and flying off to nirvana.

After 2 years, when Gelong Thubten understood his ego made him suffer, he confronted it with compassion, acceptance, and awareness. This made him overcome his depression and he spent the last 2 years of the retreat in total bliss.

Next time when you feel miserable because of this pandemic or anything else, think about Gelong Thubten’s story.

Don’t listen to your ego what you are missing out or what kind of person it wants you to be. Whatever the ego tells you, have an open mind, and accept the situation you are in. Don’t look for the next bliss instead remind yourself you already have everything you need to be happy.

Unhappiness covers up your natural state of well-being and inner peace, the source of true happiness. — Eckhart Tolle

Don’t waste the next year waiting for this pandemic to be over. Live your life and chose happiness over depression and anxiety. If Gelong Thubten can do it, so can you! Let’s make peace with our minds!

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