Kiera Van Gelder's Articles on Lions Roar

After years of treating her depression with medication and therapy, Kiera Van Gelder turned to Buddhist practice to heal. But when her depression and suicidal thoughts returned, she was forced to reevaluate her view of an unmedicated spiritual path. When I lived at the dharma center, I slept in a room directly above the kitchen. Our center also had a meditation hall, a shrine room and a dining room on the bottom floor, but it was here, in my room above the kitchen, that I felt the deepest pulse of the community. In the mornings, the smoke offering seeped into my dreams, along with rhythmic chanting as a housemate with a melodic voice started her day. At night, I could hear the lama and other residents preparing food. The smell of sweet sautéed onions drifted up though the old floorboards, along with laughter and the occasional scrape of chairs and rattle of dishes. An old, tarnished cowbell heralded dinner, and my typical response had been to burst from my room, moooo-ing like a hungry cow. Not anymore. Now it was hard to move from my bed. As soon as I came home from work, I crawled under the covers with the lights off and lay there, alternately sleeping and listening to the humming of the household. Shortly after the cowbell there was a knock at the door. A housemate, Sophia, wanted to know if I was coming down. I declined. Still under the covers, I listened as the voices receded into the dining room, and then the silence of the empty kitchen pulled me down into another long, aching sleep. When I woke up to go to the bathroom, I discovered a tray with dinner outside my door, and a small flower in a vase. I started to cry because I was hungry, but I couldn’t enjoy the food my sangha gave me. I wasn’t ungrateful; I was depressed. Six months into my stay at the dharma center, I had decided to go off all my psychiatric medication. Despite my best efforts, my attempt at “unmedicated spirituality” was a spectacular failure. Yet I did everything right! I researched the withdrawal process and worked with a psychiatrist to titrate down, milligram by milligram, each of the pills. It had taken months to accomplish this. With each reduction of the chemicals, I increased my practices: an hour of yoga, an hour at the gym, daily mindfulness meditation and prayer, eating only whole foods, going on retreats. To help my brain, I added nutritional supplements, and with the direction of an herbalist, took pungent capsules that made my burps taste like compost. Between all that and an acupuncturist, I spent more money in those six months than I had in a decade of intensive therapy. And it would have been worth every penny, had I not fallen between the cracks of Buddhism and psychiatry to such a degree that I was not only depressed and racked with anxiety, but suicidal again. And every time I walked out my bedroom and into the sangha, I felt like a failure. “Personally, I don’t use medication, I use the dharma,” Sophia had said when I first told her of my decision to get off the drugs. She had assured me that it was working just fine for her. We were in the kitchen washing lettuce and making sure no little bugs got squashed in the process, and I had been slightly buoyed by her confidence; indeed when I was able to drag myself out of my room and participate in the practices with the sangha or listen to a teaching, I got a small charge, like a spiritual cup of coffee. Only it didn’t last. There were many reasons I had decided to go off all meds: I’d been taking psychotropic drugs for more than a decade, and while the reasons for using them were legitimate, I worried about their long-term effects on my health. I was unhappy with some of the side effects. As I identified more seriously with Buddhism, I wanted to physically and conceptually distance myself from my past as a mental patient, and to align myself with the natural, holistic lifestyle I craved and believed was most authentic. My greatest motivation was the hope that Buddhist practice would show me the core of my afflictive emotions and mental distortions. Taught by my teachers that all thoughts and emotions were transitory and without substance, it had only made sense that I take off the training wheels and experience my mind in all its raw, naked power. Yet now, without the medication, I was more hostage than selfliberator and I’d come to a grand impasse: how could I be free from suffering when my mind naturally reverted to a state of self-destruction when left to its own devices? This question haunted me as I sat in bed in the dark, forcing myself to eat cold stir-fry. And I wanted to know: Had I failed in practicing the dharma? Or had my Buddhist practice failed to help me? And if I returned to the drugs, would I ever discover my true buddhanature? I came to Buddhism because I suffered and I wanted to stop suffering. Yet I didn’t initially seek out the dharma. One day in my early thirties, I found myself sitting in a quiet circle in a room while a woman at the front struck a metal bowl with a wooden dowel and told us to listen to the sound with our full attention. She had us follow our breath as we inhaled and exhaled, and gently reminded us to let go of any thoughts that arose. All these exercises were part of what she called “mindfulness,” and we did them doggedly week after week. In time I’d understand they were practices done daily in thousands of Buddhist communities, but my entranceway to the Buddhist path was not through a sangha. It happened when I was a patient at a mental hospital and my teacher was a psychiatrist, not a lama. Some people are surprised to hear that psychiatric wards and therapy groups are breeding grounds for dharma practice, but when you think about it, what more logical place for the dharma to take root than where emotional and mental suffering is overwhelming and pervasive? Back in 1974, when Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche declared to Daniel Goleman, then a Harvard psychology professor, that “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology,” he foresaw that our deepest suffering would come dressed in the clothes of mental illness. And true to his words, in the past decade Buddhist practices and mental health therapies have increasingly joined forces. My introduction to mindfulness came through a type of psychiatric therapy called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), developed by Zen practitioner and psychologist Marsha Linehan. Other people find their way to the dharma through pain and stress management therapies such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction pioneered by another Buddhist, Jon Kabat-Zinn, or through Mindful Self-Compassion therapy, developed by psychologist Christopher Germer, a Vipassana meditation practitioner. The umbrella term for all these approaches is mindfulness-based therapy and what is so revolutionary about them, and what leads participants toward Buddhism, is their emphasis on acceptance, nonjudgmental awareness, and mindfulness of the present moment. My training in a mindfulness-based therapy taught me, after decades of talk therapy and six different psychiatric diagnoses, to successfully learn how to live with overwhelming pain and to manage my urges for self-destruction. After therapy ended, I wondered: “What next? Where can I further my recovery and continue to use the soil of my suffering to grow and help others?” It was then that I opened to the dharma. First intellectually, through books and audio tapes, then interactively though meeting teachers and joining a sangha. I came to Buddhism like an aching body inches into a hot bath: first my toe, then my leg, until I wanted total immersion. So I moved into a dharma center. While some of the language and the practices of Buddhism differed from what I was used to in therapy, the overall picture remained constant. I suffered; there were causes for my suffering; there were ways to be free from this suffering, and I was treading the path that would accomplish this. Until I went off my medications. Close to a year into my stay at the center, disturbing news arrived: One of our longtime members, who went rogue shortly after I arrived, was discovered dead in the woods of Vermont. A suicide. I’d met the young man only twice and he showed no signs of depression or self-destruction. He’d refused, however, to visit the center’s new residence; he insisted it was possessed by evil spirits and angry energies. Granted, it was an old building, with its double pantry and creaky servant’s staircase and an inherited out-oftune upright piano still wedged among the dining room’s mahogany and glass cabinets. But there were also ordained lamas, and the house was filled to capacity with the bright treasures and accoutrements of a full-bodied Tibetan shrine, providing most people with a sense of peaceful enclosure, if not outright protection. We knew only certain facts: The young man’s suicide letter described evil spirits pursuing him all the way to Mexico, where he’d traveled to find some means of exorcism. Having failed at that and still tortured and hounded, he returned to the woods by his home to die. People at our center wondered how he could have done it. He was obviously in pain, but he was also a longtime practitioner who believed in the law of karma, who understood that the act of killing would result only in more suffering. In the Vajrayana tradition especially, there is a special class of hellishness reserved for those who kill themselves. No one in their right mind believing this could still be willing to die. We all had our theories: Some felt he was spiritually delusional; they claimed the house was filled with protective, not harmful, deities. They pointed to the many blessings that visiting teachers had bestowed on the space, and the morning smoke offerings that worked to appease harmful spirits, especially the water serpents called nagas that lived downwind of us in the local lake. Other members felt he’d delved too deeply into the “secret” and “hidden” practice of Vajrayana...

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