Cultivating the Inner Life
“Did you hear about [insert celebrity name here]?”
“Yeah...I don’t get it. All these people who have everything, and they keep dying of overdoses and suicides. It seems like they would be so happy, but they’re not.”
A common conversation, right? Maybe you’ve had some variation of this dialogue before?
I’m no celebrity, but I’ve grown up much of my life in a relative state of privilege. My basic needs have always been provided for, and then some. I don’t remember ever hearing my parents discussing how they would put food on the table, I’m well-educated, and I live in a first-world country.
A Secret Garden vs. A Game of Minesweeper
So I was shocked when I learned that I’d been depressed for much of my life. “That’s depression?” I thought. I thought everyone’s inner world was just...like that. And maybe I was just weaker than most other people. I wanted my inner world to feel like a secret garden, but it felt more like a game of Minesweeper. I never knew when I was going to trip on something that would blow up.
But when I began my personal therapy journey, I began learning more about what really contributes to a healthy mind … and what doesn’t really matter as much as I’d thought.
Someone can seem to have a wonderful life on the outside—safe, secure, healthy, and wealthy —but it’s hell in their head.
Someone else may have been through unimaginable trauma, but they were equipped with the tools, love, and community to process it and bring purpose from the pain.
If you’re a relatively privileged person and you’ve shared with someone that you’ve been battling depression, have you ever heard in response, “What right do you have to be depressed?” or its less blatant cousin “Why don’t you spend some time counting your blessings? You have so much to be grateful for!”
I’m all for cultivating gratitude. But often, what people point to is not the internal state of gratitude, but all the external things for which you “should” give thanks: “You have this and this and this! Therefore, you should be happy!” They may mean well, but they invalidate you by trying to talk you out of your experience.
Then, when you still can’t make yourself be happy, you not only have the depression to deal with, but also the shame and guilt that can come with the thought “I have no right to feel this way. I should be happy.”
And so, instead of getting curious and questioning your depression to get to the bottom of it, you shove it down, beat yourself up, feel ashamed, plow ahead, get “busy,” and perpetuate the cycle. You remain disconnected from a deep part of yourself.
The Importance of the Inner Life
We’ve lost sight of the inner life in modern culture. We act like it’s not important, and the ways we “comfort ourselves” (really, escape from ourselves) prove it.
“Treat yourself to a glass of wine, you’ll feel better!”
“Go to out with some friends (that you probably only have a surface-level relationship with, anyway), you’ll feel better!”
And if you don’t...well, there’s something wrong with you because #firstworldproblems. Be grateful.
But in reality, the inner life tints, shades, interprets, and even produces the outer life.
“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks”
“The inner is foundation of the outer. The still is master of the restless. The Sage travels all day yet never leaves his inner treasure.”
What if having everything on the outside really isn’t as important, at the end of the day? What if our inner world really is the most important thing? And yet so few of us have spent any time being taught how to pay attention to it, or even that it’s worth paying attention to.
What if our inner world is the one thing that can always bring contentment and joy, even if we’ve lost our jobs, a relationship, money, or other important things in life?
I’m convinced that we’re spending too much time looking externally for things to get us out of pain when we need to spend more time with ourselves and with our thoughts. We need to get curious about our thoughts and ask them questions.
Why did that emotion come up? Why did that thought come up? Do I really know that person doesn’t like me, or do I just think they don’t like me?
Learning to Slow Down the “Train” of Thought
We need to take time examining how we think. We need to slow down the train so we can inspect each individual cart, rather than just letting the whole train roll down the tracks to its (usually destructive) destination.
Picture Mr. Incredible throwing himself at an oncoming train. Remember that scene? At first, it didn’t look like the train would stop. That’s how it is at first when you’re trying to slow your thoughts down, especially if you’ve been suffering from anxiety or depression for a long time.
When we first try to cultivate the inner life, we may feel like Mr. Incredible trying to stop the Depression and Anxiety Train.
The train won’t seem to slow down at first, but it will inevitably lose momentum. It will take a while to build up enough resistance to stop the train of destructive thinking completely. But eventually, you’ll be able to pick apart your thoughts one by one and uncover the root seed thought that gets the train going.
It’s hard work. It’s not easy, especially when we’ve been trained (haha) all of our lives to look for comfort outside of ourselves, to look for happiness outside of ourselves. Happiness, contentment, joy, and peace don’t come from the outside in, but from the inside out.
I’ve been around the world and spent time in very different cultures, and I believe the journey into yourself is the most challenging, painful, bewildering, rewarding, and adventurous one you could undertake. Your inner life is worth it.
And one day, perhaps when you’re feeling so battle-weary you don’t know if you can make it another day, you’ll finally wake up noticing your mind feels more like a secret garden than a game of Minesweeper.
