James Gordon
Getting Unstuck: Moving With The Current of Life and Finding Guides Along The Way
WE ALL HAVE HAD experiences of feeling stuck in our lives, whether for a short time, or pathologically stuck, where nothing seems to help us get out of the morass of a sticky swamp. Psychiatrist and mind-body medicine pioneer James Gordon knows this firsthand because of personal experiences with depression which spurred on a journey of personal transformation and his professional passion in mind-body medicine. He is the author of Manifesto for a New Medicine, former chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, DC and newly named Dean of the College of Mind Body Medicine at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. His newest book, Unstuck, speaks about how to use a multifaceted mind-body-spirit approach to address depression, anxiety, stress and trauma. LA YOGA spoke to Dr. Gordon about getting unstuck and cultivating compassion.
Felicia M. Tomasko: There are statistics that state that antidepressant use in the U.S. has doubled over the past decade. To what do you attribute this to and what are some ways that we could, individually and collectively, change this statistic?
James Gordon: I think there has been a tendency in our society to turn life experience into the signs and symptoms of a disease. We do that partly because we want to fix everything. Instead of seeing that life has its complexity and human beings are subject to all kinds of difficulties as they grow older and more complex, we are hopeful that there is something wrong that can be as easily fixed as we fix a car where aspects of a person’s life are as isolated from each other as one part of a car is from the rest of the car. This is a naïve, mechanical view of human life.
These points of view are reinforced a hundredfold by people who make a great deal of money treating unhappiness and life’s difficulties as disease states through a process of indoctrination and deceptive advertising. When you put those together, there’s a willingness that we all have, including physicians, to push treatments that are far less effective than the people pushing them say they are. How do we change? People have to wake up!
In the Hans Christian Anderson story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, people who saw the truth had to point it out to everyone else. People who see these situations need to share them with others. The major reason I wrote Unstuck was to help other people wake up, trust their own understanding and have some courage to stand up against these perceived truths and social conventions. For example, there are some recent studies that show that antidepressants are far less effective than what was originally publicized, when you take into account the unpublished studies along with the published studies. The drugs are barely, if at all, more effective than the placebos. Not that the drugs can’t help some people, but side effects, sometimes very disabling ones, manifest in the majority of people. If we wake up and start looking at this critically, drugs are not a first choice, but a last resort.
FMT: In Unstuck, you discuss the experience of depression as a sign that something is out of balance, anywhere in the body, mind and spirit. When you are encouraging someone to go through the process of finding balance, is there a particular place to begin, or do you find that a multifaceted approach is necessary?
JG: The first place is listening to people and saying to them that this is a wake-up call. The symptoms of depression or anxiety are signs that your life is out of balance and you can respond to the call. There are specific tools you can use to feel much better and make a difference. There is hope. People have to want to take this journey and be willing to do things on their own behalf. If they want a magic bullet, I rarely have one, but it is possible and thousands of people with significant depression and states of anxiety have changed their lives.
FMT: In many traditions, there are teachings about suffering inspiring a person to seek enlightenment (such as the story of the Buddha). Or we could talk about the shamanic journey of facing death and how that allows a person to experience the world beyond. What would you say about this?
JG: The hero’s or heroine’s journeys are not only interesting because they’re interesting, but because those are the journeys all of us can be on if we’re willing to open ourselves to that possibility. Buddha’s last words were to be a light onto yourself. That’s what is there for all of us, to take this journey of healing to become whole, and that is the invitation I’m issuing on behalf of the universe. It’s a party to which anyone who wants to can come. This is a hopeful kind of understanding. It brings out the best in you to take this journey and discover all those parts of yourself, including those aspects of yourself you may not like as well.
You don’t have to belong to any particular group to take this journey. All traditions have within them this understanding of that dimension we call the spiritual and they have their own means. In Unstuck, I use techniques and approaches from many traditions: Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and African Sangomas. There is a universal language we can speak in that works with second grade kids in postwar Kosovo or former prisoners in Gaza, that everyone understands.
FMT: When you talk about the need to change and the process of incorporating change, you talk about effort before surrender and the interplay between effort and surrender. I think this is an important distinction for many people, and it is not often easy to see. How do you explain this concept?
JG: The metaphor that I use is allowing oneself to move into the current of life: if you’re sidelined or stuck in a swamp, you have to put forth effort to get to where the current is. When you’re stuck in three feet of mud and the water is flowing past, you’re not going to go downriver. So often you have to put forth a physical effort to get unstuck.
The reason why physical effort is so helpful and often so necessarily is because when we are depressed, we are stuck physically as well as psychologically. To raise energy, we have to put out effort to do it. Often when we say we are stuck, doctors will give drugs, they say, “We’ll give you something to get going.” Sometimes this is necessary, but there is so much else each of us can do to get us going. The easiest and most frequently recommended way is through movement and through exercise. Through exercise, we can put out juice to keep us going.
For me, one of the most important aspects of Yoga is being able to relax into the postures and allow your body to tell you what posture you need to get balanced. There’s such a wisdom in it. I do Yoga, and grace comes and my body tells me what I need to do: I move into postures, hold as long as I need and my body shows me the next posture I need to do. I may end up in an utterly different sequence than any I’ve ever done. Amrit Desai, who is one of my Yoga teachers, has made this significant contribution for me. And the practice becomes a vehicle for relaxation, allowing the genius of Yoga to work on us.
FMT: We can sometimes get caught up in either suppressing emotions or indulging in them. Is there anything that you suggest to help people walk this paradoxical line carefully?
JG: First we have to be aware of emotions. So often people don’t have a clue, or they only have a clue, and that’s it. It’s useful to express emotions somewhere, with discrimination, and to find a way to share, whether its words on paper, with another person, through drawing, movement, pounding pillows or other methods. As Blake said, “All desire is innocent,” all emotions are innocent. It’s when we get stuck in emotions that they become a problem. When we are stuck in anger it becomes hostility, when stuck in sadness, it can become sorrow and it can kill you. We can also get stuck in emotions like a simulation of joy, a hysteria that’s not real joy.
Emotions are always coming up so suppressing and indulging are both traps. We need to learn how to express, how to become aware and accept and be willing to let them come. When we do, emotions change and they follow their own inherent development. Our job is to let it happen, be aware, and not indulge; relax. This is easier said than done.
FMT: Throughout Unstuck, you talk about the benefit of finding a guide and also learning to trust your own inner guide. This seems to be advice that is helpful to everyone, no matter our path, journey, challenges or diagnoses.
JG: One of the problems in our society is that we feel it is so shameful to ask for help in a deep and personal way. It’s easier to ask for help on a technical matter: You can ask your mechanic or IT guy or gal for help. We look at our lives in the same technical way all too often. Somebody has got the six ways to fix this or that, or somebody else has the right pill or right procedure and they know the answers, so we’ll go to them. But they’re not really the people who are there for us in an ongoing way walking with us and understanding us from the inside out, they’re giving us a snap judgment based on what they’ve done with other people.
To be fully known by someone with compassion is such a great blessing. To be willing to have the humility to allow yourself to be known and have someone walk with you and help you because you don’t’ know what to do is a huge sign of basic soundness and sanity and healthiness. In our society, therapists, psychologists and physicians (although not often enough) most often fill this role of guide. In other societies, they may be priests, wise women, curanderas, sangomas. This is a wonderful role to be able to play for other people and a wonderful thing to have available if you’re in trouble.
The vast majority of people who are going through a difficult time with depression, confusion or anxiety, need someone who is there to talk with them. Just coming through it is not the same as really learning the lessons that these challenges have to teach us. A guide can help us learn the lessons we’re meant to learn and help us become the people we’re meant to be as well as help us to deal with the symptoms.
I’ve had a number of guides in my life and I’m very grateful to them. Anybody who thinks he or she is too big or too important to have guides only has to look at some examples. Look at Odysseus, the wiliest and greatest of warriors, who had Athena there with him all the time, helping him to deal with the most impossible situations. Socrates, considered one of the wisest men of his era had the Delphic Oracle. When he was at a total loss, he would go to this unlettered woman who would tell him the deep truths he needed to hear for his own well-being. There is something there we need to pay attention to: We need to reach out.
Those of us who are willing to guide others need to be on our own journey. It’s not like we’ve arrived or graduated from mechanics or guide school. We have to be continually open with whatever we need to learn, including being open to learning from someone whom you are guiding to put your heads together to figure out what to do next.
I’m a big fan of guides and also of guides getting ongoing training or education. Clinicians of any kind need to be in this process of ongoing learning about themselves and look to guidance from others. Any time we have a mind-body training, we look at the issues that come up during training, supervising each other and always learning. We look at what we have ignored, since the most difficult issues are the ones we have within ourselves, the buttons that get pushed and the blind spots we’re unaware of that get in the way of helping each other learn.
FMT: How can we incorporate more compassion in our lives, both with ourselves and the people around us, because this seems to be such a crucial link in this journey?
JG: For me, it is a continual challenge because I have to deal with my own judgment of myself, as well as of others; I have to become aware and I have to soften to myself as well as soften to others. I have to become aware of when I’m judging myself or others. The judgment comes from neurosis or insecurity. When I see it, I can relax and the judgment shifts. For example, I may judge myself because I haven’t completed my day’s quota of writing. I notice what is happening and notice that judgment is spoiling my day right now. So I notice what I am doing to myself and accept the fact that I haven’t done the writing and notice how I feel right now. Our judgment can get pretty ridiculous and not very nice and what good does it do? Is it going to get anything done that needs to get done? But by relaxing, we can see clearly. There’s a song: “I Can See Clearly Now.” Seeing clearly, the body starts to relax, we smile a little, and with the process of being more compassionate to ourselves, there is also the possibility of being more compassionate to others. Also, most people would really like to be compassionate, so give them the opportunity by telling them, “I really need your help.”
FMT: You’ve worked a great deal with people affected by trauma, and compassion seems to be related to this. JG: The deepest part of the work with trauma is creating atmosphere, a safe place. When you feel compassion, not pity, not even sympathy, but compassion and accept people just as they are in all their difficulties and all their confusion and all their pain and accept them with compassion and respect, then everything changes.
One of the reasons we have success in using our work in war zones (we’ve seen 80% reduction in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder/PTSD using mind-body techniques over ten weeks, with gains that have held for six months or longer, even in places like Gaza) is the atmosphere of compassion and within that, teaching techniques that can be helpful. Through meditation, guided imagery, Yoga, people can find solutions to problems that have seemed unsolvable. Yoga is a wonderful way to help people relax and breathe and become reacquainted with their bodies in order to change depression, PTSD and chronic stress. Mind-body medicine and Yoga are powerful tools to help us surrender to the transformational force of life.
For more information about Unstuck or the upcoming Mind-Body Medicine Professionals training in September in San Diego, visit: jamesgordonmd.com.
By Felicia M. Tomasko, RN
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.