The Problem With Being Melancholy

The Problem With Being Melancholy

Melancholy thoughts are a great detriment to our health and to our happiness. All our successes and failures, our pleasures and pains, come and go. Why should we take them so seriously and make ourselves so miserable?

The Sun is a great symbol and what it is a symbol of? A symbol of light and joy!

It teaches us that we must find avenues through which the light of the soul may flood our whole being and fill it with radiance. We can kindle this light only when we establish our contact with a Higher Power that will shield us and radiate through us.

Swami Paramananda Book of Daily Thoughts and Prayers 

This daily message captured my attention right away! As most anyone who knows me can witness that I can be quite melancholy at times. In fact, earlier in my life, I could be spotted as someone who was in one of his “blue moods.”

Classically, melancholy was one of the four Hippocratic humours that comprise our bodily functions. My best recollection of where I first found this word would be from my precocious reading in medicine and physiology. Much later, in early adulthood, I was given this term again as a student of Anthroposophy, when I was given the 4 types of people/personalities that are directly based on his insights and esoteric teachings.

One of the ways I learned to relieve myself of such burdensome moods and a sad/sour demeanor was through adopting the practice of regular daily meditation, such as my practice of Transcendental Meditation. Over the years in ministry and life, I had to learn to accept those circular moods and cyclical feelings as just ego manifestations, and to allow myself to bear witness to their thoughts and urges without acting on them or giving them the power of reality…

Contacting the Higher Power, as Swami advises, is the best long range approach to such emotionally based problem solving. We learn to observe or watch ourselves in our mind’s eye or imagination… Watch our self-talk and our troublesome feelings, as the fair witness, whose role is to see all but it sits or declines to react, so that the power of those convincing feelings and previously coercive thoughts can dissipate and disappear into their “native nothingness.”

Fair warning!  This discipline of sitting with one’s thoughts and observing but not reacting to one’s feelings is a long haul approach. It is more than naive to expect that such mental and emotional discipline can be achieved in anything less than the long measure of years! 

When I advocate for this slow and steady pace of learning the art of disciplined awareness, I am reminded of the plaque that sat on the wall of my dojo as I first began to learn the art of karate  and its by-product, self defense. It was an attributed Buddhist quote that stated: 

“The path is difficult; the prize worthwhile. Nothing worth your efforts comes easily.”