"What if the suffering that we call depression contains experiences and
lessons without which we cannot be fully alive?"
This is one of the many startling questions that Giving Up Without
Giving Up invites us to ask ourselves. Depression seems to be a
contemporary epidemic, a condition understandably feared and avoided by
all. Yet this book explores the possibility that we have much to learn
from the desert times in our lives, when it feels as though we are
losing everything, most of all any sense of who we are.
Drawing on his extensive experience of meditation within both the
Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, as well as his own
times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers us a moving
account of just how this wisdom practice can accompany each of us as we
make "the gentle pilgrimage of recovery". He guides us through "the
invention of depression" in the mid-20th century, questioning the
increasing tendency to medicalize human suffering. Based on the insight
that "Life is the Treatment", he offers a thorough and practical
approach to our times of personal desolation, showing how we can learn
to treat ourselves and each other with care and compassion. At the heart
of this approach is the practice of meditation, learned from the Buddha,
The Desert Fathers and Mothers, and Jesus himself. It's a practice that,
this heartfelt book insists, can help you "to be depressed - which might
mean in mourning - for exactly as long as you need to be, no longer and
no shorter. Then, changed, you are brought back to life, which is change
itself."
