Stories about depression
9 Buddhist wisdom stories about depression from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- Depression privileges — a third bowl of ice creamJoke · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: He tells a depressed man not to advertise recovery too soon — wife and boss will put him back to work. The man later reports: when depressed he got two bowls of ice cream; if he…
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You got very many privileges being depressed." And I remember this because he told me afterwards, "Yes, so true. You know, this morning I had two bowls of ice cream. My wife would never let me have two bowls of ice cream when I was okay. But now she thinks I'm depressed. Oh, you have a third bowl
- I know you, MāraAnalogy · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Buddhist scriptures: Māra the mischief-maker is overcome not by fighting but by recognition — 'I know you, Māra' — whereupon he droops his shoulders, lowers his head and leaves.…
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I know you Mara that's all just understanding and as soon as the monk the N the lay person or in this case the Buddha said that I know you Mara this guy marao he knows me and would droop his shoulders lower his head
- Interrupted by the radioStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: A former caretaker of the Perth centre retired to Beverley for a peaceful life but fell into depression. He went into his shed, tied a noose to the rafter, set up the chair, and…
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he lives over in Beverly he was an old caretaker of our Center here he left to have a nice peaceful time up in Beverly and but you know we all go through difficult times he went through a depression and he got so deped pressed he actually went into his shed and tied a rope to the rafter tied a noose got the chair ready and went into the Caravan where he was saying to write his suicide note he had the he had the uh the radio one at the time just the local radio and as he was writing a suicide note you know just halfway through who would come on the radio aan brah and he said oh no I can't do anything without this m getting in the way so he ripped up his suicide now untied the rope and came and told me about it afterwards he said it's really too difficult to commit suicide you even get on the radio and stop me that's another guy I've got saved his life
- “My nose is too big”Story · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: In his first year in Perth a 13-year-old girl, brought by her father after every other psychologist and psychiatrist had failed, finally admits her problem: her nose is too big.…
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I still remember this when I first came to Perth the very first year this thirteen year old girl came to see me. Her father organised a meeting, she wanted counselling, she'd been to all the other psychologists, psychiatrists or whatever in Perth and this was the last resort to go and see a Buddhist monk. They must have been desperate in those days to come see a Buddhist monk. Because we didn't have much of a reputation and I asked her what's your problem and she took a long time to get it out of her cause you know when people really feel they have a big problem and they just don't want to share it with you especially a thirteen or fourteen year old young girl. And eventually I got it out of her. She said, looking down at the floor feeling so embarrassed, she said 'my nose is too big'. Now you know, you girls you know that, you know where she's coming from, that to her every time she looked in the mirror she saw her nose and it was too big. I tried to use like a scientific approach to her problem, you know I mentally I measured her nose and I've seen many noses in my life and I measured it in my mind and I told her, lady that your nose is pretty average. It's not the most beautiful nose, it's certainly not the most ugly nose, its just a nose, it's average ok. But she wouldn't accept that for her it was the biggest problem because it was right in front of her face. I didn't, I didn't actually help her, but she helped me to understand the negativity of fault finding.
- The grumpy licenceStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: On a meditation retreat a woman complains that everyone else is happy and she feels pressured to be happy. Brahm prints her a letterheaded 'grumpy licence' — permission to be…
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I wrote her out a grumpy license and it was on a letter head it was really nicely done nice font and I said this certificate gives you know to this girl permission to be grumpy for any reason or no reason whatsoever for the rest of her life s aab Bram her teacher it was a grumpy license and I've done many of those license before angry license depressed license I'll give you permission to be depressed and as soon as I gave her that grumpy license she looked at it and she laughed her head off and that was the end of her grumpiness
- The prisoner who fed the catStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: A depressed prisoner insists he is only a bad person. Ajahn Brahm has him list bad deeds on the left of a sheet and good deeds on the right. At first the right side is empty…
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there was one of these prisoners who just so depressed? And when I said, why are you depressed? Look, I'm in jail. I did a bad thing. I feel so terrible. This my life is over. Finished. And then usually I asked him, well, what good things have you done? Nothing. You must have done something good. No, I'm a bad person. And then and then he he uh wrote out I wrote out this piece of paper line down the middle your name on the top. Now on the left hand side write all the bad I won't show it to anybody else. Write down all the bad things you've done. Things which you put been put in jail for and things which you did but weren't put in jail for. Put them all down. They won't show them to anybody else. He trusted me. That's one of the nice things about being a monk. People actually trust you and you know if that's what you say that's what you're going to do. So he wrote all these things on the left hand column all the terrible stuff he'd done. He felt good about confessing opening up. But then I asked him on the right hand side all the good things you've done. Nothing. No. Come on. You must have done something. The prison had a cat and I knew that he looked after the cat. Did you give the cat anything this morning? Said I gave it source of milk. Put it down. Had to force him to put down and write down. Fed the cat saucer of milk. But then he found another thing you could put down afterwards. Once you break that damn wall, it was amazing all the kind good things he'd done that past week. And you filled up the right hand side of that piece of paper. You know what I did next? tore that paper down the middle, threw away all the terrible things he did, and gave him the good things he did. Please keep this. Put it next to your bed in your cell. Photocopy if you like, but please keep that to realize you're not such a bad person after all
- The suicidal spider — eight webs smashedAnalogy · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Mindful spider builds a perfect first web; broom smashes it. Second, third… eight houses destroyed. Exhausted, nearly dead, she asks what's the point — banks foreclose, owners…
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story of the suicidal spider. When was the last time I told about the suicidal spider? Did you really know that even spiders sometimes get depressed? But they don't have like a telephone line to call. So many spiders become suicidal. This particular spider ah, she was just born and I told the story recently. Okay. This spider was born and it made a nice little web in somebody's house. And this the spider was very Buddhist, very mindful, very careful, took her time, didn't rush, in the moment, and constructed this amazing web. Now it was just absolutely perfect. And it was her home, her first house. If that spider had built like a real like one of the brick and tile or whatever else you use to make your homes, that would have been on the front cover of the spider equivalent to Home and Gardens. It was architectural masterpiece. And she put so much time into building it that once it was finished she put her herself in the middle to take a rest and wait for for the the food to come. Not Uber Eats, you know, because this was just natural way before people thought of home deliveries. You wait there and soon as a fly comes in, that's your lunch. So exhausted, resting, waiting for lunch to arrive, then the owner of the house saw in the corner of his room there was a spider web. So she got the broom and she smashed the spider web to bits. And that poor spider had to run for her life. She only just escaped the broom. And she ran ran as fast as she could to the house next door and another web. Of course your second home is nowhere near as good as your first because you put more energy and love into it. And she built another home and she just when she finished she rested in the middle of it. And of course what happened? Somebody else in that home a maid saw the the spider web in the middle of the the corner, smashed it with a stick. So that spider had to run away to to another home. The same thing happened to the third house. Now, how many houses have you built? Imagine that happened to you. You just finished a house, you haven't even paid off the mortgage yet, smash. And even worse, haven't had any lunch or anything to eat. So that four, five, six, seven, eight houses the spider had some Chinese connection because I thought the eight was a lucky number. So tried number eight but didn't work. Eight houses. Eight webs it built. And after the eighth web was destroyed, smashed to bits, and just that close to dying that spider just started to recollect. What's the point? What's the point of
- Two bad bricks in the wallStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Building the broke new monastery at Serpentine, the ex-physicist monk lays his first brick wall with painstaking perfectionism — then sees two crooked bricks. He wants to…
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The story of the two bad bricks in the wall, twenty six years ago, twenty seven years ago when we moved to Serpentine to build that monastery down there we had no money, we were broke, and because... we owed money for the land, there were no buildings on that property. So I had to learn how to build. And I was theoretical physicist before, ok, in my head doing sums all day. Now I had to get out there and get my hands dirty and mix concrete and lay bricks and put on a roof and do plumbing. Everything we did. And even to this day, if any of you going into that main hall in our monastery, I am the builder. My name is on the building license for that. And it's still standing so that's pretty good. [LAUGHTER] So in particular, this story I had to learn how to lay bricks. Laying bricks was not a simple thing to do, it may look easy but it's so hard to get everything level. But, as most people would be I was a perfectionist. I had to make sure that brick was perfectly level before I went onto the next one. Sometimes one corner was high, you'd knock it down and another corner would go up. You knock that corner down then it would go out of line. You knock it back into line thinking it was finished, you notice one of the corners was high again. It was just one of those jobs which, where you couldn't get everything in the right place but you kept on trying until you got it. It took a long time but it didn't matter cause I wasn't being paid. So I could take however long I wanted. And when I finished that wall, that first brick wall, like anybody else you were proud, finished, you stood back to look at it and admire it, and it was only then when it was finished I noticed that two bricks were crooked. All the other bricks were straight, two bricks were crooked. So what would you do? What I did was try and scrape the mortar out so I could reset the bricks so they could be perfect. But the mortar was hard, you couldn't scrape it out. And the other monk who was with me at the time, Ajahn Jagaro, I asked him look can we afford, can we please afford some dynamite so I blow it up and start again? Bulldozer would do, push it over. Because...that spoiled the whole wall. Those two bad bricks, they ruined the whole thing. But we couldn't, I was stuck with it, we were too poor to do anything with it. So for three months, every time I went passed that wall I saw my mistakes and I felt so sad. I'd stuffed up. And the worst thing about stuffing up when you're building everybody could see it, you can't hide it. It's a big wall, out there in the open. So, every time there was a visitor, I would actually volunteer to take them around so I could, you know, take them somewhere else so they wouldn't see my mistakes. At night time I'd have nightmares about that wall. I would, I'd dream of it, because I'd really made a big mistake and everybody could see it. And it was three months, roughly, I'm not quite sure it's a long time ago now, about three months somebody else was with me and they saw that wall and they said that's a beautiful wall. And I just couldn't believe what I'd heard because for three months I'd been suffering so much with that wall and they said it's a beautiful wall. My first reaction was to ask them are you visually impaired, are you blind, did you leave your glasses in the car? Can't you see those two bad bricks, the crooked ones. And what they said next just changed much of the way I look at life and stopped a lot of inherent depression in myself. What they said was yes I can see the two bad bricks, but I can also see the nine hundred and ninety eight good bricks as well. And that really hit me, because I realised for three months I was blind. All I ever saw was my two mistakes and I just could not see all the beautiful perfect bricks which I had laid. And when that guy told me what about the nine hundred and ninety eight good bricks that was the first time in three months that I could actually see the bricks above, below, to the left and the right of my two mistakes. And I had to agree with the fellow, it was a beautiful wall, once I could see the whole picture.
- What do people drink in England? Grey teaJoke · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: Winter England gag: sky, buildings, coats all grey — punchline grey tea; stiff upper lip is just frozen weather.
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everything is gray and you know the punchline of this joke what do people drink in England oh Gray tea it's all gray no wonder people get depressed and it is a depressing time of the year can I remember that and that's why you know they say the British have got a stiff upper lip that's not voluntary it's just Frozen