How Playing the Guitar Can Help Heal Depression
I’m not here to offer up a comprehensive theory on what depression is and how it is healed.
But I am here to share with you my personal experience in pulling myself up and out of depression. The guitar played a major role in that process.
Like many of you, I grew up surrounded by a goodly bit of negativity. It doesn’t take any special background to know negativity intimately. Just turn on a television, and you’re sure to encounter something surprisingly negative soon enough.
If you combine a standard processed food diet with immersion in mainstream media culture, toss in some familial issues with alcoholism and bankruptcy, and top it all off with adolescent hormones, you’ll often find that you’ve created fertile ground for depression.
In retrospect, there was nothing particularly interesting or unique about the struggles I went through as a teenager.
This world, at this moment, is going through an unbelievable period of upheaval. I’m amazed how normal things often appear in the face of all this change, tumult and transformation.
I remember watching my father work in his career for several different companies over the course of my childhood.
I remember being taught to program BASIC on an Apple IIE when I was in 3rd grade. The computer screen was black and green. This was in the mid- to late-1980′s.
I remember, later, being a freshman in college. Nobody had cell phones. This was in 1997.
Then, I became a sophomore in college. I started seeing a couple people with cell phones. Later in the year, I had my first friend who had a cell phone.
As a junior in college, cell phones were really starting to be pretty normal.
And by my senior year in college, basically everyone had a cell phone.
Now, that may not seem like a significant shift here in print, but looking back at the cell phone explosion, it’s pretty clear that something major took place.
Big Changes
Very few people actually understand what all this change is about. The true, extensive ramifications of the technological infiltration into modern human culture that has gone on is basically unprecedented. There are thinkers out there, like Kevin Kelly or Marshall McLuhan, who advance ideas about what it all means.
But as far as the people I knew growing up, there was no overarching theory or perspective on what the rapid pace of technological change means or how to situate it in an overall approach to living a good human life.
Upon graduating from college, I found that it was up to me to find stable ground on which to stand. I realized that my education had prepared me to do algebra and calculus, write extensive essays and chunk large projects down into manageable bites, but I had never learned
How to Breathe
How to Eat
How to be Happy
or How to Feel my Feelings.
And so, I set about figuring those things out, those simple, basic things that for whatever reason I was never directly shown in all my years of schooling.
The current generations of young people on earth are having to contend with unbelievable rates of change and inputs of new information and technology while simultaneously contending with decaying ways of doing things that may have worked 20 or 40 or 100 years ago but no longer work today.
And, quite reasonably, many people are extremely depressed over all of this.
Thirst for the Truth
For reasons that few understand, human beings do not automatically distinguish truth from falsehood with 100% accuracy.
It is extremely possible for individual human beings to think something is true when it is actually false and vice versa. For large groups of human beings, it seems even more common for Truth and False to become, mysteriously, inverted.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t Truth out there, however. Truth is as accessible as ever, if not more.
Depression is a gift when viewed in light of the difficulty of discerning the True from the False.
Depression is pure feedback–something isn’t working. My way of thinking, my way of feeling, my way of acting–something isn’t right here.
In my case, looking back, I see my experiences with depression as instrumental in giving me the drive to head out and learn the Truth. Depression can function like spiritual jet fuel. And I made it my quest to squeeze all of the energy out of depression without becoming attached to and stuck in it.
Looking backward from this vantage point across my life, I remember the early hints that the guitar was coming for me.
I remember visiting a friend in Tulsa, Oklahoma and sitting in front of him as he played “Tears in Heaven.” The music was sublime. There is something about genuine live music that calls to us to remember our true nature and our true destiny.
I didn’t immediately begin playing the guitar then when I first heard my friend playing like that right in front of me, but it is clear to me now that a seed was planted that day, and the seed eventually sprouted.
It took a few years, but I did eventually realize that I could generate beautiful music from my own fingers. And so, when I was 16, I began earnestly trying to figure out how to coax beautiful music out of the acoustic guitar.
How the Guitar Can Help Heal Depression
This is a huge topic, and I can really only introduce it here. But I did want to touch on the actual mechanics by which the guitar can help heal depression. As I see it, here are some of the most important aspects of the healing power of the guitar:
1. The Focus is Clear
2. Playing Guitar Exercises Our Feeling Muscles
3. Self-Esteem Comes from Overcoming Challenges
4. Beauty Heals
5. Access to Ecstasy
Here’s how the guitar helped me heal the depression I experienced as a teenager and young adult:
1. The Focus is Clear
When all else in my life was chaos, the guitar was always there with its limited number of strings and frets. Music, while infinite, is somehow smaller than Life itself. When Life is barreling out of control, the guitar is there to guide me back into some semblance of order and stability.
My depression arose out of repressed anger and feelings of helplessness. A childhood of training in how to berate myself internally eventually began to manifest as internally-directed self-hatred, which in turn manifested in my emotional experience as depression.
Depression can feel entirely overwhelming. Why else do people kill themselves in the face of it?
The guitar gave me something concrete and clear to hold onto. Something that was constructive, positive and beautiful.
This blog is what I call a superniche–I’m writing about esoteric nooks and crannies of the already pretty narrow guitar playing process. And here I am, following the rabbit hole waaaaay down to the relationship between guitar playing and depression (and awakening).
The thing is–nothing that I write here is rooted in abstraction. Everything I write here stems from my experience spending thousands upon thousands of hours with my fingers on the guitar learning to make it sing.
My experience learning to play the guitar guided me forward across deep chasms of potential doom and despair.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, the fact that the guitar narrows all of human experience down into a defined, clear set of challenges and demands has provided me with an immense amount of relief across my life. To some, that may sound like escapism.
But the guitar isn’t an escape, because if you’re practicing properly, it always brings you right back face-to-face with your own self.
And in that way, the guitar makes the infinite burden of human awareness somehow manageable and accessible.
If you have the guitar itch, scratch it with all you’re worth. The guitar can save your life if you let it.
2. Playing Guitar Exercises Our Feeling Muscles
I’m often struck by a general trend that’s out there in the world–it seems most people are hell-bent on feeling as little as possible.
If you open up to your feelings, you invite all of them in–the happiness, the sadness, the agony, the ecstasy.
In order to avoid the difficult or challenging emotions, many people shut down.
To play music, the last thing you can let yourself do is shut down emotionally.
Music combines the height of human intellectual prowess with the height of human potential for feeling. Beethoven’s music is not great because Beethoven was trying to feel “okay.” Beethoven clearly felt A LOT, and his music explodes with the ferocity of his feelings.
Depression is an internal battle against feeling fully. I shut off the full extent of my painful feelings, and by extension, because the equation balances itself out naturally, I shut myself off from the greatest and most positive feelings I could feel as well.
It is possible to play music by going through the motions, but music played that way completely sucks. You know it, and I know it.
Great music comes from a human being’s full commitment to the music. Full commitment to feeling everything possible draws out the magic that can enrapture an audience and bring grown men to tears.
As I followed my journey with music, I learned to feel. To open myself to all my feelings as they soared through my being.
You basically have a couple responses that you can adopt in response to the way the world is. Either you close yourself off from feeling, because it’s all just too scary, or you open yourself up to feeling all of it.
It takes courage to feel.
But in experiencing courage and in feeling, we come alive.
And while it is certainly possible to be alive and feel bad, it is damn hard to feel fully alive and still feel depressed at the same time.
3. Self-Esteem Comes from Overcoming Challenges
An easy life is a boring life. Nothing much happens, and everything is completely in control.
Watching tv is easy. Going to the movies is easy.
Playing guitar is hard.
In the past few years, I’ve been in close proximity to several different people who have tried to learn guitar. Close friends, students, my partner–and without fail, I have watched the guitar bring my loved ones to the brink of despair and giving up.
The guitar is hard, people. I can get almost anyone playing chords and strumming along to straightforward songs in no time at all, but if you want to really make some music, be prepared for a long slog up Guitar Mountain.
The challenge grows us into our best selves. I know firsthand this is how it works.
It almost seems like one of the great secrets to life is to re-configure how we relate to difficulty. Embrace difficulty as the greatest thing possible–because when you encounter difficulty, you know you’re alive, and you know you’re really getting after it and growing.
Once I’d caught the fire for the guitar, I had to learn how to play it.
I fought tooth and nail, and I went through many ups and downs across all of the years I’ve been striving to learn how to play the guitar.
I wouldn’t trade any of the difficulty for anything.
From my current vantage point, I can look back and see the incredible progress I’ve made. I can now do things that I dreamed about previously. That is such a great feeling, and the reason it’s a great feeling is that these capabilities I now almost take for granted came at a high price.
It’s hard to feel depressed and believe the demons in my head when I have such a clear glaring example of being able to overcome steep odds and prevail in the direction of my dreams.
4. Beauty Heals
Human beings receive sustenance from beauty.
Every culture since the dawn of awareness has heralded and appreciated beauty.
The beauty of an exquisite multi-colored sunset. The beauty of a bird in flight. The beauty of a young child in total rapture.
The beauty of music.
As a guitarist, you are an apprentice to beauty. Like it or not, the guitar is training you in how to know, seek, serve and evoke the spirit of Beauty in all that you do.
Beauty, by virtue of its nature and very existence, is healing.
And, as I apprenticed to the guitar and became ever more capable of creating new forms and styles of beauty, I found myself being healed. Beauty is hopeful. Beauty is defiant.
Being able to create beauty and play with it is a miracle of life that no amount of depression can completely destroy.
No matter how things sometimes appear, I know deep down that Beauty Always Prevails.
The guitar is my teacher in this way.
5. Access to Ecstasy
Early on, when I was just starting out on the guitar, I would strum an A minor chord and hold there listening the strings ringing and falling back into silence.
I had never heard anything so beautiful.
These days, it takes a little more than just a softly strummed A minor chord to connect me completely to ecstasy, but I can still experience incredible joy whenever I want simply by picking up the guitar.
I don’t think non-guitar players really appreciate what a gift this is.
We actively move feelings. We move energy. We play with the moment and tease it into something more amazing and beautiful than it might otherwise be.
Right now, as you read these words, millions upon millions of human beings stare at television and computer screens being entertained/entrained. These folks are not exercising their right and ability to shift the moment in the direction of ecstasy.
You, on the other hand, in every moment that you play the guitar, are becoming ever more a master of ecstasy.
(If your music isn’t carrying you in the direction of ecstasy, then We Need to Talk!)
As the years unfolded, and as I learned to surrender to the guitar and rise to its challenge in my life, I found myself awash more and more in ecstasy.
The ecstasy doesn’t have to be dramatic–it can creep up on me as I fumble through a new piece that I’m learning.
It can surprise me when I idly pick up the guitar to play something or other and then, oof, I’m feeling connected to something far greater than little old me.
And I can set out deliberately to know and experience ecstasy through a song or a piece that I play with everything I’ve got, the culmination of all the thousands of hours I’ve spent learning to play the guitar honed to a point and launched at Right Now.
Yes This Article Has a Conclusion
I believe it’s bad form on the web to write at such length, but this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
I was suicidal in high school. I went through periods where I didn’t want to live.
I hated this world for being such a source of misery, pain and suffering.
And I felt mostly numb.
But by the grace of God, I kept walking forward, one step at a time.
I learned to play the guitar, and I learned from the guitar how to play my life as a human being.
We’re All Gonna Die
Last week, one of my greatest high school teachers died in a car accident while on vacation in Greece.
Just before I began writing this post, a friend informed me that one of her young students in her Aikido dojo committed suicide last week.
This world is in crisis. The humans are in crisis.
If you are reading this, then you are one of the ones who can stand for sanity, clarity and ecstasy in this world.
We need your beauty and your heart.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for caring.
