For the last several weeks, I’ve been experiencing a consistent low mood and low energy. It has carried the weight of what could easily be labeled as depression. In this dense, heavy, and constricted experience, I’ve noticed old habits reappearing. Not as intentional choices, but as reflexes. Attempts to escape, to numb, and to dissociate. Most of the time, I've felt like I just can't be bothered with much of anything.
In response to that heaviness, I’ve been engaging in self-soothing behaviors in an attempt to to escape. I’ve been eating in ways that don’t really honor my body’s needs. I haven’t been moving as much as I know my body prefers. I’ve been scrolling through YouTube shorts and watching dark, dramatic content, which poses as "entertainment," but actually just feeds the fear-based low vibration. Each of these behaviors seemed to be offering me something that looked like relief, distraction, or comfort.
I’ve done some version of this for most of my life, and I know I’m not alone in that. In today’s world, distraction is always available. Numbing is always nearby. It’s all but built into the environment we live in.
On a deeper level, I also know these behaviors aren’t personal. I understand why they happen. I’ve got insight into the patterns, and I hold a lot of grace for them when they arise. But there has still been a gap between understanding and lived, embodied change. I haven’t been able to fully feel why these habits continue, even when I know (intellectually), that they don’t serve me.
I’ve often described these behaviors as zombie habits. Not because there’s a dramatic story attached to them, but because they feel mindless and automatic, almost mechanical. There’s a sense of movement without a chooser behind it, like something gets activated and then runs its course. It’s as if something within is shambling through familiar corridors, not fully awake, moving by muscle memory toward the same old places.
These zombie habits don’t seem to belong to a solid, separate “me” doing something “wrong,” and they’re not driven by a clear story I can point to in the moment. They feel more like an impersonal movement of energy through a system trying to regulate itself in the fastest way available, reaching for whatever is most immediately familiar, even when it isn’t actually nourishing or helpful.
There’s something else I see more clearly now. Even the relief I’ve been reaching for isn’t really working anymore. There’s a brief sensory distraction, a momentary flicker of what is coded as "sensorial pleasure", but even that’s started to carry a kind of bitterness. It’s not nourishing. It’s not neutral. It feels increasingly depleting. Even harmful.
And that’s where a deeper recognition has landed. Like an internal implosion, really.
There is no relief in these activities anymore.
Not real relief.
Not even close.
What I’ve been drawing from my entire life is something I can only describe as a well. An internal place I go when I feel discomfort, heaviness, or a need to shift my experience. I’ve tried to motivate myself, soothe myself, and push myself forward by pulling from that place.
But I now see that this well has always been poisoned.
It’s been filled with expectation. With guilt. With shame. With egoic identity. With ideas of who I should be and how I should be living. It’s been shaped by concepts and internalized pressure. And I’ve been drawing from it over and over again, hoping it would give me the fuel I needed to feel better.
In this recent cycle, I’ve found myself listlessly shuffling back to this poisoned well out of (zombie) habit. But something has changed. The well is now completely and utterly dry. Not a single drop remains. There’s nothing left there that actually nourishes me. No real water. No momentary succour. Only highly toxic residue...
And so I’ve been left in a kind of stark, paradoxical clarity.
Even if I try to use these old strategies, they no longer bring anything that resembles relief. They only reinforce the depletion. There’s a simple, embodied, gut-level knowing now that continuing in that direction can’t work.
There’s something both sobering and strangely freeing about that.
One one hand, it feels like mourning. There’s grief in recognizing that a familiar system of coping is simply no longer available. There’s grief in realizing that something I’ve relied on for so long can’t carry me anymore.
And at the same time, there’s tremendous relief. Liberation, really.
Because I don’t have to keep going back and drinking from something that harms me.
I don’t have to keep returning to a source that’s dangerously empty.
I don’t have to keep performing the motions of control that no longer produce any real (or imaged) effect...
I don’t know who I am in any fixed way. I don’t know what to do. And on some level, I also deeply sense that I’m not any of the identities (including no-self) that I’ve been trying to stabilize anyway.
What I do know is far simpler.
I can’t stay where I was.
And it turns out, I actually am willing to move!
This isn’t coming from force in the old sense. It isn’t coming from shame or pressure or the conditioned urge to escape my experience. Those sources have gone quiet. There’s nothing left there to draw from.
Instead, there’s a different kind of orientation here. It feels more subtle than thought and less reactive than habit. It doesn’t operate through force or correction. It is the deeper intelligence that is already present, underneath the noise of the mind, something I’m coming to recognize, feel, and trust rather than override.
It’s unproven (or so my mind says).
But it’s here.
And now, it occurs to me to call upon my Living Precepts:
In this moment, I am here.
In this moment, there is space.
In this moment, I am being held and loved unconditionally.
These aren’t answers. They aren't affirmations. They aren’t strategies. They’re more like a small flask of clear water carried into unfamiliar terrain. Enough relief to take a step without returning to poison.
And so, I find myself setting out.
Not with certainty. Not with a plan. But with a willingness to not return to what no longer works.
There’s something unknown ahead. Completely unknown. And there is also, for the first time in a while, genuine, unconditional acceptance of that.
Not because I understand it.
But because I am here.