I have been meditating for over fifty years — since I was five years old, watching my breath move in and out. That practice became the central pursuit of my life: the search for what the contemplative traditions call equanimity, bliss, or oneness. I devoted years of serious effort to it. I lived in a monastery and meditated for eight to twenty-four hours a day.
I never found it in meditation.
I found it, eventually, in depression.
That statement requires a great deal of explanation, because it can be badly misread. I am not saying depression is desirable, or that it should be sought, or that it is a path anyone should take. What I am saying is that in my own life — a life shaped by both serious bipolar disorder and a fifty-year contemplative practice — the deepest peace I have found arrived through the most difficult experience I have known.
The Years of Seeking
In my twenties, I recognized that some people seemed to have accessed states of awareness far deeper than what I had reached. I met with as many of them as I could find. I studied the lives of saints. By thirty, I was living in a monastery, and my fellow monks called me "Samadhi Tom" because of my capacity to enter deep meditative states.
And then, just when permanent peace seemed within reach, I fell into the deepest depression I had ever experienced. It lasted months. I was so debilitated I could not walk across the courtyard to eat.
I left the monastery. I spent my forties lost. The depressions and manias became more frequent and more severe. Eventually I was diagnosed — first with depression, then more accurately with bipolar disorder. I experienced the diagnosis as a kind of death sentence combined with an explanation: the experiences I had interpreted as spiritual were being reframed as symptoms of mental illness.
In despair, I attempted suicide. I am grateful to have survived.
The Turn
Surviving brought something unexpected: a resolve to find meaning through my condition rather than in spite of it. I began writing about depression — specifically, about how people throughout history had found profound meaning within their most difficult experiences. I wrote about St. Teresa of Avila, who spent her life believing she would find union with God only by eliminating her physical pain, and who eventually discovered it within the pain.
One statement of Teresa's stayed with me for months: "The pain is still there. It bothers me so little now that I feel my soul is served by it."
I kept returning to it, puzzled. How could she say it bothered her so little when she was bedridden? After nearly a year of living with the question, something shifted in my understanding. When Teresa said "it bothers me so little," she was not speaking about her body. She was speaking about something deeper — what I would call the self that exists beneath all experience, and that is not ultimately disrupted by any of it.
In that moment of understanding, I found what I had been looking for.
What Equanimity Actually Is
The word I prefer is equanimity rather than bliss or ecstasy, because equanimity more accurately describes it: a state in which all experiences are equally embraced — not equally pleasant, but equally workable, equally held. It is not the absence of pain. It is the discovery that pain does not have the final word on whether one can be at peace.
This is the essence of what Paramahansa Yogananda describes in his translation of the Bhagavad Gita: "Be steadfast in yoga, devotee. Perform your duty without attachment, remaining equal to success or failure. Such equanimity of mind is called Yoga."
Equanimity does not require the elimination of difficult states. It is finding that something remains stable across all of them.
What This Has to Do With Bipolar IN Order
The Bipolar IN Order framework I teach is not primarily about spirituality. It is a practical, graduated program for helping people function better across the full range of bipolar experience. But my own journey informed the fundamental conviction behind it: that depression and mania, properly understood and approached with the right support, do not have to be only enemies.
This is not a claim that clinical care is unnecessary. Quite the opposite. The foundation of everything I teach is appropriate treatment — medication when needed, professional support always. The equanimity I eventually found did not arrive instead of treatment. It arrived after decades of work that included serious clinical engagement.
What my experience showed me is that something more than crisis management is possible. That is the hope that Bipolar IN Order exists to make practical.