Roguepuppet, I need to say something in defense of the way you are feeling. It seems that you feel you are capable of this zen when in fact your body may not be allowing it. I know this well after beating myself up for years for not being 'the nice' person I thought I was. I actually put a block on my phone for a couple years afraid of how I would respond if say the nurse from the docs office would call. I had become short and easily angered. I wasnt the quiet, gently intensely patient person my pastor used to marvel at when my kids were young.

What I discovered was that all that changed after 2 things happened. First I finally got the strength to go off my antidepressant. I was on Paxil and it has a very bad history of severe affects when one withdraws from it. I had tried to stop and had scary stuff. It was like day and nite. About 2 months after going off it I felt like who I always not some stranger who alienated even my kids.

The next thing was finding out my body struggles to keep enough vitamin D in place and consequently the parathyroid that elevates when one gets low on vit D. http://www.parathyroid.com/parathyroid-symptoms.htm Here is a link to the symptoms that can come with this. My vit D levels were in the single digets! And honestly I wasnt doing anything different than most people that dont get as much sun because they work in an office. I was supplementing more than the average person.

The point here is that I have every faith you can do zen. I can too. But I have hit this board with a flurry of messages on days that my vit D has dropped too far and the parathyroid is too elevated leaving me in an unnatural place.

To be clear here I would never suggest you stop an antidepressant if it is working for you. I am just one of the folks that cant take them and wish I knew this sooner. They 'make' me crazy so to speak. And the same for the vit D tho I am a firm believer that if one isnt sure they should get tested since I was doing the 'right things' and was dramatically deficient. I just feel that there are medical reasons we can be off what is normal for us. And that is worth exploring.

Annie59