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On Being with Krista Tippett

[Unedited] Parker Palmer with Krista Tippett

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Society, Spirituality, Society & Culture, Sociology, Culture, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Social Sciences, On Being, Arts

4.710.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is the unedited conversation Krista had with Parker Palmer in 2002, which is excerpted within our produced episode “The Soul in Depression.” That episode also includes the voices of Andrew Solomon and Anita Barrows. Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. Parker J. Palmer is a teacher, author, and founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal. His many books include Healing the Heart of Democracy, Let Your Life Speak, and On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

0:07.0

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,

0:13.0

a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

0:19.0

Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

0:22.0

I'm Christa Tippett. Up next, my unedited conversation on the spiritual territory of depression with Quaker, author, and educator Parker Palmer.

0:32.0

There is also a produced show called The Soul in Depression that includes parts of this interview and other voices. Find that wherever you got this podcast.

0:42.0

I think I've told you before that I have also struggled with depression and had a pretty serious clinical depression a few years ago.

0:49.0

And read your book. Actually, did you publish your essay on depression in Weavings first?

0:54.0

That was the first iteration.

0:56.0

Yeah, I read it in Weavings and then again, and let your life speak.

1:01.0

And so what I'd like to do is just talk that through with you.

1:05.0

The Soul in Depression, how you've experienced that, what you mean when you talk about it.

1:09.0

And you've written so eloquently about it.

1:13.0

And I'd be interested if there's anything that isn't in the book that seems important to you now or that if you've continued to reflect on this in different ways.

1:23.0

But I'd like to begin just by asking you to tell me a bit of the story.

1:29.0

What happened, how you began down that path into what you called the dark woods, called clinical depression?

1:38.0

What happened to you back then? What was that?

1:41.0

Well, I went through two periods of clinical depression.

1:46.0

And both of them when I was in my 40s, they were separated by a couple of years and both lasted a year to a year and a half.

1:57.0

And both were deeply devastating experiences in the second half of each of those two depressions.

2:08.0

I was constantly thinking about killing myself, waking up each morning, wondering if this would be the day to do it.

2:20.0

And actually practicing various methods of doing it from time to time.

...

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