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Depression is not a single emotion, but a constellation of emotions, postures, decisions, and health issues that erect what I call the “brilliant stop sign of the soul.” Depression is an ingenious (albeit overwhelming) movement in the psyche that takes you out of commission for crucial reasons. It’s important to understand the difference between despair, which arises when your natural sadness has become blocked or trapped—and depression, which is a cyclical and unresolving movement through any number of blocked or overemphasized emotions (the emotional mix is different for each individual). Depression arises in response to exterior and interior conflicts that destabilize your psyche, and while it can be crushingly disruptive, depression has a vital healing purpose.
When people are suffering with depression, there are nearly always four or five deep and painful situations or health concerns transpiring at the same time. Though depression can and does spin out of control and destabilize bodily systems, emotions, mental functions, and visionary awareness, there is nearly always an inception point at which the depression arose in a very manageable way as a response to trouble or injustice that was already occurring. Treating the depression as a separate disease entity without addressing the very real situation it points to is an incomplete way to manage it, because depression is a natural protective response to disheartening or destabilizing stimuli. The practice for depression is not to launch yourself toward happiness for the sole (and ultimately joyless) sake of happiness, but to understand what has occurred—inside and outside of you—to disturb you. Your first task is not to erase your depression, but to focus yourself in the center of the village inside you so that you can view your depression not as a negative comment on your intrinsic value, but as a brilliant message about the specific (though obscured) issues you face.
If you’re currently taking antidepressants (including St. John’s wort or any other herb), you are welcome here. There is still plenty of work to do in the emotional realm when you’re on antidepressants. In fact, you’ll probably be better at working with emotions if you’re on the right antidepressant. If you’re on a suitable one, you won’t be a zombie; you’ll just be protected from falling into a bottomless pit. I empathize with the need for medication because I wrestled with my own horrific suicidal depressions for over three decades—and relief of any kind was a godsend. However, until recently, I was too brainwashed against conventional medicine to go near a real doctor, so I had no choice but to learn to deal with severe and debilitating depressions without medical help. This was excellent training for the work I did with people who would not or could not tolerate medications, but it did cost me a great deal.
Current research is showing that untreated depressions, especially major depressions, can teach the brain how to fall into depression more easily the next time. Untreated depressions can wear a path in the brain, just like other repetitive or poorly managed emotions can. Unfortunately, this pathway also affects the endocrine system, sleep patterns, memory, and even the DNA in your brain cells. You can damage your brain with untreated depressions, so they’re nothing to fool around with. Get help! I did, finally, and not only am I now being protected from recurrent major depressive episodes, but I’m working my way back to proper sleep patterns and endocrine balance as well. There is also some preliminary data showing that antidepressants—specifically the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors)—can reverse the damage that major depression wreaks on the DNA in brain cells. This is a relief!
Now, after I have advocated for medical intervention in cases of depression, it’s important to understand which type of depression you have. I suffered from early-onset major depression (my first suicidal episode occurred when I was eleven), but I have no manic features or cycling anxieties. Depression that cycles with manic features is called bipolar depression, and it requires different treatment than major depression does. Bipolar is a tricky disease, and it’s important to get it properly diagnosed and treated (treatments for major depression can actually make bipolar depression worse). Depression that cycles with anxiety, phobias, or OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) symptoms requires yet another form of treatment and is often helped with antianxiety medications and short-term cognitive-behavioral therapy. Low-grade chronic depression that lasts for two years or more is called dysthymic depression, and in some individuals, low light conditions can trigger seasonal affective depression. Additionally, women can suffer from hormone-related depressions, either as a part of their monthly cycle (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) or after the birth of a child (postpartum depression). These hormone-related depressions should be taken seriously; they can throw the entire body out of whack and train the brain to lean toward depression. Psychotic depression can look something like schizophrenia, with hallucinations or hearing voices, and atypical depression (which is currently being linked to either dysthymia or a mild form of bipolar depression called cyclothymia) involves heightened sensitivity, moodiness, increased appetite or weight gain, and oversleeping. Remember, too, from the chapters on anger, that cycling rages often mask an underlying depressive condition (especially in men). If you flare up with rage and righteous indignation a great deal of the time, please check in with your doctor or find an online depression questionnaire and take an honest self-assessment. Again, depression is nothing to fool around with.
In contrast to the above conditions, situational depression is the form of depression most of us are familiar with. It occurs when we feel down and sad, not just for specific reasons, but about everything. Situational depression is something that most of us have experienced: we feel continually down, unmotivated, isolated, teary, agoraphobic, or unable to sleep, eat, or function. Many people who suffer from situational depression swear by a certain drug, herb, meditation practice, exercise, dietary restriction, or just about anything else. As it turns out, they’re not wrong. Situational depression is amazingly malleable and will respond to just about any change in routine. When mental health studies show that nondrug modalities such as therapy and meditation are just as effective as antidepressants in relieving symptoms, those studies are often being done on situational depression. Those of us with major depression, bipolar depression, hormone-related depression, and anger- or anxiety-linked depression disorders may require more intensive interventions. Bless yourself for moving through depression in whatever way you’ve been able to thus far, and know that proper diagnosis will protect your brain and your body.
The depression practice in this chapter works very well for situational depression, but it shouldn’t be the only practice you use if you’re experiencing the more serious forms of depression. The serious forms of depression are true illnesses, and you should treat them as illnesses and not as character defects. Love yourself, take care of yourself, and don’t tough it out. Help is available.
Situational depression has become a rapids-level emotion in our culture, which values work over reflection, lords the intellect over the emotions, and treats the body and the spirit as absolute opposites. However, situational depression isn’t truly a rapids-level emotion. The basic momentum behind situational depression is protective and self-respecting, and it arises at the behest of the village inside us. In a well-moderated psyche, depression acts as a kind of energetic tourniquet when some part (or all) of you is off-balance and headed for trouble; it is a conscious decision made by your central nature. The problem is this: most of us don’t have any connection to the full village inside us. We think of ourselves in destabilizing terms: body over spirit (or vice versa), logic over empathy, spirit over emotion, or any number of unbalanced permutations. As a result, most of us have detached our elements and intelligences from one another, and thrown huge portions of our souls into the shadow, which leaves us with no functional awareness of why we initiate our depressions in the first place.
When we drop into situational depression, most of us understand on some level that we’re somehow involved in disabling ourselves; unfortunately, we aren’t taught to honor or celebrate our self-restriction as necessary and even sacred. Instead, we see (or are coerced into seeing) ourselves as disordered. Though depression actually exists to protect us from endangering movements and stances, our culturewide inability to live from the awakened center of our souls has instead led us to treat depression as the endangering movement. For decades, we’ve studied, tracked, analyzed, treated, drugged, and hunted down depression in an effort to expel it from our psyches. If any of these interventions worked on a more than symptomatic level, they certainly would have worked by now. But the bald truth is this: situational depression will return when it is required by the psyche because it is a logical and justified reaction to the internal, familial, social, financial, and political decay and injustice we face every day of our lives. I would even go so far as to say that if you look deeply into the condition of our culture—at our political system, at the way we treat our youth, our elders, the poor, the mentally ill, and those we incarcerate and war upon—and you’re not depressed at all, then there’s something truly wrong with you! Depression is not the problem; situational depression is a response to the problem, and it carries a gift for all of us.
If you have no empathic skills, you’ll crumble in front of depression and lose your way. However, if you can focus and ground yourself and set your boundary, you can create the sacred space you need to engage your depression as a mentor instead of a tormentor. Emotions are your soul’s deepest language; if you try to banish your depression (or any other emotional state), you’ll essentially kill the messenger and leave your soul without a voice. If you can instead engage your depression honorably, you’ll learn amazing things about yourself, your lifestyle, your relationships, your culture, and the world.
It took me twenty long years to engage my own depression in an honorable way, and when I finally worked up the courage to ask my depression what it wanted from me, I fully expected it to turn on me like a rabid dog. As I sat trembling inside my bright boundary, grounding and focusing myself with a kind of bleak desperation, I readied myself for the tirade I knew was coming. It never arrived. Instead, I was immediately overtaken by a startling vision of Londoners in World War II sending their children to relatives in the countryside. That was the introductory image; it told me that the depression was not attacking me, but sending parts of my soul away to safety while it held fast in a combat zone. This was a shock, and it had nothing whatever to do with anything I had been told about depression. There was a definite and palpable protective movement occurring inside me—not a disability or a lunacy, but a decisive and conscious maneuver made by a part of me I didn’t know existed until that moment. Suddenly, with the help of that previously unrecognized aspect of myself, I was able to observe my emotions fighting to be heard over my internal din—struggling, gasping, and dying—as my depression worked desperately to save my life. I most especially felt the anger trapped beneath my depression, anger that wasn’t able to protect me or restore my ravaged boundary, but was instead reduced to making agonizing, stopgap decisions in the face of tragedy.
I have since discovered the origin of the war my psyche was fighting so grimly, and why the children of my soul had to be sent away for their own safety. At the time, I was still running on the fumes of trauma, dissociation, emotional suppression, and massive internal clashes among each of my elements and intelligences. However, since I had learned (as most of us do) to gloss over and work around all my internal troubles, I no longer had clear awareness of them. In fact, I actually looked fairly good on the outside—pretty functional—except for my detestable, unrelenting depression. In my opinion, depression was the only thing wrong with me; if it would just go away, I’d be happy and well. The vision my depression presented shook me out of my complacent, repressive trance because its depiction of a world at war was piercingly and inarguably accurate. When I was able to reframe my view of myself with the support of that vision, I marveled that I could feel anything but depression, because my psyche had become a full-scale battle zone. The crippling lack of energy, focus, peace, and happiness I experienced wasn’t the problem, and it didn’t arise by mistake or by accident; my energy was depleted because some part of me had sent it away on purpose—to keep it safe and alive until the end of my war. I have since observed this same situation in every case of depression I’ve encountered (though the components and intensity of each battle are unique to each person). Something sentient in the soul reacts to extreme internal or external instability by hiding energy in outlying areas until the center of the soul is habitable and capable of conscious action.
If you can take hold of this war analogy, it can help you remove the taint of pathology from your own movements into depression. Rather than seeing yourself as an incompetent or disabled person, you can bring compassion to your struggle and essentially roll up your sleeves and get to work—instead of being worked over. You can discover the logic behind your depression, which will help you see that no healthy forward movement can or should be undertaken from a position of strife and instability (you can’t make coherent decisions or take effective actions if your own elements are trying to murder each other!). Instead of fighting a futile repressive battle that will only intensify your internal strife, you can honor your depression’s inhibiting tactics; you can tune in to your depression and listen to its wisdom. Though this is a necessary healing step, it is a difficult step to take in a culture that urges you to soldier ever onward, instead of stopping to reflect upon the direction your life has taken.
Unfortunately, our culture does not value reflection, which means that the soul-rescuing essence of depression is not readily accessible. Instead, depression has been desecrated and pathologized, while our ability to address internal and external injustice has consequently deteriorated. If you agree to demonize depression, you won’t be able to truly alleviate it, no matter what you do. You’ll have no skills, no agility, and no true grasp of what is occurring in your psyche or the world. But if you can create sacred space and protect yourself from the deluded beliefs careening through our culture, you can perform the soul-honoring and lifesaving tasks your depression asks of you.
The honorable task of depression isn’t to get happy, nor is it merely to restore your lost energy (or crank up your existing energy); these repressive and erasure-based approaches cannot in any way address the original imbalance that initiated your depression in the first place. Repressive techniques may erase your depression in the short run, but in the long run, where do they leave you? Do you have more skills or internal resources? Are you fully upright and emotionally competent? Or are you merely less depressed? Depression exists for a specific and protective reason, and it is not the enemy. It is not the creator of the war inside you, and it isn’t even one of the combatants. Depression has the dreadful and thankless task of restricting your energy when an internal war has already started, and it grimly and deliberately impedes your ability to walk down the wrong path, doing the wrong thing with the wrong intention.
Your soulful task is not to erase your depression and keep walking; it’s to understand your necessary movement into stagnation and to address your depression as a peer instead of a combatant. Your sacred task is to end the war between your elements, clear away the rubble, restore the flow in your internal kingdom, and make a home that the children of your soul would want to come back to.
It’s hard to ground or focus yourself during an unwelcomed depression because the depression sucks all your energy away, leaving you uninterested in effort of any kind. This is a clue. Depression is your psyche’s way of alerting you to a serious disruption or imbalance. It acts almost in the way a circuit-breaker does when spikes of energy occur. Circuit-breakers will trip in response to electrical disruptions in order to protect the line behind the breaker from interruptions or surges. If you can grab on to this image, your depression will immediately seem less toxic; its existence will prove that you have a kind of protective circuit-breaker on your line.
The first movement in depression isn’t an electrical engineering skill so much as it is a postural change. It’s important to bow your head and listen closely to your depression (instead of collapsing before it or chasing wildly after your lost energy). In a depression, a brilliant and buried part of you is acting as your protector. Your proper response should be one of gratitude. Please remember to see your depression as a vital warning sign that your energy is spiking and leaking away while a war rages within your village. Your job is to honor the fall you’ve taken and use your depression’s pinpoint focus to help you rise again with honor. When you do, your healthy vitality will return naturally.
The practice for depression, especially if you suffer from major, bipolar, hormone-related, or anger- or anxiety-linked depression, is a lifelong practice (which may include intensive therapy and antidepressants); it’s not a set of tricks. Of course, all the skills in the raft-building chapter 10 are necessary, but so is a study of the relationships between each of your elements and intelligences, focusing especially on your fiery vision and your airy logic. In most cases of depression, one or both of these will tend to dominate in your psyche (you’ll be overly intellectual or massively transcendent, or both), which will throw your earthy body, your watery emotions, and the village inside you into disarray. This internal turmoil will then send you down a precarious path toward distractions, addictions, and dissociation—all of which will magnify your depressive tendencies and enter you into an uncomfortable feedback loop. When you’re trapped in this loop, each of your elements and intelligences will spiral into confusion and infighting, so it’s important to focus on the balancing practices in chapter 5. When you can bring all parts of yourself to bear on the situation, you can take your rightful place at the center of your village and meet your depression honorably. In that sacred space, you’ll be able to identify which parts of you are engaged in battle and which emotions are caught in the crossfire.
You can examine your grounding and focusing skills (or lack thereof) to discover how your body and your attention work (or don’t work) together. You can also study the difficulties you may have had with any skill you’ve learned so far (there will always be some jarring discrepancy somewhere). Or you can simply ground yourself, light up your boundary, and ask the questions for depression: “Where has my energy gone?” and “Why was it sent away?” When you can bring all parts of yourself to bear on the serious issues your depression has been trying to alert you to, you’ll completely understand the genius of sending your energy and the children of your psyche to the countryside. They’re better off there. I think we should all go!
When you can ground and integrate yourself, you’ll be able to stand inside your private sanctuary and differentiate between the many emotional states trapped inside your depression. You’ll be able to feel the difference, for instance, between sadness and despair, between grief and world-weariness, between anxiety and healthy fear, and between apathy and an urge to suicide (see chapter 23). In each case, you’ll be able to enter the practice for each emotion you feel and honor each of them in turn. Also, when you can ground the depressive stagnation out of your body, you’ll be able to observe and address the physical, emotional, and mental habits that have built up around your depression, whether it’s inactivity or hyperactivity, too much sleep or insomnia, over- or underexercising, repressing or exploding with certain emotions, massive mental activity or bouts of confusion, addiction, or dissociation, and so on. Then you’ll be able to examine your contracts with your many reactive responses to depression, and destroy them as you ground yourself and clear all the clogs and spikes out of your system.
Of course, your rejuvenation practice (see in chapter 10) is vital. This practice fills you up, time and time again, with the energy you need to revitalize yourself. And in cases of depression, you really can’t overdose on these healings. Some people healing from depression perform their rejuvenation practice twice a day for weeks on end. This is a wonderful way to restore yourself and maintain your skills if your depression tries to reanimate itself through sheer force of habit.
Conscious complaining (see in chapter 10) is another wonderful tool that can be considered an emergency first-aid kit for depression. Conscious complaining unlocks the chains that wrap themselves around your psyche, and it kick-starts your flow in a powerful way. This practice is so important for the healing of depression that I’d suggest creating a specific complaining shrine (with dark or annoying colors, pictures of bratty children and grumpy animals, and so forth) in order to sanctify and honor your depression. At first, your complaints will be pitiful and depressive, but if you persevere, they’ll start to heat up nicely (which means your anger is returning with all its protective focus). Pay attention to these complaints; they point directly to the troubles that have dropped you into your current depression. Your practice then, when your resources and your village are restored, is to meet those troubles with your full-on, fully activated self, and to do what you can to bring balance to your life and justice to the world. Don’t underestimate the power of a good complaining session. It can clear you out, restore your energy, and heal your soul!
Antidepressants work by restoring flow to some of the neurochemicals that become unbalanced by depression, but it’s also helpful to restore your chemistry and bodily flow in other ways as well. Exercise and exertion, balanced with plenty of rest, help you move neurochemicals and hormones through your body more efficiently. Toning your muscles and raising your heart rate also places your body under a strain that is more manageable than the strain it experiences in an unchecked depression; exercise has an important healing and retraining function for a body suffering from depression. If your body can experience a safe form of strain—for instance, a twenty-minute run, a dance routine, or a period of weight-lifting—and is then allowed to rest and recuperate, you’ll have a visceral experience of meeting strain and tension, managing it, and recovering from it. This is an excellent healing for your body, regardless of the form of movement or exercise you choose. What matters is that you exert yourself in a safe and conscious way and then allow enough time for your body to recover from your exertion. This recovery time is vital, because overexercising can throw you into depression just as surely as inactivity can. When you’re dealing with depression, it’s easy to force yourself into a grim exercise routine (or to cease all movement); unfortunately, both extremes are unhealthy. The key to coming back from depression is to treat activity and rest as equally important things.
If you’re depressed and inactive, you should begin exercising gently and work your way slowly back to fitness; if you’re an athlete dealing with depression, you should mix up your workouts so that you’re not doing any specific activity more than once every other day (exerting yourself past fatigue and not allowing enough recovery time or enough sleep are sure-fire ways to make yourself physically and chemically depressed). Movement is essential for your health, but balance and flow are even more important.
It’s also important to maintain flow in other areas of your life as well, particularly in your meditative practice. Make sure your practice is not primarily transcendent and dissociative, or it may actually intensify the internal struggles that provoke depression in the first place. If depression is a constant companion for you, please consider meditative practices that honor more than one element in your quaternity (good ones are dancing, yoga, tai chi, qigong, nature walks, art, reading, studying, and so on). Movement, flow, and quaternal balance are the keys to bringing yourself out of a depressive spiral.
Sleep is also imperative for your emotional and physical health, and many psychological and medical studies on the natural circadian rhythms of the body show that sleep disruptions (for instance, in night-shift or swing-shift workers) and sleep deprivation contribute greatly to depression and hormonal and chemical imbalances. As a species, we were meant to rise with the sun and sleep in the dark, but our modern lives have almost completely separated us from the natural cycles of the day and the seasons. This separation is certainly a result of our unbalanced focus on work and productivity to the exclusion of all else, and it has had consequences that we’re only now beginning to comprehend. Our extreme productivity has created a population of overworked and overtired people who may be depressed (and unhealthy) simply because they are struggling under unreasonable sleep deficits.
Please be aware of your own sleep patterns if depression is an issue for you. If you require stimulants (coffee, tea, sugar, or herbal energy boosters) in the morning and depressants (alcohol, overeating, tobacco, or marijuana) at night, something is going on. All artificial stimulants and downers will disrupt your chemistry, your hormones, your circadian rhythms, your sleep cycles, and your energy. They may help you race through your day and collapse at night, but they’ll only cement your depression. There is no replacement for good and sound sleep.
It’s also important to look at your relationship with food and to observe your eating behaviors when your emotions or your depressive tendencies move forward. Do you slow down to feel your honest emotions, or do you race toward comfort foods (or extreme diets and regimens)? You can actually create food sensitivities by using food as a drug. If you treat your body as a thing and use food (or the lack of it) to lift yourself out of your depression, you’ll disrupt your internal balance, which means you’ll increase your depressive tendencies and spiral into ever more troublesome eating habits. When you’re in a spiral like this, you don’t have to swear off food forever; you just have to stand upright, shake yourself off, and treat food as food while you work with your emotions as emotions. If you like chocolate (or whatever), go ahead and eat it in moderation because it tastes good, but don’t eat it because you’re sad, anxious, depressed, or angry (and don’t punish yourself for wanting it in any case). Again, it’s all about balance and about respecting and honoring each element in your quaternity.
As a final dietary note, you may have heard that you should never eat when you’re emotionally upset. While there is some truth to this admonition, following it when you’re depressed could mean that you don’t eat for weeks! The balancing practice for eating in the presence of strong emotions is to name the emotion consciously and then name your hunger as itself. If your emotions and your hunger are improperly connected, you’ll know it right away because your statements will tend toward emotional clutter: “I’m not really hungry, but I’m depressed and chocolate milk sounds soothing,” or “Grilled cheese sandwiches mean love!” To bring consciousness to your eating, you can learn to say, “I’m depressed now, but I’m hungry for lunch,” or “I’m really bummed about work, but I want some tomato juice.” This simple awareness exercise will help you stop distracted and addictive eating in its tracks, because it will give a voice to both your watery emotions and your earthy hunger—and help you realize that they are (or should be) separate entities. When your emotions are trapped and troubled, they need to be honored and channeled, not fed!
What about it? Depression isn’t a happiness deficiency. It’s a response to injustice and internal imbalance that diminishes your emotional agility and your ability to feel any emotion properly. Depressed people do experience happiness, but their souls are in so much turmoil that their happiness can’t act upon them in truly healing ways. Then again, neither can their anger, their sadness, their fear, their shame, or anything else. If I could wave a magic wand and simply add more happiness to depressed people (without addressing any of their honest issues), they wouldn’t be able to hold on to it. This new infusion of happiness would eventually leak away with every other emotion—and its loss would drop them into an even more depressive spiral. No, more happiness is not the answer.
When I tell people that depression is calling the soul to serious practice in response to a long-standing period of strife, they nearly always understand. But they also nearly always restate their original reason for seeking help, as if I haven’t fully comprehended their situation. People struggling with depression usually remind me they want to go back to a time when they felt happy—when they had lots of energy, when the troubles of the world didn’t bother them, and when they could do whatever they wanted without repercussions. And I always smile, because what I hear is that they want to go back to the lifestyle that dropped them into their depression in the first place, except this time they want to get away with it! They don’t want to be impeded in any way; they want to be able to push their way through life no matter what is going on in their souls or in the culture. Well, bless their hearts—and bless mine and yours while we’re at it—because I think that’s what we all want: to be able to make it through life with no illness, no unhappiness, no death, no pain, no downtime, and no turmoil. We want to be invincible, endlessly happy, and wildly successful. We want to be the heroes of our autobiographies—always making the right choices. But we aren’t always heroes, and we don’t always make the right choices, and fortunately for us, our souls have a way to stop us when things get out of hand.
Depression is a wonderful teacher in its harsh way. It steps in when your intellect and your emotions are at each other’s throats, when you fly over your emotions and batter them with logic, or run screaming from logic and follow only your transient desires. Depression jumps into the fray when your intellect begins to lose its ability to think coherently; when your body trammels toward meeting its needs for food, sex, and more stuff without any emotional, spiritual, or logical considerations; when your visionary spirit begins to lift away from your life; and when your emotions become dishonored, inflated, or ignored. Depression takes over after your sadness has asked you to release something, but you wouldn’t; after your anger needed you to set a boundary, but you refused; after your shame asked you to amend your behaviors, but you kept right on misbehaving; and after your fear alerted you to certain danger, but you ignored your intuition and kept right on going, stumbling into one totally avoidable problem after another.
Depression doesn’t arise when you’re merely unhappy; it arises when you’re fighting an exhausting battle that impedes your ability to act conscientiously. Though depression is often blamed for isolating people and making them socially and politically ineffective, depression actually stops you when you’re already isolated and ineffective. If you were to simply add more happiness to your system, to power yourself up with joy and throw yourself back into the fray (see the topic of exhilaration in chapter 26), your actions would be damaging to you and every person in your milieu, because your actions would spring from a psyche at war with itself (no matter how peppy you might feel). Happiness is a lovely and valuable emotion, but it is not a magic pill, nor is it the emotion you need when you’re fighting a war. All of the happiness-based emotions arise naturally for their own reasons (not yours); they shouldn’t be imprisoned, glorified, or lacquered over the top of true-but-unwanted emotions, or you’ll throw yourself into a tailspin. Depression isn’t a happiness deficiency; it’s a rapids-level emotion in our culture. Therefore, the rapids-level mantra applies: the only way out is through.
The practice for depression is full-bodied and complex because depression is a response to full-bodied and complex issues that arise not just from you, but from our culture itself. Therefore, when you’re in a depression, it’s important to approach the situation sociologically, and use your vision and all of your intelligences to help you identify which parts are personal and which parts come from cultural conditioning. For instance, trouble with eating and emotions has very little to do with you; it’s a function of the way our brains associate sweets and fats with reward and comfort, and the way we’ve taught ourselves to eat over the top of our feelings. As such, nearly every modern person can be considered to have a moderate eating disorder. In this same vein, the fight you experience inside yourself (where your elements and intelligences are at war) is also not your personal pathology. We’ve all been trained to separate our elements and intelligences and repress each one in turn, which means we all suffer through the resulting tendencies toward distraction, addiction, dissociation, and depression. When you can bring all of yourself to bear on this damaging cultural conditioning and burn your contracts with it, you’ll certainly alleviate your own depression, but more important, you’ll begin to alleviate the trouble in our culture because there will be one less person carrying our cultural disease and one more awakened soul in our waiting world.
When you’re in the awful throes of depression and quaternal infighting, it’s hard to believe that such a world-changing thing is possible, which is precisely why your psyche has to inhibit you from making any focused or effective action! When your quaternity and your intelligences are at war, your psyche knows that you are part of the problem, and it will try to stop you from adding more unbalanced, depressive, powerless noise to the cacophony that is our modern world. Your task is not to fix the world so that you won’t be depressed, nor to happy-peppy yourself up and erase your depression; it’s to take your depression personally enough to get to work and clear the debris from your soul. When you’re balanced, focused, and able to take an upright position in your own psyche, you’ll spontaneously take an upright position in the world, and from that upright place, personal, social, and political justice will naturally begin to flow.
It’s important to distinguish between depression that is actually stuck, and depression that isn’t quite through yet because you’ve still got imbalances to deal with. Please check into the balancing practices in chapter 5, the addiction chapter 6, and the raft-building chapter 10. Please remember that relieving depression is only a first step. The journey is lifelong, and it involves constant awareness so you don’t return to the powerful and culturally approved wholeness-trashing behaviors that lead inevitably to depression.
If you’re meeting your depression in as many ways as you can (and you’re getting restful sleep), but it just won’t move at all, please see a doctor or therapist, and consider filling out a sleep questionnaire to see if you have any signs of a sleep disorder (snoring, high blood pressure, depression, and daytime sleepiness are warning signs of a possible sleep disorder). When you’re dealing with recurrent depression, you’ll need counseling and perhaps medical support before you can come back to balance again. Depression signals a serious situation. It is not a simple movement into sadness, anger, or fear; therefore, its practice can be quite involved. There is no shame in needing help, support, intervention, and camaraderie as you wrestle yourself back from imbalance into stability once again. Reach out!
Honoring depression in people who have no emotional skills is a difficult task indeed, because they usually lack the capacity to identify or work with the many emotions and issues trapped beneath their depression. Sadly, attempting to create sacred space for depression in unskilled people can be somewhat hazardous to your own emotional health, due to the cyclical ingenuity of the depressive state. If you attempt to help depressed people heal this difficulty, set that boundary, or feel this feeling, you’ll notice that as soon as they become functional in one area, another will fall into disorder—almost as if on schedule. In a very short period of time, you’ll find yourself cycling along with them in a drama that has no resolution. There is an important reason for this: depression performs a vital protective function in the soul, and until people are upright again, their depression simply won’t let them go.
Depression always points to a complex series of internal issues. The soul of a depressed person is being called to ritual, and that ritual will involve incredible changes. It’s important for you to set your boundary strongly when you’re around depressed people so you don’t get roped into becoming a sort of overseeing high priest in their healing process. Though depressed people often need therapy, addiction counseling, or some sort of alleviating practice or substance, the true work of depression is always an inside job. Bless yourself for wanting to help, but know your limits. Help the depressed person find support and therapy. Depression can be a serious and life-threatening malady; as such, a depressed person may require far more help than a friend can provide.
Remember to welcome your depression as a signal of imbalance in your separate elements and intelligences, or of a fierce battle within the village inside you. Depression is ingenious stagnation; it stops you for a reason. Welcome and thank your depression.