Depression

Thorns

September 20, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

Words can have a funny effect on us, especially when we are little

thorns-1 At the end of the day, that’s all they are – words – so we can easily just allow them to pass by

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But often, instead of letting them go, we take them…

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…and transform them…

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..into thorns

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And we stab ourselves with those words

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Keeping them inside us as we grow older

When a thorn is there for a long time it starts to feel numb, and we may not notice that it is there

That is, until something, or someone, happens to rattle the thorn thorns-7

Bringing up the pain

What rattles the thorn can be directly related, or indirectly related

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Although it was us that stabbed ourselves with the thorn in the first place

We can forget this

And blame the pain on the person who moved the thorn

thorns-9 But when someone touches our thorn

We must remember that this is a gift

They are reminding us that there is a thorn that we need to remove

When we feel the pain, it is an opportunity to feel it

And to see it for what it truly is

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As you start to do this, the healing can start

The solution isn’t to deny that the thorn is there, or to pull it out with brute force

In fact, the more you apply pressure, the further the thorn will plunge in

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The solution instead, is to do what you should have done in the first place

When you heard those words many years ago

Let go

Remember that it was you who stabbed yourself with those words in the first place

So it is also you who has the power to release it

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Finally freeing yourself of pain

Remember, this is all thanks to that person who rattled the thorn in the first place

Alerting you to its presence

So the next time you feel stress, anger or pain because of someone else

Instead of lashing out at them, ask yourself

Which thorn is being rattled?

And let the healing process begin

Afterword

For the purposes of this story, I have said that we can turn other people’s words into thorns. However, in reality we can turn any thought that we have into a thorn. For example, you may be with a group of people and feel ignored. You think ‘no one ever listens to me’. Instead of simply observing this thought and letting it pass, we can transform this into a thorn to carry with us until we choose to pull it out again.

When our thorns are rattled it is painful, and we really don’t like it. So we actually spend so much of our lives being fearful of, and trying to avoid, situations that could potentially move our thorns.

I for one, am terrified of criticism. This is because it moves my thorn saying that I am a bad person. I observe in myself how I navigate situations to desperately avoid this from happening. I think this occurs on a subconscious level for many of our thorns.

However, this is a shame. Because the only way to remove the thorn is to feel where they are and to see them for what they truly are. Only then can we relax and let them go. Thorns are actually very much like shadows (see previous blog post), so the best way to release them is to stop resisting them and to accept and love them. Nothing else is needed really. The thorn will then come out by itself.

Darkness: Cognitive vs Emotional Depression

September 13, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

We live in a dualistic universe. Up vs down, positive vs negative, light vs dark. So far with my posts I have been writing optimistic, hopeful posts. I would describe them as talking about the ‘light’ side of life. However, now I want to discuss the opposite end of the spectrum of human experience — darkness.

A person once mentioned to me that I had ‘insufferable happiness’. I replied that this was because I live with a ton of darkness. Although during the day when I am with people I am smiley, what most people don’t know is that pretty much every morning I wake up in floods of tears from the weight of emotional anguish I feel inside.

Now, in writing this post I am not looking for sympathy. I am finally writing about this publicly because I want to share my experience. For 15 years I have felt very misunderstood, and have explored and learned about darkness in my own way. I am still learning. If the posts I write resonate with anyone out there, I just hope they know that they are not alone in their experience.

On the surface, people may see what I have as clinical depression. If we go by the definition provided by the most famous clinical diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, then perhaps I do. Symptoms include chronic depressed mood, difficulty with sleeping, difficulty concentrating and loss of energy.

However, over the years I have come to distinguish between two types of depression. The first is what I call “cognitive depression”. The other I call “emotional/spiritual depression”. I’ve outlined the differences and similarities between the two below:

Cognitive Depression	Emotional/Spiritual Depression
Often triggered by some critical event.	No attributable trigger.
Comes and goes in large waves.	Always there like a white noise.
Feelings of helplessness, lack of control, despair, sadness.	Feelings of emotional anguish, pain, sadness, anger and suffering.
Clear negative automatic thoughts. Self-critical.	No relationships between thoughts and feelings. Mind can be very clear, even optimistic.
Low self-esteem	Self-esteem not necessarily affected.
Feeling feels like it stems from the mind.	Feeling feels like it stems from stomach region.
Necessary to recognise the negative automatic thoughts for what they are. Necessary to let go of needing to be in control. Surrender and accept the circumstances that have occurred.	Necessary to accept, love and surrender to all the dark feelings that are bubbling up to the surface. Empty the mind and let the feelings be.
Difficulty concentrating.
Fluctuations in appetite.
Difficulty getting to sleep.
Need time alone, but also very lonely.
Both characterised by long periods of sadness.

Whilst the two can occur separately, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, you can start off with emotional depression. Even though your thoughts are clear, you are in a ton of emotional pain. Concentrating is difficult. Because you can’t concentrate, work is affected. When you fall behind on work, this can make you feel bad. This can be the trigger for cognitive depression, where this time round you do have critical thoughts that race through your head.

Right now I have emotional depression. Some people find it a bit difficult to get their head around this. “What happened?”, people naturally ask. When I say “genuinely nothing”, sometimes I get funny looks. They think I may be suffering from low self-esteem, but I don’t have that either. I just have a lot of emotional pain. This was why therapy did not work at all for me. The therapists wanted to scrutinise all the thoughts I had. I felt like saying ‘ok, fine, but what you say doesn’t change at all how I feel’.

Over the years I have come to my own understanding of depression. Essentially, I have come to learn that it results from repressed emotion. Whenever you suppress anger or sadness, it doesn’t disappear. It gets stuck inside you. The only way to let it go is to fully embrace and accept the emotions that are desperately trying to be expressed. When you do through techniques such as meditation, you might even get a flashback to the exact incident where this emotion arose.

This may all sound very unscientific to people well versed in clinical psychology, but it is what I have come to understand through both my own research and experience with depression. I hope to talk more candidly about the techniques I use to manage depression in the future.

That’s it for my first of what will be a series of posts on darkness. As I said, I hope to share with people how I manage it, but also perhaps just to write honestly write down the struggles I face too. If you’re reading this and are going through something similar, don’t hesitate to reach out. Also if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in a subsequent blog post.

The Man Who Was Afraid of His Shadow

August 9, 2016 by lyra777 1 Comment

Once upon a time, there was a man who was afraid of his own shadow.

He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that there was a dark, scary monster that would sometimes be behind him, and he was terrified.

He tried everything he could to get rid of it.

He ignored it

He yelled at it

He despaired at it.

But he was so scared, that the one thing he never did was to turn around and look at it.

The shadow would sometimes come out when he was with his friends, and all he could do was apologise for the black monster that followed him.

But the shadow didn’t go away. He ran and ran, but not matter how far he went, the shadow was right behind him.

He ran and ran, until he could run no more.

Now out of options, he decided to do something different.

Something he had never done his whole life.

He was going to stop, turn around and look at the shadow for what it was.

Slowly he approached it.

He stared at the very shadow he was afraid of straight in the face.

Suddenly, he came to a life-changing realisation.

The shadow came from him.

The shadow was him.

He didn’t want to accept it. That big black monster that followed him all his life, was an extension of him?

But as time went past, he decided to look more closely at the shadow. He started to get to know it better.

And as he did, he started to realise it wasn’t so scary after all. It may be black and gloomy but it couldn’t actually hurt him.

It was only a shadow after all.

He realised that what was hurting him was his fear of the shadow. The way he had spent his whole life running had drained him for years.

After finally seeing the shadow for what it truly was, he decided to try something new.

Why not love, instead of fear the shadow?

Instead of running from it, why not embrace it?

The man decided to shine the bright light of his attention to the shadow, enveloping it with love and warmth.

It was a part of him after all.

And then the unexpected happened.

The shadow disappeared.

Because to transmute darkness, all you need is light.

This was the lesson that he learnt from the shadow.

To this day, sometimes when the sun sets, the shadow reappears behind the man.

But the man no longer runs. He is no longer scared.

He simply turns around, smiles and lovingly shines his light on it.

Afterword

Probably the first thing people may think when reading this story is that the shadow represents something like depression. But actually, your shadow is any side of you that you don’t like. Like anger, jealousy, arrogance, anxiety, grief or longing.

We often feel that those emotions are there, but we don’t like them. So we push them away instead of fully embracing them.

In fact, we often reject them as part of our identity completely. If we get angry at someone we may later say, “Sorry, I wasn’t myself”, or if we’re depressed we may think, “I want to be myself again”.

This, on a certain level, is true – you are not ‘yourself’. But only because you are rejecting something that is fundamentally a part of you.

Remember, these shadows aren’t separate from you. They are a projection of you. In pushing them a way, you are actually making yourself feel worse.

We are raised by society to believe that we must be happy all the time. Being positive should be our baseline, and if it’s not, there is something wrong with us. We must ‘fix’ ourselves, and ‘fix’ our lives.

But there is nothing to fix. You are perfect just the way you are, emotions galore.

We are here on this Earth to experience. We subjectively add labels such as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to the emotions that we feel. But at the end of the day all emotions are just another way in which we experience being a human.

It’s just that some emotions are just harder to accept within ourselves than others.

The first step towards healing your shadow is to acknowledge that it is a part of you. Take responsibility for your shadows. This is not saying if you get angry/sad/depressed/[insert emotion] it’s your fault. I’m saying simply acknowledge that it is an emotion that is part of your experiential being.

The next step is to lovingly accept it. When you relax and fully accept the emotion that you are feeling in the present, it is actually released. The light that you shine on it will conversely make the shadow dissipate. This is because you are allowing yourself to be who you are. You let the emotion run it’s natural course, rather than pushing it deeper and deeper inside yourself.

“But I do acknowledge my tough emotions but they don’t go away!’, you may be thinking.

Perhaps ask yourself, are you just feeling the surface of the emotion? Are you like the man who knew his shadow was there but didn’t look at it? Are you wishing that you weren’t feeling the emotion that you are now? Do you want to get rid of that emotion?

If you are, consider instead saying to yourself:

“I am feeling angry/sad/etc. and I love and accept myself just the way I am”

That very emotion you’re feeling is wanting to be a part of you too.

When you finally embrace the emotions that you have fully, you will soon discover that the very thing you fear inside yourself the most is actually your best friend and greatest teacher.