In this 22 minute TED talk Stephen Ildari explains that depression largely results from us living busy, stressful lives that our bodies are not designed for. Our DNA and bodies are basically still geared for a hunter gatherer lifestyle, where there may be moments of stress such as when you are facing a bear or tiger, but then once you have run away or fought the predator, the stress reduces and your body gets to relax.
For most of us today our lives are constantly stressful and busy, resulting in a prolonged stress response and being in fight or flight much of the time. This is detrimental to the body and over time results in depression. Our bodies simply have not adapted to this massive change of lifestyle yet, and the result is the epidemic in depression. One in nine Americans over the age of 12 is taking an anti-depressant.
Stephe Ildari advocates for a change in lifestyle to reduce stress, improve your body’s neurochemistry and decrease depression. He outlines a 6 step Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC) program to beat depression without medication.
His research has demonstrated that the TLC program is an effective treatment for depression, with over 70% of patients experiencing a favorable response, as measured by symptom reduction of at least 50%. That is a lot of relief!!!!! The 6 steps are:
Exercise– he claims exercise is more effective than any pill. Just brisk walking for 30 minutes, 3 times a week can help a lot.
Omega 3 Fatty Acids – our bodies can’t make Omega 3 and 6, we need to get them from our diet. He recommends a supplement that gives you a 1000 mg of EPA and 500 mg of DHA per day.
Sunlight – he recommends that people get at least 30 minutes of bright light exposure per day.
Healthy Sleep – at least 8 hours sleep a night is needed
Anti-ruminative activity – stop yourself ruminating on negative thoughts and feelings. Focus instead on doing something pleasant, calling a friend, exercise or journalling.
Social connection – resist the urge to isolate, reach out and connect to people, socialise and you will feel better.
Doing the above will help your body to relax and return to a greater state of peace and happiness. To learn more about Stephen Ildari’s program visit his Therapeutic Lifestyle Change website.
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When a person has suffered many disappointments in life, they learn to switch off from life, from expecting good things or even believing it is possible for their life to work out okay. This is a self defense mechanism aimed to limit the pain received and protect from further disappointments.
But switching off from life, hope, faith is a disasterous thing to do, it is a giving up of life force energy, of joy, of hope, of happiness. It will inevitably lead to judgement, ridicule, low self-esteem, depression and feelings of unworthiness.
If the major traumas occurred when a young child, 0-7 years old, it is highly likely that a pattern of learned helplessness was embedded in the child’s unconscious and as an adult plays out constantly in all aspects of life, leaving the person feeling a victim, feeling unable to change anything and accepting life is always going to be this way.
With such pessimism life becomes drudgery, one boring or scary or threatening and dangerous day after another. It is easy to see why people may self medicate through addictions to avoid the emotional pain and sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
It is a cruel way to exist, it is a numbing out of life, a walking dead scenario, feeling as if there is no point in staying alive or trying to change anything, because it feels like it never works or changes, it never gets better.
This is a very painful place to be in internally, to feel this hurt and broken that you don’t know how to go on, how to survive, how to live. You give up trying and just survive one day at a time. Life is monotonous, bland, boring and suffocating. Sadly this is a common state of being for many people. Gladly, you don’t have to stay stuck in it.
You only feel so helpless because it is younger parts of you that got hurt and disappointed, whose pain is so high, that it is over ruling everything else. If you heal these wounds and help free your inner child or younger selves then that pain will not be your primary emotion or experience of life.
You the adult has every opportunity to make different choices, to have fun, to be positive and enjoy life. It is just hard to do when your vitality, your life force is stuck in the past, playing out a repetitive loop of negativity.
So how do you free yourself of the wounds? There are many ways that help. At this stage it is just important to know you can break free, that you can heal and that life can become better. To let a glimmer of hope exist.
Just because people in your past hurt you or disappointed you, doesn’t mean it has to reoccur over and over. If you heal the wounds you can flourish. You will no longer attract in that treatment as you will no longer be a vibrational match to it. Once you have released the pain, your body can relax, come out of fight or flight and shut down zombie mode. Life force energy can flow freely through your veins again, revitalising you to live life fully, embracing possibility and taking action to live your dreams, your greatest potential while here on Earth.
To achieve this the wounds must be healed, the emotional pain must be released / transmuted and your heart opened back up to allow love in, to trust and take action, to risk changing / trying something new and letting people close.
When people are closed down out of disappointment, it is like they have bolted the door, put up a security fence, have guard dogs snarling, attempting to keep out anything good from occurring, so that they will not be disappointed or hurt further.
People with good intentions attempt to come close and they are faced with snarling dogs, electric fences and machine guns aimed at them, as if they are the enemy, when all they want to do is love you. It takes a strong and determined person to persevere in this situation and say “Let me in, it is okay, you can trust me”.
Many just walk away, they see the wounding in the other, the closed door, so they turn away. Hence the hurt person ends up alone, isolated, desperate for attention, for love, but not allowing it. No wonder they feel so hopeless.
There is a war going on inside, keeping the goodness away.When someone does come close they can over react with anger, feeling like “How dare they expect me to let them in, how dare they expect me to take a risk”. You push the person away so hard.
Depending on how deep the wound will depend on how automatic this rejection process is. It can be so strong that rage is triggered and a feeling that you could set the person on fire because they have threatened you and your safety by daring to enter into your closed kingdom, and it literally feels like a threat to your existence. So sad when really the other is saying “Hello, do you want a friend? Do you want to play?”.
It is like two young children meeting in a playground and the first person has planted their feet, crossed their arms, stomped on the spot and said “NO”, shouted “NO, you will not play with me, go away, leave me alone”. They are totally closed off in their tantrum about how they feel and what has occurred to them in life. Then they sulk, pout, kick and scream about how unfair it all is. Most of us can see this behaviour in toddlers, young children quite easily, but we fail to see that as wounded adults we are doing the same thing.
Life can’t change dramatically for the better unless you uncross your arms, suck in your bottom lip, and you open up to connection, to playing, to having fun. While you are shouting NO nothing much can change. So you have to be willing to lower the defenses, to open up to another way of being and to feeling and releasing the emotional pain underneath the wounds, then it dissolves, then you walk free of itand you can see the blue sky and sunshine and let it in, you can see the beauty in life and let yourself be replenished by it and experience good things and have your life work out more enjoyably.
It is clear that it is up to you to take action to heal the wounds. Noone else can do it for you. Even those brave souls who wear suits of armour and non-flammable overalls who come close wanting to help you move forward. Their efforts can only help if you let them in. If you keep shouting NO energetically or actually saying it through your words and actions, then their efforts can’t help.
It is up to you to take the risk to let life be different. You can do it and it is worth it, so worth it, to walk free from misery and enjoy life, to be pleasantly surprised by the mystery of life and finally see the goodness in all things. You can achieve this, simply by healing the past so it doesn’t cloud your future. It can be done and I and many others can help you do it, if you let us, if you open up and say “YES to life, YES I am willing to move forward and to risk being happy. YES I can do this, I will do this, I choose this”.
Then life will lead you forth to the right people, places, books, courses and whatever else you need that best suits you to help you heal and break free from the pain. It will be different for each person based on their current state of awareness, willingness, and ability to feel and release their pain. Some will need to do self-study at first, before they would be willing to risk seeing a therapist and trusting someone to help them move forward. Some may prefer talk therapy as they don’t yet feel safe enough to go into their bodies and feel what is there. Some may prefer to start with body work modalities to help the body relax and let go, preferring this as they are too scared to voice their concerns or speak the truth that they have tried to hide from their whole lives.
Inside your body are all the trapped emotions and memories from the traumas you’ve experienced. It results in muscular tension and holding patterns that are so common in our society. It results in tight, sore shoulders, necks and backs. It is literally like the body has clenched, locked down, armoured up in order to protect itself.
A large part of healing is releasing this tension, melting the armour and the hypervigilance that comes from being in fight, flight, freeze so much.
This has to be done slowly, gently. You can’t take the top off the volcano and have all the pressure escape at once. It’s too volatile, too dangerous, too overwhelming. You need to let out the pressure and steam slowly, gently, so you don’t explode emotionally, but also so your body can integrate the shifts and changes.
There are many ways to reduce the internal stress and pressure, soy ou can cope more easily with whatever life brings you. When you’re already stressed up to your eyeballs internally it makes it so hard to cope. It’s like you’re exhausted with nothing else to give or any capacity to take on more – whether that be a challenge at work, a family member wanting your support or asking you to do something.
When you’re already at your limit, when your plate is full, any additional stressors can result in strong, undesirable reactions. You might react in anger or rage, or just be irritable and cold pushing people away or ignoring their needs. Not because you don’t care. You do care. You just don’t have any more capacity to cope with another stressor.
Thankfully you can use a range of methods to diffuse your internal bomb. Most people turn to addictions to try and numb it, escape it, avoid it, distract from it. They get busy or drink or shop or play video games or any other distraction that stops them from feeling what is occurring inside.
Clearly, this is not a healthy or long term solution. Your nervous system still has all the charge in it, all the pent up energy and emotion, so addictions just form a temporary fix that is bound to fail as the internal pressure continues to grow and the person eventually implodes or explodes.
A much healthier way to reduce the pressure, to let out the steam is spending time in nature, going for walks or swims at the beach. Anything that helps you to slow down, to have greater relaxation and ease in your body.
I have found Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) particularly useful, as it lets out that tension from the body bit by bit, calming your nervous system and giving you more capacity to cope with day to day life. As you release the pressure, it is like you’re taking some of the burdens and pressures from your plate, so there’s room, capacity, to handle life events with a bit more grace and ease. You don’t get shoved into overwhelm as quickly.
TRE is a set of simple exercises designed to help the body access its innate stress, tension and trauma release mechanism. This is an inbuilt tremoring process that uses up the stagnant energy, melts the armour and helps you shift out of fight, flight, freeze into relaxation and ease within. When this occurs it is easier to interact with others as you feel safer in your body, less threatened and defensive. It’s a powerful process for calming the body back down to it’s natural peaceful, playful state.
Excitingly TRE can be learned quickly and once learned you can use it for free for the rest of your life. You can do the exercises and tremoring releases in your own home, whenever you want.
If you want to go deeper, learn more or have some support as you go along, you can see a TRE practitioner like me, but you don’t have to do that regularly. You can just do it when you want to or if you need some extra support.
TRE gives you back your freedom to engage in your healing journey and to heal at a rate your body is comfortable with, listening to and honouring your body. It is well worth learning TRE to empower yourself and move forward with your life. You don’t need to stay stuck, defensive or hidden. You can be free.
There are many roads home, to healing, to your heart and wholeness. It doesn’t matter which road you take, what matters is your willingness to take a step forward into the unknown, into life being different. If you are willing, the Universe will meet you and guide you forth.
May you learn to run joyously along your path, knowing you are taken care of, and see the beauty of life and love all around you. For it is there just waiting for you to open your arms and embrace it. Life really is good once you heal your pain and can see more clearly. May you obtain inner peace as quickly and as easily as you can. With love, Amen.
Most people do not fully love themselves. They may like themselves a bit, think that they are okay, but they don’t cherish the precious being that they are. They don’t look at themselves with love and reverence. They don’t honour their bodily needs and treat themselves with the respectful thought, touch and actions that they would do for others.
Many of us have been taught to dislike ourselves. Life has shown us evidence that we are not lovable, good enough or okay. This is false evidence. It was just the interpretation of events that were not actually about you, even if it seemed they were.
Parents can rarely meet all needs of a child. It is too much to ask for. That is why traditionally they say it takes a tribe to raise a child. When one is tired and needs to rest, another steps in to care for the child. That way interactions can be mostly positive, loving, nurturing and accepting.
In today’s way of being parents are often trying to do it on their own or with occasional support from family or friends. The parents are tired, coping with work, money concerns, their own stuff as well as caring for the child. Out of exhaustion and frustration it is harder for all their interactions to be loving and kind to the child. There are times when they simply have nothing left to give and may feel resentful of the child and its needs. They may wish the child didn’t exist or they could give them away. This is just exhaustion. Just a lack of support in the way that modern life operates.
The children however can sense the above. They feel that Mum or Dad is not available, distant, angry or upset. They feel the absence of love and joy when Mum is depressed and lonely, struggling to cope. While the parents actions are not really about the baby itself, it will feel like it is. It’s not that it is the baby’s personality, the being that it is, that is the issue. It is the demands of parenthood in a time when that role is undervalued and unappreciated. It could be any baby and it would get the same response. However, as a baby and a child growing up we do assume it is about us personally. We may think ‘if only I was prettier, smarter, more like Mum, Dad, brother, sister – whoever does get the attention more easily – if only I was like them then I’d be lovable. Then I’d be okay’. This is the foundation of self loathing, self rejection and self denial. We start manipulating who we are to please others, to get approval, to fit in and receive love. It is all about LOVE.
In the early stages of life we need to be nurtured and looked after by others, mainly our families and friends who care for us and our welfare. Without touch and care babies do not thrive and gain weight. It physically damages them to be left alone and not cared for.Uncontrolled crying, being left to cry, actually releases cortisol into the baby’s blood stream, a stress hormone, that eats away, dissolves parts of the baby’s brain. It actually damages the brain physically.
So don’t let babies cry. Find a way to be there for them. Ask for help and support when you need it. Go outside into nature and let the Earth’s energy support you if no one else is around. Ensure that you do have plans in place for those times when your personal reserves are empty, when your gas tank is on zero. Have someone you can call on or text that can come help.
Do loving and nurturing things to reduce your stress levels and support your body. Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) is a process you can use at home whenever you like to reduce tension, stress and trauma. It helps you to come out of overwhelm, to calm down and relax, so it is easier to deal with life’s challenges and connect with others. It soothes your nervous system making it easier to face the day ahead and the tasks you must complete.
The breakdown of community and isolation that most people live in, makes connection so much harder. So many people are lonely, scared to reach out to others for fear of rejection or further loss and pain. Instead they hide at home with their pets who provide them with their main source of love and affection.
If so many people are feeling lonely, unloved or deep down feeling perhaps they aren’t lovable, don’t deserve love or will never be loved, shouldn’t we just all take the risk to love each other, to meet each others needs? Acknowledge we are all carrying wounds around this and beliefs about ourselves that we need to change, emotional pain that needs to be felt and released, so that we can realise we are perfectly okay as we are. Take a step today and reach out to another human being. Offer your friendship, your love, your time and see what happens. Not all will accept, but some might and you only need one or two to start with. Offer them your heart and say ‘I will love and accept you as you are, will you do the same for me?‘ You may not say this out loud, but energetically it is what you are wishing to portray. Get out there, join social, sporting, art or other types of groups. Do what makes your heart sing and you will start to feel more fulfilled and full of love as you honour yourself and treat yourself in more loving ways.
There is much that you can do to show yourself that you are loved, lovable and deserving of good things in life. Tell your friends how you feel and you will be surprised that they feel that way too. We all have some self doubt and insecurities. We all have issues we are working through. Sometimes sharing with others is good. Other times put that aside and just have fun. Just go out and have fun.
This is how you love yourself fully, by honouring your own needs and meeting them. By doing for yourself what your parents could not do. You choose to be there for yourself, to meet your needs, to rest when needed and have fun.You follow your heart’s messages and do what it desires. You risk opening up and connecting with others who feel safe and play together, honouring each other.
Love is not hard. It is our natural state, the most natural thing for us to do. We have just been conditioned to be wary of it due to life experiences.It could be school events where you were bullied or teased. It could be workplace incidents that led you to feel incompetent or not good enough. These issues can occur at any time of our life, but the seed of them is planted during our time in the womb and as a baby.
A foetus knows whether it is wanted or not wanted while growing in the Mother’s womb. The foetus receives the Mother’s blood supply and all the molecules of emotion it contains, through the umbilical cord. It carries this from the start, this knowing, and it forms the start of its identity. Preconception, pregnancy and birth truly are significant and important events which shape the personality of the child and its feeling of being loved or not, safe or not, wanted or not. These are times when tenderness and care are needed. When loving touch is needed. Ensure that these are times of love and joy, and your baby will flourish and grow with less doubts about self and his/her self worth.
The important thing to realise is everyone goes through this. We are all carrying degrees of ‘Am I okay?’ questioning. Realise you are. You are enough. You are perfectly enough exactly as you are. Find the courage to show yourself to the world and stand strong in who you are. You don’t need to play games for approval or modify yourself to fit in. Let it go and be yourself. Let it go and be happy with what you have and who you are. As you do so your inner world will flourish and your outer world will alter to match it. You are okay. You are lovable, and you do deserve the best in life. Do the healing necessary so you believe in yourself and live life freely as the beautiful human being that you are. Blessed BE. Amen.
People isolate themselves when they are feeling overwhelmed by life.They may have been hurt badly and not trust anyone or they may be fearful and depressed. Either way hiding out alone feels safer than risking contact with a world that to them seems harsh, unforgiving, cruel and threatening.
Life is not like that at all. You are always surrounded in the love of God/Source Energy, however, most people are so busy in their heads that they don’t notice it. You rush from one place, one task, one test to the next. You don’t rest fully in the peace of God/Source Energy, in your heart or spend time in nature deeply connecting to the Earth and your true nature.
People rush, rush, rush and then feel exhausted, then they wonder why they have no energy to enjoy life, to go and have fun. They get caught up in negative thoughts and conditioning, which just play out on an endless loop, until they wake up from this state of exhaustion and seek the light.
Sadly all this busy-ness has led to diminished connections with other people. It is rare for you to stop and meet another fully, to look into their eyes and feel their essence, to hear what is going on in their hearts and to talk honestly, truthfully about their experience of life.
You are all walking around like empty cups. Your cups should be filled with love and be over flowing from you to others. Connecting to God, to nature, to each other deeply fills your cup. But most people, nearly everyone, thinks they are too busy to slow down and have their cup filled.
If conflict occurs and you feel fearful, your cup is drained of the little amount of love you have in it. Then you feel empty, drained, exhausted. You know that it was the conflict with that person who led to you feeling drained, so you vow to isolate yourself from people like that, so you don’t get drained further. But in isolating yourself out of fear your cup stays empty. You get stuck in fear and that is the opposite vibration of love.
To love fully you need to be filling your own cup from God/Source/Nature, then you have so much love it doesn’t matter if a little conflict occurs. You will be able to respond to it more lovingly and be less affected by it as your cup is full and over flowing. Instead of getting upset, angry or blaming the person for negatively affecting you, you would simply send them love, feel compassion for them, as they are obviously having a hard time and have an empty cup.
So the key to feeling good is not to isolate out of fear, but to connect with love to God/Source/Nature, to listen to your heart and do things that bring you joy. Do this and your cup is filled, then it is easier to face the other aspects of life.
With people that you do feel safe and good around, make sure you take the time to connect, to talk heart to heart, to fel seen, heard, validated. You will never have that kind of connection with everyone, but when your cup is full the interactions that are less pleasant don’t bother you so much.
Yes you should have boundaries between yourself and those who disrespect you, abuse you or take advantage of you. That is self love, to say no to their demands. But make sure you spend time with those who do love you, respect you and treat you well. Don’t isolate and hide – at home, in social media, in work, etc. Come out into the open and breathe in fresh air, absorb the love, take the risk to open your heart and be present to what life is bringing you. It is all helping you grow and all leading you forward to a higher vibration, to the vibration of love. It is a process, a long one for many who resist out of fear, but know you will get there in the end, everyone will.
When you are isolating out of fear it is like you are stuck, frozen, unable to move and life life fully. Symbolically, that is what is also occurring within you. Any buried emotions, trauma, stress and tension gets held in your body, in your muscles and it is this stuck energy that leads to physical pain such as aching backs, shoulders, hips knees, necks. It is this tension, this rigidity, locked-in that stops our bodies from moving fluidly, from gliding with ease through life.
When our body gets locked up tight so does our thinking. It becomes less flexible. We see more in black and white terms. We see less love and goodness in the world because we are seeing through the lens of pain, of tightness, of soreness, of defeat, anger, disappointment and fear. The way we feel inside our body affects our thoughts and way of seeing in the world. We see less opportunity for change, for improvement. We slump down into resignation, shut down, overwhelm. We curl into a ball to protect ourself.
All of this inner tension, stress and pain can be eased if we use Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) to activate the body’s natural process for releasing that tension, stress and trauma.
The body has a way to ‘shake it off’, to cleanse that energy adn use up all of the fight/flight molecules stored in the body from all the times when we were triggered, but didn’t fight back, run away or speak our truth. All the cortisol and adrenaline was released into our blood stream to prime us to act, but we didn’t so it never got used up and these chemicals stay in the body as incomplete trauma activations. They build up and it is part of what causes our muscles to then tighen up and ache.
TRE can help you to shake out those energies, to complete the trauma activations, so that your body can finally open back up, relax, see and feel more clearly from the now, rather than feeling from the past. Clearing out that stress and tension enables you to see differently, to have easier social interactions, to feel more playful and safe.
When our body is tight, wound up, on hyper-alert, of course it is hard to play or joyfully interact with others, but that all changes when you complete the trauma activations and enable your body to come out of high alert back into peace. It is well worth doing so you can come out of isolation and enjoy life.
When you have healed the hurts in your body, it is much easier to open your heart, to love yourself, others and just BE. You can be present to all that occurs, choosing faith and peace, knowing it is all perfect and all of life is made of God and is doing God’s will. There are no bad people or places or choices, just learning opportunities. Just people who have closed their hearts to love and the light and who will open back up in time. Nothing to do or force, just trust God’s plan and love all that arises.
Send love to your fear, to your pain and to your sadness. Send love to those who you perceive have harmed you. That is what they need most, love. Noone who is feeling good about themself and is at peace within would willingly hurt another. They know that to do so hurts themself. So know that anyone who does hurt you is suffering, they are struggling within themself and with life.
You don’t need to accept the poor treatment, but try to send them love instead of hate or anger or judgement. They are judging themselves harshly and that is what leads to their angst. It can be torture when you are stuck in self defeating patterns of self judgement, self hate and self loathing.
Sadly many people speak to themselves more harshly than they would speak to others. They beat themselves up internally calling themselves names and feeling not good enough. It can be a very dark place. Know that noone will treat you as badly as you treat yourself!
When you are in that dark place the whole world seems dark, but the light is there, just waiting for you to see it and let it in. This is the process of awakening to love, light, God, peace and joy. This is the path back to wholeness. Become your own best friend, be loving and kind to yourself, say nice things about yourself to yourself. Be the loving parent you wished you had.
As you become more loving to you internally, the outside world will mirror it, bringing you people who treat you with more kindness and love. Life is just a mirror showing us what we still have to heal.
Heal it and see the truth, there is nothing but love around us. Anything else is an illusion created by our minds out of fear, judgement and hate. Heal it and you wil see peace, joy and beauty wherever you go. for it is there, we just have to clear out the blocks, the filters to seeing it. Blessed BE. Amen.
Remember everyone is on this journey, you are all isolating out of fear to some degree, not showing your true self for fear of rejection or ridicule. Yet you all are longing for love and acceptance, so why not give it. Just love everyone as they are. If you could do this the pain and fear will drop away and you will all feel safer, happier and more able to enjoy life fully. Choose to love and be loving, that is the key. Blessed BE, Amen.
Here is a great article explaining how our ancestor’s negative experiences affect their DNA expression, which can be inherited by future generations. For instance, if Grandma was raised in an abusive, alcoholic home or suffered some other trauma, some of that trauma and reactions to it can be passed onto future generations, predisposing them to becoming anxious or depressed.
There are higher rates of mental illness in society as people are living more disconnected lives. Parents are busy working and earning money for possessions, they do not have the depth or quality time required for deep bonding with a child. Without the bonding children do not develop a strong sense of being loved, lovable, acceptable or okay. They are left wondering whether they are lovable or not. This is the seed of mental illness – this questioning of self, this doubt as to one’s acceptability or not.It leads to self hatred / abuse and less ability to connect deeply with others for fear of rejection and loss.
People therefore isolate themselves and feel lonely, cold, separate and this too is emotionally painful. All of these sad, negative feeling emotions get bottled up and become the dominant, most common feelings in their life experience. Naturally this low vibration state results in depression and passivity. The person feels stuck, unable to pull themselves out of the situation.
Poor diet makes the situation worse and can result in sugar and hormone imbalances. Lack of exercise also results in imbalances that could be easily rectified. Serotonin and other brain chemicals can be balanced naturally – rest, spend time in nature, nurture and love yourself. This is hard to do when you feel you don’t deserve love or aren’t worthy of it. It feels like a waste of time to try and improve when it feels so bad and overwhelming.
Clearly it is at the mental level and emotional level that most work needs to be done to clear up negative thinking and expectations and open up to love. The emotions need to be felt and released so the person can balance back up to their natural state of peace and joy. It is possible. They just have to do the healing/transformational work.
False chemicals can help in the short term e.g. antidepressants or hormones/brain chemicals. But it is better if the body heals itself and starts producing the required chemical itself. This can and does happen. Exercise increases levels of serotonin and other endorphins, diet can also influence it, as of course can changes in thinking. The body can rebuild itself.
You live at paces that your body was not designed for. The frantic busyness of modern life leads to stress, fatigue and burn out. More and more people are affected and when they can’t cope internally with the pressure of their life it gets called mental illness. However, the solution in most cases is simple – simplify your lives; heal your emotional pain; learn to love and accept who you are; learn to be the the kind parent to yourself that you needed when little; learn to laugh and play and accept what comes; let go of trying to control life or impress others. Be yourself. That is enough. Life wants you to be your authentic self – live from your heart – follow / act on your passions, be of service to all in your own unique way.
By liberating yourself from the rat race, you show others it can be done and that they also could choose to do it – to choose freedom, simplicity, health, deeper connection with self, others and the Earth. This is healthy. This is how you are meant to live. It is all about love. If children are conceived in love, raised with love, learn how to love and respect themselves, others and the Earth there would be lower rates of mental illness.
Yes the pollution of food, air, water, soil does have some impact, but it is relatively minor compared to the internal pollution from negative, self loathing thoughts and painful emotions locked inside. These eat away at your spirit, your zest for life and leave you feeling flat, exhausted and low – a recipe for lethargy, depression and therefore mental illness.
Have a spring clean of your internal closet and let go of the darkness. Let the light, bright, colourful aspects of yourself come to the fore. You truly can enjoy life more fully. You just have to clean out the old and make room for the new to enter and anchor into your vibration. You can heal all pains with time, energy, love and awareness.
See the bigger picture and purpose of life, realise that ‘negative’ events in your life occurred to help you grow and evolve and are leading you onto something greater in yourself that could not have been achieved without that event.
Life is a mystery. Things happen. You can’t control it, but you can choose how you respond to it. You can choose to wallow in pain and regret and depression or choose to make the most of what you have and live life fully embracing all that comes your way – the choice is yours.
Mental illness or health is a choice in the sense that you can learn the skills to bring you back to balance, back to peace and joy.
Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) can help you to discharge the tension and stress in your body that has you on hyper alert. It can help your body and nervous system to calm down so that you can see more clearly rather than seeing through the lens of trauma and past experiences.
TRE can help set you free of the emotional pain and discharge it so that you can live in the now seeing life around you from a more open and positive perspective. While the pain and trauma is inside you it taints your view of the world and prevents you from relaxing, feeling safe and enjoying life more fully.
TRE can be done at home regularly to help you slowly, bit by bit to release the tension and flow more freely with life. If you have trouble moving through your emotions when they come up you may need to work with a TRE provider first for a little while so you can learn to self-regulate, but after that you can use it for free for the rest of your life as a tool to help you reduce stress, tension and trauma so you can live life more peacefully doing what you want in life.
You can’t control what happened in your past or what will occur in the future, but you can control how you respond to it and how you let it affect your life. Your reactions are your choice and you can change the way you react by altering your thoughts; altering your emotional balance inside; and by changing your expectations or core beliefs.There are many ways to do this. They are just skills to learn, that all of humanity would benefit from, so you could all live in peace and harmony.
Depression occurs when a person has not been able to express their emotions and has bottled them up inside. Their bodies are full of sadness, grief, anger and emotional pain – shame, guilt and more. Through life’s many challenges the person has faced the difficulty, but come out of it wounded, disappointed and dismayed – wondering if that is all there is to life.
In their dismay and disappointment they shut down from life and the possibility of joy, love and peace. They come to expect further hurt, loss and pain, so [they] hide away from life and interacting with others who they fear will judge and ridicule them for feeling the way they do.
What they don’t realise is that everyone goes through challenges, disappointments, and disturbances to life as they knew it. Things happen. People die, jobs end, heart attacks occur. These challenges come unexpectedly and can knock a person from peace and balance into a negative spin. Every one goes through it. There is no shame in struggling to cope with life’s pressures. You just need to learn how to process and release the emotions, the pent up energy and pain, so that you return to a state of balance and peace.
Mental work is required to adjust thinking patterns and come to allow hope, positive expectations of the future – to know ‘Good things can and will happen for me’; ‘I am a good person and I deserve good things’.
Often once a person feels blue they start to beat themselves up – to feel less than others, not okay, incompetent. This just worsens the situation as they then get stuck at home not wanting to go out and face the world. They don’t want to reach out for help or tell anyone as they are so embarrassed and ashamed, but really reaching out is what is needed.
Trying something new, making friends, having fun, speaking your truth, feeling your emotions and breathing through them, learning to witness them and not be overwhelmed by them – creating distance between them and you – the emotions and your true self – all help. They are just skills that need to be learned, as is being nice and supportive to yourself – eating well, exercising, moving through emotions with kindness to self, nurturing and nourishing self.
Many people when depressed feel like trash, worthless and that is how they treat themselves. They need to move from that to seeing themselves as someone who has temporarily lost focus and just needs love and support to get back on track.
They need to become the kind, loving parent to themselves – giving themselves permission to rest when needed and to play and enjoy life. It sounds easy to do, but it is very challenging as when you are depressed your energy is so dense, low in vibration, that it is hard to hear your intuition or higher self. It is hard to get guidance from within or from spirit. You don’t feel the spiritual support all around you as your vibration is such that their messages can’t get through.
You can shift your vibration higher by movement – exercise or dance.
You can walk in nature or at the beach and let Mother Nature cleanse you.
You can listen to music that uplifts you or even chakra balancing CDs which help shift the blockages, making it easier to access them and release the emotion.
You can have a relaxing bath with salt in it to cleanse your energy body and release toxins. It helps to relax your muscles as well.
Body work – massage, reiki, etc, all helps as it aids the body to move out of its lethargic state and to let light and energy back in.
Breathing in gold light and seeing it flood your whole body – purifying it and cleansing it, also helps.
There are many activities that can help. Writing a diary, drawing or painting how you feel – it all helps shift the current low vibration of your body to a higher state.
The key is accessing and releasing the buried emotions as this is what keeps a person stuck in depression. They feel they can’t go on, they can’t face anything more as they feel they wouldn’t cope and it’s not worth the effort or risk to try. This type of thinking leads to fear and paralysis.
When your body is full of fear and you feel stuck, paralysed, unable to move forward, you are stuck in a freeze reaction. Your nervous system is overwhelmed and in a sense has shut down, it’s frozen and moved into collapse.
This is a normal process that occurs when a person has experienced or is in the process of experiencing trauma. You move through fight or flight into freeze and then into collapse.
In the frozen state, the body is still hoping the predator threatening you won’t see you and you’ll get to stay alive. You’re frozen, but still on hyperalert ready to flee if you get the chance. This is exhausting for the body as it uses up a lot of energy. It’s like you’ve got your foot on the brake and the gas pedal at the same time primed ready to act but staying still.
If escape seems impossible and death seems imminent you move into dissociation and collapse. Here your body is pumped full of natural endorphins, opioids, to numb you so you don’t feel the predator’s attack and what occurs to your body. This is why when you’re depressed you can feel detached, numb, not really present to what is occurring around you.
All of these bodily reactions are an innate mechanism that occurs at the subconscious level. You don’t choose to be numb and shutdown. Your body does it automatically to protect itself.
To come out of this state you need to calm your body so it feels safe again and can relax. One way to do that is by using Trauma and Tension Release Exercises (TRE). It is the body’s natural tremoring mechanism to release stress, tension and trauma. It can help calm your body down out of hyperarousal back through fight and flight, and down to calm relating, which is our natural baseline when we feel safe and supported.
Learning to witness your thoughts and watch them pass through your mind is another key.You don’t have to respond to the thoughts, be hooked by them, to go into the drama they try to create. Thank the thought and let it go.
Tell yourself positive messages –
‘I choose to be kind and loving to myself now’.
‘Even though I have done things I am not proud of in the past, I am now choosing to behave differently’. ‘
Even though others I cared for didn’t seem to love me, I am choosing to love me now’.
‘I am okay, I am worthy of love and life’.
All of these belief systems need to be programmed into the body and lots, lots more. Every negative self belief or belief about life can be changed. There are many ways to do this.
You can simply repeat the positive belief over and over until it becomes your new habit – like writing and displaying affirmations to help anchor it into your consciousness.
You can see a practitioner of the Lifeline Technique, Pysch-K or other modalities that reprogram the subconscious mind – literally replacing the old belief with the new one.
You can use EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) also called Tapping to tap the new belief into your system
There are lots of ways to do it, but the key is to realise that it is these old, outdated negative thought patterns that keep a person feeling so flat and depressed.If their thoughts are really negative it is hard to motivate yourself into action. So it is here with the negative thoughts that change has to occur.
There are many tools you can use to help shift depression. It is just a matter of trying different things and finding what works best for you.
Know that simply staying stuck won’t work. You need to take action to change your situation. Depression is so common in today’s world that no one will laugh or ridicule you for it. There is lots of help out there.
If your emotional pain is so deep that you become suicidal then it can be useful to go on anti-depressants temporarily to give your body a chance to relax and restrengthen, before you delve into processing the emotions. You will still need to go through them and release them, but building your stamina first can help.
Anti-depressants are not a cure, just a temporary dulling of the intensity of the emotions, so you don’t feel them so much. They numb you slightly to the pain and this can be beneficial for a short while. It is not beneficial long time as it will not help you to find peace, joy or excitement in life. With your doctor’s help you can reduce the anti-depressant while you learn new skills to support yourself to function more effectively.
Depression results from emotional pain and disappointments in life, so people who suffer it need love, support and encouragement from those around them. Be kind to all people you interact with, as everyone is going through their own challenges and all need kindness and love to help them through.
Peace is found once the old thinking and negative emotions are released. These are replaced with joy, passion, fun and happiness.It is possible. It is your natural state of being, just life’s experiences took you away from it. We can all regain balance and peace if we do the work needed to shift that which no longer serves us and to fill the space with that which does. Blessed BE. Amen.
