This video by Marisa Peer is brilliant. Very insightful. Lots of simple healing advice. Well worth watching.
From: http://blog.mindvalleyacademy.com/happiness-and-positive-living/how-to-run-your-mind-for-phenomenal-success
Tag: overcoming depression
What is the best way to heal after an abortion?
An abortion causes a death not only to the fetus, but also inside the parents. The guilt, shame and grief that results is enormous. Some push it away, pretend it didn’t happen. Some get angry and want to blame their circumstances or the other person. Some want to die themselves or punish themselves for their choices. None of this is helpful.
What helps most is to honour the child, to love them, to thank them for choosing you as a parent and to acknowledge the truth that you weren’t willing to accept the role. Thank them for choosing you and make it clear that you were not ready or capable for whatever reasons, but you love and accept them into your heart. You did not reject the child itself. It is worthy of life, of love, of acceptance. You were just not able to provide it at the time. This is the truth that must be heard and honoured, so that soul does not feel alone, abandoned, rejected and lives in pain. Let it live in love inside your heart.
“I honour you for wanting to be with me, to have me be your parent. I honour that and I wish you well. I pray you find soul’s more willing than I, who say yes, next time you attempt to birth into life on Earth”.
Imagining them happy with new parents is beneficial. You give them permission to move on and the same for yourself. There is no benefit from getting sick, dying, staying small or unsuccessful or childless. You are allowed to be happy, successful, healthy and be a good, loving parent when you are ready.
You do not have to miss out on life just because the child did. Choose instead to do something good to honour the child. Donate to an orphanage, honour a foster child, carry a photo of your loved one in your heart, share your story with the world to help others. Make sure something good occurs as a result of the experience and the child’s sacrifice.
“Because of you I have healed my wounds and become a better person. I am no longer focused on my career at the expense of everything else. I am no longer so caught up in my head that I don’t hear my heart. Because of you I have faced my hurt and processed it. I have become a better person and I will use it to help others who also need to heal and hear their heart’s messages. Because of you I am living a healthier life and when I do get pregnant again I will realise how lucky I am and will be grateful. I will never again take it for granted or so lightly. I now realise the seriousness of my choice and the severe consequences that can result. I will not make reckless or thoughtless choices again. I will honour all who come across my path. Because of you and the pain I felt at your loss, I have learned what it is like to suffer needlessly, to be deeply depressed and to regret your choices. I will be better able to empathise with others who also suffer, due to my experiences with you. I will be a better person, Mother and therapist, because of you. Thank you for the many gifts you have given me. May you also receive gifts and blessings throughout your life that lead to your soul’s evolutionary growth. Thank you for being that catalyst for me.”
If you can find some form of the above, some form of value that has resulted from the experience, it can help shift the guilt and blame, pain and sadness. It can help awaken hope, love and light – allowing life again.
Know that every soul gets exactly what it needs to experience for its evolution. They choose what will occur prior to incarnating. So a child knows in advance whether or not it will get born or die young. This is known to the soul/spirit of the child and because it is still in spirit form before birth, it is still connected to God/Source and knows what is occurring.
Those souls that choose to be miscarried or aborted have chosen that experience. They may not be ready for a full life experience and just want a taste. They may choose to go through it to assist the Mother and bring new life into her body – the cells growing and cleansing her body of the old. There can be many reasons. The soul may choose the experience knowing it will be a catalyst to shift the parents out of their current slumber – to improve things or leave the relationship. God and that soul knows the reasons. You will too once you pass over and see the reasons for all events in your life and what they were teaching you and helping you evolve.
There are no mistakes, everything happens perfectly for the evolution of all souls. So forgive yourself, accept your choices, feel the pain and let it go. Vow to do better next time and honour the child that was and those that come after. Choose to honour the child by living your life fully. You are allowed to enjoy your life and be happy. That is what God wants for you and all souls.
You have not sinned or killed. It was not your intent to brutally slaughter the child. It is not the same as murder at all. Your circumstances, your maturity level, all led to your choice. With greater wisdom you would have chosen differently. But at the time you did what you thought was best. Do not ruin the rest of your life over that choice. Let yourself off the hook and be happy. Live fully and be a loving parent when the time is right. It truly is okay and you have been forgiven – by God, by the soul involved. You just have to forgive yourself. You can do it.
If you are struggling seek help and support from loved ones, a therapist or a support group. So many people have experienced this. It is actually quite common, it is just not talked about. You don’t have to suffer alone. Reach out and get the assistance you need.
You can use Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) to help release the stress, tension and trauma, so that you can relax more, come out of numbness, depression and shut down.
TRE can help you to shake out the pain, teh dense emotion and stuck energy, so that you come back to life more fully. You can use it regularly as part of your self-care routine. Once you have learned TRE and how to self-regulate your shaking you can use TRE for free at home whenever you want to help you and your body to relax and find peace. It is well worth doing.
By Jodi-Anne (05 Aug 2015).
Further free guidance on healing techniques and self love are available on the Life Insights and Healing from child abuse pages of this website.
Why is mental illness increasing?
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.
By Jodi-Anne (31 July 2015).
Further free guidance on healing techniques and self love are available on the Life Insights and Healing from child abuse pages of this website.
How to move through depression and find peace
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.
By Jodi-Anne (10 July 2015).