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The beauty of my depression

For the period of a month, there is a light depression in me.
Depression is one of my favorite feelings. As Marshall used to say: “Depression is when you don’t know what you need and you don’t know what you want.”-
Depression is a certain pain that pulls me in, to be closer with myself, to hear myself (my Needs and my Requests).
Christmas holidays offered me the opportunity to take 10 days to be on my own. I took off to Malta to let depression do what it is there to do- to guide me inwards, towards myself.
Here is more about my depression:
 
Story:  The voices behind my depression:
When listening to my depression, the main message that came to me was: “I miss creativity“. Immediately I thought: “So what to do now? Should I become an artist again..?”
1) The thought “What to do” is causing my depression:
I noticed: whenever I think “What to do?” I start feeling depressed. It is a jackal thought: “What should I do? What is the good/best/right thing to do?”.
So all throughout my vacation, each time I catch myself thinking “What to do?” (for example: “What shall I do today? Where should I go now? Shall I turn left here?”), I do a Self-Connection process:
I stop → I breath 2 times to welcome the sensations of the heavy depressed feeling in my body → I connect with the essence behind the thought (Need): “I long for inspiration/creativity” → and I remind myself (Self Request)- “It doesn’t matter what I do, I am on vacation- this is time to do nothing!”.
Once I do that, my body feels light and inspired again.
 
2) Doing nothing and welcoming death:
The first thing I am habituated to do in the morning when I wake up is to look at the clock in order to plan my day (“What to do??!!”). So as I am constantly thinking “What to do?”, I constantly feel restless.
So I practice the following: Instead of looking at the clock, I just stay in bed, dream, fall asleep again, be with the sensations in my body (mourn & celebrate)….
This was a torture… Only after a few days of practice, while sitting on top of a cliff in front of the ocean I could suddenly sit without restlessness. I spoke with myself aloud (it is so great when there is no one around…), and I heard myself saying to myself: “Yes, maybe I took all I could from this life/world. Maybe there is nothing else for me to discover. Maybe it is time for me to die.”
Finally I touched the sentence that was hidden behind my depression. Saying this thought out loud was a taste of honesty I didn’t feel for a few months. Naming it, I suddenly felt calm, relieved and alive.
And, as often happens to me when I welcome the possibility of death, life starts to happen:
 
3) Following impulses of beauty and pleasure:
Then I saw: ‘creativity’ has nothing to do with becoming an artist (luckily, as I was not looking forward to going back into that…). It is about being in the unknown:  
When I was an artist, I spend a lot of my time ‘exploring through the unknown’: Like a child, I followed inner impulses of authenticity, pleasure and beauty, without yet understanding what the meaning of them were, I just followed my body wherever it wanted to go.
This can be well explained by an example I like from the psychologist Carl Jung- He had a time when he suddenly wanted to play with sand in the sand box. He didn’t understand why, he just played with sand. The whole day for some weeks or months. That turned to be the beginning of him developing the theory about ‘Symbolism’.
So my vacation turns into a “being in the not knowing, following impulses of beauty and pleasure”.
Sitting on the cliff, I found myself singing. Singing in a special way. It was probably not beautiful for someone who would listen from outside, but it was pleasurable and beautiful to me- I followed my vocal cords as they were going, without resisting nor fighting them. Finally I re-touched the magic of spontaneity. Characters started to speak through my voice and they made me laugh…
 
After that, my vacation didn’t turn into paradise. The thought “What to do” continues banging in my brain every few seconds. I loose myself in it, feel heaviness in my body, and over and over again I reconnect with myself through the process of Self-Connection.
Yet, there is something in my belly that is here since a few days. A certain sensation that is all the time there, that I would call- I feel happy.
 
With love for depression,
Yoram