Radical approach to depression
When I was living in New Mexico studying acupuncture and all the rest, the main axiom for all healing work was clearly to educate the patient in taking full responsibility for their own health and their own state.
When I returned to London 1983 and set up what swiftly grew into a vast, thriving practice, this then became my central message.
But I soon discovered the good people of London hadn’t progressed to the stage of evolution common in New Mexico at that time, which was pretty much then new age central in those early halcyon days of the human potential movement.
Back then people hadn’t started heaving into the anti-depressants like they do now, with upwards of 30% (at least, at least) of the population of the developed countries on them these days. And all they do is numb you to the very internal processes you actually need to be aware of in order to rearrange them into a more harmonious and beneficial configuration, if you want to enjoy life fully.
And after all enjoying your life fully is the quest. Enjoying every moment, including the ones when you’re feeling glum, out of sorts, fed up or so on – enjoying feeling that way rather than fighting it – is the antithesis of depression.
Depression has become endemic. This is essentially due to us being divorced from the natural environment, from interaction with the natural environment in the sense of hunting, gathering, food-growing and so on. In thrall instead to the electronic womb. This comes along with and encourages being divorced from our true natures.
The electronic womb provides seamless reality – plastic money and globalized facilities and systems mean we can move about inured to the shock of the new on encountering foreign cultures. Inured we become dehumanized. Dehumanized we’re inclined to act, to pretend we’re something more than we are. We become self-important. Self-important we overlook the actual importance of the Tao that makes all this be here. We become divorced from our souls.
The soul left unattended, uncared for and ignored, feels great anguish. Yet it has no obvious way of expressing it so it closes down.
This leaves the untethered thinking mind free to indulge in overthink. Overthink leads swiftly to self-absorption, self-absorption to self-obsession, self-obsession to disassociation, and disassociation to alienation.
Closing down it presses in on itself – it compresses or depresses itself.
If we were in touch with the natural cycles, if we were engaged in real and essential labor rather than screen-based activity, if we were expressing ourselves authentically, there wouldn’t be this epidemic. People would get fed up, they’d get glum, their moods would sing between high and low, and they’d take that in their stride without assuming they had a disease. And the drug companies wouldn’t have the trillions of dollars of annual revenues from selling drugs we don’t actually need.
Not that I bear them any grudges or judge them for it. What they do is their business. Likewise what each of us do is our own business. But whether wittingly or unwittingly they’re nonetheless doing humanity a disservice in this respect. Anti-depressants encourage not taking responsibility for your state and thereby disempower you. They encourage you to depend on others for your sense of wellbeing, rather than facilitate it yourself.
The more I’m thinking about it, the more startlingly blatantly clear it is that humanity needs to know some basic truths.
Love, B