Depression
The following is a test to determine if your mission on earth is complete....Check your pulse. If you have one, your mission on earth is not complete.
Depression is nasty. I know because I was deeply depressed for the first fifty years of my life. The worst years were in my thirties. I remember cursing in the morning because I woke up and was still alive. I never went to counseling or took medication for depression, although I probably should have. I just dealt with it. I don't think anybody who was close to me had a clue as to how bad my depression was, they just saw me as being sad a lot of the time. I think that most people who deal with depression are worse off than they let on.
Depression is many things to many people. It kills your energy, it sucks out your life force, it kills your creativity, it flattens your personality, it can even make you suicidal. At the time, I saw depression as every negative thing I could imagine, and as long as I saw it that way, it held it's ugly power over me. In my early fifties I decided to attack depression from a different angle. Why not, nothing else had worked. I chose to see my depression as a gift. It was a gift because it offered me the motivation I needed to change my outlook about life. I realized that I had to take power over this thing and quit reacting to it. As long as I reacted to it, I fed it, and the more I fed, the stronger it became.
I started to read motivational and self help books. These books gave me the inspiration I needed to take control over the way I thought about things, to start acting and quit reacting. I realized that life was always going to be riddled with problems, but we can chose how we deal with those problems. We can chose to be in control or be controlled. I was tired of being controlled.
Suicide was never an option for me. No matter how dark I felt, I never entertained the option of suicide for one second. I have always believed down to the core of my soul that we are here for a reason and that it is important to do what we came here to do. One of the things I came here to do was to experience depression. It would be my Avenue to connecting to my higher consciousness, to change from pessimism to optimism, to see the glass as always half full instead of half empty.
I started my journey out of darkness by practicing what is called the law of gratitude. I started giving thanks for everything in my life. Every night I would lay in bed and think about the good things that happened that day, no matter how small they were. If it was only the weather, then I would try to focus on how nice the weather was and feel gratitude for the wonderful weather that day. I worked on ignoring the things that depressed or upset me. In the morning, I would give thanks for a brand new day, regardless of how I really felt about it.
I also focused on the beauty of things. I made myself recognize everything that was beautiful. It could be a dog or a tree or a pretty lady who smiled at me. If it wasn't beautiful, I refused to put anymore attention on it than I needed to. In time I would stretch this exercise out to the point of seeing beauty in everything. The important thing is not that you see everything as beautiful all the time, but that you try to. By keeping your attention focused on the positive things in life, you kill the breeding ground for depression. Soon it has nowhere to survive.
I still feel those dark moments trying to creep in from time to time like a heavy weight descending down on my consciousness. Except now, I have the tools to shrug them off. I will not let it own me, not ever again. There is so much beauty and joy in life, we just have to chose to recognize it. The hardest part is recognizing the beauty in the problems that we face everyday. When we can see everything as a potential gift, we diminish the negative power those experiences could otherwise have over us.