Taking Out Stones: Dealing with Depression

I remember when I lived off the grid in Oregon.  It was on the edge of nowhere which is often more full of somewhere than the agreed upon “somewhere” that people call cities or townships.  I had gone to the farmer’s market in the nearest town and traded a vendor daffodil bulbs in exchange for a shoulder massage.  I came back to the nowhere that was very much a somewhere to plant these bulbs in the earth, but I did not have a shovel.  What to do?  The ground was full of small rocks that were lodged into the packed earth, tightly holding onto their mother. After  being used to dwelling in one spot for so long, they did not want to move.   But, I wanted to plant flowers to add much needed color to this landscape. 

I sat on the ground next to my small, crumpled paper bag of bulbs and put my hands on the earth.  My hands became the shovel.  But, that is no easy task when the earth is so tightly packed with an order that makes everything fit perfectly, an order I intended to disrupt by planting bulbs.  Perhaps the fairies wanted to see flowers on this land, too.  I felt that there was a force helping me that I could not see, but had the same intention. 

When I tried to dig with my hands without any order, it was grueling.  If I had not surrendered my situation, I would have been there to this day, puzzled with tired hands.  Instead, I “heard” which rock I had to pull out first.  Magically, I was guided.  First I needed to loosen this rock before that rock would budge.  Then I needed to tend to a rock nearby that held others in place.  There was an order to this digging and I had been “invited” to partake in changing the scheme of things one stone at a time.  I could not rush things.  I could not control things.  I had to listen to which stones could be dislodged first so that they next one would come loose. 

I was able to remove enough stones, one at a time in a certain, unseen, order, to create space for the daffodil bulbs.  I had left that area before winter, so I never got to see the yellow splendor that decorated the earth, but I was told they spread and created a fairy world of wonder. 

It is years later that the memory of planting those daffodil bulbs wafted into my consciousness.  I was trying to make things in my life change without heeding the lesson of one stone at a time. I was frustrated at the timing and seemingly disorder of things.  I wanted situations to work out the way I thought they needed to be.  Instead, I had to stop and remember that lesson:  One Stone at a Time. 

We can become depressed when we think things are not working out as we planned.  But, thinking in another way can help us remove a lot of negativity.  One stepping stone leads to another stepping stone.  One stone is loosened to help remove another one.   We don’t have to understand, with our ordinary mind, the whole process.  We might understand some day, we might not.  Trust the process.  We may only “hear” to remove one stone at a time or to step on one stepping stone before another, but we may not see the whole picture.   Something important is happening, but it is below the surface so we cannot see it.  We often panic or get depressed because we cannot see the order underlying things.  In our fret to control, we might try to remove stones that are not loosened by other stones first.  We might try to jump to stepping stones that are too far away from where we stand, causing feelings of failure and misery.  We might lack patience and try to bulldoze everything at once leaving ourselves exhausted and disconnected from our true selves.  We might live our whole life trying to dig in areas that are not meant for daffodil bulbs.  

Relax.  There is an order to things when we stop to connect with an energy that speaks to us when we are quiet and receptive.   The rest of the world may not understand, but that is not important.  What is important is that your intention to beautify the world in some way has been heard.   You will be guided, step by step, to loosen stone by stone.  This, in itself, is a way to overcome many types of depression.  Trust the process.  Listen to your heart.  

What to Do with Depression that Feels like Anguish

There are many types of depression.  We know about them.  Some are lethargic, some are aggressive.  Some eat at us and pick on our skin as if we must pluck out our feathers while some are quiet and smolder underneath.  Some are so loud everyone can see our pain, others can be hidden buy our Huge.   Some are a constant hum that we are annoyed with while some have us grasping at escapes to end our pain.  What kind of depression do you have?

I notice that many types of depression have a similar origin.  Some of us get depressed because we don’t like what we are doing or we don’t want to do what we think we have to do.  We want to die to escape the pain but we don’t, instead we get depressed.  But what if we tried something else?   What if we allowed ourselves to do what we enjoyed doing? 

Many of us don’t know what we enjoy doing.  This is because we live in a work ethic society that puts guilt on us if we do what we enjoy.  We feel guilty if we are doing anything besides what we think we should be doing.  Even if we severely don’t want to do what we think we should be doing, we punish ourselves for not doing it.  This not only creates depression, it creates anguish.   Some therapists can help us try to do what we think we should be doing.  We often think that if we forced ourselves to overcome the barrier to our resistance, then we would feel better.   But, what if this was a totally backward way of thinking?  What if trying to overcome what we think we need to overcome is not on target with our Higher Thinking and Higher Feeling Self? 

There are many success stories about people we are successful and happy because they ditched their “should” mentality and listened to their heart.  In fact, most people that we read about that are happy have the same story.  They overcame their “should” story.  It is not an easy thing to do, especially if we don’t think we can succeed.  It is even harder if we have tried a number of times to listen to our heart, but still failed.   It can feel like a lose/lose situation.  Lose if one forces themselves to do what they don’t want to do and lose if they try to listen to their heart.  So, instead many just become depressed and do neither what they think they should do nor what they think they want to do.   They might escape into alcohol or drugs or sleeping or take pharmaceuticals to try to solve their problems, but often make things worse.   Death often looks better. However, the Soul doesn’t die and we might have to repeat this life over again, only it can be even more challenging if we end this one too early by our own hand. 

Some end up seeking help.  Sometimes that helps, sometimes it makes us feel that there is nothing that can help.  We are told to be positive and thankful over and over again, but it can be difficult if we think we need to do something to pull through, but cannot muster the energy to do that thing. Depression can grab us tightly so that it might take all day to change our mind and feelings to be positive and thankful.  Even if we manage that, we still tell ourselves that we didn’t succeed in our effort to overcome.  It becomes a vicious cycle.  It can feel like a groundhog day that has no ending.  We may silently wait for death to come to us, but that might take a long while, further pushing ourselves into deep depression. 

We may also come up with a million excuses to not feel better, to not succeed, to not allow ourselves to do what we wish to do.  We may think that depression at least makes us feel better because we think it is more appropriate to feel bad and punish ourselves for the guilt of not doing what we think we need to do.  This has us twisted in pain with no known way to get out of it that is not harmful to ourselves.   

There is no one size fits all when it comes to this kind of depression.  There is no one way to deal with this kind of pain.  But, there are some tools that can help.  For one, let us try to stop focusing on pain.  We feel bad because we are focused on feeling bad, focused on depression, failure and the ground-hog day of no-way-out-of-misery.  Being busy is good because it gets our mind away from being what it is used to being.  It is used to being our enemy.   It is used to finding thoughts that make us feel bad. 

So, for this day, find something that you can do that will get your mind away from making yourself feel bad.  Try to do something that you have been thinking about doing for a very long time but haven’t.  Let’s do this together.  Let’s have millions of people doing this together.  If you have something that you have been putting off, let’s do that now.  Right at this moment, start on that project that you have been putting off.  Ready, Get set, Go!   

Stay tuned for my next tool in the days to come….  For now, let’s begin to do that task we have been putting off…..   I’m going to start to clean out and organize my file cabinet….