Yoga And Dealing With Depression

I don’t think that it’s news to anyone that people aren’t very happy out there. There was just some study I heard about a few weeks back that 1 in 6 Americans are on some kind of med for a psychological issue. It’s an epidemic in fact and very hard to deal with. Depression is something that most people deal with at one time or another but there are things that you can do to deal with it. In this article I am going to share some of these ideas with you and hopefully they can make a difference in your life.

One of the first things I want to make clear is that I don’t have anything that can bring an immediate halt to someone’s depression. Some people might sit and try to meditate if they’re depressed and it doesn’t work. They just sit there going over the thoughts causing them depression in what can feel like a perpetual loop. If something happens to you like you have a break up with your significant other or experience some kind of tragedy I would not recommend trying to meditate, I would say go watch a movie or do a physical activity. The mind is clearly distracted and the easiest thing to do is move the attention to something else.

When something happens to us that causes an emotionally charged state there is intense energy associated with these thoughts. Your body feeds off of this energy and is not going to just let these thoughts pass it is going to hang on to these thoughts and the “feeling” they produce in the body. In essence you are your attention so you are going to be stuck until the energy burns itself out. Think about it, in the positive sense, if you won the lottery what would this event cause? You would have an emotional reaction that would cause you to think about all the things that you would buy, the places you would go, the people that you would tell, etc., and your attention would feed off of this energy through creating similar thoughts until the energy is burned out. In the negative sense, you could lose your source of income. The thoughts associated with this would be all of the consequences for not paying your bills, what people may think, your future, etc.

What needs to be understood to deal with this is that it is not you who is creating these thoughts. If you were in fact the creator of these thoughts (the thinker) you could stop thinking which you can’t do. You need to become aware of this and remember this. You need to remember that the narration in your head has nothing to do with you. The problem is when you turn your attention to the charged thoughts. Being distracted. This is why I mentioned earlier to watch a movie or do something physical, this is to distract the mind and get some relief from being stuck.

The problem is not within you and you must know this. When you are upset look around you and observe that the emotions are not in your environment. The emotions are not attached to your body. The emotions are simply energy that you allow to take hold of you. Once you allow this to happen it effects your heart rate, it affects your breathing, your skin, etc. But, it is not contained within any of them. The problem is not yours but you assume it to be and the consequences of playing along are getting stuck in the web.

Simply agreeing with the argument is clearly not enough to overcome the energy, how do we gain the ability to free ourselves from getting stuck from this energy? There are a great number of things that you can do. In Eastern spiritual practices one of the first things that you are taught is breath control. Controlling your breathing is paramount in controlling your mind. When you are upset your breathing is erratic, if you have control over the breath you become immediately aware of this and correct it. Another thing that controlling the breath does is it develops concentration. When you do not have concentration you are not going to be able to resist the energies associated with intense emotions. Concentration will help you deal with this.

So, the idea here in dealing with depression and our emotions is to get them under control through our recognition of them. This is gained through practice. Through practice you become aware of the process. Once you are aware of the process you are then in a position to deal with it. Initially it is going to be difficult. Eventually your previous highs will be your new lows and you will become stronger and stronger as you become more and more aware of the games that the mind plays. It’s certainly not easy, but the rewards are definitely worth the effort.

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