Depression

 "You cannot be fixed because you were never broken.

 

The word “depressed” is spoken phonetically as “deep rest”. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound (and very misunderstood) state of deep rest entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity. It is an unconscious loss of interest in our story. It is so very close to awakening – but unfortunately rarely understood as such. Or as one friend put it, “Depression has awakening built-in.”

 

True happiness has no opposite, for it embraces all. It is your nature, not some far-off utopia. It is you, before you were named, before you learned to doubt yourself.

 

All your problems are just thoughts. And thoughts are not a problem.

 

There are only solutions, waiting patiently for ‘you’ to disappear."

Jeff Foster

 

My father was depressed for decades, battling bi-polar which mostly meant depression in his case. He never told me what his spiritual reward—the one Jeff Foster seems to indicate—was. He was a man of few words. Yet, I know that I have my blue phases just like him and I am facing my deep rests and know that they have broken open ‘the story of me’ and I am grateful for it.