The Real Purpose of Depression

A client of mine is having a tough time right now. Actually, she's been having a tough year for years now. Some form of depression has haunted her for a good portion of her adult life. Recently she had a car accident during a time when she's been struggling with challenges in choice of career and honoring her passions in life. How to do both and meet the material needs of this world are something all of us are contemplating right now.

She's been unemployed for a few months now and the money is running out. The material world is making it difficult to be in a higher frame of mind. As things have seemingly become more dire every day, she's allowed the car accident to bring up a thought process that 's been with her for a long while. Does she check out, meaning commit suicide, or does she stay? While she was not physically hurt enough to require hospitalization in the recent car accident, she still suffered some physical impact to her body that has her in some pain right now. Lying in bed has brought up the deep depression issues that she has refused to deal with in her life.

Many spiritual teachers have addressed the issue of depression and its role in our emotional and spiritual evolution process. I believe the best explanation I've been able to synthesize from various sources is that depression is the Universe's way of putting It's Cosmic Thumb on you, like the giant out of some fairy tale. Imagine the Giant from Jack and The Bean Stock coming down and pinning you to the ground with his thumb, daring you to squirm outta that. You ain't goin' nowhere, are you? Until you surrender to the Thumb, that Giant isn't letting you up. Depression is exactly like that.

It's the Universe's way of telling you that you have created an opportunity to reach down into the bottom of the well, pull up all the old crap that's buried there, dump it, and start over. It used to be that we felt we had to be consciously aware of what that crap is or was. Psychology tells us that unless we consciously know what's going on, it won't go away. From my personal experience and that of witnessing the healing of my clients over the last 15 years, I don't think that is so true anymore.

I think our job in our healing process is to simply be willing to surrender to the process. A lot of healing takes place at the subconscious level, the place where we may never have any consciousness. How do we know healing has taken place? Because all of a sudden things change. Maybe it's as simple as we begin to think more clearly. Or the things we need in our lives manifest more easily and rapidly. Or we simply feel better, brighter, more optimistic for "no reason." We don't have to know what the healing process healed. We just have to become aware of the gifts it brings us and be grateful.

In order for this to happen, we must invoke the affirmation of "I will to Thy Will." Or maybe the better scenario is meditating on waving the white flag of surrender. Maybe then the Giant will relax the Cosmic Thumb. Now, if you keep waving the flag, thinking that you are going to fool the Giant into letting you go, you don't know Him/Her very well, do you? Giants are not fooled so easily. They've been there, done that, seen it all. They have all the time in world, which is interesting, since time doesn't exist, but that's another conversation for later. That's not such good news for the person under The Thumb, is it? Eventually the squishee has to truly give up and wave the white flag for real. When that happens, miracles occur. No exception. Every time.

When you surrender into the conscious and subconscious healing that is taking place during depression, you let go of all that no longer serves you. This creates the space that allows the new you to emerge. So, depression can be viewed as the energy or apparent chaos that's taking place while you, the catepillar, are morphing into the butterfly. I love that image. The Giant's Thumb could actually be utilized as an anchor for the cocoon needed for you to go through the growth and metamorphisis of emotional and spiritual evolution. I personally find that comforting. The catepillar has no idea how it becomes a butterfly. It doesn't need to know, does it? It simply surrenders into the process.

So, if you find yourself in depression, don't buy into the hype and media that it is a bad thing. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you, if you let it. Be willing to surrender, even if it's just a little bit at at time, to the process. Keep digging through the crap. There's a pony in there somewhere who's chasing butterflies.

The Importance of Doing Your Inner Work

When I finally decided to go to massage school in Chicago, IL, I had already been a practicing energy worker and craniosacral therapist for about eight years. Like so many people who have abuse histories, I turned to alternative healing when traditional therapies no longer worked. I was introduced and practiced healing modalities such as reiki, vibrational healing, Healing Touch, and many others for seven years before becoming a paid therapist.

During those seven years, I experienced quantum leaps in my own personal healing. I went from being in victim-mode to transcending survivor-mode. Along that road, I learned many things about what it means to be a healer. I witnessed what happens when a person who is not working on healing their own emotional and spiritual life calls themselves a "healer" and then attempts to use the techniques of energy healing to manipulate others. When I became a professional therapist, I used these examples to remind me of the potential power a therapist has on a client's healing. Over time, I found myself teaching the importance of doing inner work to other therapists, some of whom had been practicing therapists for years. I also attempted to teach these concepts to new students in a massage therapy school. Unfortunately, the standard massage therapy program does not allow for that kind of information to be taught.

Many people gravitate to the healing professions (psychotherapy, counseling, massage therapy, vibrational healing, etc.) because they are using those modalities to heal the emotional and spiritual issues they are experiencing. Almost everyone, as they achieve milestones in healing, wants to share what they've learned with everyone they know. They naturally want others who are also experiencing similar traumas to benefit from what they've recently learned. The best way to know that you have learned something is to teach it to others. This is the beginning of being a channel of healing energy. Whether the "teacher" is a clear channel of healing energy is another issue.

As Gregg Braden writes in his new book, The Divine Matrix, quantum physics is now proving that there is no separation between anything. When you come into contact with another being, you leave behind a part of you that stays with that person. The emotions that you feel react instantly, beyond distance and time. When you touch someone, you leave behind epithelial cells. Those cells are not separate from you just because they are now on someone else's body. They continue to react to your emotions. If you feel anger, fear, sadness, depression, happiness, joy, or peacefulness, those cells feel it at exactly the same time. The person to whom those cells were transferred also feels your emotions. When you consistently feel low-vibrational feelings, the other person reacts to those feelings and the cycle of emotional and spiritual chaos continues until someone changes their feelings to a higher vibration.

The impact of this scientific fact on the healing professions has, I believe, not been fully appreciated. For example, there are hundreds of institutions teaching massage therapy. With some exceptions, the required curriculum in most of these schools does not include any training on vibrational healing nor is there any formal discussion about the importance of emotional and spiritual health of the massage therapist. Potential students are not educated about this important requirement before they are enrolled in a program and, unfortunately, many people teaching massage therapy do not understand it.

Ok, to be fair, there is a five-minute discussion about the concept of psychological transference and counter-transference in the required ethics class. That is the only discussion about the role the therapist's emotions play in the healing process or the impact of the client's energy on the therapist. Students are required to memorize the formal definitions of each term and regurgitate it on a test. This is certainly not the way to impress upon a potential channel of healing energy the importance of doing their inner work! More time must be devoted to developing a complimentary program in the standard massage curriculum that supports the emotional healing and spiritual growth of people who want to be massage therapists.

Why is this important? As the public becomes more and more aware of the power of therapeutic massage modalities, the massage industry has exploded. Potential clients are searching for a therapist who can address them holistically and help them heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Therapists who are consistently working to maintain their own emotional and spiritual health will be highly sought after because they will be capable of facilitating that process. The therapist who has technical skill and who does not do their inner work will continue to serve those in the population who don't want to experience holistic healing. Both people will be successful monetarily. Both people will facilitate a particular level of healing. Only one will consistently demonstrate an understanding of the work and participate in the joy of watching clients make miraculous breakthroughs in healing. And isn't that the reason why you wanted to be a healer in the first place?