How Yoga can Help with depression
The essential point here is this:
‘managed emotions’ result in depression. Managed emotions and undigested emotions require our attention if we are to continue developing our empowered mental health.
I used to think I knew myself well…what I didn’t realise is I didn’t…I didn’t realise that my body was my gateway to understanding and accessing my emotions and feelings – the more in-touch with my practices I became the more I could clearly express my emotions and needs honestly and effectively. This realisation blew me away and still does!
It’s like my skin and body opens me up and allows me to access inside of myself…how weird and wonderful! So many people have no idea about this, what feels like to me a phenomena! This is why the more YOGA I do the happier I am because I learn to express way more clearly and concisely.
Here is a piece from a book I’m reading about the psyche:
“The most precise definition of depression is a bad case of suppressed emotions (emotions – energy-in-motion or supposed to be!) emotions that have been ‘managed’ instead of being ‘felt,’ digested, understood, assimilated and acted on in a way the preserves and improves relationships. When a person is depressed in this way, she/he has a significant backload of undigested feelings piled up behind an inner dam, blocking natural flow of her/his psyche and life. If this blockage becomes severe or prolonged physical and psychological vitality will grind to a halt and result in becoming sluggish, vegetative.
What a depressed person needs is to feel ‘more’ not less. This highlights the disastrous consequences of thinking of depression as a bad case of sadness with the implication that the cure is to feel less sad. Such a prescription is exactly wrong. If a person is depressed because of a backload of unassimilated sadness then what the person needs is to fully feel sadness to grieve wildly. Any ‘psychotherapeutic intervention’ would try to talk the person out of the grief, distract them from it or suppress it with psychopharmacology which would just make it worse and certainly would not be therapeutic, rather it would result in the same sort of emotional suppression or repression.
The best therapy for depression begins with resuscitation, animation and liberation of the inner wild one. Who wholly supports the deepest and most effective healing.’
…so I’ll write my paragraph again (and by-the-way, I don’t and never have had the label of depression but I easily think I could have if I hadn’t found yoga and I’ve most certainly seen a lot of it and know it really is an epidemic in society at large…with so many generally numbing-out and self-medicating.)
I use to think I knew myself well…what I didn’t realise is I didn’t…I didn’t realise that my ‘body’ was my gateway to understanding and accessing my emotions and feelings – the more in-touch with my practices I became the more I could clearly express my emotions and needs honestly. This realisation blew me away and still does!
It’s like my skin and body opens me up and allows me to access inside of myself…how weird and wonderful! So many people have no idea about this and what feels like to me a phenomena! This is why the more YOGA I do the happier I am because I am more able to express myself clearly and concisely.
Access. Feel. Express authentically who you are and how you feel; you owe it to your soul.
Namaste Wendy
