Overcoming Depression: Sitting In The Eye of the Storm
Since the pandemic, depression, and anxiety in America have become rampant with federal surveys showing that 40 percent of Americans are now grappling with at least one mental health or drug-related problem. So many people suffer in silence, feeling alone in their dark hole. I hate knowing this. It moves me to want to take action.
The truth is we all need help at times and we will never get the help that we need if we stay silent and don’t seek out the help we need. We won’t seek our help if we don’t think we need it (or deserve it). Because feeling depressed carries a social stigma, I find that many of my patients and clients have a hard time even recognizing that they are one of the many who have been suffering in silence. So much healing begins to be made possible by just helping them discover who they really are and how they truly feel and to give voice to the parts of them that feel suppressed, oppressed, and depressed.
The voice of depression says “it is hard to anticipate the rainbow when it feels like I am in a monsoon storm that will never end. “
Yet the moment we realize that the storm is there to support us not oppress us is just one way where we can begin to truly break free from the grips of depression.
The storms of our lives are there to awaken us, to cause the ground beneath us to shake so that we can begin seeing the truth of who we are and how we can experience the happiness and fulfillment we seek if we were to change the way we think, eat, breathe, love, and/or live our lives.
The storms are our call to courage and are there to wash away our pain so that we can reclaim our truth, our power, and our most authentic self that lies beneath our greatest fears.
The storms are there to invite us to take the steps we need to take to finally free ourselves from our own pain.
When we learn to weather the storms of our lives and stop running for cover at the first signs of them the alchemical process of transformational change begins to unfold. We know that the storms will continue to come but they no longer carry the ability to uproot the foundation of our being because we now understand how the storms are an enlivening force in our lives. We are able to sit within the eye of the storm and find moments of peace because we have learned that no matter how hard life feels in the moment, we know that one day we will look back on that moment and smile, simply because it was all part of what has made up our life, and we had decided to finally live it.