Tag: depression

Your Orientation Matters

December 13, 2025

So much of our consternation and anxiety come about because we are oriented against the way life is. When you’re oriented toward always being right, it hurts real bad to be wrong. When you are oriented toward being perfect, you get defensive when it is insinuated you are not. And when you are oriented toward projecting a certain image to the world, you brace yourself against anything less being portrayed. All this fighting against the natural way of things creates anxiety. We spend a lot of ...  Keep reading

Your Many Deaths

January 21, 2024

If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its ...  Keep reading

Dark Nights (Plural)

April 15, 2014

You have heard it talked about that most people go through some kind of “dark night of the soul” at some point in their lives. Well I don’t know about you, but I feel like I go through some kind of depression/darkness almost monthly (if not more often) when I feel depressed and it feels like there was no way to avoid it. I just need to be depressed, something needs to die.

My wife told me last week too that babies go through a fussy period when they are getting ready to move through ...  Keep reading

Compulsions

February 22, 2014
So much of our depression and anxiety occurs because of our constant compulsive behavior. We feel badly and our compulsions crop up to try to help neutralize our pain and help us feel better. It is like our bodies and brains instantly want to heal us, but since these compulsive behaviors have their genesis in our brokenness, they do not help. They only serve to produce more of the feelings we sought to neutralize in the first place and more unwanted behavior is produced.  Compulsions could be defined as anything that is produced unthinkingly out of our guilt, fear, discomfort or pain. What’s amazing is that you can enact the same behavior and if you do it in thoughtfulness rather than compulsivity, it can be life-giving. The goal of the healing arts is enhancing our thoughtfulness about our pain. The thoughtfulness means we will again become present to the pain, but ignoring pain and relying on our compulsions will not help. The more we can do thoughtfully (and not compulsively), the more we will be able manage anxiety and emotion. The goal is that brokenness will be healed and we will be able to live out of our wholeness.

Something Needs to Die

November 24, 2012

My friend and mentor has told me this many times: somebody told him once that when you are depressed, you want to die. And you obviously don’t need to die, but something in you needs to die.

That is brilliant. I think I go through this almost weekly depression and many times, I have no idea what is going on, but sometimes I feel like God is trying to kill something in me. More often than not, it has been when I have grown hardhearted, or I am trying to hold onto something that has needed ...  Keep reading