Surviving The Holidays, Dealing With Depression

The holidays are very hard for those suffering from depression. This is a short talk on how to find a new way of life and find the real center and doing so will help you deal with life. I heard that 22 Veterans commit suicide every day and that number increases during the holidays so this is for those who need to hear another way of dealing with life.

Transcript

Hello and happy holidays.

Welcome back once again.

My name is Douglas Grumman and I want to dive into this holiday spirit and address how hard it can be for some people to get through this period of the year.

First off I should mention that I am not a doctor.

I have no degree in psychology.

But what I do have is a deep understanding of a spiritual essence of a mystic's approach toward your spirituality and your mental and your emotional,

Your intellectual growth.

All these things come into play.

So like I said,

I'm not a doctor but I'm going to try to impart some understanding as to how you can get above what they call the normal range.

See it kind of goes like this.

Those that have mental illnesses,

There's a range for normal people.

Let's say it's from 10 to 20.

And anything below 10 like 8 or 7 you're falling into abnormal or mental illnesses.

But what the psychiatrists don't understand or talk about,

Probably because they just don't know about it or they don't believe it exists,

Is that there's an above what they call normal.

And that's like from 20 to 100,

To infinity basically,

Because when you go above what they call the normal standard of your psychological being,

Then it's called super consciousness.

And super consciousness evolves into what they call cosmic consciousness.

But psychologists don't talk about those things because they just want to get you back into the normal range.

And around Christmas time,

Around the holiday season,

That's kind of a hard thing to deal with because you don't want to be in the normal range because most of the people living in what we call a normal range are egoist.

They have,

They're living from a false center.

And when you live from a false center,

It's very easy to fall into a state of depression.

Because without a spiritual center,

Then the ego,

It's like a block in the door.

It prohibits you from experiencing the spiritual center.

So we have to learn I guess,

In a way to get rid of the ego.

And it seems like it,

You know,

Growing up and developing in life,

Early stages of life,

Having an ego is a good thing,

It actually helps you to develop and grow.

But when you start becoming an adult,

When you start getting past the age of about 15,

16 years old,

The ego becomes less and less important.

It is important in a way to find a suitable partner to share your life with maybe,

Maybe,

Maybe not,

I don't know.

Some people think it's important to get a good job,

You know,

To think that you're really good at something or better than somebody else's something.

So that will help you to get a job.

How does that help us with our spirituality?

How does it help our spirits to get through,

You know,

A time when everybody seems to be giving and loving and caring and,

And it is nice to see that.

I mean,

I wish people were like that more often,

And not just,

You know,

A couple weeks out of the year where people actually give a shit about other people.

So the like I said,

This normal range that everybody's living in.

If it wasn't so ego centered,

If,

If,

If people had this spiritual essence about them,

Then I think it'd be more genuine and people would actually feel it.

But they don't.

And it's hard.

I've heard that about 22 vets,

Veterans die and commit suicide almost every single day.

And vets,

Me being myself being a vet myself,

I quite understand the depth of it.

I mean,

You think about it.

If,

If you're a civilian,

And you go out and you murder somebody,

You're going to get tried and probably put to death for or have a lifetime sentence in jail because you murder somebody.

But if you do murder,

If you commit murder in the name of society,

Or war,

Whatever you want to call it,

Then it's perfectly okay.

And that plays a very hard role with these young men and women who have entered the military and been pretty much brainwashed into becoming a soldier into someone that will kill upon command.

I know because I was conditioned that way myself.

And I think,

You know,

Once I got out of the military,

Actually,

Before right before I started getting out of the military,

I started meditating.

I learned about meditation and I learned to feel the effects of it and how it erases the ego basically,

It settles you down and helps you be real realize that there's another center in life.

I lived off the ego center for the whole time I was in the military.

Because you're conditioned to obey orders you and and disobey,

Disobeyment of an order is was a pretty serious thing.

So if if these young men and women had to basically commit murder in the name of society,

That's a hard thing to deal with later on in life or even even after it happens.

Even with your conditioning,

You know that that is wrong murder is wrong.

So yeah,

So a lot of vets get out of the military and they don't know which way to turn.

They don't know how to cope with this conditioning that was imparted on them that was was pushed in and shoved down your throat.

And,

And now you have to learn to deal with with life being a civilian and that can be really hard,

Especially around the holidays.

So yeah,

Having a spiritual center instead of an ego center will really change your whole outlook in life and take you past that.

What what society calls normal.

I mean,

If you think about it,

You've been bred since you were very young,

Almost almost the age of a baby when you start realizing that you get attention when you scream or or you people will treat you differently if you act a certain way,

If you behave and you get rewarded and these things are the start of where the egoism starts in.

And it's always this other that is influencing your growth,

Both both mentally,

Both physically and emotionally,

You get a you get influenced by how others react to you.

And this creates this this false center in you.

But that's what society needs because society can control you.

As long as you feel,

I guess if you win trophies,

Or if you do things that others feel that help you develop a sense of pride about yourself.

And like I said,

These things aren't bad growing up.

They they do help you.

And the thing is,

Is the interesting thing I just read recently is that without this false center being there,

You could never discover the real center.

So it's a necessity to have this false center growing up.

In the East,

They've kind of pushed against the ego from birth.

But the outcome of that has been that there's not really been no development towards a deeper sense of spirituality.

There's a spirituality on the surface.

But when you go deep into it,

People get pushed off their centers real easy and pushed right and back into the ego center.

So,

You know,

Facing the holidays,

I just want to share that there's a way to go above this normal sense of being from the 10 to 20,

Which is a very short range because there's so much above it.

I mean,

You can fall below it too and fall into deeper depression.

And you can go below the minus number one,

You can fall very deep into it and you become the worse that you dive into it,

The worse you become more schizophrenic and more depressed and until you just almost can't stand it anymore.

But if you're in that state,

If you're that depressed,

If you're so far into this stage that it seems like there's no way out.

I mean,

I would hope that maybe a psychiatrist or something could help in some way.

But if that's not working,

I'll let you know that you can float.

And floating takes no effort.

And it'll help you get across this darkness in life,

This void that seems to be hard to get through.

Just allow yourself to float.

It takes no energy.

And by floating,

I mean by becoming still and have no mind.

And let that help pull you back off the banks of the wrong side of the river and help you get to the other side of the river.

Floating is a tantric principle.

But for many people who suffer from mental anxieties and mental illnesses,

Then you need to find some way to start dealing with things.

And that's a start.

That's a way to get started.

Because if you think about it,

A lot of your life you've been basically swimming upstream.

You've been spending all this energy trying to please others,

Or to conform or be a part of society.

When in reality,

The society range is very small.

And it's really not that great.

Now there have been other people like Jesus and Mansour,

Buddha,

Lao Tzu,

All these people went above the normal range.

And they were a lot of them were either murdered or condemned.

Mansour was basically quartered by horses.

They tie you up by four horses and they just take off in each direction and they pull your body to pieces,

All because he said,

I know God,

Or he said,

I am God.

So he,

You know,

I guess what I'm saying is to go above the normal range of being doesn't mean you have to have another ego or ego come in the back door and proclaim to everybody that you know God.

I mean,

If you realize God,

And you come out and say that to people,

Then they don't feel like you're part of normal society.

They think you've fallen below.

Whereas you're actually entering what we call super consciousness.

And it's not until you start entering the super consciousness that you have this real center to you,

The spiritual center to you.

The spiritual center is there in all of us.

But we live on the periphery.

We live out on the very edge of our beings instead of in the center.

And that's why it's so easy to fall back into mental illnesses.

Because you're living on the edge already.

If you lived in the center,

If you had this new center about you,

This spiritual center,

Then nothing can push you.

It can try it can,

You'll feel the pull of these things trying to pull you against your coming out of your spirituality and back into an ego center or back into depression or anger or anxiety.

All these things that are actually there and they exist for the spiritual person too.

But when you develop this,

When you move from the center,

Then you feel the pull of them,

But they don't affect you.

They don't pull you off your center.

And the ability to just breathe and focus on your breath.

And some people have found that if you breathe and take a gap between breaths,

So you inhale,

Hold it,

Take a gap,

And then exhale.

And in that gap,

You'll feel that you can't think that there's a center there.

It's between the exhalation and the inhalation.

In fact,

You could think of inhalation as being holy and exhalation as getting rid of all the negative energy,

Getting rid of all the negative.

And if you breathe that way,

And you just focus on that for a few minutes,

Say 5-10 minutes of just focusing on your breath,

And feeling that center,

Taking the gap and feeling the center between the breaths,

You'll find that when you come out of a meditation just from watching breathing,

That you're more centered and you're calm and you feel a lot better.

You feel more energetic,

You feel happier in a way.

And if you do it for about 30 minutes,

What will happen is you'll dive into a state of no mind where there's no thought between,

Even when you're inhaling and exhaling,

You just witness what's going on.

You just feel this vibration of the air coming in and how beautiful it is,

And the exhalation of getting rid of what your body doesn't need to survive.

And when you do that,

A sort of bliss comes over you and that's when meditation actually starts,

Is when you come to the stillness of mind.

And if you just allow that stillness of mind to happen,

Then after about maybe 5-10 minutes,

Meditation will happen.

You'll feel that shift.

You'll feel a jump,

Like an energy shift.

And that's you going from your ego center to your real center.

And I know that you might be dealing with some really tough things right now.

Like I said,

I've never suffered depression.

I've tried medicines for depression because I had some illnesses of my own and doctors thought I might have been suffering from depression,

But I'm just the most happy-go-lucky person in the world.

I just couldn't sleep.

And that's a sign of depression too,

I think they say,

Is that people that don't sleep well,

Or if you don't sleep at all,

Then in a way you're suffering from depression.

But it did help me to see a psychiatrist and to take some medicines to help me sleep better,

Help me face the depression a lot better.

I mean,

It's a lot easier to face life when you're sleeping well.

And I will say that if you shift to your spiritual center,

Then you enjoy closing your eyes.

You enjoy the darkness.

You enjoy the stillness of the night.

And it's like a womb for existence.

It's much easier to sleep in the nighttime than it is the daytime.

I know because I've met a couple sleep pathologists,

People who run the sleep labs,

And I did go to a sleep lab once,

And they told me I had the sleeping habits of a 90-year-old man.

They said I stopped breathing like 80 times in one night and they wanted to put me on a CPAP machine,

But I basically refused to be put on a CPAP.

What I did do is I stopped taking the sleeping medication I was taking,

And that helped me to realize what was going on.

And the doctor said to me,

I told the doctor,

I said,

Hey,

I'm sleeping more now than when I was on the sleep medication.

And the doctor told me that,

Yeah,

Well,

When you make a deal with the devil,

Then you have to pay the price.

And I know he meant it as a metaphor,

But basically he was right in the sense that facing your demons,

Facing the darkness with courage and awareness is a way to deal with the complex nature of how our existence is,

Of how we cope day by day.

Like I said,

Having the spiritual center will definitely help.

And having super consciousness come in and take you above the normal range will definitely help you out.

And like I said a few minutes ago,

Maybe I didn't finish the thought.

I'm guilty of that sometimes.

But you can live in society and not let them know exactly what's going on with your,

I mean,

A lot of people have to hide their depression anyway.

But hiding super consciousness is a lot better.

I've had to live with a,

Basically a very tight knit Christian family for 20 years.

I beat when I married into the Greek tradition and I basically,

They say there's no other religion other than the Greek Orthodox tradition.

So I didn't mind it,

But after a while my spirituality grew so much that,

This is going to be a little bit funny for you,

But I used to sneak in my Osho book and when everybody was opening the Bibles and reciting out of the Bibles,

I hid my Osho book inside my Bible so I could read and feel like these people who are,

I'm not saying they're wrong or bad in any way,

But it just wasn't my way.

I discovered a better way.

One that,

I mean,

Most,

Think about this,

Most religions just want you to conform to society.

And if you conform,

And all,

That's basically all that Buddhism,

Hinduism,

Christianity,

All these isms and ions and whatever they call them,

They all basically just want you to behave and be part of the society.

I was reading an Aikido book of mine,

One of my Aikido teachers,

One of my first Aikido teachers was a Japanese fellow by the name of Satomi.

And he became enlightened and he went and told the founder of Aikido,

Which is his teacher,

Actually he says,

Hey,

Sensei,

I've become enlightened.

And,

Oh,

Sensei,

You should have told him,

Forget about it,

Just drop it.

And I don't know if Satomi realized what he meant by that.

But it's one of the greatest insights is that if you've attained,

If you've awakened,

And I know that term comes loosely with a lot of people lately,

But if you've truly awakened,

Then forget about it,

Drop it,

Let go of it.

I mean,

Yeah,

It's great that it existed.

And we acknowledge that,

You know,

You've attained something.

But if you attain something and then it gets like certified,

Like someone else agrees and says,

Yes,

You've attained,

Then it also opens the window for the ego to come in the back door and try to reenter and take away.

And it will.

Ego will shut down your spirituality in a second.

So,

Like I said,

If you're dealing with depression and you're feeling normal and you're feeling okay and you're feeling a little bit happy,

The ego can basically shut down the door and stop you in your tracks and make you feel miserable again.

So getting rid of the ego is very important.

And like I said,

The way to do that is through that meditation I discussed through the growing.

And when you meditate,

You grow,

You grow spiritually,

You go mentally,

You go intellectually,

And you just,

You physically,

You just grow into this new being.

And then eventually you don't need the ego anymore and you just drop it.

You shed it like a bird sheds its eggshell when it's born.

You shed it and then you're done with it.

And when you're done with it,

You don't need it anymore.

You don't need the ego to,

You don't need people's approval or admiration,

Admiration I should say,

Towards your being,

Towards your essence.

It's,

It's,

When,

Like I said,

If you have this new spiritual center,

Then it's so much easier to go through life and you'll,

You'll overcome your depression.

And it's not like you can't fall into depression again,

But it's very hard to be pulled off of spiritual center when you know about it and when you're existing from it.

So if you're dealing with the hardness and the harsh reality that life,

The life as you know it is surrounding you and making you feel depressed and more depressed,

Then like I said,

Learn to float first,

Seek help if,

If,

If you can,

If you think that,

That you can find,

If you can find a person who spoke a spiritualist and a psychologist at the same time,

They're out there.

There's people out there like that.

They can help you get back towards normalcy a lot quicker.

But if being normal is still not acceptable for you,

Then you should just know that super consciousness,

Cosmic consciousness and divine consciousness are all out there above the range of being normal.

And they are attainable by anyone who goes in search of this higher way of living.

But anyway,

I guess we'll wrap it up there.

I want to say thank you very much for listening to me.

And I hope that you guys have a good holiday season.

No matter what religion you follow or,

Or whatever,

I think a season where we all care a little bit more about each other and the essence of giving is in the air.

And that's a good thing.

That's not a bad thing.

So even if you're atheist,

And you're listening to this,

Just a,

I mean,

Just acceptance of a season of caring and sharing is,

Is good enough.

I think Jesus would be very happy just to know that you are healthy and seeking super consciousness.

Jesus seeked super consciousness himself.

And I think Jesus would like you to experience it for yourselves too.

You could call it being born again,

You call it whatever you want enlightenment.

When you shift to that new center to the spiritual center,

Then you'll know what wholeness is what godliness is.

So anyway,

We'll end it here.

Thank you again for joining me.

Take care of yourselves out there and much love.

Aloha to mahalos to all my spiritual surfing friends and blue skies to all you skydivers out there if any skydivers are listening to this and around the world as I say,

Happy Holidays and much love from from me.

Take care yourselves.

Bye