Overcoming Depression

This talk outlines and introduces several concepts and tools from wisdom traditions of Chinese medicine and Daoist philosophy to help you begin to evaluate, understand, and break free from chronic emotional patterns like depression. It will help you understand the role of emotions from within these traditions and why it’s possible to truly break free from these chronic struggles even though it can so overwhelming.

Transcript

So welcome.

Thank you for being here.

For those of you that are able to make the live call.

I appreciate you taking the time to give this a listen.

And if you're catching this on playback,

Thank you again for listening as well.

I'll be taking some questions at the end of the call for those who are around.

So if you have some personal questions,

Please stick around.

I am looking forward to sharing some of my background and the tools that I have used over the years in my own life and with my clients.

I hope that you find the information in this call and this recording helpful.

And would like to welcome you to reach out and set up a free consultation.

If you have any questions after listening to this,

You can reach me at my website,

Which is www.

Justinerlich.

Com.

So if you have any personal questions,

Would like some feedback and you couldn't make the call to ask questions at the end,

Please just reach out.

So today's call is focusing on depression.

But although it is focusing on that,

Really all of these tools can be applied to really any sort of emotional struggle.

So if you have friends or family that are struggling with depression or any other chronic emotional struggle,

Please share the information.

My background,

Just to give you a little bit of information about me,

Is in classical Chinese medicine and Taoism.

Both of these systems,

Both of these wisdom traditions teach about the integration of body,

Mind and spirit.

I believe in that integration completely,

That we are integrating beings and cannot isolate our parts and think that they don't influence each other.

And of course,

Modern Western medicine is showing this more and more.

So all of this is based around that belief that we are integrated.

And there are a few other assumptions that are built into my worldview and hence influence all the information in this call.

So those things would be that we are all here for a reason.

Life is meant to be mostly filled with joy.

There will be difficult times,

Of course,

Sometimes extremely difficult and very sucky.

But we can always heal from those events.

That healing always occurs in the present moment,

Not in the future and not in the past.

And the things that take us out of the present moment are the things that often keep us from being able to fully heal whatever it is that we are struggling with.

And so those will be some of the influencing beliefs as we kind of go through some of this information.

So depression.

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel,

The way you think and how you act.

It causes feelings of sadness,

Loss of interest in activities that you used to enjoy and can cause physical problems,

Etc.

We know that depression is a very common pattern.

A lot of medications out there right now around the treatment of depression and the managing of the symptoms of depression.

And I think it's important to remember that the managing of symptoms is not the treatment of those symptoms.

And we really want to differentiate between managing symptoms and treating the source of them.

So in Chinese medicine,

We look at depression in a slightly different way,

A slightly more expanded way,

Let's say.

And that is that depression happens when there is something there that is blocking our full experiencing of life and what we want our life to be.

We could say like,

You know,

When we turn away from being our true self,

Either consciously or unconsciously,

When we're not able to be in touch with that part of our own personal truth,

Our inner spirit knows this just intrinsically,

Even if we're not conscious of it.

Whenever we do that,

There's a loss of joy,

There's a loss of light,

Loss of love,

Of happiness.

And we can turn away from our true self in sort of the three dimensions of life,

Which would be the physical world,

Emotional world or the spiritual world.

And that means we can live a physical life that we just know we're not in resonance with,

We can have an emotional relationship that we know we're just not truly in resonance with,

And we can have loss of faith in something bigger than ourselves,

Which can cause a loss of resonance with the idea of hope and love and goodness on a much bigger level.

There are usually sort of two primary reasons that we end up turning away from our truth.

And that can be social programming,

Either things we're taught by our family or things that are expected from us within society.

And then trauma,

Trauma can cause us to pull back from expressing ourselves and being our true self.

And so when we're trying to look at where we are breaking from ourselves,

We can begin to sort of say,

Okay,

Well,

Am I turning away from myself on a physical level,

On an emotional level or on a spiritual level?

And then we can ask the why?

What is the reason for that?

Is it because of some social event?

Is it because of a traumatic event?

In all of those cases,

There is almost always a component of judgment around something that causes us to pull back.

We judge the external world that it should be a particular way or it shouldn't be a particular way.

Or we judge ourselves,

We should be a particular way if only I was like this or if only I was like that.

Or we think that we shouldn't be a particular way.

And whenever we get stuck in that space of judgment,

We can never really be fully present with the immediate moment,

The present moment,

Because we are judging it.

And if I am judging that I don't want to be depressed,

Then I won't be able to fully be present with my depression and what's happening and I won't be able to heal it.

Because I'm not in the present moment and all healing occurs in the present moment.

So a lot of the work that we're doing is trying to figure out what takes us out of that present moment so that we can really begin to heal what's there right then.

It's also good to know that within Chinese medicine,

Emotions are completely natural,

Just like the weather or our thoughts,

They just happen.

What we don't want is to stay stuck in them,

But to get angry or to get scared or to get anxious is also part of the human experience.

There's nothing wrong with experiencing those things and we really want to take that in and respect that it's okay to have feelings.

So in the domain of Chinese medicine and Taoism,

There are sort of four steps that we all have to take if we want to maintain our emotional health.

We need the ability to fully experience whatever it is that we're having.

We need to be present with it and recognize completely that this is what I'm experiencing in the moment.

We need to process that emotion,

Integrate that emotion.

We need to take some sort of action based on what it means to us.

And then we need to be able to release it and move on with our lives,

Not stay stuck in it.

And so I'm going to,

In the course of this call,

I'm going to go through some of that stuff and go into a little more detail around those four steps.

But as you're looking at your emotional patterning or your emotional struggles,

You can kind of go back and trace some of these steps.

Is it coming from physical world,

Emotional world,

Spiritual world?

Is there some sort of trauma or social programming that's influencing your ability to be present?

And then when you do experience an emotion,

When you do have an emotional reaction to something,

Are you able to fully experience what that is?

Are you able to process it and integrate it,

Find some meaning?

Are you able to express yourself and take whatever appropriate action is needed and then release it and move on with your life?

If you can figure out which of those four steps you're stuck in,

Then you know where to focus your efforts so that you can move on to the next step and hopefully fully resolve whatever it is that's there.

Within Chinese medicine,

There are sort of three layers of emotions,

Feelings,

Emotions and temperament.

And there are some subtle differences and it's good for us to also sort of think about that for ourselves because it helps us again to focus our efforts so that we can hopefully heal whatever it is that's there.

And a basic breakdown would be that feelings are an emotion that we don't have really a reason to justify why we have it.

I'm just in a good mood and I don't know why.

I'm just in a depressed mood and I don't know why.

I'm just angry and I don't know why I'm irritable.

I don't have a reason for it.

An emotion is something that we can give a reason to.

I'm happy because of this.

I'm sad because of that.

We can name it.

And then our temperament is more our overall emotional patterning over the course of our life or course of many years.

And how we approach working with those is slightly different depending on what they are.

But it's good again to kind of just get some perspective on where it is that you personally are struggling so that you can really focus your efforts and make some progress.

Emotions as a whole are a response to some sort of stimulus,

External or internal.

We see something,

We experience something that we like or dislike and we react to it.

So that comes via our sensory orifices.

We see something,

We smell something,

We hear something,

We taste something.

And it can also come from our internal thoughts as well,

From the stories that run around recurrently in our head.

And then Buddhism,

They call that the monkey mind.

And Taoism,

We call it the swimming dragon.

And it's really just our crazy brain that we all have that is just all over the place,

All the time stuck in memories,

Reliving experiences,

Trying to make sense of or process different events that we experience.

And sometimes those thoughts,

Those patterns become very recurrent and become problematic.

And that's really what we're looking at right now is like when this emotion is stuck on repeat,

When the stories are stuck on repeat,

How do we begin to break free from them?

The anger that we feel around an event or the hurt that we feel around an event when we run those stories in our mind over and over again,

Our blood chemistry shifts and we relive that experience in our endocrine system,

In our physical body,

In our body functions.

And this makes us end up having to relive that event,

Relive that emotion and it sets off a cascade that we're experiencing over and over again,

Which is not good for our physical health and not good for our emotional health because we are reliving the pain of that emotion over and over again.

And again,

In Western medicine,

This falls into the field of psycho neuro immunology.

And that is that we know that our emotions,

Our psychology affects our neurology,

Our neurological system and our immune system.

And so what we want to do is to be able to catch like,

Oh,

There's a recurrent pattern here.

How do I begin to shift this?

Other things that can affect our emotional health is also our physical body.

We've seen more and more research coming out around the relationship between the gut brain axis,

Between inflammation causing neurological disorders,

Degenerative disorders,

But also affecting our mood.

I'm sure most of us will have experienced drinking too much coffee and feeling some anxiety that comes from that as just one very simple example.

But if you are struggling with chronic depression or chronic anxiety,

Sometimes the reason isn't an event that you can put your finger on.

You just sort of feel off and you can't quite figure out why that is.

And sometimes that can be coming from your physical body.

It's not the source of it is really your physical health and not your actual emotional health per se.

Other times it is a true emotional event that we need to heal.

When we are working with our emotions,

There are a few steps that we need to take to begin disentangling from what's actually going on.

And in the wisdom tradition of Buddhism,

We talk about it in terms of first arrows and second arrows.

But the idea is that we have an emotional reaction to an event and then disappear down this rabbit hole of multiple thoughts.

And that event could just be a memory that we relive or it could be something that's happening in the present moment.

Either way for our physical body,

When we have the thought or the event happens it's all in the present moment.

And so the first event is that I'm angry about something.

The second event or the second arrow would be that I judge myself that I shouldn't be angry.

So then I'm stuck fighting my reaction to my anger.

And so the and then maybe there's a third reaction and a fourth reaction.

And so our goal when we want to begin to heal our emotions is to really try to get back to that first arrow,

The actual event that causes the initial emotion.

And we can do that.

We can start that process by asking the simple question of what just happened?

What is it that I'm feeling?

What is here?

What hurts?

Where is the hurt?

All different ways we can sort of phrase that process if we can just take a pause and ask what's really going on right now.

I'm angry.

I'm depressed.

I'm sad.

Once we identify what it is that we're really feeling,

Hopefully the first arrow and not the second or third,

We can ask ourselves why?

What about the situation is wrong?

Why don't I like it?

Why am I reacting the way that I am?

And these may seem like very obvious questions.

But really being present with the answer to that helps guide us towards where the pain is at and gives us a chance to reconnect into the present moment so that we can actually heal what's there.

Trying to be present with what's really there,

That first arrow can often be really uncomfortable.

It's usually a pretty tender space.

It's usually a pretty raw space.

And so the trick is to just try to be delicately or tenderly present with what it is that you are truly feeling.

That sadness,

That hurt,

That grief,

That disappointment.

And just hang out with it.

Not trying to change it.

Not judging it for being there.

Not telling it that you don't like it.

Just honor the fact that it's there.

It is the reality of what's there.

It's like if I go outside on a hot day and it's hot,

Me disliking the fact that it's hot is not going to change that reality.

We need to be able to just begin to be present with the truth of what it is that is there in our lives at that moment so we can begin to heal it.

I will touch upon later a practice that you can do called two-point awareness that can be very helpful for developing the capacity to just be present with what's there.

But I'll get to that later.

And so you want to be able to sort of catch yourself,

Ask the question of what is it that I'm feeling?

What is really happening?

And why am I feeling this?

And just be with it.

When we're looking at why we feel the way that we do,

We want to begin to understand sort of our own emotional programming and why we react the way that we do and why do we judge the things that we do and that sort of stuff.

And you can find that in looking through your life history.

If you go to my website,

There's a download for understanding your path and begins to help you to sort of break down some of your major life events.

Which things stand out?

Why do they stand out?

What do you still carry with you from events?

What are the norms of social programming in your family or in your culture or in your gender?

And beginning to look at some of those things inside yourself can help you to begin to understand why you react the way that you do or why you process your emotions the way that you do.

And one of the areas that really is the most critical for us when we are working with our emotional health is to begin to understand our own judgments.

And often mapping these out,

Writing them down is a really helpful step because our judgments often run how we react to things and how we process things or how we don't process things in the background.

And so beginning to get to know this part of yourself can be really helpful for mapping out where you get stuck.

So you can just start to look at what parts of the world do you judge?

What part of human interactions do you judge?

And most importantly,

What emotions do you judge?

How do you judge anger and fear and sadness and all those sorts of emotions that are normal for humans?

Why do you judge them?

Why do you feel the way you do about them?

So you can begin to unravel that.

Because again,

All of this is based on the premise that healing occurs in the present moment.

And to be present with our emotion,

Of course,

We can't judge it because if I think it shouldn't be there,

Then I won't be present with it and I can't heal it.

And so beginning to see what it is you judge about each emotion and why you judge it is one of the most important steps we can take for ourselves around healing any chronic emotional struggle.

Once we've identified all of that,

We can begin to process our emotions.

I can begin to do the work and there are a few different things that are primary things that I share with my clients that I use in my own life.

One is I call side processing and that's sort of just letting off steam.

You go out and go for a run,

Go work out,

Do something just to kind of remove some of the intensity of the emotion.

It's good to have multiple methods.

And it's good to remember that side processing isn't solving the problem.

It is just helping make it a little bit less intense.

You go for a drive,

Go for a run,

Go work out,

Hang out with some friends,

Go into nature,

Et cetera.

When your emotions are particularly intense and you just can't sit down and be present with them,

Side processing is a great tool.

Just don't think that that's the same as actually processing it.

Two-point awareness is this idea of just being present with what is there and not trying to change it.

Just allowing for it to be and honoring its right to be there.

Practicing this gives us a lot more stamina in weathering the emotions of life.

It develops our capacity to work through things when they show up because we will not flinch and pull away from the things that we don't like as much.

And it also in this subtle way begins to help us realize we aren't our emotions,

Which helps us to begin to break free from chronic emotional struggles.

It is a practice.

It's not something you do once and it's over.

It's something that's really meant to be done on a daily basis.

The practice is simple,

Relatively speaking.

It's not a complex practice,

But it's not always an easy practice because the emotions that are there are quite tender.

That is that you focus on your breath.

You feel the breath coming and going and you are just allowing that emotional experience to be there.

Here is my anger and I'm breathing.

Here is my grief and I'm breathing.

You're not trying to change it.

You're just allowing it to be and including the breath or you can include the feeling of your feet on the ground helps us not go down the rabbit hole of fight or flight quite as intensely or of tunnel vision where our pain,

Our emotional struggle is the only thing that we're experiencing because we include the breath,

Because we include the feeling of our feet on the floor.

There are now two things in our conscious awareness rather than one thing.

And normally what happens when we get really triggered when we're feeling an emotion that we don't like is that we get overtaken by that.

It becomes all encompassing and we lose the forest for the trees.

We lose our bigger perspective of things.

And so two point awareness is just the idea that we include something else.

Don't try to get rid of the emotion you're feeling.

Just include something else,

Which is usually the breath,

But it could also be the feeling of your feet on the ground.

Another really critical tool for working through emotional struggles is the capacity to be inwardly vulnerable,

To be honest with yourself about what it is you're really experiencing.

This is not stuff that you have to share with anyone else.

It can be helpful sometimes to share,

But really what's most important is that you're able to be honest with yourself without judgment.

And it's good to know that you can not like something,

But still be honest with yourself about the fact that you're experiencing it rather than thinking you shouldn't be experiencing it.

As soon as that,

I shouldn't be experiencing this.

As soon as the should or the shouldn't comes in,

You're stuck in judgment and we want to watch for that.

Sometimes life delivers emotional experiences that are really rough and are not fun at all and we can not like that,

But it is the truth of what we're experiencing and we need to be able to be honest with ourselves about that.

Again,

It kind of points back to the idea of asking the question of like,

Well,

What is happening?

Why am I reacting the way that I'm doing?

And how do we just settle into a soft presence with what is really there?

Can we offer ourselves some kindness with the truth that while the emotions that I'm experiencing right now really are not pleasant,

They really suck.

Two-point awareness is a great practice to help develop the capacity for this inner honesty and inner honesty is what really brings us into the present moment so we can begin healing.

Other tools that can be really helpful,

Of course,

Is working with a coach or a therapist or an acupuncturist or a guide or any sort of formal title person that has training in helping guide people through this stuff.

Journaling can be helpful.

Journaling mapping can be really helpful.

It's one of my favorite tools that I have myself,

I use myself and I have my clients use.

So those are some of the major steps you can take to help process your emotions.

And as you begin to sort of look at your own emotional health,

Some of the things that you can check in with as a sort of checklist as you're trying to work through things is to ask yourself,

What is your actual internal relationship to feeling your emotions?

Can you experience them fully?

Can you say to yourself,

Wow,

I'm really angry,

I'm really agitated,

I'm scared?

Do you have judgments around certain emotions?

When you feel an emotion,

Can you feel it in your physical body?

Can you include something besides for just the mental story?

The goal really is that we want to be able to just observe what we're feeling and not change it and just be present with it.

Again,

Doesn't mean you have to like it.

And often we don't,

Which is why we pull away.

You can also look to see like,

Well,

What tools do you have to actually process and integrate your emotions?

How do you normally engage with them when you're feeling angry,

When you're feeling sad,

When you're feeling grief or fear?

What do you normally do?

Do you have tools like side processing or two point awareness to really process what's there?

Do you journal?

Do you paint?

Do you do certain things to help you really integrate and process what's there to make sense of the experience?

Do you have normal ways to express what's there,

To release it,

To take action based on the emotion that you're experiencing?

Can you be articulate with what it is that you're feeling?

I'm angry because of this.

I'm afraid because of this.

I'm sad because of this.

And can you express yourself in a way that is culturally or situationally appropriate?

Can you draw boundaries?

Can you express your needs?

Can you be received positively by most people around you because you're able to interact with other humans?

And do you have clarity after you express it to really understand yourself better?

While I'm feeling sad because of this,

And now I really understand myself better based on this experience so that you can take appropriate action and begin to move on with your life.

And can you really integrate whatever the experience is,

As painful as some of the traumas that we all experience can be?

We don't really have much choice other than to do our best to try to integrate them and move beyond it.

Sometimes in millimeters and sometimes in inches,

Sometimes in feet,

But we need to be able to take some action and start to move forward with our lives.

And if we hold on to painful memories,

If we hold on to a grudge,

Then we keep ourselves stuck in that time because we haven't really settled into being present with what is there so it can begin to heal.

So again,

It's sort of four steps that we want to look at is making sure you can actually be present with your emotions,

Making sure you have the tools to process and integrate your experiences,

Making sure you have the capacity to really fully express yourself if you have the need to take action based on what it is that you're experiencing,

And then being able to let go of it and move on with your life and not stay stuck in the past.

And if you find that you're stuck in any one of these four areas,

Then go out and get some help,

Develop some tools to work with that particular area.

And being able to sort of break it down into those four steps can help us get some clarity about what it is that we need to work with so that we can move beyond our depression or our anxiety or whatever event that is that we are trying to fully resolve.

And again,

Those four steps are to fully experience and be present with what we're feeling,

To process or integrate and find some meaning from it,

To take some sort of action based on what the meaning was to ourselves,

And then to be able to fully release it and move on with our lives,

Not stay stuck in the past.

And so when we are able to do all of this,

We are able to sort of heal our emotional experiences.

We're not erasing the memories of those experiences,

But it means we're able to sort of heal our relationship to experiencing life,

Integrating life and flowing with life to be able to recognize this is what I'm experiencing,

To draw some sort of meaning from it,

And to keep moving forward with life and not stay stuck in some sort of recurrent pattern.

And again,

It doesn't mean we won't experience things that are challenging or painful.

It just means we don't stay stuck.

We're able to stay with the flow of the Tao.

So if you're struggling with chronic depression,

Take some time to really feel where it is,

Maybe map out where it is that you get stuck with some of these emotions and see where you can develop some of the weak spots,

The areas that you're stuck,

Where you can get some help to heal those areas or to further develop those areas so that you can move on with your life.

Again,

Looking at your life history,

Social or traumatic programming,

Look for your judgments,

Your shoulds and your shouldn'ts.

And look for what I would call a very sacred and tender space,

Which is where all healing occurs,

Which is when we are actually just present with what it is that we're feeling and not trying to change it.

Some of the most difficult and most profound,

Some of the most difficult work and it is also the place where the most profound healing can occur is when we are really able to be tenderly present with what it is that we're feeling.

It's really sometimes quite magical what can happen in those moments.

And it's one of the biggest gifts we can give ourselves.

So I am going to start my winding down process and then take any questions.

But I just wanted to thank everyone for joining in.

If you hear the recording and you get some value out of it,

Please send me a comment,

Send me a like,

Let me know what you thought,

Let me know where I can help.

If you've been struggling with any sort of emotional struggle,

But particularly with depression,

I encourage you to spend some time,

Look at the four steps I mentioned,

See what parts are easy for you,

See what parts you get stuck in.

We all get stuck.

That's part of the human journey.

And the key is not that we're not supposed to need support in this journey because we all need the support,

But rather just figuring out which support it is that we need so we can get it and move on with our lives because really we have to keep moving forward.

Again,

If you found this helpful,

Share it with anyone you know that needs some help around these subjects.

And if you'd like some personal feedback,

Please reach out,

Set up an appointment for a free 20 minute call with me.

And I'll be glad to give you some personal feedback or some ideas of where I think you might be stuck and some steps you can take to help yourself along the way.

Thank you so much.

I'll take some questions before we end the call.

Reviews

Oh wow, I learned a ton here. I’m grateful to you!

This is very helpful. Thankyou.

So very well organized, clear and helpful, presented with cultural and historical references and sincere emotional support.
Thank you 🙏🏽

That was incredible.

Really great

Very simple guidance that can be used in so many aspects of life. Thank you!

This is such a useful & informative talk, thank you so much. I’ve listened to it a few times, and it has given me so much insight into the feelings of overwhelm, anxiety and depression I’ve been feeling for quite a while now. I am so very grateful 🙏🏻❤️