Deep autumn is a classic time of year for the pea soup of depression to hit. In the Pacific Northwest, the rains kick in as the sun becomes a fleeting memory, and all the things we’ve been running from for months begin to creep forward into our consciousness, pushing for triggering and release. If we haven’t “cleaned house” in awhile, these ghosts emerging from the depths of our closets have the ability to overwhelm us - and in so doing we become, like our backyards, heavy and laden with muck, mist and bog, and we find we can’t move as easily.

Most of us know what real depression looks and feels like. Even if we haven’t experienced a depressive period ourselves, we probably each know or have heard about somebody who has, and how they were during it. Depression is rife with a feeling that there is no way to get out from under, that nothing can work. It’s a time where we look at all of life through shit-coloured glasses. There’s no energy to do the things we like to do or have to do. The life force drained out, we vegetate, flatline, feel squashed and compressed. We can’t feel. We indulge in distractions and addictions of various kinds. We are uncomfortably numb.

The central theme of depression, if it could be described in one word, is hopelessness. It’s very uncomfortable for the loved ones of a depressed individual (DI) to be around him or her, and the kneejerk tendency is to help them lift out of it any way possible. They try to distract the DI from what ails them (should that even be evident), point out how so-and-so from Iraq has it worse so buck up, become an ad hoc salesperson for the latest miracle pharmaceutical or toss a few hope ropes in case the DI has the strength or ability to grab one and hoist themselves up.

Realistically, there’s nothing a friend of a DI can do that’s more effective than staying close by while the DI muddles through as best s/he can, ready to lend a helping hand when asked. For the DI, it’s a time to find as many mental judgments about his/her situation that can be found, and then formally release them out loud (e.g. “I release the judgment that I am never going to have the life I want,” etc). Sometimes doing this can trigger the tears, rages or freakouts that can dispel the heavy fog.

Whenever I am depressed, what also helps me find my way through is getting into my body. If I can walk a little, do some deep breathing, yoga, Somatics, anything to help me focus inward – it can enable me to get some sound expression happening, which always helps shift me when nothing is moving. It’s said that the less we do, the less we want to do, a vicious cycle. Inertia begets depression begets more inertia. Distraction and medication can be very short term solutions that in the end reveal themselves as circular train trips returning us to the very station we try to escape.

Hating or pressuring ourselves to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps doesn’t work either, it’s another circumnavigation. Sometimes nothing at all works. The best we can do is sit for awhile in the low vibration of hopelessness with what is happening or not happening, accepting ourselves as best we can for being in this place, trusting on the way to trust that this too shall pass.

What is “our truth in the moment”? It can be found in what we perceive, what we do, say feel, believe or think. We have been told as children to “tell the truth, now”, and we’ve taken in many messages since that time that revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is what shapes our character and integrity. I resonate with this to a large extent, while also knowing that honesty and truth-telling is fraught with old pain and damage for many of us.

We have trauma around revealing truth and not being believed; when we have given all we have to give and are met with mistrust and suspicion, it is a grave indicator that we contain large gaps of mistrust of ourselves being reflected by the person facing us. We have trauma around feeling too afraid to reveal key parts of the truth; this unprocessed fear generates its worst nightmare when somehow the withheld information is discovered and the other person responds with feelings of betrayal and hurt. Additionally, we have trauma around the guilt we feel when our truth triggers someone else into their hurt. This guilt within can look like punishment from without; on the personal scale we have been punished for lying, telling partial truths, and for telling the whole truth. On the global scale, withholding or even revealing the truth has resulted in torture, death or perpetuation of crimes against humanity.

The consequence of these seminal scenes in our pasts around giving our truth is that our behaviour can warp when faced with another opportunity to speak our truth to our friends, associates, bosses, families or lovers. Perhaps we find ourselves situated somewhere near the poles of the hiding/spilling continuum, on one end either withholding our truths nearly or totally completely, on the other revealing every low-level detail we can think of regardless of its appropriateness to the situation at hand. Neither polarity offers a balanced response.

Emotional and spiritual process can be vital ahead of time in order to get clear on where to land within this spectrum, and to more accurately align with our own inner sense of what feels right to reveal as opposed to “what we should say”. Judgments such as “they can’t handle the truth” are distorted evaluations predicated on past pain and experience. Releasing any judgments, predictions and projections out loud around what to say and how much or little is right to say can also be extremely helpful in the time prior to approaching someone with our truth.

The payoff of finding a balanced truth to give in each situation is the growth of trust: trust for self, trust for other, and trust for the truth itself. The cultivation of trust is, perhaps obviously, most intrinsically important in long-term relationships, where investing our deepest truth in each moment becomes paramount.

Without knowing how to give our truth, we cannot develop the trust we need in ourselves or in anybody else. Being in our deepest truth can grow with practice, becoming more facile with time and deeds. When we can be true to ourselves first and foremost, thoroughly honest with ourselves at all levels, it can radiate outward into all of our relationships.

Because of chronic and imprinted patterns of denial, we have been cut off from the awareness of the power we have, consciously or subconsciously, to magnetize everything that happens to us. A car crash I was in twenty years ago is certainly nothing I would have consciously chosen to manifest, but at that time my subconscious anger denial was so massive and so in control of what I was manifesting that it needed to draw that huge and dramatic an experience in order to get me off the dime toward a choice to intentionally heal what was buried in my subconscious. I was drawing experiences without knowing that I was.

The more unconscious that denial is for me, the more the experience it draws seems random and the more victimized I feel. Yet, it’s all “self chosen”. My emotional body is my Self as intrinsically as any other part of Self. The backlog of emotional denial I have has a direct effect on how consciously or subconsciously I manifest my reality. The feelings themselves want to directly express, not be hidden away. Expression is their natural state of being – being held quiet is not intrinsic to the nature of human emotions.

These experiences we draw that we cannot explain, we cannot explain because the reasons are buried in the subconscious, where old, denied emotions like rage, terror, and hurt live, apart from conscious awareness. We can only recover this awareness piece by piece by “vibrating” or allowing the trapped emotions to rise and show us, our conscious selves, our minds, what they have been holding and the reasons why. My experiences show me where I am denying, insofar as I don’t understand what they are showing me — they are “reflecting” to me, holding up a mirror, of what I am not currently seeing, as well as whatever portion of it I already do understand.

The entire reason for drawing the new experience is to trigger the held emotion and gain resulting awareness and understanding about why I had a similar, original experience way back in the beginning, in my very first incarnation as a manifested being. Once I gain the fullest, deepest understanding I can get on a particular issue, I no longer have to repeat the same kind of unpleasant experience and can finally move on to more pleasant, evolutionary experiences. I’ll only know for sure that “I’m done” with a given issue when similar types of experiences cease, or cease to trigger me.

Only when we can become fully conscious can we consciously create our lives the way we dream them to be. As long as we have most of magnetic selves trapped in the subconscious, the power to manifest in accordance with conscious desire remains latent. The mirror of our experiences and manifestations shows us unfailingly how far we have to go, and in what direction, if we can begin to learn to understand what they are saying about us, not “the other guy.”