Depression is such a powerful state of emptiness and darkness that most people instinctively want nothing to do with it. Even just researching images for this blog post, I felt a gut tendency in myself to want to steer clear of this energy, to take a distance. This is true even when we are the ones who are depressed: we want to be rid of it, get away from it, or fix it somehow. In addition to the depression itself, there often arise shame about being depressed, self-blame about not being able to extricate ourselves from it, and fear about it continuing and/or coming back in the future. No wonder, then, that the use of anti-depressants is ever on the rise, as they promise a medical fix to the problem, so we don't have to deal with it any longer.

This blog is an invitation to breathe and really look. If you don't follow the impulse to turn away, can you simply be with the energy that is expressed in the above photo? Can you notice what arises and stay with the image anyway: the fear of being pulled down or somehow being 'contaminated' by it, the repulsion, the blame? Can you simply look, neutrally, without any concept of what this is, why it's happening, and what needs to be done about it? Can you simply be with it? Can you open your heart to what you see? Can you see with your heart? What happens as you take your time, breathing, looking, being with this energy of depression, being with the man who is suffering with it?

Dear all,

I've been working hard in the last few days (hard, yes, but without straining or pushing myself) to help this new online retreat come to life fully. I'm even learning how to do basic graphic design, like the above banner for the facebook event page! It's amazing how things just unfold from one day to the next. There is a sense inside of an ongoing movement that keeps generating all sorts of activity, a sense of being in a flow that's much larger than me. It's joyful, even as it is also work, especially when it comes to settling so many details all at the same time.

There are certain themes that just seem to be part of our lives. And even if they move into the background for a while and we think we're done with them, they'll show up again and again. They're like red threads, guiding threads: asking, and sometimes even compelling, us to pay attention.

Meditation, love, and healing are three such themes for me. And they came up to announce as themes for the meditation evenings that I'll be offering every other week in Montreal starting in September. I always trust what comes intuitively like that, and often I'll find out as I go along exactly what that means and how it will play out. 

So how do these three fit together?

After having written the last blog post, Intuition Revisited, I knew I wasn't quite done yet with the topic. There was this phrase that kept coming to mind: intuition is the voice of the heart. I hadn't been able to integrate it with the flow of the text, so I decided to write another post about the connection between the heart and intuition. Here it goes.

In the earlier blog, I focused on the contrast between the survival mode, which is ultimately driven by fear, and trusting the flow of Life, with intuition being an integral part of the ‘trust mode’. But how and where do we find trust in our psyche? When we rest in trust, where do we in fact rest? Trust cannot reside in the mind, as the mind will always find reasons to doubt whatever we think we know and can trust.