Quote Originally Posted by Derby Tup View Post
What do you do if you believe that your depression isn't your fault? If you believe it's like having a cold say or a broken leg? I've never felt right for as long as I can remember, well over 40 years. I didn't know what it was for decades, but I've never believed it was my fault (I'm not criticising you or or your thought process btw Luke. It's a genuine question)
Firstly, and most importantly, you aren't fighting it. You are accepting it as part of you. To decide it is your fault is to impose causality on an effect from an arbitrary viewpoint. One of the founding principles of The Work is to never argue with reality; the reality is- i feel depressed, it hurts to argue with this fact. It will stop your recovery in its tracks, your recovery will only move at the speed of your own understanding, it once took me 6 months of constant work to understand something very simple; once i'd understood it the thought let go of me and has never returned.

"Man is stuck with his lack of knowledge about himself until he can learn to look beyond apparent causes. For the human record, we can note that answers never arise from identifying 'causes' in the world. Instead, it's necessary to identify the conditions that underlie ostensible causes; and these only exist within man's consciousness itself"

In laymen's terms, stress is not in the world, it's in your mind.

"No definitive answer to any problem can be found by isolating sequences of events and projecting upon them a mental notion of 'causality'. There are no causes within the observable world, as we shall see, the observable world is one of effects".

In laymen's terms, don't argue with reality.

"Man's dilemma-now and always-has been that he misidentifies his own intellectual artefacts as reality. But these artificial suppositions are merely the products of an arbitrary point of perception. The inadequecy of the answers we recieve is a direct consequence of the limitations implicit in the viewpoints of the questioner".

In laymen's terms, you can't move on past what you don't understand, and once again- stress is in your mind!

Quotes are from 'Power Vs. Force' David R Hawkins

So secondly, what do you do? You congratulate yourself for accepting your depression as part of you and not a separate entity to be feared, attacked or rejected. I was talking to one of the advanced level Psych-K facilitators before my chinese acupuncture appointment earlier, a lady of exceptional insight who has little formal therapy qualifications. Just like Byron Katie, she says that depression is an alarm clock. It shuts your body down like a computer going into hibernate, it drags you into a cave until eventually you start to listen and begin a process of learning, understanding and correction. As you progress you become stronger and wiser, you now instinctively move away from the hurt because you understand and recognise it, just like how nobody has to think about removing their hand from a flame- you just do it.

I'm assured that if you are depressed it's your body's way of telling you that something you are doing is wrong, either that or you are not doing something that you should be doing. With me it was a combination of mental attatchment to untrue underlying beliefs and lack of love for myself. I didn't love myself enough to provide for my very soul what it required, and i believed things that hurt myself deeply. Once again we circle back to the understanding that stress/depression is in here and not out there.