What many people call depression is just a feeling that has not been fully felt without words and pictures on it. Words like “I’m depressed” and pictures of yesterday and how awful it was will never actually feel an emotion. They merely interpret it. To feel it, one must experience it without words and pictures on it. Experiencing it this directly often releases it fully. This is what we do with the Living Inquiries.
– Scott Kiloby
I find that for myself. When I have examined the words and images, and recognize them as words as images, it’s easier to recognize sensations as pure sensations, and this allows whatever is here to move through. It unsticks what’s here. It allows it to be met, befriended, felt, even loved.
I have been pondering depression without words, the depression that wordless animals must feel, the depresses that instructs, encourages rest and stepping back… I don’t know if the words are useful…
I suggest that a busy person is not depressed, doesn’t have time for it… takes the action needed or works.
My sense is that depression may keep a person from working and thus is self perpetuating… absent the motivation for work, it must come from the outside… in must be imposed. The solution may demand social alliances, close social alliances: I don’t know of any depression that would actually prevent locomotion. drinking, swimming, stacking wood…
I think there are several facets here.
One is the function of depression in an evolutionary perspective. Since a predisposition to depression must have been passed on over a great number of generations, it’s reasonable to think it has a function. For instance, it may be a sign that we are “off track” in an essential way. It allows us to pause, ponder, and do a course correction.
Another is how depression is created through taking certain images and thoughts as true. (I suspect that when non-human animals get depressed, it may be because they too hold certain images as true and real.) Then there is biology, relationships, culture and so on.
And then there is what to do about it…. exercise, CBT, inquiry, making changes in life so it’s more aligned with our truth, love and passion, and much more.
What Scott Kiloby talks about here is that when images and words are stripped off the sensations of depression (through the Living Inquiries), it allows these sensations/energies to change and move and “move through”.