This is Going to Hurt but Then it Won’t

There is a pharmaceutical ad that goes, “Depression hurts.”

The truth is that depression does hurt, and it can hurt as much as any physical pain. I know. I have been there, many times. I’ve been anxious, too. Another truth is that humans will do almost anything to avoid pain.

The first thing I would tell anyone who is depressed or anxious, besides not to change any medications they are on or to make sure they continue seeing a therapist, if that is what they are doing, is to clean up their diet. I have a lot of information on my website about a whole food plant-based diet, and I would recommend reading Super Immunity by Joel Fuhrman, MD.  After thirty days on a diet rich in healthy plant foods, I can guarantee most people will begin to feel better.

Is diet a miracle cure? For some people, that may be all it takes, but for others, like me, there is more to the story. However, it is impossible to ignore the role that foods play in our moods. The spike in depression rates over the past few decades coincides with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the decrease in the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Ancient teachings, such as Ayurveda, divide foods up into how they affect the body and mind, with foods to avoid, and many of those foods are the ones that fill grocery shelves around the world today.

But food is not the only culprit when it comes to mental health. Our bodies store the memories of events that have been stressful and traumatic, even when we think we have completely forgotten them. These memories are stored emotions, and emotions are energy. The key is to get still long enough to let that energy out.

The problem is that we don’t want to do that.

Why would we want to remember what was so painful that our conscious mind has forgotten it?

Because….

…if we don’t get to the bottom of things, our subconscious will drive us and our lives crazy.

***Alert! If you are depressed and are thinking about hurting yourself, stop reading now (bookmark you place) and call someone. If you are thinking about suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline- Call 1-800-273-8255, which is available 24/7. ***

If you know the trauma that occurred, you may need to find a good therapist who focuses on trauma. Uncovering trauma is painful for everyone, but it can be overwhelming to do alone so don’t try.

For the rest of us, this is going to hurt, but then it won’t.

The truth is that once we decide to get still enough to know what in our subconscious is driving us, we can clear out the old and open ourselves up to life.

The first time I experienced this opening I was doing yoga at home. I was newly married, and I was excited about yoga though I didn’t know many people who practiced it. After practicing a few asanas, or poses, I began to cry. The tension in my body was leaving, and along with it were the emotions that were keeping me tense. As is true with many people, those emotions were based mostly on the physical and emotional pain I had suffered as a child.

I was not used to sitting still. I was on the go all the time. Yoga required me to sit still and to stretch, to be quiet, and to pay attention to my breathing. My fears began to surface, and I cried thinking that my husband was going to fall out of love with me. We were newly married and happy, but that didn’t matter. Instead of seeing that fear as irrational, I believed it.

In short, I didn’t know what I was doing. I had started yoga to get fit. I had no idea how it would change not only my body, but my mind and spirit as well.

Yoga is only one way of processing what is eating us. The other is mindfulness meditation. Actually, yoga poses were designed to help yogis sit in meditation. However, mindfulness meditation doesn’t require us to sit in lotus position. It can be practiced sitting or lying down.

What happens in mindfulness meditation is that we become aware of our thoughts without giving them power over us. When I get quiet enough, and still enough, I can listen to the running tape in my head and bring to the surface what is driving me.

Carl Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Emmet Fox, in his book Find and Use Your Inner Power, tells the story of a soldier who had been wounded in war, his body full of shrapnel. Years later, every few weeks the man would feel an itch somewhere in his body, and in a short time a tiny lump would appear at the surface of his skin. A day later, a tiny piece of metal would break through, and he was able to remove it.

Fox equates this to clearing out the fears, doubts, and frustrations buried in our subconscious. Mindfulness is a way of allowing these thoughts to surface. When we know what we are thinking, then we can deal with our thoughts. Like the pieces of shrapnel, our thoughts will surface, perhaps first through an uncomfortable feeling, and what was once hidden is now in the light of day. For many of these thoughts, that is all that is needed, awareness.

For the more painful thoughts, it may take a little more analysis. When I was worried about my husband not loving me anymore, I could have held that thought up to reality. In reality, he was showing me love every day. My fear was not reality. I could have looked deeper at the fear itself. Why did I think that someone whom I loved would not love me?

Instead of doing this work, and it is sometimes hard work, we zone out of our lives. We watch TV, shop, drink, take drugs. You name it. Anything to distract us from what we are feeling. The problem is that is the long road to nowhere.

We will have to distract ourselves all our lives, and that gets exhausting. We need more and more to silence the inner niggling. Sometimes we have to drown out what feels like someone pounding down our inner door. All because we can’t stand the pain of facing what is inside of us.

The good news is that once we process our greatest fears, our past, the pain we have buried deep inside, we heal it. It is gone. We lance the wound by cleaning out the infection. The lancing hurts, but it allows us to heal.

I didn’t stop to find out why I feared not being loved, and that fear directed my life. It wasn’t, however, fate. It was a subconscious belief that I had held since I was a child. While I knew what I feared, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know that I could just stop fearing. I didn’t know that I could bring myself back to the present moment, which is and always will be the only reality, and in that moment realize that what I was fearing was not true.

Sitting still with my thoughts has taught me so much about myself. While I used to run from them, I realize that my thoughts aren’t going to hurt me. They are just thoughts. The hurt comes from me believing them. Before I sat still and got quiet, I didn’t even know what I thought.

I started small by sitting only five minutes, adding a minute or so each day. Over time, I have been able to sit for up to 30 minutes, but my average is about 15 minutes. The point is to start. At first, I felt pain and regret, and it washed through me, but it only lasted about a minute or so, and it was gone, forever.  

Soon I began to feel good. Free.

This beats a lifetime of running. While I am not done processing all that drives me, like the soldier, I just wait patiently for the emotional shrapnel to surface, and I know I can handle it. I don’t need to run away from it. It is healing me, not hurting me.

Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash