Depression is frozen feeling. It’s seldom a disease of the ‘mind’. It’s a disease of the heart. It is sourced in unexpressed, unreleased, and unhealed pain that is held deep within the physical and emotional body. You can talk about it in therapy to soften its edges, you can medicate it in the hopes that it becomes more manageable, but the real work has to happen somatically, deep within the body itself. The frozen material has to be thawed out, worked through, released. Our shadow is not our enemy. Repression is. Unfortunately, we still live in a world that is afraid of the source material. So we shun it, bury it, ‘manage’ it with dissociative spiritualities, medications and analysis (‘excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis’). All of this merely perpetuates and concretizes the problem.
The only way to heal depression is to get to its roots. To get right inside those frozen feelings, and to thaw them out somatically. We felt the initial pain in our hearts. We must go right back inside of our hearts to feel and resolve it. No more damming up of our emotions. No more defenses and denials. Instead, a society-wide acceptance of the fact that we are all carrying pain. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It's part of our collective experience. And a culturally embraced invitation to do the real work to heal its deep roots with body-centered psychotherapies. And with love. The more we can love those who are struggling with depression, the more strength they will have to reclaim their past and heal their hearts. They didn’t have support back then. Let’s give it to them, now. Let’s create a safe societal container to bring those feelings back to the surface. THE FEEL IS FOR REAL. Let's feel our way back to life... - Jeff Brown, the message at the heart of 'Grounded Spirituality'