Alane Freund, LMFT, HSP expert, says this about mental health: “There is one thing that absolutely improves mental health in a highly sensitive person — actually it makes everyone’s mental health better. THE MAGIC PILL IS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE.”
I think in the past most of us either figured we needed some sort of pill to change our lives—to change us. That little magic pill that I’ve written about before. And while some little pills work like magic to take away a headache, there are none that truly transmute the energy of depression and anxiety into something concretely different…and beautiful.
Instead, they only obfuscate, blur, and smudge the issues. They deter us not only from becoming consciously aware of what’s really going on, but keep us from discovering and being our authentic selves. Which keeps us from discovering our true purpose in the life we have been given…the life we have chosen to live.
All based on the idea that we’re broken and need fixing.
Is There A Logical Approach to Depression—and Does It Work?
Fortunately, the world is opening the door to “alternative” treatments* (I prefer “totally natural, non-chemical, make-all-the-sense-in-the-world-compared-to-pharmaceuticals”). And yet, many of us are not interested in going that route. Many of us simply want to know a different way. To experience that epiphany, that realization that provides access to the shift we so desperately need and want.
I myself spent years in and out of the world of traditional medications. It’ll show my age, but it was when I lived in married student housing with my husband and two small children that Prozac was being developed.
A friend of mine, married to a biochemist and also a new mother, musician, and Highly Sensitive Individual (though we had no label way back then) suffering from depression, told me that her husband was on this scientific team for Prozac. We couldn’t believe there might be an actual drug for depression. It seems too good to be true.
It was an exciting thought. Yet it took many years before I ever looked into taking Prozac (or any other drug for depression). Admit I was that depressed? Admit I sometimes wanted to cease to live? Never! I was riddled with too much shame and blame to ever let that happen.
Until one day I knew that if I didn’t do something differently, I was in danger of actually ceasing to exist altogether.
So I understand medical intervention in the form of drugs. I understand psychological therapy work. And I worked the system for years.
Still, when the drugs stopped working and new ones caused sleeplessness and weight gain, and my anxiety never went away, and newer drugs and more drugs were the only options on offer, I decided there had to be a better way.
That’s when my path turned to spirituality.
I’d always known I felt different and was different. Always felt like that alien dropped here to survive on a hostile planet. But now I saw just how responsible I was for my own life. How much I needed to stop being a victim of it.
I didn’t know how to do it. I started by reading books and testing the waters of understanding new ways of thinking. Reading people like Joseph Campbell and Michael Singer and Neale Donald Walsh and so many others. So obvious, it now seems to me, but it was all news to me.
Even with a husband who had studied and undertaken various spiritual practices his entire adult life, I was too overwhelmed with my own feelings of anxiety, depression, and inadequacy to fully practice what I was learning.
What I’m saying, though, from the here and now, is DON’T GIVE UP.
My work on being an HSI has led me to fully grasp how it’s all about energy. And yes, for me, energy work includes “spiritual” growth. Things like meditation, which quiets the mind and soul and invites the authentic human spirit to shine.
Still, even without the spiritual aspect woven in, we can work with energy. Start with quantum physics. Start with scientific research on how certain musical frequencies destroy cancer cells. Start anywhere that feels right.
Transformation is all about energy. Energy is there for all of us. And all of it is within the realm of possibility.
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*For example, “studies by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers showed that psychedelic treatment with psilocybin relieved major depressive disorder symptoms in adults for up to a month.”