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I’ve had more than one person reach out to me on the sensation of emptiness in their life. They feel like a shell. The drive or purpose they once had in their life has faded and they more and more just don’t care anymore. This is one sign of what could be diagnosed as clinical depression. And traditional psychology views this as an abnormal disease that needs to be cured. While traditional psychology is trying to be helpful the very attitude of viewing depression as a disease is a judgmental energy. With judgmental energy the places you feel unwell are not met with healing but instead with harshness, criticism and pressure to change back to “acceptable”. And so this will tend to exacerbate the unwellness we are trying to heal.  But there is now a new psychology mindset called PVT (Polyvagal Theory) that avoids the criticism, judgement, and pressure in order to offer healing more profound than traditional psychotherapy. 

An article in Psychology Today describes PVT and how these places of emptiness and clinical depression are NOT a disease but actually a healthy message from the more primitive and child-like parts of your existence. The healthy message is encouraging you to pause, find space, find time and come back into wholeness and unity with yourself.

With PVT when the environment and experiences in your life become too overwhelming your VNS (vagus-related nervous system) puts you into a shutdown state. Your vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body that connects your brain, lungs, heart and digestive organs. When your VNS goes into shut-down state this is your safety relief valve. Initially this shutting down action may feel very disconcerting and alarming because before the shutdown you will have come from a place of much more activity. But the truth is that this prior state of much more activity will have involved excessive stress, worry and expectations and so was unhealthy. Therefore, this shutting down is an invitation to rest easy and realize this sensation of emptiness and clinical depression is a healthy response to a prior unhealthy lifestyle.

On an emotional level this shutdown is your inner child desperately calling out to you to pay attention, reconnect and listen. There are many times in our lives that we quickly override our fears by rushing through things, submitting to the opinions of others. We may then take drugs or alcohol to numb out our fears, sadness or pain. We may also get easily embarrassed or ashamed of revealing our true selves. When we do these overriding kinds of things we are ignoring our inner child that is the source of play, fun, joy in our life. This is a core area that needs to be fed with love, worth, and safety. It needs to be be seen and heard, received and acknowledged. 

When we ignore our inner child we disconnect from him/her and withhold the nourishment he/she needs. Eventually he/she starves and our connection withers. Then the play, fun and joy in our lives withers. Our lives start to feel mechanical, without purpose. We feel like empty shells. This state of being is an unhealthy state from which our inner child as a last resort shuts things down which we will experience as clinical depression.

This is why it’s important to create time and space for playfulness and joy in our lives. Make sure to find playful things that are not high-tech and complicated but rather simple and closer to what a very young child might do. This might be drawing, coloring, or painting. Even more profoundly bring back dancing into your life. Much of industrialized high technology civilization has made dancing feel embarrassing. But it is in fact a fundamental human activity that children do organically that brings back vitality and passion into your life. Read the article “Clinical Depression to Passion” for more on dancing to heal clinical depression.

Modern PVT Psychology describes optimal mental health occurring when we can enter a place of play, trust, safety, rest, and engaging social interactions. These places, especially places of play, is most valued by children. When you can connect with your inner child you become aware of any longings, fears, and beliefs of your inner child and you can fulfill them. And when you do this you create resiliency, confidence and wholeness in your life. When you lose this connection with your inner child you will feel empty, disconnected, burnt-out, lost or depressed. So if there is any area of your life where you feel empty, disconnected, burnt-out, lost or depressed, I encourage you to try the below meditation. This meditation is designed to help you listen to the wisdom that is behind when you are feeling clinical depression. This an updated version of a meditation I had used for myself when I was in the darkest places of severe emptiness and depression. I now share this with you.

Repeat this meditation more than once. As you repeat it will subconsciously reestablish your connection to your inner longings and desires. This will allow you to re-establish purpose and meaning into a life that might otherwise feel empty and depressed.

Do you find yourself feeling more down during the winter season? You are not alone. Approximately 10 million Americans experience what amounts to a clinical depression during the winter season. This phenomenon is known as Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD for short. It is attributed to the shortened daylight in the winter versus the summer. I am one of those people who is strongly effected by SAD and I’d like to share my solution using specialty indoor lighting.

In this article I will discuss and demonstrate the use of a “Happy Light” to counter SAD. Then share how I’ve found a much more powerful lighting solution. I will be sharing how I recently discovered what I consider a “Super Powered Happy Light” that has worked so much better for me in countering SAD.

If you believe you are impacted by SAD the most direct way of finding relief is by consciously getting more sunlight. To do this you can either move away during the winter to places with more sunlight or you can make use of indoor specialty lighting to help give your body a sunlight boost. The easiest way to find this type of lighting is to search the internet for what are sometimes called “Happy Lights”. These “Happy Lights” are designed to simulate the sensation of sunlight on your body.

It’s easy to find a “Happy Light” that will cost anywhere from $20 to $90. The most popular brand is made by Verilux®, but there are many other brands that are available. To use a “Happy Light” you place it on a table, turn it on and let the light shine on one side of your face. With these lights it’s important to keep the light between 6 to 24 inches from the side of your face for a duration of about 2 hours to get sufficiently intense lighting. The closer the better.

All the “Happy Lights” will mention providing light intensity of 10,000 lux. However, this 10,000 lux rating by itself is not meaningful because it does not tell you how close you need to be to the light to get 10,000 lux of light intensity.

Some lights require your face to be within 6 inches of the light to get 10,000 lux while more powerful lights allow you to be over a foot away and still get 10,000 lux. So for countering SAD it’s important to consider how large of a space that will get illuminated at 10,000 lux. The larger the space the more you can freely move around and get the proper lighting. The larger the space the more of your entire body will get the proper lighting. With the ordinary “Happy Light” only the part of your face that is within 6 inches of the light will get proper lighting. Most the rest of your body does not get the proper lighting to make a difference. And this is why I believe these ordinary “Happy Lights” have NOT worked for me in countering SAD.

There is another number used to describe the power and brightness of a light source that we need to introduce. It’s called lumens. The higher the lumens rating of a light the larger the space surrounding the light that can achieve 10,000 lux. Most companies do not tell you the lumens rating of their lights. However, it appears that the typical “Happy Light” outputs about 800 lumens and can so achieve 10,000 lux no further than 6 inches. Think of it. Six inches is a very tiny space to have to keep your face within.

Recently I found something much better than the typical “Happy Light”. It turns out you can purchase lighting that uses the same “Happy Light” technology but boosted to about 30 times stronger. I was able to find 20,000 lumen LED floodlights that can achieve 10,000 lux as far as 30 inches away. I have found that a 20,000 lumen LED floodlight works as a “Super Powered Happy Light”. I’ve used ordinary Happy Lights for years without much success. In comparison these 20,000 lumen LED floodlights work great. The difference is very noticeable!

With the ordinary “Happy Light” it will may take many days of consistent use to notice a difference. But with these LED flood lights you can notice the difference immediately. With the ordinary “Happy Light” only a very small space gets brightened up. With the LED flood light the entire room and your entire body gets brightened up. That’s why I call them “Super Powered Happy Lights”.

Some things to note are that the LED flood lights run much hotter and are much bulkier than the ordinary “Happy Light”. They are also more expensive. The LED flood lights cost from $100 to $200 whereas the ordinary “Happy Light” costs from $20 to $90. So if you feel you only have mild SAD symptoms it’s definitely worth trying the ordinary “Happy Light” first and seeing if it works for you. Then if you find they aren’t sufficient for you then definitely try using an LED flood light. You can’t do better than these “Super Powered Happy Lights”.  When you get a LED flood light it’s recommended you get one that is rated at 20,000 lumens (remember it’s 20,000 lumens not 10,000 lux) and color is rated at 5000K to 6500K.

To demonstrate the use of the ordinary “Happy Light” versus using a 20,000 lumen LED floodlight (aka Super Powered Happy Light) watch the below video.

Do you find the world filled with increasing uncertainty? Does your future feel less secure? Does your future feel unsafe?  You are not alone by far.

In America about half of all adults feel in imminent danger at least 1x a day (source: OnePoll in 2022). Nearly 70% of adults feel the economy is getting worse (source: ABC News Ipsos in 2022). All of this creates the climate for heightened anxiety. Anxiety is not just heightened for adults. There’s been between 24% to 31% increase in emergency visits related to mental health for children 5 years or older (source: CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics in 2020). Everyone is being impacted by increasing levels of anxiety.

Anxiety is just another part of natural human life so it is not something that can be eliminated. However, when it becomes chronic, paralyzing, and unhealthy it starts to make life spiral out of control. I have many years personal experience being in sustained periods of very severe anxiety and depression. But now I’m so much stronger. I will still experience anxiety, but now I’m more often able to take myself outside of anxiety and not get so caught up in the turmoil. I’m more able to observe my anxiety from the sidelines and offer compassion and healing to it. In this article I share with you my approach to not just cope with anxiety but to actually heal anxiety.

I lived much of my life afraid of lots of things. I was afraid of upsetting or disappointing others. I was afraid of being laughed at. I was afraid of being yelled at. I was afraid of not being good enough to get hired for a job. I was afraid of being unemployed. I was afraid of having no money and going into endless debt. I tried lots of positive motivational visioning to build myself up.  I also worked through many therapy and coaching sessions to identify reasons why I did not need to be afraid. They helped to some extent in coping and managing anxiety, but for more severe anxieties they seem rather limited because they mostly relied on educating the mind and failed to address the emotions. After many years I came to discover the missing piece in most all approaches to dealing with anxiety. The missing piece was love.

At first this does not sound obvious. For example how can love counter fear of loss of job or fear of bodily harm? Getting a job and not love would seem to be the best thing to counter fear of loss of a job. Taking a self-defense class and not love would seem to be the best thing to counter fear of bodily harm. Understand the core aspect of anxiety is not about what you can physically do to protect and defend yourself. It’s about accepting the fact that there will always be something you don’t know and can’t control. And so the core aspect of anxiety is about finding ways to dealing with what you don’t know and can’t control.  Because in the end even after you get a job you will still feel on edge to prevent losing that job and even if you improve your self-defense ability you will still feel on edge bracing for a threat you’ll never know will appear. With anxiety I want you to start thinking about how can you shift out of living on edge and start living in ease?

Much of society views anxiety as a problem to be fixed or disease to be removed. This makes one think about coping techniques like using smoking, alcohol, or controlled substances. These can be effective short-term solutions for coping but they don’t get to the root of anxiety. Many psychiatric medications can also be effective for coping with the symptoms but they still do not get to the root. The problem is not so much what we do to try to cope with anxiety. The problem is that we are simply focused on coping more-so than healing. The coping attitude considers anxiety as something we need to fight, avoid, remove or resolve. This attitude adds a hard edge to anxiety. That edge tends to tighten up, intensify and compound anxiety. I want to introduce a change in attitude and our relationship with anxiety that will soften the edges in life. I want to encourage us to move from simply “coping with anxiety” into more “healing anxiety”.

It’s about softening the edge. To soften the edge the first thing is to stop considering anxiety as a problem to be fixed. Stop looking at anxiety as an enemy disease to be removed from your body. Instead start to view anxiety as a timid best friend. Start to consider that anxiety is just an emotional expression connected with the more tender, vulnerable, and lesser seen parts of you. When you make this shift then anxiety becomes your doorway to discovering more of you. So instead of hiding, avoiding, or numbing out the parts of you that are scared you start to heal, transform, and integrate newer more creative parts of you into your entire being. The result is you steadily transform those anxious parts of you into an ever more resilient, capable, compassionate, caring, creative and courageous you.

One thing that will help encourage this shift and softening of edge are practices of self-love.  This may include taking time for self-care. But more importantly practices of loving kind self-talk help induce feeling fully loved. The goal is to feel unconditionally loved for being you just as you are.  This means feeling loved not for what you’ve done or not done but for you just being alive and existing just as you are and nothing else. 

To help you start making that shift watch this below video where I share a simple technique I call “Heart Aligned Healing” which combines positive self-love talk with physical contact with heart.

Heart Aligned Healing is an effective technique to promoting self-love in the face of the challenges of everyday life. Understand whenever you can support love of self then it the supports you feeling completely secure for who you are. It makes you feel like you don’t have to do anything. And when that happens you allow yourself to be the best version of yourself always. And in dealing with the uncertainties of life the most prepared you can ever be is when you are the best version of yourself. When you are the best version of yourself you still encounter fear, but you will face that fear as the best possible version of you. When you do this, it results in continual healing of anxiety.  Through the process of healing the things you fear start to gradually soften and lessen with each encounter. And you shift out of living on the edge into living with ease. You become a person filled with natural resilience, confidence, creativity, capability, and courage. 

If you are interested in more tools on self-love and creating this shift out of edge, I strongly encourage you to

1) Get my “Spirituality for REAL” book series or

2) Enroll in my newest online course “Be the Center of Your Universe”. 

Self-care and self-love is a good thing. Well sort of.  Because at the same time, we are also told not to be selfish, because selfish people are often judged as bad and looked down upon in our society. This is an article to clear up the confusing and stressful mixed messages about self-love and selfishness. Most of us have been left to assume that healthy self-love is a delicate balance between selflessness and selfishness. This article will show you the way to authentic self-love in an awakened reality where both selflessness and selfishness do not exist.

A selfish person is viewed as someone who constantly does things for themselves. They keep taking things for themselves. That person is looked down upon.  A selfless person is one who constantly does things for others.  They keep giving away things to others. That person is viewed as virtuous and good.

Growing up Chinese, I was raised with strong messages of selflessness. As a child, I remember large dinner gatherings with aunts and uncles at Chinese Restaurants. There were large quantities of food ordered. It was far more than everyone could eat and in the end when the large bill came everyone fought for the check. The person who fought the hardest regrettably won the right to pay the large bill, was judged as generous and avoided being labeled as selfish. The person who fought the hardest without getting the check was the biggest winner because they gave the outside appearance of being selfless and preserved an internal selfish goal of not wanting to pay. This pretty much sums up the dysfunction that exists in our conception of selfishness and selflessness. 

I was also raised Catholic under the strong image of many saints who endured impoverished living while serving selflessly for the poor and the sick. The image of Jesus Christ’s barely clothed body suffering on the cross seems to project a belief that generosity or selfless giving to the point of personal suffering was the most noble status to achieve. This starts to make one feel guilty, bad or sinful for spending money on themselves when they should perhaps give all of it away to the poor. Therefore, I think I was like most and could not live up to such high standards of goodness and sainthood.

With these belief systems in place, I never felt good about myself. I saw that these belief systems are woven into all of our relationships with ourselves and others. The most important thing that governs our happiness is how good we feel about ourselves. Are there places where we feel like a good, very likable, loveable and generous person? Are there places where we feel we look bad, unlikeable, envied, despised, and considered selfish? These questions reveal why we may be driven to please as many people as possible, why we may set boundaries and why we may be willing to accept some people not liking us or calling us bad.

Most people understand the  importance of self-love and self-care. Many people will admit that self-love is just a healthy amount of selfishness that avoids becoming excessive and overly focused on the self.  However, it is completely subjective where that balance point is, which can become  confusing and stressful. Let me explain what I mean. 

Selflessness is considered generous and judged as a concept of “good”. Selfishness is considered the opposite and judged as a concept of “bad”. The thing many don’t realize is that a selfless person is often acting from a place of “not-enough-ness.” When this happens the outwardly selfless person can inwardly lack self-worth and needs others to witness them doing a selfless act. They seek a kind of internal  praise that is typically missing. If the selfless person doesn’t get sufficiently rewarded by others for their sacrifice they will start to feel resentment.

Selfishness also comes from this same place of “not-enoughness.” With selfishness, the person makes up for their lack of self-worth by claiming more external things. The truth is that both selfishness or selflessness both come from a state of insecurity and feeling like one isn’t enough. Both come from a place where we feel driven to do something to prove our worth because we can’t believe our mere existence alone is enough. If it were at all possible, what we’d like to do is act selfishly in private, but always be witnessed in public doing selfless acts. This becomes an exhausting and stressful life to live, but this is exactly what can happen in our relationships. Sometimes we are trying to make up for an inherent worth that we don’t believe in, so it prevents us from giving ourselves the love we actually need and crave.

Understanding self-love is about “being” not “doing.” Any love that is dependent upon “doing” is conditional love. Conditional love requires that you do something to prove yourself with outward physical action. Unconditional self-love is NOT about “doing,” it is about “being.”

I can give myself as much or as little love as I want and still come from a place of love. I can also take as much or as little love as I want and still come from a place of love. As long as I am in that place of self-love, I will be secure enough about my worth regardless of how much I decide to give or take external things in life. The secret is “being” and not “doing” self-love.

How can you get there? Having a self-love meditation or self-love mirror talk can help you start “being” self-love instead of “doing” self-love. For example, here’s one practice to try that I use and find very helpful:

1. Find a place you feel safe that no one else is around to watch or can hear you.  The place needs to have a mirror so that you can see your face.
2. Once in this place. Look at yourself and observe all the features of your face. Don’t try to fix anything on your face, just look and observe all your facial features. If you find this too intense, you can take small steps and make eye contact with yourself just a bit and then look away.  Then when ready, restore eye contact.
3. Say to yourself “I love you.”  Then notice the feelings you may feel when you say that. Do you shrink back a bit? Do you hear a voice saying “this is silly?” Do you wish something were different?

For those who may think this is about practicing self-vanity, let me suggest some more words to say in the mirror. Say the following words to yourself in the mirror:

“I love you. I have been with you through every second of your life. Through all those tough times that seemed so unfair to you, I was there with you. In those places no one else was with you, I was with you.  I know what you’ve been through. I understand what you’ve really been through like no other. I applaud you. I love you. You are loveable. You are so important to me.  I love you.”

How’s that feel? Are there any critical feelings that make this feel silly or wrong? Is there something about you that you don’t like seeing in the mirror? This may be a very new way of looking at self-love and self-care.

Doing this self-love practice in your own privacy is creating a state of self-love. It allows you to come to “being” love as opposed to “doing” love. Once you can be love for yourself, you can soundly be the lover for others. You then model unconditional love for others. In this place of unconditional love, what you decide to do or not do is irrelevant.

Do you feel your life is plagued with increasing chaos and fear? Does your future seem increasingly less certain and scary? If this is true then you need not fear, because this is actually a sign of things wonderful heading your way. These are signs of tremendous growth that have been intentionally sent in your direction. This may initially sound preposterous, but it’s true. It is actually good that it’s true. In this article, I will explain why.

Some of the toughest times in my life happened over 20 years ago. My wife had been going through increasingly inexplicable health issues and I soon found myself in a caretaking role. Over time my life spiraled into places of increasing darkness, hopelessness, and depression. I saw a therapist for support, but in the end, it was an idea implanted in my mind that started to shift things in a better direction. The idea was that good or bad things don’t just happen to me in life. Instead, events happen to me in life and it’s up to me to decide if that event is good or bad for me. How I decide to react to that event determines whether the final outcome is good or bad for me. It is our perception of external events that create our life experiences and not the external events themselves.

In the book Spirituality for REAL: Deep Healing I use the following co-creation equation as a powerful tool to describe how this works:

With “Event” we are talking about external events. For example, someone yells at you and you feel bad. You might say that that person made you feel bad, but it really requires you to decide that the yelling is a bad thing for you and that you should feel bad about it. Suppose that person was speaking a language you don’t understand and I tell you that he said, “You’re an idiot.” Then you should feel bad, right? But then what if I told you that he really said, “You look fabulous.” Then maybe you would feel good. What if I told you that he really said, “My football team has lost,” or “I wish you had wavy hair.” Then how would you feel? 

Maybe you would be upset with me for having played mind games with you. Suppose that before I was supposedly playing mind games, I was told that my mother had just died in a horrific accident. Because of that event, I felt dazed when I tried to interpret the words of this yelling man. Now how do you feel about me? Ultimately, it’s up to you to interpret and judge the event, which then sets up how you will feel emotionally. The perception you choose sets up how you feel emotionally, which then becomes the reality of your life.

When you examine your “Perception,” you take time to observe and question how you feel. Then examine the beliefs and events in your life that contribute to how you are feeling. Start by clarifying your beliefs. When you do that, you make fundamental changes in your being and existence on Earth, thus changing “Reality.” You will certainly change “Reality” in terms of how much happiness you experience from whatever life has brought to you. You will certainly affect “Reality” in terms of what others will experience from you so they can react to you. You will also affect the “Reality” of what is physically happening around you now and in the future.

Through this way of continually re-examining my beliefs and reframing my perceptions, I have come to see the entire constellation of external physical events of life and of the Universe have been, and continue to be and always will be but only the most benign and beneficial. The utmost perfection in love, compassion, kindness and purpose is woven into everything that comes your way in life. There are no accidents and mistakes and mess-ups. Everything that has come your way is the best possible gift ever.

The ability to reframe things into this perception of life allows you to remain open to finding hope and peace regardless of how severe the chaos, terror and turmoil may be. So far all of this seems like interesting mental exercises, but how can you make actual shifts in perception that create your own hope and peace in spite of any external chaos?

In the book Spirituality for REAL: Deep Healing, there is a 4 -part perception system, that if you can start to internalize, will create this shift. The 4-part perception system is as follows:

1. There is only one real person in this world and that is you
2. All others and all things are merely virtual things and situations designed to teach you
3. Everyone else is God, your teacher. Treat others with such due reverence
4. It’s just God and you. You are God’s sole REAL student

I recommend you watch this video where I describe and explain more about this 4-part perception system.

Please watch this video more than once. It is the mechanism from which great spiritual leaders such as Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi derived great human strength, compassion and love. It allowed them to find hope in peace in the midst of adversity and also made them beacons of actual change in the world to foster hope and peace.

Finally, if you want to learn more I encourage you to read the Spirituality for REAL book series and enroll in the online course “Be the Center of Your Universe”.

All of us experience stress and health challenges in this world. With increasing global climate changes, increasing conflict, and increasingly complex economic challenges, the level of stress has only grown. This increased stress then contributes to things like high blood pressure and declining health. In this article, I intend to share with you a meditation to both help improve your stress levels and health .

Currently our news is filled with headlines of political conflict, military conflict, increased violence, worsening climate changes, economic turmoil, and newer strains of viruses such as COVID or monkeypox. This all adds up to a state of overwhelm from an increasingly threatening world. But despite the newest challenges of our times, there remains one age-old means of countering the states of overwhelm, lowering stress, and improving health. That age-old technique is known as meditation.

Conservative medical organizations such as the National Institute of Health recognize the health benefits of meditation. A study in 2012 published by the NIH highlighted a lowering in blood pressure with larger benefits seeming to come from mantra-based meditation versus mindfulness meditation.

There are many kinds of meditation.  Some meditations involve stillness, some movement, some involve complete silence, some involve voicing mantras, and some involve holding certain body poses. Even common everyday activities such as walking, swimming, or biking can be considered meditation. In this article, I’m going to focus on meditation where you remain still for an extended period in a comfortable seated or lying position. Of all the kinds of meditations, I’ve found that the ones that involve stillness are the most beneficial..

My first introduction to meditation was as a child. I was a sickly child. I was contracting the flu regularly once or more a year. Each time I was sick I remember having to recover by spending a day or two in bed getting rest. But this changed when I turned 14. I started working with guided meditations originally to help improve my memory. But meditation had a side effect,it allowed me to recover faster from illness. On my first try at applying meditation for recovery from a flu infection, I was able to accelerate recovery down from a full day to half a day. On the 2nd onset of flu, I was able to recover in 30 minutes! Then for a very long stretch of years, I never caught the flu again. This was potent proof for me that meditation was both helping stress and my health.

I would like to share a version of this very powerful meditation I used when I was a child. To do this meditation please find a quiet safe place where you can either sit or lie down in a comfortable position. Next identify any area of your life where you are feeling fear, stress, anger, or struggle. It can be purely emotional but can also include any physical ailments or discomfort. Notice this area and welcome it into this safe space where we will meditate. All are welcome here, especially those places that do not feel OK. It is OK to not be OK here. That’s why we meditate. We meditate to start bringing acknowledgment, validation and healing to these places in our life.

Now listen to this meditation.

 As you come back, please. Notice how you feel. And when you have time again come back and repeat this meditation.

According to the World Health Organization, depression has been on the rise worldwide since 2005. The CDC has also reported steady increases in anxiety, depression, and mental and behavioral disorders for children starting at age of one. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lifestyles has exacerbated this. But there is a positive lining to this if we examine it from a spiritual perspective. This article will introduce newer approaches to healing depression based on personal experience.

The fact is I had been diagnosed with clinical depression for several years. In some of the most severe periods, I made suicide attempts that required hospitalization. The most recent occurrence of clinical depression appeared after many years of working as a project manager in a fast-paced highly demanding business. 

Despite periods of depression, I was able to find space exploring arts, rejuvenating myself, learning to listen to and dance to music, and exploring nature. In the experience of my depression, I had come to find the gift and joy of discovering what it means to be a human. I came to realize a passion for healing humanity after my efforts and learning about self-healing. Like many, I had taken medication and embraced the tools and wisdom of modern western medicine. But I also discovered a way to flourish by allowing myself to dance, express creativity, and passion, explore, read, write, swim, eat well, hike, and create videos. 

What has become clear is that my depression was and is NOT a problem that needs to be fixed but is instead a natural healthy response of my body to things that were no longer compatible with my purpose and passion in life. I realized by listening, I opened up a greater awareness of what it is to be fully grounded, confident, creative, powerful, and loving. So my symptoms appeared for a reason – to help me recalibrate my purpose and find wholeness.

I found that the modern corporate environment is generally fast-paced, and pressure-filled. Every person I interacted with in this environment would have agreed that the pressure and stress were substantial but that it was just part of life. The issue is that some people perhaps thrive or manage to get by in these environments, and some don’t. In these environments there is an idealized myth of workers exuding confidence, being able to impress by working long hours, constantly traveling, and fitting in many extracurricular social engagements all while managing to hold a smiling, energetic and exuberant persona. I observed many rising stars in the corporate world who almost seemed to fit this persona. But the truth is that this persona is an idealized myth. It is a myth so strong that often I could not shake the belief that something was wrong with me. Under the demand of this myth, I started to feel disregarded, unappreciated, ignored, unworthy, invalidated and unloved. These are the conditions that over time will suck the life out of us all. When this happens for too long a state of clinical depression is typically reached.

Our mental health disorders are healthy wisdom-filled responses that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. An article in Psychology Today describes that conventional psychiatric approaches to mental health have gotten it wrong with the attitude and approach to depression. Conventional thinking considers depression as the enemy to fight, and that those with depression are broken. This adversarial perspective to healing limits our options and ability for mental health and balance. Now more holistic attitudes in mental health consider depression as a healthy response of the human body to unhealthy conditions that offer helpful information for actual healing. 

Depression is no longer the enemy but rather a partner to offer guidance and insight into your well-being. Now with the wisdom of depression working for you instead of against you, you are open to a wider means of solutions beyond conventional medication and psychology. Conventional medication and psychology remain effective tools but are now only part of a much wider set of tools available. 

For me, conventional medication played a key role in the early stages of the most severe places allowing me space to broaden the set of tools for improving my mental and physical health. Eventually, the solution for me evolved into a state where a psychiatrist could see medication was no longer needed. It’s been that way for over two years. When addressing issues of depression, one of the biggest tools in the solution to healing is the attitude of everyone. 

I am proposing a change of attitude toward how we engage with depression. For example, you are more likely to heal with a doctor that has a friendly attitude and can offer validation, than with a doctor that is condescending and close-minded. With a change of attitude that starts viewing depression as a wise guide rather than the embarrassing stigma, conventional treatments become more effective and the options, decisions, and solutions begin to open up.

When we are in clinical depression, in the short term, we can make use of medications to counter the symptoms. However, for the long-term solution, we must heal what is harmful in the environment to allow the return of our body to a state of rest. Note that the opposite of clinical depression is not happiness, it is vitality. The goal of healing depression is not about trying to be only happy and avoiding any feelings of sadness, fear, or pain. The goal of healing is to embrace the full spectrum of human emotions and experience all its vitality. 

I believe that there is a remarkably low priority that our culture gives to areas of song, music, and dance. Prioritizing these areas of art would do much more than we think to create vitality, creativity, and playfulness in our world. In my experience, I have found that dancing is an especially vulnerable and potentially embarrassing thing to do. However, according to the most watched Ted Talk in history, given by Sir Ken Robinson, dancing is highlighted as an important skill to prioritize in our education system. With the support of Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk, I now strongly believe that teaching ourselves how to dance, even in the most vulnerable ways, is going to be a big part of human growth. The state of being while immersing yourself in dance is perhaps the optimal state of your body. In many ways I have found without any good intellectual reasons that by me finding ways to express myself through dance, I have come to develop confidence in being just me and to rapidly convert deep hopeless depression into vitality, joy, and passion.

I encourage you to take the time to explore all kinds of music. And if you like something, then take time to act out the music by pretending you are the singer. Lip sync to the music. Express the mood and emotion of the singer as you imagine the singer. Finally, dance to the music any way you want it. Do so in private or in front of a mirror, but just dance. At least once a week carve out 1 hour to just dance. At first, it may feel awkward, but as your body gets more used to it, it will start to feel more organic, and you will crave and enjoy it more. You will begin to add more vitality and self-confidence to your being.

When you do things to address your depression in an accepting, loving, and unshameful way, you will meet the natural human that needs to be loved, understood, regarded, appreciated, validated and find a sense of belonging. Sometimes this can be helped through medicine, but it always can be helped through a search for vitality in your life. Everyone has the power to change their environment into becoming a fulfilling and peaceful place to grow in. 

I invite you to watch the below video as an invitation to dance out your emotions, especially the heavier emotions. Dance to help bring back vitality and passion into your life.

Finally, watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TedTalk on education and the importance of teaching dance.

When life is overwhelming beyond expectation and all that we have learned to be resilient still is not enough, it is important to know how to reset into being centered and grounded. Being centered is related to being grounded but the two are slightly different, as they support each other. When you can find a practice to achieve the combination of the two, you create a safety net that you can reach whenever needed and when all other means are not available or practical.

For many years I have worked in the corporate world in very stressful situations, where I was held responsible for keeping projects on time and on budget. I was expected to be the mediator in smoothing out conflicts. I needed to be able to balance the tension between those doing the work of the projects and those demanding the results from the projects. At times I would get yelled at by those doing the work or those demanding that I hold a line for people to work harder. 

At times the threat of being fired for not meeting expectations loomed over me. 

Despite all the support I had in place with meditations, spiritual practice, spiritual leaders, therapists, and support groups it still could get terrifying and overwhelming. In those times I needed a reset button.

I slowly learned — that reset button was grounding into tangible reality.

The best way to ground into tangible reality is to look for simple, solid objects to see, touch, feel, breath, smell and hear. These are non-electronic, low-technology things like a wooden chair, the floor, the sky, dirt, trees, plants, sounds of birds, rain, thunder, wind, sun, stone, cold and hot. The means to do this exists in every real-life thing you can touch in this world that exists in nature. And when you ground in nature and the Earth you also become centered in Divinity and Purpose. 

That place of grounding is the place of those vulnerable parts you have come to trust emotionally that feels like home. Symbolically grounding is about connections with the physical ground of our home base Mother Earth.

Meditation and prayer are definitely quite good to help you center, but often they can reach out-of-body kinds of centering rather than solid physical and tactile grounding. If you do choose to meditate or pray: try to do it on the ground in a way that you can physically feel the ground. Also, take time to open your eyes slightly during your meditation. These things help keep your meditation and prayer grounded.

The more you are exposed to the natural dirt, stone or rocks of the Earth the better. Choose things made out of wood, stone, or concrete over things made out of glass, metal or plastic. The less synthetic and more natural the material the better for grounding. If you’re inside a room then feel your feet on the ground. If there’s a carpet scrunch it with your feet. If you’re seated in a chair feel the chair pressing against you. Look at the walls for any features, imperfections or cracks. Listen for any sounds. Notice any smells.

Imagine you are just a rock with nothing to do but just observe. As a rock you have all the time in the world. As a rock there is no danger, no fear, no hunger, just existence and nothing more. Creatures and weather will come and go thousands of times and you will still be there. For long periods of time nothing comes by. Now listen to sounds in the distance, perhaps a clock ticking or a refrigerator sound. Listen to sounds in the distance outside your window. Feel textures. Listen to birds in the distance.  Cars, people.  Look at the clouds and the sun. Allow yourself to get bored and feel time like it’s going on forever. You have all the time in the world, no urgency at all, and nothing to do but just exist.

An excellent way to ground is to go take a walk in nature.  Find a nice big tree and lean against it with your back or face the tree and touch it with both your hands. The bigger the tree the better the grounding. Trees are very much the epitome of what it means to be grounded. And so, they emanate the energy of grounded-ness. Large trees are living forms that have existed long before you were born and will likely live long after you leave Earth. These large trees may have witnessed multiple generations of change. They emanate timelessness and the idea of firmness and dependability that has stood the test of time.  Stand next to and touch the tree with your hands or stand with your back against the tree. Feel the tree and what it feels like to be this tree. Feel into the tree and down into its roots.  Feel how massive the tree is above you, and how deep it goes into the Earth. Imagine you feel sprouting roots deep into the Earth just like this tree.

If you are in the middle of the city with no access to nature, then look for solid concrete, brick or rock structures and sit, lean or touch them as you would have with a tree. Become aware and of how firm they sink into the ground below the concrete and asphalt surfaces.

You are big, and firm and nothing can push you over. Events of chaos and turmoil from a storm may come by but you will be there long when it’s gone. And many other events of chaos and turmoil will come and go.  You will still be there standing as always.  And all smaller creatures that seek safe haven will gather around you because they know you are the “rock” of stability.  You are the ground. 

To assist you, watch this video

Now come back. Notice how you feel. Take time to notice how life is. And when you have time again come back to exercises of grounding, do so and it will also induce centering along with it. It will organically allow Divine hard solid reality to achieve complete center and grounding.

Recent times have been filled with dramatic life challenges. First our lives had been drastically impacted socially and economically by COVID-19. Then a major conflict in Ukraine has had major global repercussions. On top of this are trends of more severe weather patterns, economic inequality, increasing pollution, and social unrest. More than ever we all long for a means and a way for a better life that doesn’t just revolve around working harder. 

This article is an invitation to start embracing life in a way that organically brings solutions, options, safety and support into our everyday being. This can be done without needing more time, money or effort. It is done by embracing a more pragmatic view of spirituality. When you can do this, you start to become a person that is resilient, creative, happy, and clear about anything that life brings.

It used to be that my spirituality consisted of perhaps going to a church a few times a year, kneeling in prayer, or possibly meditating. That way of life was fine as long as things remained reasonably manageable. That was not the case. For a large number of years, things were not fine. They were overwhelming and very depressing. As my wife struggled through increasingly unexplained physical disorders — I dipped deeper into exhaustion and depression. 

During those times conventional allopathic medicine was failing us and more and more we resorted to alternative medical doctors and therapists. The form of therapy that for much of the time showed the most promising results came from human energy healing practitioners. In many cases, the health treatments overlapped with religious and spiritual beliefs. We spent lots of money on treatments not covered by insurance and the results always seemed temporary and inconsistent. As time progressed the next doctor, therapist, or practitioner revealed a new layer of cause. It seemed we were always focusing on symptoms or side effects and not the root cause that could solve all the problems once and for all. We needed to find the root cause.

During these dark times of depression, I sought the help of therapists, religious and spiritual thought leaders for support. And in the process, I gained extensive knowledge of the spectrum of alternative health care treatments. So, I started to teach and share my knowledge in a local night school. One night as I was preparing to teach a class, I found out that everyone had canceled.  So that night for some odd reason I was guided to go ahead and teach to an empty class. As I taught, suddenly the answer to coming out of years of hopelessness and forever depression became clear. And the answer to the root cause of issues in my wife’s health, my health, my overall outlook of life and the future was quite surprising. 

I saw that whenever we seek to get to the core of a problem and not just the symptoms then we are looking for the root cause. And ultimately the root cause of any problem is the same as finding the purpose of that problem. Then I also came to realize that “finding the purpose of an issue” is the same as “finding the spirit behind an issue”.  What do I mean by “spirit behind an issue”?  

What I found is that if you simply replace every use of the word “spirit” with the word “purpose” you’ve kind of removed all the mystique of “spirituality” and go straight for the answers. For example, if someone talks about “Team Spirit” or “Patriotic Spirit” they are not talking about the religion, prayer, or meditation behind the Team or Patriotism. They are talking about “Team Purpose” and “Patriotic Purpose”. And so if we want to find the fundamental root cause and solution to every problem and challenge in life we need to seek Purpose. I found that this “search for purpose” is also called “spirituality.”

So if you’re not worried about upsetting someone’s belief of what is or is not spirituality then I propose the following simple and practical approach to finding answers that have worked for me. I was once a skeptical scientist and engineer struggling to find any answers in my life – a life that I was drowning in terror and depression. I’m still the same skeptical scientist and engineer but now have been imbued with resilience, creativity, joy, passion, confidence and clarity about life. I’ve become both the spiritual mystic and still yet the same skeptic at heart.  This is my technique.

1. Every time you think, read or hear the word “spirit” replace it with “purpose”, and every time you think, read or hear the word “spirituality” replace it with the phrase “the search for purpose”
2. Then for every issue, challenge or problem you face in life, no matter how big or small, decide on who you feel like asking a challenging life question to. You can pick God, Buddha, Allah, Jehovah, Great Spirit, Mother Earth, Life, the Universe, Source, Higher Self, or even a deceased relative or friend. Ask whoever you trust. Feel free to change as needed.
3. Then for every issue, challenge or problem you face, ask the following question: “What is the purpose for this in my life?”
4. Now be open to look and listen for the answer to that question. Know that the answer will always come because you’ve done the most important work of asking the right question using the word “purpose”.

Keep repeating these four steps over and over. As you do this you now start to organically open a direct channel to all that is Divine and galvanize it with a direct line into every beat of your heart and every breath of your life. And as you do this you now can experiment and decide for yourself if any form of ceremony, prayer, meditation, chants, incense, crystals, clothing or music helps you in this cause to figure out problems in your life. 

Continually, repeat these four steps and you now have spirituality fully integrated in your life. You are now positioned to be resilient, creative, happy, and clear about anything that life brings.

To help solidify things I recommend following the short meditation in this video.

If you’re interested in finding out more I suggest reading my first book: Spirituality for REAL: Beyond the Incense and Meditation