Metaphysical Meaning Behind Depression

Depression affects many of us at some point in our lives. If you are suffering from a chronic condition, serious injury, loss, or emotional trauma, you might find yourself suffering from depression.

Most of us understand that depression can have many causes, but did you know that there are differences in the brain that occur with depression? According to this article at WebMD, the hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is vital to the storage of memories, appears to be smaller in people with a history of depression than in those who’ve never been depressed. Further, a smaller hippocampus has fewer serotonin receptors, a chemical known for its calming affects. http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/causes-depression??

There are many ways to treat depression from psychotherapy to herbal remedies. Any treatment or combination of treatments could make a difference for you depending upon the source of your depression. And it seems, there is a common underlying metaphysical meaning that you might want to explore for supporting your treatment(s) of choice. When I meditate about the root metaphysical cause of depression this is what I hear:

Depression is the result of not feeling worthy to experience the pleasure of life or the hope that life can offer you soulful fulfillment. Because you feel let down by what life has presented you, you have given up hope (at least temporarily) that you can enjoy a satisfying life right now.

Loss is consistently involved in depression. You might feel a loss of hope, clarity, ability to trust yourself or others, health, ability to live your purpose, happiness, innocence, control, acceptance, love, awareness of your divinity…you feel a loss that is profound and deep.

In some of our current spirituality, we attempt to jump over our feelings of depression, telling ourselves that what we are feeling is not real. All we have to do is get back in touch with loving feelings and everything will be all right.

To some extent this is true. Love does remedy depression. However, if you ignore your current feelings, are you really loving the whole of who you are? Is it possible you are ignoring the part of you that most needs your love?

Louise Hay describes the metaphysical meaning of depression as: Anger you feel you do not have a right to have. Hopelessness.

Loving the parts of ourselves that we perceive are working and ignoring the ones that feel bad, isn’t full and complete love is it? It’s selective love, and if some of us were to trace the root cause of our depression, we would probably find that somewhere in our journey someone (maybe even ourselves) loved us only selectively. So how do we learn to love ourselves completely? We’ve got to discover some compassion for the parts of us that we consider to be unworthy. We need to hold in our energetic arms the things we have done or experienced that caused us to feel unworthy to be fully and completely loveable.

How do we get there? For those of you that read my articles regularly, this suggestion won’t be a surprise. Consider this guided meditation created to help us hold our most vulnerable feelings: Creation Meditation.

Depression has been called “anger turned inward.” Anger and sorrow are natural responses to feeling unworthy. However worthiness is a natural state of being, and it arises from within us when we hold in deep compassion with the parts of ourselves that are feeling unworthy—the parts of us crying out to be understood and loved.