“I have no depression in my life whatsoever - literally none. I have sadness, and joy, and elation, and satisfaction, and gratitude beyond belief. But all of it is weather, and it just spins around the planet. It doesn’t sit on me long enough to kill me. It’s just ideas”

- Jim Carrey

“You should think of the word depressed as ‘deep rest’...Your body needs...deep rest from the character you’ve been trying to play” - Jim Carrey. My experience with depression was that, starting from early childhood, I suppressed emotions that I didn’t have the space, time, tools or permission to feel at the time. Instead I focussed on being what I thought others wanted me to be, what would please my parents and seeking out what I thought would “get” me love and happiness until eventually the sad discovery that none of those things brought true, lasting happiness and the overload of banked-up emotional stresses simply shut my system down. Game over. Apathy. Fatigue. Emotional and physical slump and illness as a result. What felt like an unending well of sadness and apathy.

What my body was asking for was deep rest. Rest which then allowed those stresses on the system to be released so that I could feel the natural flow of energy and bliss chemistry which resides beneath all of those stresses. Often though this welling up of emotion is scary - what’s happening? When will it end? How am I going to go to work/be there for my children/clean the house? But if we were to understand this process, to allow it, ask for the support and take the time we need - and in my experience introduce a powerful technique of meditation (as Jim Carrey has also done) which gives the body that deep rest, accelerates the speed of release of those old stored up stresses and starts to trigger the body to produce those natural bliss chemicals - then what might our attitude to depression be? Might we be able to accept it, surrender to it and in doing so trust that we are on the road to release and a deeper joy than we’ve ever known, even though it’s scary and we not sure how long it will take. Might we, through this experience, seek out and find the truth of ourselves and let go of the characters which so fatigue the system in the effort to maintain them?