Mark L Lockwood BA(Hons)(psy) Leading life strategist and clinical Director of Center for Healing and Life Transformation in South Africa has helped people internationally discover how to recover from depression, burnout, addictions and other disorders and disease in relatively short periods of time. Using new scientifically tested, researched and proven methods of what he calls the Contemplative Intelligence (CQ) process of dealing with mental health issues. Awareness and then simple skills and micro routines and practices formulated into the right package prevent depression from occurring and help people heal, recover and renew their lives.
The Body-Heart-Mind coherence techniques he uses daily help people shift energy and focus and recovery quickly, deeply and in the long term. Depression is a part of the brain. It has a chemical make up. Genetic factors contribute to the risk of developing this disorder and “if the brain and body can switch them on, the brain and body can witch them off”, says Mark. Although there’s no single cause of depression it can occur for a variety of reasons and it has many different triggers, stressors or stimulus’s that can start to allow the dark roots of depression to begin to manifest.
“To be depressed is to need deep-rest, rest from all aspects of fear followed by the need for calculated and contemplative new action towards new outcomes”
Mark L Lockwood, founder Contemplative Intelligence (CQ)
For some it is an upsetting or stressful life event, such as bereavement, divorce, illness, redundancy and job or money worries that can be the cause. Different causes can often combine all at once and boom, we have the beginnings of depression in our midst. Life can be difficult, extreme and demanding. So much so that if any one of us are not mindful we can end up in a state of despair. Depression is actually difficult to diagnose and the criteria we use to make that diagnosis is to somewhat of a degree flawed. People can be in a state of grieving a divorce or the loss of a loved one, or they could simply just have a life or job for that matter that they despise. After all job dissatisfaction is the most common cause of heart attack, the kind of heart attack that you don’t get to walk away from. Having a lousy life and being or feeling trapped in a poor set of circumstances can certainly feel like depression. It may just be that we feel crappy, hopeless or downtrodden. Not necessarily clinically depressed. Still, not that it matters much. Feeling low, empty and hopeless is. A state that most of us will go through several times in our lives.
How to recover from depression requires the knowledge that depression is also known as ‘anger turned inwards’. This suggests one of two very important things when it comes to the subject of depression. First, if we cannot manage our emotions, they will eventually run riot. It is a skill that few us are ever taught by all of us need to learn. If we are unable to handle our impulsive moods by early adulthood at least, we are in for trouble later on in life. Preventative steps or a plan for how to recover from depression should be mandatory in everyones bag of tricks. Suicide rates are soaring and so are reports of depression, burnout, anxiety and distress related illness. Yet, treatment is another story. Medication is good, but far from a fix. Depression medication currently seems to be a coping strategy for most at best. Second, understand that the cure or treatment, whichever you believe is possible, is the opposite of depression. However your depression formed and fed itself either happened over time or in response to strong emotional impacts. Either way we need to find the way out of these states that have put body, mind, emotions and soul into a stressful state. We need the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unimagined and the extraordinary if we are to walk down a different road entirely. We need a psychic shift that is nothing short of transcendental. We get there through CQ meditation work, Contemplative Practices, Centring Prayer, Affirmations, Walking, Stilling the impulses and learning how to interrupt and manage the behaviour chain of how everything unfolds in our bodies, hearts and minds. We leave nothing undone.
If we let irritability turn into frustration and let emptiness morph into hopelessness or if we just let bad sleep patterns turn into insomnia we have gone down the rabbit hole of depression. A hole which can feel difficult to ever get out of. Prevention is better than cure. If we wake up to the onset if depression too late then we need to study how the hell to get out of it as fast as possible. That too is not always easy and people disagree w
The Body-Heart-Mind coherence techniques couple with contemplative practices which help us get out of lizard mind mentality and into a state of mindfulness has become far more effective than we ever imagined it could be. We had no idea how a combination of the right set of practices or techniques could get someone out of something like a deep state of depression, even if those states had been active for years. Recently these practices have been used with stroke recovery, frontal lobe epilepsy, arthritis and other issues that people seek to overcome so that they can live their best lives. It seems that we all have an innate desire to grow and heal and recover from hopelessness and find something better. That desire, as hidden as it can be, can be sought out, hunted down and activated. We may be fickle creatures to a large degree but paradoxically when we want something enough, when inspiration and desire meet somewhere in the soul miracles happen. Dormant faculties and talents come alive as Patanjali suggested, way back in the third century, and we embark of the miraculous.
When some great purpose inspires you, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; Your mind transcends limitation, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents became alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
Patanjali
When it comes to answering the question of how to recover from depression, try and avoid the laws of complexity and overwhelm. Try to keep the plan simple. Formulate a plan or get one from someone who has a good one and then use it with all the energy you have. If you do you are more than likely to lift depression and grow. So keep it simple.
When we align work on our bodies, which release chemicals when we move and exercise for example, we start to move away from depression. Our bodies contain genes for example that are a pharmacy of chemical compounds that we can use to regulate our moods. If we know how. If our minds can play a role in creating negative states like depression, it can in turn create more positive ones. This is the law of cause and effect and we can cause effect with our thoughts, feeling, perceptions, frames of reference and mindsets. Then we can add to this cocktail of depression recovery spiritual practices. Don’t take them too lightly. We are all spiritual by nature. That inner desire and yearning for more is all the scientific evidence you need of that. The thousand of spiritual teachers and healers such as Christ, Buddha and others all suggested that we need to tend to ourselves in a deep, loving and insightful way, and they are correct. If we neglect the self, the other, the world and God we start to fall apart. That is basic mathematics. When we return to these things and nurture them we start to thrive and arrive, rather than just survive.
We have to step up and step into ourselves. We need to change the way we move and breathe. We need to change our outcomes by completely changing the way we think, feel and act. We must go beyond the conformed mind that is limited, heavily boundaries and stuck in fighting, flighting and fleeing. Depression is all things fight! This paradigm shift we undertake must be whole and complete. It must be transformative and done by the renewal of body, sinew, mind, synapse and your very soul. Half measures will deliver poor results, less than we as potentially divine beings deserve.
The future of depression treatment is looking better than it ever has before despite the large numbers of people falling prey to this disorder. Soon we will stop people jumping into the holes they fall into instead of just pulling them out afterwards. Use Body-Heart-Mind techniques and meditations. Get yourself into a program for healing and life transformation. Get to the track or the gym and jog to your psychologists office and get to work on eradicating this enemy from your entire being. You really, really should never stay stuck. No one should, because you can heal your life and make it a masterpiece regardless of your current circumstances. It just depends on how you think about it. You see, either nothing is a miracle or everything is!
For more information on How to recover from depression, or to come to the Center for Healing & Life Transformation or to start the online depression recovery course, call +27824424779 or email centerforhealingandlife@gmail.com
