She read a previous post, The 12 Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening, and commented that she had problems with #9, A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.

You know what? I also have problems with this one. That got me thinking.

I make mental maps of other people. Since I can’t be them, I try to understand them. I want to put myself in their shoes, to see the world through their eyes, to understand what makes them tick. And I can’t do that entirely, although I have found this effort worthwhile because it helped me develop my compassion for others’ experiences of life.

I notice someone do or say something that’s puzzling to me, and I become aware there’s a hole in my map of them, or an error that needs to be corrected.

My mind comes up with an explanation: “Oh, they said that because they were feeling insecure.” Sometimes I ask myself, after observing some very puzzling new behavior, “What probably happened to them that would explain that behavior?” (I’ve gotten clairvoyant hits on another’s experience that made me wish I had never been curious.)

I imagine that other people do the same with me. In fact, I believe it’s very difficult for human beings not to do this with each other. People are weird sometimes—strange, puzzling, nonsensical, difficult. Map-making, or interpreting the actions of others, is a major hobby for a lot of people. We like explanations, reasons, causality. We like to peg people, typecast them, make them fit our maps.

It’s a good practice to keep your map loose, ready to be redrawn at any time. You can take it for granted that any map has holes in it, and shortcuts and inaccuracies. Else it wouldn’t be a map, it would actually be the person, impossible to carry around in your head.

People are infinitely more alive and complex than anyone’s map could ever depict. Actually, people are infinitely more alive and complex than their own maps of themselves depict, much less those of others.

Also, time is an illusion, a useful convention we’ve devised. There is no past or future, only the present. Does the past explain the present, which explains the future? Maybe it works in reverse. Who can really say? We make these maps to create a consensual reality, and it falls way short of the real thing.

Who really knows why anyone does anything? The simplest explanation I know of is to attribute it all to chi, life force, moving vital energy. That’s how their chi flows in the present moment. Perceive it with wonder.

The most playful way of understanding the puzzles of living with others is to make like the medieval mapmakers and fill in the blank spots with images of beasts such as sea monsters, unicorns, and cameleopards.

In case you were wondering, here’s what a cameleopard looks like:

It makes me smile so much that just for the pure experience of more joy, when I don’t understand someone (or myself), instead of heavily puzzling on the reasons for their (my) behavior, I’m just going to attribute it to a cameleopard. Yes, a cameleopard made them (me) do it!

Doesn’t that feel lighter?

If you try to research the subject, it appears that spiritual and clinical depressions are worlds apart and is not least expressed by the language used to describe either state. One uses the language of medical and psychological science, the other calls on spiritual metaphors.

In my practice I am working quite a bit with people suffering from clinical depression and of late I am more and more able to make the distinction.

Depression  is a syndrome, which means the presence of certain symptoms indicative of low levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter with an important role for the proper functioning of the central nervous system, heart and circulation, appetite and digestion, sleep and mood (just to mention the most important). Depression is a state of exhaustion and with exception of the rare cases of a primary imbalance of the neuro-transmitters in the brain, mostly brought about by chronic stress due to external factors like environmental influences or life-style choices, but mostly caused by inner conflict. It is important to understand that stress is not a unilateral event induced by one thing, but mostly the culmination of many contributing factors. Symptoms of depression include, but are not limited to, fatigue, loss of interest and motivation, trouble sleeping, changes in appetite and weight and many more. In treating depression holistically, it is important to identify all the reasons that may have contributed to the physical, mental, emotional and energetic break-down and – in co-operation with the afflicted person – look for the underlying cause. The good news about depression is that it can be treated successfully, even healed if the depressed person is inclined to take stock and is ready to change.

Healing depression is all about change. The cause of depression is mostly stress – which is marked by resistance, or high levels of stress hormones, that keep the body in a state of contraction and imbalanced metabolism, and to understand the reasons and causes for stress does help to identify the factors that need changing or adaptation, in order to achieve a better and healthier balance. The pillars of treating this kind of depression is to recognise the causes for stress, the right diet to help the body to re-energise, methods for relaxation, as well as understanding the role of emotions and expectations in terms of creating inner conflict. Allopathic and homeopathic medication and methods may be of great value and I use them based on individual need.

What I discover tough in many of these patients are signs of being ready to take a step towards awakening. So I very often introduce them to certain practices, like conscious breathing, non-judgement or even spiritual literature. To me, many of these “clinical depressions” have a strong spiritual component and the art of counselling is to figure out how far each individual is ready to go in terms of change. Sometimes this is just a more healthy routine in terms of eating and exercising, at other times it includes a quite intensive counselling in terms of letting go of anxiety or anger, as well as inner conflicts. Not one is like the other, but meanwhile I can tell, if someone is ready for a transformation.

So this “normal” type of depression, which is basically exhaustion, very often is a spiritual depression in terms of having run out of rope and letting the defences down. Even more so, I observe this in people suffering from addiction and virtually all of them suffering from depression.

Spiritual depression in the literal sense is about letting go and being ready for awakening and there may be many different layers for this. There certainly is the turning point of realising the possibility of a life lived by the paradigm of love, instead of fear. There may be the symptoms and conditions in association with the energetic changes of awakening, that often go along with symptoms of depression, pain or disease. Or it may even be indicative of the a state of yielding, the turning to the inner self and neglecting the outer for a while.

The important thing is to recognise the symptoms of awakening and offer counsel and assistance. I am seeing these symptoms in people who are on the spiritual path, and I see them in those who have never been interested in spiritual matters. I see them in religious people and I see them in atheists. I see them in young people, I see them in mid-life and I see them in old age. They all have different paths, different life stories and different challenges. So they all need a highly individualised approach and what really works in my experience is to help them to turn to themselves and listen to themselves how to best untangle the many strings and knots that keep them in darkness.

Spiritual depression is primarily an energetic imbalance and this is why energetic methods – like acupuncture, energetic exercise or even homeopathy help very much. It is also important to understand that the body is changing when more consciousness is coming through the system – much like turning up the voltage, and this can in turn also lead to mysterious symptoms.

Teaching people to listen to their own body and to tap into their own inner wisdom, seems to be the most important action anyone can take when facing symptoms of the multi-facetted condition of spiritual depression.

I’ve been on a spiritual quest for most of my post-pubescent life. Interestingly enough, the start of the quest coincided with the start of my lifelong battle with clinical depression, back in about 1981 or so. My beliefs are somewhat fluid with one big exception: I have issues with organized religions of any kind. I had initally thought I was just rebelling against the Christianity I grew up with, I’ve since discovered that I have trouble supporting any religion as The One Truth. Mostly because I don’t believe there is just one truth — I think we’re all trying to understand and connect with the same thing. Religions, even the most tolerant ones, at their cores serve to bring groups of people together in a common bond while at the same time separating the groups more and more from each other.  But I digress.

My spiritual exploration has been fitful, consisting of periods of intense study and frantic purpose interspersed with longer periods of essentially being asleep, absent from all but the basics of life: eat, sleep, work… lather, rinse, repeat… The periods of wakefulness are usually sudden and are triggered by something external to me. And during all of them, I’ve experienced meaningful coincidences, instances where the hand of the universe is discernable. Before I moved here, I was endlessly slogging through contract job after contract job, with ample unemployment between. Depression was heavy. I’d been stubbornly refusing to give in and move somewhere with better job prospects for so long and the state of my life reflected the struggle. When I finally made the decision to move here, everything seemed to fall into place, quickly. Another time, I was unsure about where to go next, spiritually. At the time I was working in customer service and our phones were never silent, especially at the end of the day when I was usually manning the phones alone. One evening, another department manager stopped by my desk and we began to chat. We ended up chatting about spiritual exploration for about an hour, an hour during which the phone never rang. She gave me information about the meditation class that I mentioned previously (the one that led me to Caroline Myss’s works) and essentially provided me with the push I needed to keep travelling down the path. It came at the exact right time, and it underscored for me that you need to be open to what the universe has to offer or you’ll miss it.

I’ve felt the same thing happening over the last couple of years, more intensely in the past year leading up to now, though I don’t always pay attention as I should.

Today’s little meaningful coincidence: I visited songdeva‘s blog as a result of the comment she posted in one of yesterday’s posts. She hasn’t posted much recently (I hope she’ll keep posting now that she’s started again)  but her older posts are a treasure trove of spiritual guidance. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of them. Skipping past the crochet posts (I can’t crochet to save my life, though I can macramé), I ended up at Guideposts for your Spiritual Path (Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening, Part II), which in turn led me to Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening: A List. It’s an interesting list, some of which I recognize in me and some of which I haven’t yet experienced. The original author of the list, Ellen L. Montgomery, appears to have dropped off the face of the planet (or at least the surface of the Internet). Her old home page no longer exists and there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. The phone number that was on her site is now registered to someone else. And the only references to her that I can find are other people reproducing the Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening: A List article that she wrote. Thank God for the Wayback Machine. There, you can browse the other articles she’d written for her newsletter (her original version of the Symtoms article is also available and an updated version is in the archive of her other — and also defunct — site). I found myself at Things Fall Into Place, a 1998 article about synchronicity. 1998, incidentally, was around the time of that chat I mentioned earlier.