Charlie Brown! You Blockhead! Depression was the focus on this week's show - and man was this a boring frickin' topic. I compare it's afflicted to the people suffering from shyness. They both carry the assumption that everyone else cares about their internal experiences. And to top it off, once you're in the depressed perspective, you cease to relate or equate you internal experiences to anyone elses. So the downer sape is locked into a fixed way of interpreting life. But life doesn't care. It just keeps those waves of experience crashing down on you and soon your downer becomes a bummer, and then a bender. If you enter into a rut, the 'known misery' becomes your security blanket to the only thing a depressed sape lives for - the possibility it could all get worse. And why? Look!
The origin of depression isn't external. It's in the natural cycle of life. The square wave of our breathing shows us that when we're depressed it isn't due to a lack of inspiration but a lack of expiration. Depression is the result of a breathing rhythm that doesn't allow the individual to empty their lungs, to EXO or exit the body with both their attention and their breath. So just by placing more of an emphasis on breathing out just a little more we release the physiological grip of da blues. But realize that we pass through it each time we breathe in again. We HAVE to get depressed to make space to receive the air. So it's on the in-breath that all the anxiety rushes in. Then if we don't let that energy go and fail to release it on the out-breath, we're discharged and soon after that, we feel less energized. This gets imposed on our movement patterns and soon we're 'feeling' sluggish. So then we get the 'full metal jacket' - a short, shallow in-breath and a slow, shallow out-breath. Sigh!
Wordsoma - There really wasn't much to report on this front during this show. Like I said, depression is only a puzzle to the depressed. It's a solo flight into the darkness. I did mention an old somatic term that qualifies as jargon. It's called The Dark Vise and rather than tell ya, I'll show ya.
"If we reflect upon the collision of the Red Light and Green Light reflexes in the senile posture and their statically opposing contractions, we suddenly realize the potential fatality of the senile posture. The body's two major muscle groups are opposing one another involuntarily in a static, isometric contraction-a Dark Vise that causes chronically high blood pressure. As mentioned above, hypertensive arteriosclerosis is at the root of cardiovascular disease, a major cause of death in later life. Moreover, it is common for elderly humans to have high blood pressure. By putting these two facts together, we come up with a cause of hypertensive arteriosclerosis: the senile posture that occurs due to the unimpeded habituation of the Red Light and Green Light reflexes. If these reflexes occur often enough and strongly enough, they can become habituated, fading gradually from voluntary consciousness into sensory-motor amnesia-and the Dark Vise takes over." - excerpt from “Somatics” by Thomas Hanna p. 106-110
So in case you don't really care, what all this fuss above means is, if you're depressed for prolonged periods of time, you'll get locked into postural habits that put your heart in a pressure cooker from the loss of voluntary motor control of the muscles that allow you to move freely from a relaxed neutral posture. You've seen these people everywhere. The ones with the candy cane postures have their heads out in front of their chests, locked in flexion. They have literally failed into their old fetal C-curved spine, the one that has weak cerebellar development, which is a hallmark of both fetuses and the senile - translation - brain rot!. The jacknife sapes with the bubble butts are still trying to fight gravity and they are the ones who get the belly aneurysms when the system can't distribute the tension anymore & buckles below the heart. Either way, not good people. Will you breathe now?
Time Techniques - We talked about the two primary timelines we use to organize our experiences. The issues in depression isn't time, it's what's expected to happen next. Depressed somas are in a constant state of dread that they'll be a mismatch between what they anticipate happening and what actually does happen. So they carry two (or more) constrasting images about the future and as a result, refer to the past for guidance. This is why we say depression thrives on 'known misery' because if keeps circulating old images that allows for a low degree of security, but no freedom at all.
We talked about adopting the Raindrop Time Technique to get around this draw bridge & root yourself. By placing the future (what's next) above you, you feel more 'in the moment' and then as you exhale the past goes through you and into the ground. Try this one for a few days and then go call Prozac!
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