The Pagan Yogi

It’s not the ‘traumatic event’, or the memory of it that causes your depression or your obsessive thinking; it’s not the ‘emotion’ or the ‘mood’ that ‘spoils your day’; it’s not even the ‘thought’ or the ‘feeling’ that sours your mind or causes a spiral down into those dark places. It’s not the ‘trigger’ - but the identification with it and the attachment you create to it. The ‘This is me’ story. Each and every ‘cause’ is a passing phenomenon - here, then gone: overtaken and replaced by the next experience, the next ‘phenomenon’. What makes them ‘tricky’ is how ‘sharp’ and ‘sticky’ you allow them to be for triggering trains of thought and habitual thinking, rumination,  and obsessive story making. Letting them become the grit in the flesh that forms the scar - and then scratching it over and over until it’s so sore you can’t think of anything else and you become the scar. BUT - if you learn and practice distance between the phenomenon and your awareness of it, you create space and

Shame is learnt so early - before you’re even verbal or aware. It is unspoken, and subconscious, and it breaks the essential underlying psychological and energetic connection between our selves and others, our feeling of oneness expressed as  unconditional love.  That Shame and sense of unworthiness become the roots of a deep and primal fear: fear of rejection, of abandonment and separation. And because it is so deep, so unspoken, it’s roots go down into the very core of our unknowing selves - and rots away at the very roots of our identity and future happiness. But the cure to fear is knowledge . Not just belief, but direct and experiential knowledge of the fundamental ONENESS of everything that means that none of us is ever alone - none of us is capable of being truly abandoned or alone.  We learn to overcome the Fear and the Shame by soaking ourselves in the conscious experience of our connection and our oneness.  And that’s why so many mystic and religious traditions make

One thing I have learnt in this last period of depression  is that the way we look at the world, and the way we make value judgements about the world - that changes the world and changes how we act within it; It’s not just about what you do, but also how you do it and how you think about it that changes us and how we think and feel about ourselves...! If you choose to see the world in terms of ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ - if you choose to accept the idea of an Angry God, of guilt and shame, then you are choose to live in a world where you can NEVER be good enough, or worthy enough, and will always be cut off from all that is truly beautiful and loving.  Here in the West we are obsessed with thinking we are alone - that we are individual identities, little islands of consciousness that must struggle and compete against each other, that what we desire must be at the expense of another’s as we strive and struggle for ‘salvation’. But we now know this is an untruthful and unhel

Yesterday was as black as they get, and despite everything I tried, I sank deep into the empty darkness of despair. But simply holding on to the passing awareness of the true still heart, somehow I came through. At the deepest point, I sat in meditation, listening to one of the beautiful guided meditations from Baba Ram Dass on the Be Here Now Network website, Focused on the Buddhist Gate mantra:  Gate, gate Gone, gone Para gate, para sum gate Gone beyond, gone beyond beyond Bodhi swahah To that One, praise! (https://soundcloud.com/ramdass/the-heart-cave-meditation) And as I sat, empty of all but the awareness of the breath, it became an ocean of awareness in which I both floated and encompassed - and at the heart of me coalesced an image of my Lord Shiva, dancing the Universe into being and destruction, and HIS face, like that of the Greenman I wear under the skin of my back, became my own: and I knew that even in the depths of my despair, the soul of GOD and my own soul were in fact

“Dearest; I think that I am going mad again..." I don’t think there is a better ‘description’ of how it feels to fall into depression than this achingly sorrowful music by Max Richter , inspired by the writings - and suicide - of Virginia Wolfe... I listen to it and I hear and recognise the same slowly tightening circles of obsessive thinking, the deep low pulse and undertow of dark thoughts, the slow calcification of aching withdrawal into a hopeless stillness, the maddening fear and certainty that ‘this time might be the final time...’ - and the helplessness of knowing that your are hurting those who love you most - but feeling, falsely, that they might finally be able to find a kind of happiness and a sense of release should you finally fill your pockets with stones, and disappear beneath those dark waves without a trace... And yet, despite its darkness, it is some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard - and, strangely, that makes me feel that, maybe, whilst I can still h