Bringing us back to our souls, bringing us back to our true natures, which is my brief, puts pay to depression.

Depression occurs and literally means when you push or press yourself down – you cramp your soul, cap your spirit, stop being you, necessarily are obliged to start acting instead, and become an empty shell rather than the living vessel of consciousness you were intended to be.

You don’t ‘get’ depression, you ‘do’ depression

And as you’re the one with the power to generate the condition, you’re also the one with the power to stop generating it. 

Depression doesn’t actually exist… at least not in the conventional sense. It’s actually a relatively lazy catch-all description of a combination of various factors, the unconscious response to which is to press yourself down, and specifically press down or compress your natural primal self, thus inhibiting the flow of vital force or chi running through your body. This is what causes the physical sensation of lethargy, apathy and inertia that gives so-called depression the appearance of a disease.

Enjoying your life fully is the quest. Enjoying every moment, including the ones when you’re feeling glum, out of sorts, fed up or so on – enjoying feeling that way rather than fighting it – is the antithesis of depression.

Depression has become endemic

This is essentially due to us being divorced from the natural environment, from interaction with the natural environment in the sense of hunting, gathering, food-growing and so on. In thrall instead to the electronic womb. This comes along with and encourages being divorced from our true natures:

• The electronic womb provides seamless reality – plastic money and globalized facilities and systems mean we can move about inured to the shock of the new on encountering foreign cultures.
• Inured we become dehumanized.
• Dehumanized we’re inclined to act, to pretend we’re something more than we are. We become self-important.
• Self-important we overlook the actual importance of the Tao that makes all this be here. We become divorced from our souls.
• The soul left unattended, uncared for and ignored, feels great anguish. Yet it has no obvious way of expressing it so it closes down. This leaves the untethered thinking mind free to indulge in overthink.
• Overthink leads swiftly to self-absorption, self-absorption to self-obsession, self-obsession to disassociation, and disassociation to alienation.
• Closing down it presses in on itself – it compresses or depresses itself.

If we were in touch with the natural cycles, if we were engaged in real and essential labor rather than screen-based activity, if we were expressing ourselves authentically, there wouldn’t be this epidemic.

People would get fed up, they’d get glum, their moods would swing between high and low, and they’d take that in their stride without assuming they had a disease. And the drug companies wouldn’t have the trillions of dollars of annual revenues from selling drugs we don’t actually need.

Drugs are a temporary fix

I have immense respect for the medical profession. We’d be in a proper pickle without one. Likewise the people who produce the medicines we need. However that doesn’t mean I condone everything they do or omit to do. And I have never viewed holistic medicine as an alternative, but as a complement. As a rule of thumb, conventional medicine fixes you so you can carry on in the game, while holistic medicine heals you. The two are necessary companions, especially in acute situations, where the patent has no time to spend on the healing process and needs fixing fast.

So if you must, take pills as an expedient. But rather than rely on them as a cure, see them as a temporary fix. And meanwhile take responsibility for addressing the actual underlying glitches causing the inner turmoil in the first place. Fundamentally the cure consists in retrieving your true nature, your soul and establishing or reestablishing your connection with it , so you’re able to communicate with yourself and others from that depth of self.

Which is why I’ve created this training and why I naturally feel so deeply about it because it distresses me witnessing so many beautiful souls suffering in this beautiful world when they don’t need to be – and while lending my support to everyone involved in helping, including the conventional mental health industry, it frustrates me observing what I consider, through decades of experience helping people with all sorts of distressed mental states, not only depression, to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how the mind works, what the mind is, and how to help the mind correct itself, based on a completely misconceived model that totally misses the point – hence why the numbers of people diagnosed with mental ill-health is increasing exponentially and not decreasing as it would be were we aware of and willing to use the right tools.

My own experience with depression

My role is to help you and/or anyone who wants it live and love your own story more – it’s all about you, not me in other words. But I feel impelled to share my own story to strike a chord of empathy with everyone who’s suffering from depression, rather than possibly being thought of as just some Taoist chancer peddling tools to fix conditions he couldn’t really care less about. Not that I would care but it would be doing you and potentially everyone a disservice were it not made clear that what I have to share can truly help you.

Between ages 14-17 with hormones in flux and raging hard, and being no stranger to the inner world, I’d been training in aikido, meditation and healing for 3 years before the full hurdy-gurdy of puberty was upon me – I’d even taken my first acid trip before I was 14. Yet even this nascent armory was no match for the hormones and I’d regularly succumb to bouts of intense depression, so deep I’d touch the very foundations of the primordial swirl of existence, mind tainted with such dread, it was all I could do to function day-to-day. These were followed by bouts of such exhilaration and excitement it was impossible to keep any semblance of feet on the ground as I soared to the heights of existence and gaze into the face of God (Tao – who doesn’t really have a face, save the ones we ascribe it – obviously).

Once the cyclic nature of these alternating bouts became evident I also noticed around halfway through the up-phase I’d start succumbing to increasing anxiety about the inevitable next down-phase.

Fortunately for me, back in those antediluvian days people around still had the common sense to tell me, ‘don’t worry, it’s your hormones, it’s normal, it’ll pass, you’ll get through it – you’ve just got to keep going’.

These days I’d have been taken to a doctor, been diagnosed bipolar, clinically depressed and/or even manically depressed, and be prescribed anti-depressives, which would have attenuated the intensity of the existential crisis I was going through enough to make me not bother doing the actual work I so needed to do to correct the condition.

And had that been the case none of this fine work I’m proud to say has helped well over the million-plus people I’ve done one-to-one sessions with, not to mention the incalculable millions who’ve benefited online and via all the books and retreats and workshops and talks, and TV programs and radio shows and all the rest – none of it would have happened and we’d not be here now discussing the potential for attaining to the state of unfettered personal magnificence we’re each here in this lifetime to embody and enjoy.

Towards the end of the hormonally driven bipolar phase I was in, I’d finally acknowledged and acquiesced to the fact I’d grow by a quantum leap through each bout of down, so that rather than resist the down, I might as well welcome it, enjoy it even. And that’s when depression became no longer depression, but it’s opposite, a form of expression the Tao of me was deploying to get my attention and train me.

I went through many stages to reach that and had I had the psycho-energetic efficiency I now enjoy it would all have been a lot easier and swiftly passing, and I’d still have attained to the blessings hidden in the folds of each dark night of the soul.

Had I gone the modern way of masking the condition I’d still be inwardly terrified of depression and would be doing all sorts of modern and in my opinion inefficient ways to avoid it. I would still be terrified of depression. But I’m not because I’m 100% protected from doing that to myself now.

However if you or someone you know who needs this, are trying to avoid or are in a bout of depression, whether chronic or passing, whether bipolar, manic or steady, whether clinical or non-clinical, indeed no matter which descriptor has been used to shackle you to, 100% ANTI-DEPRESSION TRAINING is a must-have, as in you, or whomever, could have this sorted out 100% if you/they wanted – and believe it or not, it’s fun to do.

Change the way you see yourself and your life

Delivered by a sequence of succinct videos, one per day, this training bit by bit changes the whole way you see yourself and life, and the whole way you respond to it, at the very deepest level – and it does so 100% over a full 6 week period – because you need that much time to make it really stick 100% for the rest of your life in the same way it works for me.

And remember the Taoist approach includes dealing with your state on an energetic and physical level via rebalancing the vital organs, as much as it addresses the composite aspects of the condition at the psycho-emotional level, and being the masters of perspective, also furnish you best with what to do with your newfound state of happiness once you’ve got it – giving you the reason to propel yourself back to health.

In the training I take you through the psycho-emotional components of depression and show you how, by addressing each factor comprising the condition, determining where you originally made the choice to be defeated by each of them, and then actively choosing differently, the so-called depression lifts.

We’ll be examining exactly which factors comprise the condition for you, and addressing them and showing you how to exercise different choices for each.

We’ll also be examining the moments of trauma that occurred to trigger those initial choices in the first place, because awareness of these and revisiting the scene of the crime so to speak is essential for making different choices.

And as well as this obvious psycho-emotional level of operation there are also further levels to consider.

The physical-energetic level

A certain degree of compression of the wild self is normal, but when the mind is cluttered or prejudiced against simply enjoying being here, or when societal conditioning has had such an impact you’re living a total pretense, and the self-exerted control is so in excess you find it impossible to experience catharsis or express yourself freely to any extent, your flow of life-force is in dire need of stimulation to reduce the self-compressing tendency – hence we’ll be learning all relevant ways to stimulate the liver energy.

The psycho-energetic level

The way you experience life is not only determined by what you’re thinking in terms of whether you’re thinking positively or negatively, but by where you’re thinking from. People habitually think from their pre-frontal lobes just behind the forehead, which is certainly not the most efficient place from which to observe your mental and emotional processes, as it’s similar to sitting in the front row of a cinema and having too much screen to look at to be able to take in the whole picture. Enlightened perspective can only be gained by thinking from the back-brain. Moreover emotional clarity can only be attained by sitting in the back, rather than in the front of your body.

We’ll be looking at how to internally reposition yourself so you’re observing from behind and you’re able to accommodate any amount of inner or outer turbulence without being upended.

Intention

The power of intention is paramount. Once intention is clarified sufficiently for the subconscious to hear and agree, change occurs spontaneously. This involves accessing and deploying positive thinking. Positive thinking is not the denial of negative thinking, but the incorporation and accommodation of all negative fears and doubts and transforming these into forces that work to your advantage. This in itself is a perfect example of healthy non-depressive intention: that everything, no matter what, works to your advantage.

We’ll be looking at and you’ll be learning to develop authentic positivity and determining intention.

Future direction focus

Having a reason to decompress and rejoin the ‘race’ is obviously vital, for without one where would you find the inspiration to stir yourself to change the way you’ve grown accustomed to thinking and being? Finding direction is intimately linked to finding your calling. Finding your calling is intimately linked to knowing what quality you bring to the social mix and which you’re able to contribute, without which it’s impossible to feel any sense of self-value.

We’ll be looking at and you’ll be learning how to discover your calling and direction and to start activating it.

Physical toning

The wild beast in you requires movement. It requires exercise. Even the most basic unenlightened form of exercise provides relief from self-compression. However intelligent exercise, especially qigong, which developed as a direct antidote to self-compression, has a startling antidotal effect. Partially this is linked directly to the liver in that the liver stores the blood and releases it on demand whenever the body is undertaking any sort of strenuous activity, and the more used your body gets to strenuous activity the more readily the liver releases the blood, which takes the pressure off the liver and frees up its energy, thus elevating your state. And obviously the beneficial effect of intelligent exercise on all the vital organs promotes a state of optimal energy flow, which equates instantly to optimal mental flow, the direct opposite of the stagnated mental state accompanying depression.

We’ll be examining and you’ll be learning liver-specific qigong and general toning routines to elevate your state.

100% Anti-Depression Training 

45 day Taoist Treatment course to vanquish depression completely

Introduction + 45 videos with daily exercises – watch one a day and follow along