DePressed?

Breaking the Depression Cycle

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• Breaking the Depression Cycle

How to Manage Depression Triggers

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Depression Triggers continued...

Depression Trigger: Family Strife
While some people enjoy spending time with family, others may find it less than enjoyable. “Family get-togethers can rekindle childhood and child-like ways of interacting with one another,” Saltz says. “Any intense relationship tumult can alter your mood.”
Mood-Boosting Strategy
Just say no! “Make other plans and say, ‘This year, I can’t do it’.” If you are around your family, and feel that relatives are trying to rile you, don’t take the bait, she says. “Walk away.”
Depression Trigger: Holidays
For some, holidays are the loneliest days on the calendar. “Suicides peak during the holidays,” Saltz says.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
Reach out to others so you feel less alone. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter during the holidays. “Don’t have such a high threshold for asking for help,” Saltz says.
Depression Trigger: Winter Blues
If you notice that you begin to feel down each year when winter arrives, and the days grow shorter, it could be seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs during the same season each year.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
 “The good news is that SAD is treatable,” Saltz says. “Medication or light therapy, under a doctor’s direction, can help.” There is more you can do too. “You can also increase natural light by making it a point of doing work near a window – particularly in the morning,” she says. Exercise also helps improve symptoms of SAD. “Aim for 30 minutes of aerobic exercise multiple times a week.”
Depression Trigger: Anniversaries of Loss
Many people may feel depressed on or around the anniversary of a loss, almost as if it just happened or is happening all over again. “These are almost always triggers,” Saltz says.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
“When you know that an anniversary of loss is coming and that you are more likely to feel depressed, try to bolster your connectivity to people who are supportive,” she says. “Honor the anniversary, but don’t isolate yourself

From the NYX

re They Here to Save the World?

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By JOHN LELAND

Published: January 12, 2006

AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.

Rollin Riggs for The New York Times

Annette Piper, right, in her store, Spiritual Freedom, with her daughter Alexandra, 10, said she realized she could tell what's wrong with people by touch.

Forum: Parenting

"Indigo Evolution," a documentary, is to be shown widely on Jan. 27.

"Tell him I'm strong," he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.
"I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn't raining," he said.
"I'm getting bored," he said.
At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child.
"He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.
Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."
To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.
Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.
Annette Piper, a mother of two in Memphis, said that she had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them. Like a lot of others who describe themselves as indigos, she was also sensitive to chemicals and fluorescent lights. Instead of going to medical school, she became an intuitive healer, directing the energy fields around people, and opened a New Age store called Spiritual Freedom.
Her daughter Alexandra, 10, is also an indigo, she said. They play games to cultivate their telepathic powers, but at school Alexandra struggles, Ms. Piper said. "She has trouble finishing work in school and wants to argue with the teacher if she thinks she's right," Ms. Piper said. "I don't think she's found out what her gifts are. From the influence in school and friends she lays off these abilities. She's a little afraid of them."
Problems in school are common for indigos, said Alex Perkel, who runs the ReBirth Esoteric Science Center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a bilingual (Russian-English) center dedicated to "the knowledge of ancient esoteric schools and Eastern science," according to its Web site (www.esotericinfo.com).
Last year the center organized a class for indigo children but canceled it when families dropped out for economic reasons.
"A lot of people don't understand the children because the children are very smart," Mr. Perkel said. "They have knowledge like our teachers. They don't want to go to school, No. 1, because they don't need the knowledge they can get from school. So parents bring them to psychologists, and psychologists start giving them pills to take out their will and memory. We developed a special program to help them understand that they came to this planet to change the consciousness because they have guides from a higher world."
Stephen Hinshaw, a professor and the chairman of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that "there is a legitimate concern that we are overmedicalizing normal childhood, particularly with A.D.H.D." But, he said, research shows that even gifted children with attention-deficit problems do better with more structure in the classroom, not less.
"If you conduct a very open classroom, kids with A.D.H.D. may fit in better, because everyone's running around, but there's no evidence that it helps children with A.D.H.D. learn. On the other hand if you have a more traditional classroom, with consistent tasks and expectations and rewards, kids with A.D.H.D. may have a harder time fitting in at first, but in the long run there's evidence that it helps their learning."
Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in Manhattan, who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.
"I'm very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors," she said. "I'm not against medication at all. I just think it's overused." When parents take children to her for treatment - she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person's electromagnetic field - she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.
"Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, 'I'm talking to an angel,' or 'I'm talking to someone who's deceased'?" Ms. Tuchman asked. "A lot of them have no one to talk to." She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.
Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.
"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."
She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in "fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode."
Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."
In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.
For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.
"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."

RTC = Resistance to Change

 http://leobabauta.com/


Zen Habits, a blog by Leo Babauta


The reason for our suffering is our resistance to the changes in life.

 And life is all changes.
 
While I resist change (and suffer) just like anyone else, I have learned to adapt. I’ve learned some flexibility. I’ve realized this:

Everything changes, and this is beautiful.

The Pain of Life’s Changes

What do I mean that our suffering comes from resistance to the changes in life?
Let’s take a look at some things that give us trouble:

• Someone yells at you at work. The change is rooted in the fact that we expect people to treat us kindly and fairly and with respect, but the reality is that they don’t always. When they don’t, we resist this reality, and want things to be the way we want them to be. And so we get mad, or hurt, or offended.
• Your 3-year-old (or 13-year-old) won’t listen to you. Again, you expect your child to behave a certain way, but of course reality is different. And when reality doesn’t conform to our expectations, we are stressed out.
• You lose your job. This is a huge change, that affects not only your financial stability, but your identity. If you are a teacher, and lose your teaching job, you now have to deal with the changes in how you see yourself. This can be very difficult. Resisting these changes (and the financial constraints that come with the job loss) can be very painful.
• You have too many tasks and feel overwhelmed. What is the change here? We want things to be in control, but of course they aren’t. New tasks and information come in, new requests, new demands. And these are changes that are difficult, because we thought we had our day under control, and now it’s not. And so we feel overwhelmed and stressed.
• A loved one dies. One of the ultimate changes is death, of course, but what has changed? Well, the person is obviously no longer in our life (at least, not in the same way), but just as painfully, we are not the same person when a loved one dies. We have to change who we are — we’re now a widower instead of a husband, a father without his daughter, or a friend who is left alone (for example). We want life to be the way it was, but it isn’t, so we grief, we rage.

That’s just a start. Things change all the time, and we resist it. Our day changes, our relationships change, other people don’t act the way they should, we ourselves are changing, constantly, and this is hard to deal with.
So this is the pain of change, of not being in control, of things not meeting our expectations.
How do we cope?

The Beauty of Life Changes

We can cope with the pain in numerous ways: get angry and yell, drink or do drugs, eat junk food, watch TV or find other distractions. We can find positive ways to cope with the stress and hurt and anger: exercise, talking about our problems with a friend, or trying to take control of the situation in some way (planning, taking action, having a difficult conversation to work out differences, etc.).
Or, we can embrace the changes.
If changes are a basic fact of life (actually life is nothing but change), then why resist? Why not embrace and enjoy?
See the beauty of change.
It’s hard, because we’re so used to resisting.
Let’s put aside our resistance and judgments for a few minutes, and look for beauty in life’s changes:

• Someone yells at you at work. This person is hurting, frustrated, angry, and is taking it out on you. They are reaching out, trying to control the chaos of life (uselessly of course), and are not succeeding. Can you empathize with this? Have you ever felt this? There is beauty in our similarities, in our joint pain, in our connection as humans. Mentally embrace this beautiful, hurting human being, feel his pain, give your compassion.
• Your 3-year-old (or 13-year-old) won’t listen to you. Amazingly, your child is asserting her independence. She is showing that she’s a full human being, not just a robot who follows orders. Have you ever been in that position? Have you ever been frustrated by someone else trying to control you? There is beauty in this independence, this fighting spirit, this rebellion. That’s what life is (OK, life is change, but also rebellion against control). Smile at this beauty, love it, give your child some space to grow.
• You lose your job. As difficult as this is, it’s an ending, but also a beginning. It’s the start of a new journey, the opportunity to refresh your life, to reinvent who you are. See the beauty in this opportunity, the liberation from the “usual way”.
• You have too many tasks and feel overwhelmed. This is difficult, without a doubt, but it’s possible to surrender to the chaos of tasks and information and demands. You can’t do them all at once, but you can let go of wanting things to be under your complete control. There is beauty in this chaos. It is random, it is crazy, it is life. See the pain of your resistance, and the beauty in this struggle as well. Then realize you can only do one thing at a time, and do that. Then let that go, and do the next thing. By embracing the chaos and seeing the beauty in it, we can be less overwhelmed and stressed out.
• A loved one dies. Maybe the hardest one of all — it’s indubitably sad. But death is an ending, which is a necessity. Ending are necessary for beauty: otherwise we don’t appreciate the thing, because it’s unlimited. Limits are beauty. And death is the ultimate limit, a reminder that we need to appreciate this beautiful thing called life while we have it. Death is also a beginning — not in the sense of an afterlife, but a beginning for the survivors. While we have lost an important person, this ending, like the loss of a job, is a moment of reinvention. It might seem sad, but we are forced to reinvent our lives when a loved one dies, and in this reinvention is opportunity. Which I think is beautiful. Finally, of course, death is an opportunity to remember the person’s life, and be grateful for what they gave us.

The possibilities of finding beauty in our struggles with change are endless. And, I believe, that’s beautiful in its own way.