By Ma Ananda Sanghavasini, Meditation Facilitator & Intuitive Life Coach at The Divine Mine.

Through my own personal experience I can say that one of the main reasons why we experience depression in our lives is because we try to be the same as everybody else – we try to fit in. This is spoon fed to us by the media: we have to look a certain way, live a certain life style, have a certain job, and then, once we meet all these criteria, we are accepted by society. When we are accepted by society, we have ‘made it’ in life, we have become someone. Usually what we experience is a ‘high’ at first when things are falling nicely into place – the dream job, the perfect spouse, the big house. Soon enough we will experience that this excitement is short lived, and will wear off very fast. We fall back into our same, boring old self again. We thought we ‘made it’, but now everything is falling apart and leaving us, including the nice friends that we had. Thus, we fall into depression.

You see, what happens is this. When we are children, we are not bothered by all these things. We are free, just expressing ourselves as we are. Very soon we are polluted by societal conditioning, which leads to suppression of the free, spontaneous expression of the real self. We start to put up an act most of the time, the spontaneity completely gone. We live according to an agenda, we play roles depending on who is standing in front of us. Society is trying to do is to put us into a mold, a ‘one size fits all’ kind of idea. This will never work, sinse we are all unique expressions of the Divine.

Swamiji Nithyananda always says: God is an artist, not an engineer. Celebrate your uniqueness and set yourself free! Understand that we are all unique expressions of the Divine, of Existence. Whatever it is that you feel like expressing, start living it like nobody is watching. Be spontaneous and creative, connect with your source again! When comparison and judgment comes up, just watch it, but don’t energize it by dwelling on it. Just watch it, as if they are clouds in the sky floating by. This is one way of stopping the identification with these toxic emotions. There is nobody in the world who can express some unique quality like you do. Existence wants you to be here right now, just as you are. How do I know? Very simple, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Notice that when you try to fit in, it is not the real expression of who you are, and that is why we fall into depression. Depression is not a disease, so let us first start with taking the label off. It is all a matter of perspective. Depression is a gift from the Divine, simply a sign to go inward and start celebrating our uniqueness! To me, as per my own experience, depression is a gift that gives us the opportunity to wander from an outward journey back on an inner journey, back home again. When we become so uncomfortable with life, that’s when we start to make changes. When we are comfortable we tend to stay stuck and don’t evolve. So in a sense you can say that depression is a beautiful build in, protective software that we came with to prevent us from lingering. So, if you feel depressed, congratulations! You are presented a major opportunity to change your life for the better, and the energy of depression will make sure that you will get out of it!