Welcome - How to use

Having identified with depression for over fifteen years, I feel more intimate with the state of depression than with acceptance and contentment, aliveness and vigour.

The amount of things I've tried, work I've done and changes I've made have gotten me to this point: I feel like I can handle it. It's not gone, and the states of depression I can sink to are still incredibly low. I have also had long bouts of acceptance and pleasure in the details of my days and nights, I make healthier decisions (and i don't just mean eating an apple instead of a shot of whiskey) and I have several long-term sources of joy in my life. It's been a slow transformation.

Tt occurred to me that I've gotten better. If I wait until enlightenment to share this with people, it might be a while. I'm going to share what helps me, and maybe it can help you too. I can be a pretty stubborn person, and a bit of a skeptic as well, so I think the tactics I've created, borrowed and fiddled with are potentially quite powerful. Friends and co-workers I've shared some of these tactics with (and even just talked with) seem to feel better.

With an enemy as elusive and clever as depression, it's hard to tell what works and why. I'm a fan of the 'many-pronged' approach, that is, a little bit of everything. That's often how depression starts and builds in one's life; one deadly brick at a time. So we'll be taking the bricks down and building a nice fireplace with them, for which to warm yourself and your friends. Not every tip might work for you, that's okay. It will help another time, or maybe you're already healthy in that area of life.

Another effective part to the many-pronged approach: there is always something new you can try. A big part of depression is the feeling of being locked in cement; nothing will change, you'll always feel this way, everything will be grey forever... The strategy of simply trying a new thing often results in a sense of empowerment.

I'll offer reading material, nutrition tips, tools for emotional detachment and stability, ways to break past blockages and actually communicate with yourself, physical healing techniques, visualizations, stories and experience, and some tricks that are way out of the box.

Accept, loosen shoulders, move on.