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Depression comes and goes in my life.
Oftentimes and a depressed mood, a hopelessness, a futility starts mixing into my life.
It is hard to sleep, or hard to get up, or both.
Nothing changes and everything changes.
I have been watching it with curiosity. Curiosity tinged with worry… it is not pleasant to be depressed.
But today of all days curiosity won out: I stopped worrying about death.
In this article am going to allow Source to guide me to know more about why I get depressed. To allow Source to guide me to be the captain of my ship…
In this article I’ll show what I saw in vignettes… So here you go: starting with vignette #1.
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I watched half an hour of the comedy special of an Indian comic that was filmed in Delhi and in a New York comedy club at the same time, at least virtually.
The jokes of the comic bombed 90% in New York, for me, and landed famously in Delhi.
The leopard doesn’t change its spots… Home is where they ‘get you’, whatever you say, or whoever you are.
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I didn’t know Robin Williams. I had seen some of his films. Not many.
Then, out of the blue, I got a few pictures of him in the mail, taken by Keith, my one-time photographer for my magazine.
Robin Williams rubs himself to Keith like a cat, wanting connection. Leans into him.
I recognize that move. Innate. Wanting to be alone, yet wanting to be counted. An inner conflict of the two… both not quite it.
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Osho has hundreds of talks, recorded, transcribed, turned into books. He is the guru of many.
He was depressed. Was not at home. Not fully expressed. Not quite himself… He was not quite sewing his seeds in fertile ground. His brilliance lost on his listeners.
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The experience of being rightly used by life is rare.
We call it: being well.
The experience of having given all you got and ‘live’ is receiving it, is wellness. Emotional, spiritual, existential wellness.
Never quite happening. And, my assertion, this is happening for people less and less.
More and more people are in the receiving zone of your gifts, while less and less people are fertile ground.
One of my students? no. Client? no. What is she? a woman who has been following me since the beginning.
Well, she is an artist. She creates beautiful things, whether it’s a painting, or some craft, it’s beautiful.
In a world even just 20-30 years ago she would have been a local celebrity, she would be known by the people who resonate with what she does.
Today she is learning internet marketing, search engine optimization, and she is trying to sell her stuff on Etsy.
90% or more what she is required to do is to find the small group she and her stuff could connect to.
But… but… connecting is an art we are not taught.
There is a ton of talk about it… I have at least 30 books on my kindle that teach it. Boring as hell… They didn’t manage to connect to me… teaching how to connect to MY people… Ugh… something is fundamentally off here.
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In 1980 I traveled Europe. I spent a few days with a couple in Rotterdam. He was a biochemist, she was a stay at home wife. She made tiny flowers from some clay-like matter and made tiny earrings in different colors.
She visited gift shops all over, and her tiny earrings sold a lot. People connected to it, connected to her, and bought it.
She had the art of connecting.
There is not a week that I don’t think of her. Her husband was in awe of her… they connected with each other, they connected with me.
I fell in love with the Netherlands through them, through our conversations that went till the wee hours of the morning…
These are rare memories of connection I cherish.
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I carefully store in my memory banks the two moments when my mother and I connected for a moment. Two moments. In 59 years.
I have a stuffed tigger I have in my bed. I connect to it every night. We gaze into each other’s eyes, and I am grateful. I kiss its tiny button-nose. I hug it close to my chest. We connect, I make sure of it.
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I write and I speak for a living.
I am getting more and more aware that the words, the ideas are not going through. When there is no connection.
To me it is obvious.
It is not up to me.
‘Connecting’ to an unwilling other is like rape: you cannot call it ‘making love’.
Without connection there is no experience of ‘home’.
I remember when I first connected to Source. It was my first experience of coming home. Being home. Being where I was loved, appreciated, accepted. I wept.
I still experience it when I connect to connect… And I don’t experience it when my ‘job’ is to download energies. Then I am not at home, I am just a tool. A conduit.
Not my favorite state of being. I don’t mind being useful, but I don’t enjoy it.
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In the ‘From upsets to communication course‘ I got a glimpse of the cause of the disconnection.
The expression: two passing trains in the night is quite apt.
It is the ‘FIELD of communication’ that decides the experience. The experience of connection or no connection. Of love or no love. Of home or not home.
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If you are in one field and I am in another: we can’t connect. I could move into YOUR field, but I don’t want to. I could… but…
What I have to say doesn’t make sense in the field where you are. What I have to say finds closed ears, closed minds. Closed connection. And this interaction siphons away my energy, my Life Force.
It takes huge humility to move between fields, to move so the other can hear what they need to hear, so they can say what they need to say, so they can give you what you paid for, what you claimed you wanted to learn.
One of the parties has to move. If it is a ‘group call’ the natural move is that all recipients move into the field where the speaker speaks.
Humility, well, we don’t know what humility is… but we know stingy. We know being completely and totally closed. We may even recognize it in ourselves and in others. But we claim powerlessness over it… And we are lying.
Desire to receive for the self alone will make you closed. You don’t want to connect because you abhor giving of yourself, or giving anything. You prefer to take only.
Connection is give and take. You don’t want to give of yourself, because you live in scarcity.
The opposite of this closed, stingy state is, abundance.
To the degree that you don’t receive, to the degree you don’t keep your listening open to what is being said, to the degree that you think about what is being said… to the same degree you are stingy.
And to the degree that you are willing to be open for two way energy exchange, for a real connection, to the same degree you are open to abundance.
Abundance with everything.
Like an abundance of love. Abundance of success. Abundance of fulfillment. And an abundance of ease and grace.
In one of those marketing books I finally heard who is the ideal client/student for me.
I could have heard it before, because I did… but hearing and getting it are two different things.
You hear the words, but, of course, words are symbols for reality… and your understanding of the words is off… this is why your accurate vocabulary is low (part of what I measure in the Starting Point Measurements…) and you you misunderstand nearly every word.
I heard it in Frank Kern’s famous presentation, Your Core Influence. He has a simple test to decide who he wants to work with, who he wants as a client.
He says: I look if I would want to have lunch with them.
Most people, who have no sensitivity or desire to connection, would have lunch with anyone.
But people who have something to give, entrepreneurs, teachers, service providers should not have lunch with anyone. For the people who are in the ‘giving profession’ having a two-way connection is mandatory for emotional, spiritual, existential well-being… If they don’t get it: depression sets in.
If you would like to have lunch with me, so you can pick my brain… or because you find me or my ideas interesting… I probably would not want to have lunch with you: you are all about you.
Osho lived a life of no connection, and died early. So did Robin Williams.
And most mornings, most days I want to join them.
Except that I think that there are a handful of people who are capable and willing to connect with me in a two-way fashion. I just have to find them.
I now know how important that is. And also know why.
That connection is the difference between being a prostitute and a lover.
A world of difference.
Now, I could close this article and end on a low note. Life is shit. People don’t want to connect. You can’t connect. You are stingy, all about yourself… Baaaah!
But instead I am going to teach you something… Are you interested? Are you starved for connection?
I am sure you are… whether you have people around you or not. Because abundance is attractive… and depression is horrible.
So remember above where I say: the people need to be in the same field to hear and connect.
A field is like a room. You can always go to the same room instead of yelling loud enough for the other person to hear you… like you are probably doing often.
So the move is to let go of what you are doing, what you are hoping for, and have the ‘humility’ to just go to the same room as the other… so you don’t have to yell.
The move is a move in communication.
One of my students had a brief stint with leading classes for addicts. They didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. Occasionally when the group was talking between themselves, he would whisper to get them to listen up.
And it sound like a genius move, but it isn’t getting people in the same room, on the same page… What is being said in the whisper is the key.
Famed and feared negotiator, Jim Camp said that unless you create a vision in the other person, they won’t want to hear you.
On the face of it it sounds like you shove some vision down their throats.
The vision is an important ‘room choosing’ action… if their vision and your vision meet, mesh, then you’ll have connection.
The listener has the upper hand. Always.
Unless you learn to take them to the same room, and they go willingly, you are screwing the pooch.
Screwing the pooch? Yeah. They will remain in their little heads busy with whatever they are busy about, and anything and everything will go right over their heads.
It happens to me all the time. Although I know what to do, I know how to do it, and I have done it countless time, oftentimes I don’t do it.
And it is work. And what works against work is entitlement. Or assumptions. Or laziness.
Because, after all, they ‘SHOULD’ be there to listen… they paid for it… blah blah blah.
But unless you hook them, they won’t.
So I will teach this in the communication workshop…
For now you can sign up to the ‘I am interested’ group where you get all kinds of good stuff, all about communication.
If you are the right kind of person you’ll get enough so that you don’t even have to do the course… And I’ll be happy for you.
But if you are ‘normal’, it will prepare your thinking being in that group, so when the course comes, you’ll be in the same room with me, eager and ready to connect and get the immense power of communication.
Get into the group to prepare your listening
Great article Sophie. I really enjoyed it. I suffer from depression and notice that a lot those feelings have to do with being disconnected from others. Yet I force and want this disconnection because I am highly sensitive and soak up other people’s energies because I haven’t got mine under control. There is a desire for connection and the desire to be alone fighting against each other at the same time.