I have a form of “after the fear” paralysis. The worst has happened in many things. I lost my home and family. I could do it again with my new home and family but it is less fear than it is irritation and pursuit of self-vindication. That pursuit of self vindication is depressing you. Your non-goals are depressing you. Depression always arises from one or more personal non-goals.

Are non-goals aimlessness? Not really, they are mirrored aims. You feel defeated and resentful. The brain does what it can to foster defensive behaviour in you. It may just be a vague notion, a generalize malaise, or you may be conscious of the feeling you are defeated before you even try, two degrees of the same thing. But it’s a defensive reaction to how you were taught to think, how your brain was taught to behave. It replaces goals and holes with non-goals and despair, because this is all it has to work with when hope hurt despair is instinctively seen as better. At least you won’t experience that old pain again. Your brain is mindless, and its conclusions blindly simplistic.

Neither your goal or your non-goal are real. They are just what your brain uses to give you your visceral fix, to feel whole, healthy and alive. Just as your five senses needed stimulating, so does your emotional sense. Your brain is happily tormenting you because it has no other skills, no coping strategies, but there is an alternative.

You weren’t taught to think this way, but in a way you don’t need to be taught, and your brain can be conditioned to accept it just as it was conditioned to accept your real life model. Those moments in your awareness that didn’t make sense to you? That didn’t jive with your normal sense of self or emotional experience? Those are your mind. Those moments when you are deeply aware of the question, “Why the hell are these things like this?” When you experience the same old bad joke of an experience and you are left really thinking, “Honestly? Is this really how it is?” Those are your mind. You shy away from them of course. If you stayed with them, well, it makes you feel seriously threatened. If you stayed with it, then talking to that person you are supposed to talk to, well, you might not do it. You won’t feel like it. You might even feel as if you will stop doing anything at all. I can promise that there is no risk of that, and you will not even fully abandon the old sense of meaning. You will embrace parts of it for the simple reason that when you consider them, you will be left asking yourself, “Why not? Why not accept that hug?”, and you will also come to realize that not everything in the way your brain was behaving itself was meaningless. Some of it was very meaningful, and you will see the contrast between that and what I call stupid brain tricks. You can see why your old thinking didn’t make sense, didn’t seem to be reliable. Does this seem nonsensical? Does it seem undoable?

You have been in this state before, because as uncomfortable as it is your brain will grab for it as a last ditch form of self defence. Any stability in a storm is better than drowning in your own brains noise which is what people with brain illness or injury suffer though without the finality of normal drowning. The strange thing is when you have that last ditch defence, that last gasp in order to try to recover your sanity, you are actually grasping for you best option and then give it up for the inferior option.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~