Transcription
What is up, guys? My name is Lucas, and I help people understand themselves in order to live a profound life and reach their highest potential.
This video is going to be all about how to deal with depression. If you guys enjoy the content, please make sure to subscribe because it helps my channel grow, and I greatly appreciate that.
So let's get right into this. This video is going to contain a bunch of strategies and tips for understanding and overcoming our own emotional suffering. I'm also going to explain the root cause of all psychological suffering.
Before I explain any of that, I just have to make a few statements. Our emotions are our own responsibility. We construct all of our emotional states, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Let's say we get something. Okay, let's say we want a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a new car or something exciting that will finally give our life that juice we want. When we get something like this, we feel happy for a short period of time.
We feel happy not because of the object or the thing that we got; it has nothing to do with the external thing. It has to do with the removal of our desire. Our emotions are 100 percent constructed by us.
When we get that car or that girlfriend or that boyfriend or that money or whatever, it only has to do with the fact that we no longer desire to manipulate reality to serve us. That is what creates happiness.
When we feel sad or depressed or lonely, etc., any low vibrational, more negative emotion, we have an image in our mind about how we want to change the present moment in order to serve us. When we create this image in our mind, we are simultaneously saying this present moment isn't good enough.
This is a bad present moment. But when I finally get that thing that I want, now I'll be happy. Now I'll be okay. But, Lucas, I just need that one more thing. I just need one more thing. When I finally get that, I'll finally be okay.
When I finally get that raise, when I finally get that car, that girlfriend, that boyfriend, then I'll be okay. Now it's okay, but this doesn't exist. You will never achieve true fulfillment and true happiness through manipulating reality to serve you in some kind of way.
It's unsustainable and impossible. We, as humans, naturally seek to avoid suffering because we find it unpleasant, and we naturally want pleasure. We want to chase pleasure.
When we get as much pleasure as we can, there is nothing wrong with this. It's obviously understandable. But when we avoid suffering, we are now rejecting this present moment.
When we are suffering and we reject our own emotions, we are now avoiding this present moment in favor of a better present moment in our minds when we're not suffering. But this actually creates more and more layers of suffering, which then creates an even worse situation for us.
Distracting ourselves from our emotions isn't an actual solution in overcoming our own suffering but is actually making it worse. The root of the problem has nothing to do with anything external.
It has nothing to do with "I don't have enough this" or "I don't have enough that." It has to do with our own mind and psychology—psychological suffering.
At least, I'm talking about psychological suffering. In order to prevent or stop feelings of depression or sadness or anything like that, we have to rewire our minds in a pretty radical way, in a way that will completely change our lives.
It's like a total 180 from what we're currently doing. We need to rewire our minds to accept whatever feeling arises and be able to be present with these feelings.
I'm going to be explaining how to do that in a few minutes. Just give me a minute. We need to rewire our minds to inquire into the nature of our emotions.
If we don't inquire into the nature of our emotions, then we will never find the root problem of our psychological suffering. We will never transcend our suffering.
We will be stuck in this endless loop of pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain. I'm going to sum up everything I just said in a very easy way to understand.
These are just the first few steps to understanding and coping with depression or suffering of any kind, really. The first one is: don't distract yourself from your suffering.
The second is acceptance of our emotional state. Accept that we created this. Accept your emotional state for what it is.
Feel the emotion mindfully is next. This is how we're going to observe our emotions and understand how they work. When we are mindfully feeling our emotions, we have to locate it in our body.
Where is it? In the stomach? In the forehead? Your arms? Your gut? Your chest? Wherever you feel this emotion, locate the area or areas and notice it as just a feeling.
Okay, then we have to detach ourselves from this emotion. We can't get so wrapped up in this emotion. We can't get so heavily identified with this emotion because our suffering, and really all of our emotions, are completely temporary.
None of them are permanent. If you watch them, they come and they go. They arise and they pass. We are not these sensations in our body.
We are not this feeling in our gut or wherever the emotion is. We're not this sensation. Another exercise to do is asking yourself, "If this emotion could talk, what would it say?"
If you are honest, this is inquiring into our emotions. If you are honest, you have some sort of thought pattern or thought system that is creating this reoccurring experience.
So the last two points I just said teach you how to inquire into your emotions and how to mindfully feel them. This isn't something you do once or twice. This is something you do hundreds of times, thousands of times, over and over and over again.
I'll be giving you guys some habits and skills—really habits—to install in your life that will teach you how to do this, and you'll be able to do it more effectively.
The first habit is meditation, and this is by far the best habit for observing our own emotional state and our own thoughts. You shouldn't do this just while you're feeling sad, but this should be like a daily habit for you.
I would recommend moving up to at least an hour a day, but start slow. This is a great way to detach from our emotions and thoughts and just observe them.
We are going meta on our emotions and thoughts. We are taking a step back and just observing them, watching them come and watching them go.
It's important that we don't have a specific preference for what arises. We have to meet whatever arises with love, acceptance, and presence.
By doing that thousands of times, we develop emotional mastery and we transcend our suffering. We understand the nature of our own suffering.
The second skill is healthy eating. A lot of our emotional states are created by the food we eat. The body and the mind are seen as very binary.
It's like it's seen as just these two separate things. Really, in my culture, I live in Canada, but pretty much in almost all cultures—pretty much all of them, really—they're just seen as these two totally distinct things.
But they are actually one and the same. They aren't actually separate things. Each cell within your body works with profound intelligence.
Your white blood cells track down potentially harmful germs and eliminate them. Your body has this digestive system, and you're not really in control of it in any way.
Your body has a set of systems and functions that does the whole thing for you, and it works with profound intelligence. Eating really crap food affects the way we feel and think.
When we are thinking and feeling like crap, then it's easy for us to become very depressed, lethargic, etc. A lot of people's negative emotions, like anxiety or depression, are actually just caused by the food they eat.
The food that gets marketed is cheap garbage, like McDonald's or like bread and milk. Really, your diet should be about 95 percent fruits and vegetables, and there's no real exception to that.
Because that's the food that you're supposed to be eating, at least for most of us. Some people have certain diseases where they can't eat too many carbs, and I'm not going to get into that here.
But if you're like most people, then fruits and vegetables are what pretty much your whole diet is supposed to consist of. Because this allows your body to function properly.
When our body is not functioning properly, we feel divided. Our mind and our thoughts, our way of thinking, feel very divided. Our feelings are divided.
We're not present. We're not in this moment, and we're ultimately just wasting our lives.
The third point is movement or exercise. This is a great way to get out of your head, get into the moment, and make yourself feel a lot better.
So that's good. Another one is cold showers. This one is very hard to do.
I've been doing cold showers for about a year and a half now because they give me a sense of mental clarity and alertness, and I absolutely love that. I take them soon after I wake up, and this is an absolute game changer.
I would highly recommend it, but they are kind of scary because they put you into a fight-or-flight response. They shock you, so it's an actual scary experience.
If you go under freezing cold water, you are going to actually get scared. If you are very aware of your emotions, you'll notice fear arises.
Conquering this fear really gives you a boost throughout the day. It's great to wake up and immediately go into a fight-or-flight response and just accept the moment instead of running away from it.
Really embrace it and surrender to it. The fifth one is for you to do your own independent research and figure out what habits you can install into your life that help you inquire into your emotions and understand them at a deeper level.
So maybe journaling or yoga, reading specific books on emotional mastery. There's a lot you can learn, so I recommend your own investigation into the nature of your emotions.
There's a lot of things you can do.
Okay, this last part of the video is going to be rather advanced, but this is going to be the actual root cause of all psychological suffering.
This is a rather advanced part. This is for people who understand spirituality, awakening, enlightenment, non-duality, consciousness, the ego, etc.
Our negative emotions ultimately stem from us wanting to manipulate reality to serve us. People who understand this self versus other duality will really understand what I'm going to be saying here.
Our truest self, our true nature, the very core of our being, is bliss, happiness, peace, and joy. These emotions are a byproduct of us understanding what we truly are at the fundamental level.
Because we are not our thoughts or emotions, or not even our bodies. We aren't a hand or a mouth or a nose. You're not your eyeball, and I can keep going.
You're not an individual cell in your body. There's no specific part of your body that is you. You don't have to believe me; you can inquire into that for yourself and also read a lot of science about it as well.
Because they are getting into no self. Neuroscience is getting pretty big on no self.
That was actually discovered by Buddhists thousands of years ago, and recently science has realized that the identity we create for ourselves as a human being is actually a trick of our mind.
It's a way our mind fools us in order to keep ourselves alive. This false identity that we construct with thoughts and emotions blocks us from experiencing our truest nature.
Our truest self and the happiness, peace, bliss, and joy that comes with it. This is ultimately how to transcend all suffering.
Our identity as a separate individual, separate from our surroundings and all the other people, is an illusion. Our true nature, our truest self, is all-encompassing universal consciousness.
Our disconnection from our true nature or true self is the actual cause of 99.999 percent of our suffering. We have to really abide in what we truly are.
We have to grasp this for ourselves, this universal truth, this fundamental truth about the nature of reality for ourselves, and abide in our awareness of it.
There's really no other way to ultimately gain true emotional mastery, true mental clarity, true happiness, true lasting happiness, true fulfillment, and reach the highest levels of human development.
If you want to learn how to do that, I have some videos, and I'm going to link a bunch in the description that should help you out in understanding that a lot more.
But that is it for this video. If you guys enjoyed, please leave a like. If you guys want to see more, subscribe.
If you guys have any suggestions, questions, or anything like that, leave them in the comment section below. Thank you guys so much for watching. I appreciate it. Peace. Have a great day, man.