Depression and burn-out are not just a random subject that I chose. The NO-vember movement came to live because I know how much this battle against depression, burn-out, anxiety or anything else for that matter, can affect you in ways that really hurt.
Depression can have many causes. Let us not just say that it genetics, or that it is because of this and that. A human being is far too complex to just say that it is this or that. My way to Kundalini Yoga was because I was suffering from burn-out, and a beginning of a mild depression. Today I have made it my mission to help others who suffer the same.
Yogi Bhajan says that depression is when you want to destroy what you have achieved. It’s very human. What can construct must destruct. But whatever you can construct here and can receive hereafter you cannot destroy and that is your goodwill as God.
- The 18-year Cycle of Life reviews the physical health and vitality plus the overall life quality.
- The 11-year Cycle of Intelligence reviews the applied intelligence; how our intelligence affects our actions.
- The 7-year Cycle of Consciousness reviews the basic level of consciousness. How do we understand things? What are our priorities?
Take a look at the life cycles from a Kundalini Yoga perspective:
The Aquarian Teacher Manual p. 228
There are certain clusters or major phase transitions where all these cycles converge for a few years. For example, between 33-35-36. Which is for me exactly the time when depression hit me.
There were so many sources that led there. It does not matter. What matters is to catch yourself and say: no! I don’t want this anymore. Also, around this time, in your early thirties, is often when you find spiritual depression.
As you are an eternal soul born into a declining body, there is the axis of the soul that goes up, and the axis of the body that goes down with your life years. When they meet somewhere in the middle, like in your thirties, pretty much at your half term of life, your soul starts to give you signs and shouts: “Hey, human! What’s going on? There is more to this human life than this. Wake up!”
I started Kundalini Yoga in a retreat when the depression was really bad in 2013. I found not only my way back to myself, but also the path to a new life. I remember that the first times that I did Kundalini Yoga back then in Mallorca were really hard! Don’t think that we sit in front of you as Teachers and never suffered through a kriya ourselves!
One of the first kriyas I ever did is was the meditation to release childhood anger. I cried, I screamed, I cried more, all of that and more. But the pain I felt was liberating. I knew that something in me was different.
I still have this effect on numerous occasions when I practice a kriya. I personally call it the kundalini effect. The moment you realise the person who walked in that class was someone else. You are never going to be the same again.
You do not land in a Kundalini Yoga class by chance.
Spiritual Depression can lead you to compensate with other things, like money or sex. Until you realise that neither of which can fill this void inside. This shallow emptiness you feel remains.
My spiritual name Nam Hari means the kind and creative princess who meditates upon the name of God with all her heart. I was indeed in spiritual depression.
After a morning Sadhana at that time, I asked my teacher to take a Hukam with me. Hukam designates the practice of opening up at random to a page in the Sikh scripture (Guru Granth Sahib) to receive God’s guidance on how to handle a certain situation, as answer to a question, or as more general guidance for that day.
This is what it read on the question of what the legacy of my life was supposed to be:
The Guru, the True Guru, has implanted the Naam, the Name of the Lord within me. I was dead, but chanting the Name of the Lord, Har, Har, I have been brought back to life.
Blessed, blessed is the Guru, the Guru, the Perfect True Guru; He reached out to me with His Arm, and pulled me up and out of the ocean of poison.
O mind, meditate and worship the Lord’s Name.
How accurate!
Yogi Bhajan says that there is a simple answer to depression: pranayama. If you can breathe heavily from the navel point, you can get rid of depression really easily.
How is your breathing from the navel point nowadays?
In NO-vember we will work on stabilising your navel center, the 3rd chakra for self-affirmation “I AM”! and I have the right to be. Meditate on the calibre of your life, strengthen the nervous system, and elevate your consciousness.
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