Awaken Beyond

Beyond Sadness – Part 1

 

Thanks for stopping by… Let’s Awaken Beyond…

 

After my last post entitled “Beyond Happiness,” I received some e-mails asking my thoughts on sadness and depression as well.  Readers want to know what unique perspective, understanding, and awareness Awaken Beyond brings to these topics, and most importantly, what practical things they can do right now to shift their current experience of life.

 

While happiness and sadness have been of interest to me as far back as I can remember, deeply understanding depression became much more poignant immediately following my father’s suicide nearly 20 years ago.  The topic has been of immense importance to me since. 

 

First let’s look at some statistics that the label of “depression” is producing:            

 

Time Magazine states that antidepressant use in the U.S. doubled from 1996 to 2005, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. During that decade — the last period in which data were available — the percentage of Americans using antidepressants surged from less than 6% to more than 10%, or more than 27 million people.

 

While Awaken Beyond is not a philosophy of optimism, I did find more interesting statistics from the book Creating Optimism by Bob Murray and Alicia Fortinberry:

 

• Depressive disorders affect ~18.8 million American adults or about 9.5% of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year.

 

• The rate of depression is doubling every 20 years and, according to a Harvard Medical Center study, the rate of childhood depression is increasing by 23% a year.

 

• According to the World Health Organization depression second largest killer after heart disease by 2020–and studies show depression is a contributory factor to fatal coronary disease.

 

• 80% of people who see physicians are depressed and studies are increasingly linking illness to depression, including osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, some forms of cancer, eye disease and back pain.  

 

• Depression results in more absenteeism than almost any other physical disorder and costs employers over US$51 billion per year in lost productivity alone.

 

• 30% of women are depressed. Men’s depression rate was assumed to be half that of women, but new estimates are higher.

 

• Preschoolers are the fastest growing market for antidepressants.

 

You read that last part right.  Preschoolers.   In short, “depression” is such big business that is has now even made its way into the preschool marketplace so that your child can now pop-a-pill just before jumping on his or her Iron Man 2 Learning Laptop and tackling a day’s play.

 

It’s startlingly apparent that addressing depression is of major importance to our quality of life.  Correlatively, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger business by the year.  A quick search on books about depression reveals scores of psychologists and authors with books about how to “Feel Good” and be “Happy No Matter What.”  Awaken Beyond holds a much different perspective and understanding on this topic.

 

A refreshingly new perspective:

 

Awaken Beyond is not another lopsided, wishful philosophy about feeling good rather than bad, or happy rather than sad.  It neither longs for happiness, nor fears sadness. 

 

Here are just a couple of the differentiating factors in the Awaken Beyond approach to understanding and appreciating life differently.

 

1)  Awaken Beyond embraces and appreciates life’s many emotions from a balanced, integrated and whole place.  It is from this place that one begins to understand the absolute necessity of sadness and depression and appreciate the roles they play in a much larger whole. 

 

2) After one understands the essential rolls that both happiness and sadness play, students learn a step-by-step process of how to transform any challenging emotion into a deeply liberating state of profound appreciation and love.

 

3)  Awaken Beyond takes more serious students a step further.

 

Ultimately Awaken Beyond is about your own deepest nature.  It’s about awakening to your truest self and living a deeply awakened life.  Our work extends an open hand and invitation to courageously step into a much larger you… an actual deeper essence and unchanging space from where all life’s temporary emotions arise – not theoretically but as a direct, known experience. The more your life becomes increasingly awakened to and grounded in this place, the more you find happiness and sadness to be less relevant, less of a concern and much more beside the point.

 

Keep in mind that Awaken Beyond is not merely a conceptual or theoretical life philosophy, its new realizations are brought about by new practices and experiences.  Part TWO of this article will shed more light on not only what this deeper essence is, but specific, practical steps you can put into practice today to access and live from this higher, deeper, and wider place. 

 

Awaken Beyond…. Profound awareness…. Profoundly different life…