1:
Your body knows what to do. Your body and mind have a natural way of processing life, through thoughts, feelings and emotions. It's when we get in the way that problems start to occur. Take anxiety, it's a feeling we feel that drives us to act, either on the anxiety or against the anxiety. It usually creates thoughts and sensations. It's when we finally give the anxiety space and time to run its course through thoughts and sensations that we can truly begin to process the energy. This can be done through mediation.
When we allow the body and mind to do as is, we allow the energy to flow. Most of the time, we are either pulling or pushing against the energy which does not give the energy permission to run its course. When the energy runs its course, the natural love and enjoyment of life comes back up, as our natural state is circulating love energy.
2:
Depression is when energy gets stuck in large amounts in the mind and body, it's when we can’t let things come up because we have been in this push and pull so long we no longer know what to do. The antidote is processing time, it's time for the energy to work itself out, time for the energy to run its course. We need this time, in modern society we never really give ourselves the time to fully run our course, we never give any time to process. Nowadays with 24/7 access to stimulation, the energy does not have an outlet. Usually if you are a good sleeper, when we sleep we give time for the energy to work itself out (dreams) in order to get ready for the new day, the body circulates the stored energy and it manifests as dreams or thought forms working out the energy we have suppressed and stored. We can further assist this process in daily meditation. When we consciously give ourselves the time to process or have quiet.
Some people get this through walks in nature or exercise, but in its purest form the best way to process energy is meditation or a meditative practice and I believe that meditation means allowing the energy to do as it does whether that means manifesting as thoughts, feeling or sensations and whether that mean indulging or ignoring but throughout it all-showing up.
3:
Meditation gives us the center point from which we are then able to deal with the rest of our lives. When we can find a deep center, when life challenges us (creates unwanted thoughts, feelings or emotions) we can then have the skills to be with them as they exist in the moment. We can also have the understanding that they will pass and that we can be with them as uncomfortable as they might be. When things don't bother us, as adults we tend to retreat to our mind to go to logical problem solving.
Some issues can’t be solved with problem solving and must be solved with feeling. To be able to fully feel an experience, it will cease to have power over you. When you are able to be with a feeling, you are no longer running away from it. By no longer running, you have the ability to recenter yourself and assimilate the feeling into your everyday experience. This will allow the thought, feeling or emotion to move through you. It will no longer be stuck with you responding to it with anger, sadness, anxiety or rationalization but will become a practice of mindfulness in which you are present with what is no longer running.
4.
Letting life be as it is. When you finally finish all your searching, you might find that in order to be happy you must let life be as it is. This is to say that you welcome your natural response whether that be to fight flight or freeze in any situation, you allow yourself to hold on or let go. You allow yourself to do as you will in the situation present. When you incorporate points into your life that you know are “reset” or regulating moments (such as meditation, cold shower or breath-work) you can then live the rest of your life allowing the natural processes to take place. Meaning that you allow what is going to happen to happen while allowing yourself to respond and eventually you get acclimatized (or re-acclimatized) to the situation at hand.
When you have spent so much time trying to make life the way you want, manipulating the external world, your own mind, or the minds of others you begin to start trying to fix and change the world around you. Some part of you, deep down knows this isn't the way to be and is actively trying to get you to cease said behaviour. From here you may begin to realize that life will happen and you will react to it, and when we can make peace with the fact that our inner reactions are out of our control, we can start making more informed decisions and act in more accordance with our natural way of being.
With all that being said, we must have a grounding practice, something that we can come back to that provides us with a sense of ease or rebalancing. This could be as simple as sitting in silence, following the breath if that works or doing a mantra practice. When we have these ‘reset’ points, we can then get to a place where we feel more safe in day-to-day functioning and thus can handle what comes our way. When we can feel safe with the ebb and flow of the tide, we can finally allow ourselves to be pulled and pushed by the waves, understanding that there is nowhere we can be pulled or pushed to and thus find a peace in the way things are.
5.
The mind will do anything it can to try to think its way through a problem. It will always revert to thought, any issue, situation or condition you find yourself in, the natural tendency will be to retreat to the comfort of thoughts. When we can’t handle an experience we turn to our thoughts. Thoughts are deceptive though, they try to find solutions in a world made up of nothing but energy, there is no conclusion or ending, just energy moving around. Thoughts don’t provide a grounding place to come back to.
The question then becomes, where do we rest? If we can’t rest in thoughts, can we rest in mindfulness? The answer is tricky, we can try to rest in mindfulness but may find it is just more mental exertion. Our true nature lies in the expansive connection we all share, the connection of the way things are the flow of life, spirit, collective consciousness, whatever you want to call it. So the question then becomes, how do we connect with that? We do so by engaging in meditation, meditation strips back the layers on top of us that we have built up, our “calluses” if you want to call them that. When we strip it back, we find that we are more than our thoughts, feelings and emotions. You may see that we are more than the constant noise going on around us at all times.
Once we know ourselves to be more than our thoughts, feelings and sensations, we can then get to a place where we then have to figure out what to do with all the noise in our heads. What do we do with the emotions in our bodies and the constant changing nature of feeling. What we do is allow, we allow them to be as they are, we allow ourselves to get lost in thoughts and to get emotional. Because when we truly allow ourselves to hold on, that is when we can finally let go of the effort of the pull and push and finally we can rest in our body's natural process.