Anxiety & Depression — not just psychological

I was sitting in Starbucks sipping an iced Decaf Americano, having just watched a beautiful set of Curling highlights on NBC Olympics when I remembered an advertisement that had come on earlier in the day while I was watching the opening ceremony. It was an advertisement featuring a very famous swimming athlete that was talking about depression.

Later, as I picked up the newspaper, I read an article about the California community colleges adopting a “pass/no pass” policy partly as a response to the growing stresses being felt by students as a consequence of the pandemic. The article repeatedly mentioned anxiety and depression as experiences that students were having to face as a consequence of the financial pressures on them.

Putting aside the fact that we actually charge our best, i.e. young people, money in order to learn the basics of how to work this economy instead of giving this knowledge away for free, the response by community colleges does not accurately address what is going on within these human beings.

There’s more to anxiety and depression than just external factors such as financial stress, homework and the desire to do well in school. In fact, the reason anyone suffers from anxiety, depression or any mental health issue has one fundamental reason behind it: lack of proper grounding. But in order to understand what that means, let me unpack the way we humans experience life a little bit.

Levels of Human Experience

There are several layers to the human body, and at each layer, we experience life differently, as well as have experiences that aren’t possible to have at other layers. For example, if a woman rises from the base layer — where women generally tend to live — to the higher layers, she experiences an explosion of creativity that she cannot experience while she is at the base layer. A lot of people nowadays will associate what I am saying with chakras, energy centers and so on, but the picture is a lot more complicated than that, so it’s best not to think of the human body as being just a series of important centers, while ignoring the rest of the mechanism.

Whenever someone rises in experience from one layer to another layer, they start to see things in a very different way. For example, if you decide to fly over Salt Lake City in an airplane, you will see a very different picture of that city than you will when you are bicycling through it. The level of detail is different, the speed at which you experience things changing is radically different and so on.

Today, the vast majority of teenage girls are actually experiencing life at a higher level than where the physical body is manifest. At these higher levels, your experience is more akin to flying over a city in an airplane than walking on the ground. If you do this, you will perceive your life to be moving a lot faster than it actually is on Earth. This is like saying that you experience life as if it’s on fast-forward.

Here’s another analogy. If you decide to look at an article by reading through it slowly, word-by-word, you will experience a lot of stuff that you will not if you quickly skim the article for keywords and such. Details will stand out that you may not have picked up when you were skimming. Ideas and concepts that you didn’t pay attention to while skimming now suddenly make themselves apparent.

The same thing happens when you are walking around a city versus driving around it. I find, for example, that so many more details are apparent when I am slowly walking around the city of Los Angeles as compared to motorcycling around it. I am able to see flowers I wouldn’t have otherwise and pick up on simple little things like the fact that the platform that tow-trucks carry, when folded up, looks like a cross — the one you might associate with Jesus’ crucifixion, for example.

In other words, I am present at a whole different level than I am when I am motorcycling. On the ground, I have more time on my hands to pay attention to the little details.

Life is beautiful at every level, but you cannot experience the beauty of the Divine Feminine, appearing in the form of trees and flowers, for example, if you are speeding past her.

It is one reason why we love hiking in the woods. We love to slow down, and I find that I am always called to slow down, take it easy, enjoy the moment and not rush past any experience, however painful or pleasurable it might be.

But what causes people to rise up? There’s at least one big factor involved: energy.

Energy

It’s a funny thing, but when I was working in Corporate America, everyone spoke to me about the ‘fast-paced work environment’, when it was anything but, in my experience. I was at such a high place during those days that I would see things unfolding at lightning speed, pick up on details incredibly quickly and be able to converse about almost any problem without flinching. I had a boat load of energy, and I was able to basically race to the finish line every single time without a single mistake. I would watch as my colleagues would struggle and struggle to make sense of the most basic ideas while I sat, impatiently, often waiting for hours, days, weeks and years for my team to catch on to an idea I had already communicated within the first few minutes of our coming together as a team.

However, at all those times, I was able to perceive that life wasn’t moving as fast as I was. It was crystal clear to me what was going on: people on my team simply didn’t have the level of intelligence necessary to understand what I was saying, at the speed at which I was saying it.

This isn’t a criticism of the human beings on my team — they were some of the best minds I’ve ever worked with. It’s simply a question of having enough energy to rise to a higher level at work, and then come down again when you want to be, as they say, ‘just human’, all the while keeping your feet on the ground.

My colleagues simply did not have the level of energy that I had. There are various reasons for that I won’t go into today, but let’s just say that the vast majority of human beings live at a very low energy level.

Most people wake up exhausted, need stimulation or some sort of “pressure” to get out of bed, and are exhausted throughout their lifetime without realizing it. Life seems to be a drag, something they have to ‘suffer’ through. Every interaction, including a simple conversation on the street with someone becomes a challenge, something people want to get through as quickly as possible. Instead of enjoying each experience, they feel like they have to just ‘get it over with’ as quickly as they can, so they can get back to…God knows what.

In order to get through the day, people try to supplement their energy by consuming caffeine, drugs or other stimulating inputs like music, movies or thrilling experiences such as skydiving, but these kinds of inputs don’t actually provide energy. All they do is excite your system in a way that’s unhealthy, creating a sense of elation, a kind of euphoria. You get the feeling that you’re on cloud nine, that you’re flying.

In other words, they make you lose your grounding. But what is grounding anyway?

Grounding

Grounding, in a nutshell, literally means “being in touch with the Earth”.

Grounding is almost universally ignored by human beings and is still the number one problem facing America, if not most of the world, as nearly everyone has adopted a “Western” lifestyle. The “Western” lifestyle is characterized by a severe lack of connection with the elements in general, but especially with water, wind, fire and Earth. Of these elements, Earth is the only element that can provide grounding.

Think of it this way: we, as human beings, were made to be in touch with the Earth, who is a feminine creature. Most people refer to the planet as ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘Mother Nature’, but my relationship with her has evolved past dependency to a state of collaboration. While most people suckle at her teat, and are dependent on her, my nourishment is of a more evolved kind. She too, nourishes me and in a very different fashion, but this is too mystical for you to bother with right now, so let’s get back to grounding.

Grounding doesn’t just happen because you are in touch with the Earth physically, like walking barefoot on grass, for example, but also through food. When you are ungrounded, you tend to consume foods that will keep you grounded more easily — fries, potatoes, hamburgers, bread, i.e. heavy foods. All American fast food is heavily grounding, except the caffeine. But the most grounding food of all is, you guessed it: sugar.

Sugar is extremely grounding

It isn’t that ‘chemically’ sugar is a grounding substance — it is the sweetness of the Earth we are all craving that keeps us grounded. By nature, we are nourished by sweetness alone. As children, we are fed by mothers who provide this sweetness in great amounts, as breast milk, for example. And as we grow older, we tend to seek sweetness in our lives as a form of nourishment, not just in food, but in women, in nature, in flowers, trees and animals. All these things are essentially ‘feminine’ in nature.

The feminine is sweet, in other words. The more feminine something is, the sweeter it tends to be, and whatever embodies the feminine to a greater degree than the masculine tends to be sweet as well. Young children, for example, are the sweetest things on the planet, regardless of species — a fact obvious to everyone, I hope!

By the way, there is a good reason why children are always hankering after ice cream, candy, soda pop and snacks that are sugary: they want sweetness! And it isn’t just about nourishment, but also because of energetic imbalances that all children experience while growing up. Children tend to have a lot of energy because they tend not to waste it on useless activities like worrying and as a result, they need lots of grounding to be stable. They will run around all day, getting as high as kites, and will seek a way to ground themselves. This may either take the form of literally lying on the ground, touching each other, looking for sugary foods or pizza — anything to bring them back to the ground.

But if they cannot ground themselves, the body will intervene, and forcefully so. This is what happens when a child ‘accidentally’ falls down and hurts themselves on a playground sometimes. It isn’t always due to grounding issues, but it often is. Basically, the body is saying, “We are losing him” and creates a situation where it needs to reconnect with the ground in order to bring the child back down to the body. And it does so by creating a situation where the child experiences not only contact with the ground, but something else that is extremely effective at grounding a human being: pain.

Pain is exceptionally grounding

Today, women and children alike are experiencing levels of pain unseen in the past, because of a serious lack of grounding in their lives, combined with a culture that is anathema to consuming sweet stuff.

Yes, eating sugar will make you heavy. And if you’re fat and heavy, you’re extremely well-grounded. This is a fact, and the consequences of our lack of natural grounding are evident all over the world, as people get heavier and bigger.

But if you don’t have sweetness in your life, you will experience pain at some level in order to keep you grounded. If you’re really far gone, you’ll be fat, heavy and in pain at the same time! But if you avoid the pain as well, by suppressing it using drugs, for example, the body has little recourse to strategies that will keep you grounded. And if this continues for a while, you begin to experience feelings of anxiety.

Being ungrounded leads to anxiety

Why? As life progresses, you steadily start to lose touch with the reality around you and you start to experience life at a higher level than you would if you had been well-grounded.

Additionally, you experience life at a very different pace than it is unfolding in the physical dimension where your physical body lives. And as a result, you start to expect things to move at a pace they don’t. And this exacerbates whatever anxiety you’re already experiencing.

Moreover, you may start to notice things that aren’t actually happening to you— experiences of others, for example, which are also made available to you when you climb to a higher level than the one at which we live on Earth. You may start to find yourself lost in the subconscious, hearing stuff like voices and so on. You may conclude you are actually ill, mentally. And this will lead you to act on your illness instead of addressing the root of the problem: you are ungrounded!

And if you aren’t seeing life at a level that’s appropriate for a human being to live at, you aren’t seeing properly. Many people are actually so ungrounded they aren’t able to see who we are in reality. And they start to believe in all kinds of weird narratives that talk about people on Earth being under the control of other people and so on. Insanity sets in, in other words. And that’s the state of humanity in general on the planet today — utterly insane.

Utterly insane — that’s the state of humanity nowadays

When the body realizes that it is out of control, it starts to perform a yo-yo of sorts, using any means possible to bring you down to Earth. And all of us are experienced in this — we call it exhaustion. Exhaustion isn’t just physical. In fact, being exhausted physically at the end of a good day is really rewarding — you sleep better! Most people aren’t physically exhausted nowadays though, as our lifestyles rarely demand energy levels we would need in the body if we were all hard at work outside chopping wood, planting rice or hunting animals.

Most of us are energetically exhausted, aka “spiritually” exhausted. And spiritual exhaustion, when kept up for long periods of time, is depression.

Spiritual exhaustion, when kept up for long periods of time, is depression. It’s that simple.

When you put these things together: energy imbalances and a state of being ungrounded, what you get is an energy system that is off-balance. At this point, something that relies on your energy system has to compensate for a foundation that’s not level: your psyche.

When your energy system is wonky, it cannot support a good psyche and all kinds of garbage piles up. You begin to demean yourself, criticize yourself for the way you look or disapprove of the way you do things. You may start seeing strange things, believe in narratives that don’t make sense, get out of touch with reality, start believing in phenomena you don’t understand and create problems that don’t exist.

In other words, your psychology gets warped, and there’s no end to the number of crazy things people will come up with when their psychology is unstable.

But most people have no awareness of their energy imbalances, and seek help purely at the psychological level, which isn’t useful. It’s like trying to straighten the leaning tower of Pisa by hanging weights on the top floor.

The solution? Easy: first, get back to reality.

In other words, you must fix the foundation, not the top floor.

First of all, you must be fully grounded in reality. This means actually coming to terms with who you really are, not whoever you’ve decided you are, based on whatever you’ve internalized, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. The process of getting there itself isn’t easy, but it is a permanent solution.

You must understand what it is you are experiencing, and the nature of that experience itself. All of this can be done only when you’re serious about your own well-being, your happiness and your life. Most women, unfortunately, don’t want to put their best interests first — they would much rather settle for the approval of society than their own happiness. So what can we do?

If you’re in deep shit, you’re a teenage girl and you live in Los Angeles, please, bring your mother and come see me. I can’t do much for her, because older women have basically given up on themselves as far as I can tell. But for you, we can do a lot together.

But we can help each other in other ways too. You can share this post or talk to someone who’s trying to ‘get out of the situation’, by committing suicide, for example, (which doesn’t work) or you can join me in helping other girls get back on their own two feet, instead of relying on someone else to prop them up.

Why am I not giving you ‘tools’ you can use yourself? Because it’s not that simple. There is no ‘magic pill’, nor am I that callous as to tell you we can ‘fix’ you with words and guidelines.

Basically, at the very deepest level, you are absolutely fine — the rest of it is where the issues lie. We need to help you get to your true self, which lies at the core of your very being. That takes work, commitment, sacrifice, and love. Lots and lots of love, which is what I can share, but there’s a lot you must do yourself.

I am saying to you, unequivocally: there is no short-term fix to the problem of depression, anxiety, suicidal behavior, schizophrenia or any kind of mental illness. The problems lie deep within the energy body and cannot be fixed simply by addressing the physical layer or the psychological layer. It isn’t ‘wrong’ for you to get psychiatric help — not by a long shot. Working on your psychology, being positive, staying physically healthy — all of these are amazing for your well-being. But there’s more to it.

The question is: will you try?