Greetings!

What if we treated depression as a rite of passage instead of a disease?

There may not be a lot of support for this notion in our current mental health system, but there's a long history of well-documented cases—even within Christian mysticism—of deep, dark depressions, and “dark night of the soul" experiences leading up to profound and life-changing transformations.

Depression is often regarded as a stigma is our culture, something that you should be ashamed of and hide from friends, family, and the world. To make matters worse, once you reveal your depressed condition, you seem to have no choice but to listen to everyone’s advice about what you should do about it. The Western medical model is based on intervention, and it holds very little regard for the body's innate intelligence and natural capacity for healing.

Medication and therapy for depression are primarily designed to help you get your life back to normal, but what if that's an unlikely—or perhaps even impossible—goal?

What if your life is NEVER the same again, and what if that's NOT a bad thing? What if depression represents the chrysalis in your journey from caterpillar to butterfly?

This meetup is designed to help you get in touch—perhaps more deeply than you ever have before—with your own inner authority. No one but you can truly know what magnificent truth is awaiting your discovery.

As a facilitator, I’ll be using Parker J. Palmer's "Circles of Trust" model to create a safe and deeply respectful space to help you get in touch with what he calls your “inner teacher.”

Here’s what Parker says about Circles of Trust:

"In a circle of trust...we are invited to conform our lives to the shape of our own souls. In a circle of trust, we can grow our selfhood like a plant—from the potential within the seed of the soul, in ground made fertile by the quality of our relationships, toward the light of our own wholeness—trusting the soul to know its own shape better than any external authority possibly can…

"Like wild animals, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.

"Yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last things we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.

"Unfortunately, community in our culture too often means a group of people who go crashing through the woods together, scaring the soul away. In spaces ranging from congregations to classrooms, we preach and teach, assert and argue, claim and proclaim, admonish and advise, and generally behave in ways that drive everything original and wild into hiding…

"A circle of trust is a group of people who know how to sit quietly "in the woods" with each other and wait for the shy soul to show up. The relationships in such a group are not pushy but patient: they are not confrontational but compassionate; they are filled not with expectations and demands but with abiding faith in the reality of the inner teacher and in each person's capacity to learn from it…

"Here’s one way to understand the relationships in a circle of trust: they combine unconditional love, or regard, with hopeful expectancy, creating a space that both safeguards and encourages the inner journey."

The point of this meetup is NOT to debate and discuss cures and treatments for depression—there's more than enough information and advice in the world, if that’s what you seek. This group is design to do ONE THING, and that is to help you discover your own truth.

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a therapist, counselor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or pharmacologist. My role as facilitator of this meetup is in no way meant to imply that I am trained or licensed to dispense medical advice regarding the treatment or diagnosis of depression or any form of mental illness. If you are a mental health professional, and you find the assertions above objectionable, please feel free to contact me and express your concerns privately. As stated above, this meetup is not forum for debate.