For several weeks now, I’ve been going for a series of yoga therapy sessions. It’s supposed to help my depression, but that’s only if I put in the effort to do my homework.
I oscillate between depression and anxiety. On the weeks of anxiety, I have much energy and I can do a lot. On the weeks of depression, everything gets left aside and I just curl up in bed and sleep.
This is one of the depression weeks.
There’s a Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) that she gave to me, that I’ve been using to measure my depression and anxiety levels. I didn’t realise it before, but now I know that it’s not my depression that has been coming and going. Instead, I’ve been oscillating between depression and anxiety.
Anxiety is definitely preferable to depression, because at least I can still function marginally. Depression is, like, complete shutdown.
The good thing about the depression part is that it gets really bad really quickly, and just when it feels like it’s gonna last forever, something snaps me out of it. And that something is always internal.
During my yoga therapy sessions, I learned something called Deep Relaxation Technique. But I do it only for 5 mins. 5.5 mins, actually, because I usually take about 30 seconds to get comfortable.
The crux of the Deep Relaxation Technique for me is to enter into my subconscious and have a conversation with my inner self.
My inner self appears to me most often as a little boy, usually me. But sometimes it appears to me as a grown man.
The thing I like most about doing this is that it puts me in touch with my inner feelings. It allows me to, temporarily, escape the haze of confusing emotions that depression brings, and it takes me deep down, as though I were diving underwater to avoid smoke.
And there I get to meet my real self. I get to listen to my inner self and hear what I need to hear. And very often, that brings a lot of clarity, clarity that I can bring with me when I resurface to fight the smoke again.
Daniel Tay 