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It’s not always the season to be merry . . .

Over the years, we’ve been privileged to help thousands of people recover their health, many of whom suffered from anxiety or depression. In fact, one of Stephen’s very first UK clients at the Institute for Advanced Health Research, in 1983, was a young woman suffering from severe clinical depression.

You can read Pamela’s story here – Gas Pipe Blues. Fortunately for Pamela, by finding the actual cause of her depression and dealing with it, she narrowly escaped electroshock ‘therapy,’ gave up her antidepressants and her psychiatrist, and recovered. All by a simple change of something in her environment.

Pamela’s story is a good example of an obvious problem caused by an environmental stress. Since then, we’ve seen thousands of problems being caused by often-easy-to-solve environmental stresses (harmful environmental energies).

But what about when depression isn’t so obvious? Or, when it isn’t necessarily caused by an external stress?

Some of the signs of depression are:

• Low energy
• Feeling flat or blank (unable to think with any clarity)
• Not feeling enthusiastic or seeing the point of doing anything
• Not wanting to communicate
• Sleep problems
• Having problems concentrating on anything
• Loss of appetite or can’t stop eating
• Being more irritable, short-tempered or aggressive than usual
• Seeking drugs – alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc. – or food – sugar, grains, fats, etc. – in order to feel better
• Using passive entertainment – television, films, books, magazines, etc. – to fill your time rather than genuinely being interested in their subjects

Of course, none of the above necessarily mean you are depressed. But if they happen frequently – such as several times a week – there is almost always a depressive component to your ‘normal’ state. Most depression isn’t ‘clinical’ – i.e. it isn’t ‘bad enough’ to end up in a trip to the doctor, so it isn’t diagnosed as depression. And it isn’t resolved. It just goes on and on . .

Millions of people suffer from sub-clinical depression and, in many cases, they don’t know they’re depressed. They’ve lived with it so long, it just seems that’s how they are. They don’t realise they can be happier. Or that they need to be. So they don’t receive any help.

Unfortunately, as the days get shorter in the winter months so access to natural light is reduced, it only gets worse. But it doesn’t have to be this way . . . Continue reading →

Whilst science is busy understanding why 50% of people don’t respond to the SSRI anti-depressants – fluoxetine (Prozac or Sarafem), citalopram (Celexa), paroxetine (Seroxat or Paxil) and sertraline (Zoloft),  or experience severe side-effects (see the study led by Professor Rene Han, professor of pharmacology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Columbia University, published in the January 2010 issue of the Journal Neuron and also the work at Michigan by Dr John Traynor, professor of pharmacology at the U-M Medical School and director of the U-M Substance Abuse Research Center, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) – someone may have forgotten to tell your doctor.

And given that anti-depressants are one of the most over-prescribed drugs on the market – SSRI use increased from from 14.7 million in 2005 to 16.2 million in 2006 in the UK  and 118 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants in the USA in 2005, I would think very carefully before asking my doctor for them.  Doctors tend to prescribe them more when asked by their patients. The mental health charity MIND reported that 93% of GP’s have prescribed drugs due to ‘lack of alternatives.’ (In fact, there are many). Continue reading →

Many people experience depression in one form or another, from a few hours of feeling down to days or weeks of barely functioning at all. In a previous article – The End of Depression – I wrote about how all forms of depression are marked by a descending lesion in the energy body from the center of the forehead (the “6th chakra”). The length and depth of this lesion determines the type and severity of the experienced depression.

The lesion or energetic injury in women suffering from post-natal depression, appears between the forehead and the perineum – energetically speaking, a “6th to 1st chakra lesion.” So the challenge is to discover what will most effectively “seal” the energy body between the 1st and 6th chakras, without causing harmful side-effects (i.e. other lesions).

The 6th chakra controls the frontal lobes of the brain, the autonomic nervous system, sensory organs (e.g. the skin) and parts of the endocrine system. Every thought and feeling you experience is strongly influenced by the state of your 6th chakra, as is your energy level and general mood.

In addition to strongly influencing the health and functioning of your legs, feet, lower GI tract and lower back, the 1st chakra directly influences your sense of self: where you belong, how you fit in with your peers and society in general, your self-image and self-esteem. These are all affected by the condition of your 1st chakra. Someone with a typical “1st chakra fracture” will suffer from low self-esteem or, the other side of the coin, arrogance; or even, in extreme cases, “social autism” – a profound lack of awareness of how their behaviour affects others. The nature of the damage to your sense of self depends on which part of the 1st chakra is afflicted by stress. And the nature of the stress.

When a baby is born, its passage through the birth canal can damage the mother’s energy – especially if there is a pre-existing energetic weakness there. Usually, damage is minimal and local in effect. But certain conditions can cause a much larger lesion to appear.

The lesion that underlies post-natal depression is always preceded by damage to the 6th chakra (a “6th chakra fracture”) due to chronic exposure to an environmental stress. This means that the 6th chakra has already been made vulnerable by a harmful energy in the local environment, or a past or present [energy-] weakening relationship, to which the mother has an unusual sensitivity.

Unfortunately, people are largely unaware of how they and their energies are being affected by the energies of their relationships or environments. Consequently, the sudden stress of post-natal depression after the birth of a child may well be the first symptom (of 6th then 1st chakra damage due to environmental stress) they notice. Energetic changes precede physical or psychological symptoms. If, for example, an environmental stress damages the 6th chakra, which then weakens the 1st chakra, the stress of giving birth can be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

There is a constant subtle interplay between the energies of your relationships, as well as the energies of your home or office environment, and your own body’s energies. It determines how you feel in every way, from one moment to the next. If this balance becomes profoundly disturbed – such as by giving birth – in a way that compromises the natural flow of energy between your 1st and 6th chakras, depression and its accompanying loss of a relatively robust sense of self, can result.

Many women’s post-natal depression can be resolved with the help of nutrition, herbs, homeopathy and/or exercises. The right combination of these modalities will be effective if they help seal the 6th-1st chakra lesion. Medical drugs may also help partially seal this kind of lesion but they often fail to help the energy body recover 100 percent. In all cases, we would also look at ways to reduce or eliminate exposure to the kind of stress that predisposed the 6th chakra to react in this way [i.e. depression] in the first place.

A common difficulty with understanding this type of problem is that practitioners and patients tend to seek single causes. But whilst a 6th-1st chakra lesion is a single energetic cause for depression, its presence is almost always due to multiple external and internal factors. This is why we look at each person as an individual, with their own unique energetic needs. Then we can identify the reasons for the appearance of their particular “post-natal lesion” and then its solutions.

© Stephen Kane – www.energysolutions.realhealth-online.com  2008