yesterday evening i was back to our tuesday evening training.
before i became aware that what ailed me was what was then diagnosed as a depression, i had this fear of such conditions. you could call it the fear of drowning if you are not a swimmer. then i was thrown into the sea of what my psyche was spewing at me and i had not choice than to either sink or swim. unglorified and unstigmatized depression is nothing else than another of nature's ways of challenging one's survival skills. it either does you in, or it makes you strong. but what tips the scale one way or the other? damned if i know!
whatever life is, it is something about death. at birth, there is one certainty, it is death. then after that bloody and violent mess that we call birth, the big scam starts. they - the powers that be - sell you happiness, education, money, wealth and greed. they sell you this all wholesale, and you end up believing a whole lot of crap. you will believe in capitalism, nationalism, judaism, catholicism, islamism, socialism, and a whole lot of isms and non-isms that are hollow, shallow and truly pornographic in all declensions of human perception.
what is a depression other than one of one's body plea to deal with traumas whose time has come? traumatic experiences vary in breath and intensity, and our sensibilities do determine the extent of that trauma to some degree. it is however our basic psych that first absorbs and deals with the traumatic experience. the mechanisms with which our psyche deals with such experience are varied and it are nothing more than one temporary storage mechanism for pain. we call this coping. humans are plastic, beautifully plastic, malleable, receptive, and responsive. we cope in a myriad of ways with an environment, social or biological, that is nothing less than complex. for all the generality and fertile creativity of the psyche, eventually it begs to be dealt with. depression is one of the ways in that this need manifests itself. it is not pretty, it just happens.
i am not yet certain that yesterday was my return to regular karate training, but for whatever reason it felt right and it felt like i have missed it. i returned home with my body totally unimpressed by the effort. given that i have not trained or jogged at all for over a week due to being out of the country for a few days, i was surprised at my own energy level. have i dealt with the bigger chunk of the emotional clutter that brought on that depression last year?
this monk needs silence. these are precious days and with each breath i am again reborn.
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