Spiritual Techniques to Overcome Depression and Anxiety

More people seem to be reaching for spirituality when their minds get heavy. Depression and anxiety push them to look somewhere other than the clinic, partly because the modern healthcare system is such a slog. Why book an appointment and then stand in a pharmacy line for an hour when a few changes to how you live your day might do the job? A lot of these changes aren't new at all. They trace back to practices that the world's religions have taught for centuries.

Mindfulness is the one everybody talks about now, so start there. Mindful meditation asks you to live one day at a time, to stay inside the moment instead of running ahead or looking back. That habit grows patience in you. And patience shows up in the Holy Bible as one of the fruits of the spirit, counted among the highest virtues a person can hold.

Here is something you notice once you begin: one practice spills into the next. Mindfulness makes you patient. Patience softens you into compassion. A compassionate person stops judging others so quickly and gets more comfortable with people who live differently. That chain reaction, multiplied across a planet heading toward eight billion people, is how a society might grow calmer and more agreeable with itself.

Trusting yourself is another piece of it. Our minds lean toward the negative by default, so doubt arrives on its own schedule; you don't have to invite it. Working against that pull builds confidence in what you can actually do, and the day gets lighter when you believe you can handle its ordinary tasks without strain.

Anxiety, at bottom, grows out of fear. Psychology has its own methods for meeting fear head-on, chief among them systematic desensitization and thought training. Facing what scares you on purpose is called Exposure Therapy, and it belongs to the larger project of rewiring the brain known as Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or CBT.

Alongside retraining the behavior, there are positive affirmations. Because the human tendency runs toward the gloomy, staying positive takes real effort; it won't happen passively. Keep at it and the brain gets tougher, better braced for whatever the day throws. Many people say they begin to feel the Law of Attraction working too, where negativity gets pushed away and what you dwell on is what comes toward you.

Letting go of old wounds is ancient work. Most religions have a plain word for it: forgiveness. Where anxiety stares at the future, depression tends to sit in some past injury. Releasing the people who hurt you pulls your attention back into the present and makes you readier to accept what's actually in front of you, which again leaves you kinder and more tolerant.

These practices also bring you back into contact with your own body. Ask any doctor and they'll tell you that a good share of what ails us is the body trying to get a message through. The more closely you listen to it, the less often you'll feel the urge to run to a physician at the first sign of trouble.

Together they help you grow what the Zen tradition calls a beginner's mind. Part of that is learning to pay attention to your breath, maybe for the first time ever. Breathing matters enough that focusing on this plain, automatic act tunes you into yourself and into what you genuinely want from your life. From there it gets easier to set priorities, and you find the energy to chase what matters and drop what drains you.

So the question to keep asking is simple: what is my body saying right now? Often the answer is that you're worn thin and near burnout, or that some fear has gone unaddressed. Taken as a set, these practices leave a person more relaxed and more at peace. - Erwin Bishop