Depression Hurts!

I suffered from the classic version of depression . I started with bouts of it when I was seventeen, but it wasn’t until my late thirties or early forties that it got so bad that I had to seek help. Over the years doctors prescribed Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, and Wellbutrin.

I got a little relief, but the pills made me so tired all I could do was lay around and then I put on weight, which made me more depressed. So I decided to try a natural approach.

Here are the steps to recover from depression - these are the same steps that I have used:

1) I can’t stress this one enough. Drink WATER, WATER, WATER, and more WATER! Drink approximately half your weight in water in ounces each day. (ex: If you weigh 150 pounds you need to drink 75 ounces of water a day). Your water should be bottled or filtered water.

If you are a soda drinker, cut back, better yet, quit drinking that STUFF! If you are a soda drinker, start using soda as a special treat. When I was growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. We only made it to the grocery store a couple times a month, but when we did go we were allowed to get a bottle of coke. What a treat, and that’s the way it should be. It has no nutritional value and only makes you fat.

Do not and I repeat do not drink diet soda! I have done research on the artificial sweeteners that they use and have found information that artificial sweeteners can cause brain tumors. Soda is a tough one for me, because I love Cocoa Cola, so if I do drink a soda I drink regular. If you are a coffee drinker, drink your one cup in the morning to get you going then no more the rest of the day.

2) Use a natural anti-depressant. I have used prescription anti-depressants and as I said before, I did get a little relief from my symptoms but I gained thirty pounds on the prescription drugs, which made me more depressed because of the weight gain. I gained more weight than when I was pregnant. There are a lot of side effects to consider when you take prescription drugs. I do not want to have to worry about the side effects on top of my illness.

Make sure the ingredients are herbs for depression. I’ve tried a lot and some work, some don’t. Unfortunately I have found there is no magic pill. It’s pretty much trial and error, as everyone’s body chemistry differs. I take them still and my husband says I’m a whole lot nicer to be around and I have a lot more energy. My spurts of anger and mood swings have all but vanished. Something that my husband is very happy to see gone! He’ll even remind me to take them, less I forget!!

3) Use good Multi Vitamin Supplements. Don’t buy these at department stores,but instead buy them from a store that specializes in natural vitamin supplements or online from a reputable company. I buy mine from the company in the above link but there are a lot of good online companies. Just make sure they’re natural and have been tested.

4) Other vitamins and supplements that you need are a good fish oil supplement that has your Omega Oils. You can also buy a Flax seed oil that has the omega’s in it.

5) Eat a good healthy diet. I will tell you here to start using as many natural and organic products as possible. All of the chemicals that they put in our food are making us sick. Try to buy meat that is organic or has not been injected with hormones and chemicals. We women are already having to deal with our own unbalanced hormones. We do not need the ones that they give to the cows and other animals in our system making things worse.

Try to get vegetables and fruits that are organic. If you can’t afford organic, buy a fruit and vegetable wash that removes the wax and chemicals from the produce. Try to eat the deep colored fruits and vegetables they have more of the good nutrients in them.

6) Exercise. This is a hard one. When you are depressed, the last thing you have is energy to exercise, but you need to exercise to get your energy back. A catch 22. Start out slowly, even if it is only a ten minute walk or ten minutes on your treadmill. Something is better than nothing.

7) If you are a woman and are near menopause, use a Natural Progesterone Cream. I am 44 and use one. There are a lot of god ones out there but make sure it’s natural and not synthetic. I have noticed that my mood swings have subsided and no more hot flashes, but it does take about three months of using the cream to get results.

When you suffer from depression, it is a tremendous battle, but it is one worth fighting. My family had to put up with so much during my severe bouts of it. Depression hurts your relationships. I would get mean and say hurtful things, then cry all the time. I would spend weeks in bed at a time. On my good days I work, read, and do research about depression. I hope that my information will help you. It may take some time, but you will get a handle on it and if you treat it with natural products, a healthy diet, pure water, and exercise, you will be able to keep a handle on it.

Remember, if depression hurts you depression hurts everyone around you!

So please seek depression treatment and help

Diana is a Natural Health Consultant, Weight Loss Specialist, Personal Trainer, Mental Skills Training Specialist and author of the Natural Health and Herbal Remedies website. She has gone thru depression, pms, perimenopause, weight loss issues, anxiety attacks, and more but has learned how to control them through natural approaches.

Cult De-Programming?

The following good work from a person engaged in trying to free people from cultish programming is far better than most. It demonstrates the person is aware of mind control techniques employed in influencing people. Having said that I will now try to show how this piece is in fact an evidence of SPIN or influence that the person engaged in doing it might not even personally realize. For example Catholic exorcists are taught incantations and rituals to use that they may not or usually will not understand either the derivation or history thereof.

“Psychological Manipulation and Society
Cultic Studies Journal
Psychological Manipulation and Society
Vol. 11, No. 2, 1994
Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits
Who Brought Spiritualism to America
Peter Washington. Schocken Books, New York, NY, 1995, 470 pages.
Reviewer: Joseph P. Szimhart

Theosophy as discussed in Peter Washington’s highly informative and entertaining survey has less to do with any sophisticated notion of “divine wisdom” than it has with a host of preposterous pretenders who successfully attracted thousands of seekers devoted to experiencing and unveiling hidden truths. In short, the Theosophists attempted to make occultism respectable in an age of scientism. According to Washington, these neo-occultists and their progeny have essentially failed, as the jacket liner notes tell us, in a ‘curious comedy of passion, power and gullibility.’

Heading the list is Madame Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), whose colorful character ranged from the ribald to the sublime. HPB, as she has been known to the Theosophists, cofounded the Theosophical Society (TS) with Colonel Henry S. Olcott and a few others who were interested in spirit contact and psychic phenomena in New York in 1875. In today’s New Age jargon, HPB became the main “channeler” for TS. Within a few decades TS stimulated an ever-splintering amalgam of groups and cults, the more important of which Washington portrays with solid reporting from an impressive array of source material and his personal research. In each case a charismatic “guru” has either received “ancient wisdom” from some mysterious sect, self-proclaimed enlightenment, or metaphysical source, while also assuming an exalted position as guru, messenger, teacher, master, or adept in the eyes of the disciples and students.

Following HPB and Olcott (aka Jack and Maloney), Washington tackles the lives and influences of the second generation of Theosophists, including the politically motivated Annie Besant, channeler Charles W. Leadbeater, Katherine Tingley, Rudolf Steiner (who broke from TS and founded Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools), G.I. Gurdjieff, and many of their significant followers. Jiddu Krishnamurti, who became famous for abdicating his title of “the world teacher” or Theosophical messiah in 1929, a role imposed on him at age 13 by Leadbeater, is given a thorough treatment by Washington. In contrast, he only briefly describes and sometimes only mentions more recent splinter groups and leaders from the TS amalgam, like Elizabeth Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant, George King and the Aetherius Church, Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov and the Universal White Brotherhood, Lloyd Meeker and the Emissaries of Divine Light, Idries Shah and the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas, and the Ralian Movement. Washington also covers the history of the esoteric School of Economic Science founded by Leon MacLaren and his connection with Transcendental Meditation’s Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He concludes his text with a solid, dispassionate look at J.G. Bennett’s life as it was influenced by Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Shah, the Subud cult, and finally Catholicism.

Some important TS offshoots are missing in Washington’s survey, such as the Agni Yoga Society founded by Nicolas and Helena Roerich in the early 1920s, the Arcane School founded also in the 1920s by Alice A. Bailey, and the I AM Activity founded by Guy and Edna Ballard in the mid-1930s. To those who have studied the history of Theosophy as it has influenced these and other groups not mentioned by Washington, these may appear as glaring omissions. But the pervasiveness of Theosophy’s influence, especially with the thousands of New Age movement teachers and sects throughout the world, would take volumes to merely summarize. Washington nevertheless accomplishes his mission to give us a clear taste of the Western guru tradition, its roots, and its effects on certain disciples.

The book’s title is derived from a stuffed baboon that stood prominently among Blavatsky’s exotic paraphernalia in her flat in New York. The baboon was dressed complete with spectacles holding a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, mocking that controversial scientist. Blavatsky saw herself as Ancient Wisdom’s counterpoint to that “strutting gamecock” of science, whom she often railed against in her two fantastic, notoriously plagiarized tomes, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. HPB more than anyone has influenced the Western occult tradition with the notion of spiritual evolution as it allegedly occurs through rounds of “root races” reincarnating. Some of her racist notions later crept into Nazi philosophy, even though Hitler disavowed the Theosophical Societies.

A most revealing passage from Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon describes P.D. Ouspensky, a Fourth Way or Gurdjieff School leader, who near the end of his life in 1947 was very depressed (confusion and depression have been common ailments of lifelong disciples of the Western guru tradition). He took to escaping from students in his car with his cats. Ouspensky would park his car at some destination, sit in the back seat staring out of a window while cuddling his pets. “Returning home from one journey, he spent the rest of the night in the car while a female pupil stood over him at the window, her arm raised as if in benediction. A cat would never be so stupid” (p. 337). This passage not only reveals the depths of delusion both guru and follower might reach, but it also reveals Washington’s insensitivity to the perhaps deluded but nevertheless struggling, dedicated victims of such gurus.

Washington’s sources are many and significant. Three noteworthy ones are Ancient Wisdom Revived by Bruce F. Campbell, Blavatsky by Marian Meade, and The Harmonious Circle by James Webb, the latter being a complete history of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and their followers. A biography of Blavatsky was also written by Theosophist Sylvia Cranston, who clumsily tries to portray HPB as a maligned saint of the New Age. Meade’s biography is far superior and accomplishes even more than Washington’s or Campbell’s books in presenting Blavatsky’s complex persona to us. Another valuable resource on HPB and the Western guru type not mentioned by Washington was written in 1948 by E.M. ButlerThe Myth of the Magus (Cambridge Canto edition, 1993). In any case, if you wish to read an updated, critical look at Blavatsky and her influence, pick up Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon.

Joseph P. Szimhart
Cult Information Specialist/Exit Counselor
Pottstown, Pennsylvania Copyright ©1997-99 AFF, Inc.” (1)

The so-called Western guru tradition they refer to is just a superficial label. I could demonstrate how Unitarianism and Christian Science are similarly polysolipsist or panentheist in effect. Emerson, Whitehead and even Teilhard de Chardin are all part of the same line of thought as are old line Gnostic or Arian Christians and even many more mystical sects of Catholicism or Christianity including Carmelites, Quakers, Sandemanians and others. You must ask yourself if their purpose is really about stopping cultish or sheepish behavior. Is there an agenda? Why do we pay people to deprogram New Age philosophy-inspired people and allow so much Fundamentalist programming including even overlooking outright proselytizing in public schools and from the mouths of Presidents?
Their references to Krishnamurti having Messiahhood thrust upon him at age thirteen is contrary to my understanding of what Krishnamurti wrote under the name of Alcyon and how he operated all his life. He also continued to work with people inside Theosophy despite rejecting the mantle of Messiah which they do get correct. In fact if they had any desire to be fair they would point out Krishnamurti was against having others tell you how to find your true and faithful calling. Here are some words by fair biographers on this great man that illustrate his aversion to dogma or any form of cult.

“Education had always been one of Krishnamurti’s chief concerns. If a young person could learn to see his conditioning of race, nationality, religion, dogma, tradition, opinion etc., which inevitably leads to conflict, then he might become a fully intelligent human being for whom right action would follow. A prejudiced or dogmatic mind can never be free.” (2)

Annie Besant adopted Krishnamurti and was a great social activist as well as one of the few female Masons. Why don’t they mention that? She founded a College in India and was a vital part of getting India its independence. Her work in women’s rights in England preceded Margaret Sanger in the fight to educate people about what causes children despite the social taboos against education. It is sad to see this travesty is allowed to go under the heading of cult de-programming. Yes, Blavatsky was a promoter and plagiarist - so are most pulpit-pounders. In fact you can learn by reading her books and researching what she says. This is what the reviewer should have pointed out rather than saying some of these people suffer depression. They go so far as to say “confusion and depression have been common ailments of lifelong disciples of the Western guru tradition”. Sure they put it in brackets as if it was a side thought - it is the main purpose of this outright spin or lie. Yogananda was a far better psychologist than this guy could ever hope to be. I am reminded of how Erickson was a guru of psychology until he saw the truth in the Eastern thought and science of soul. Then he was mercilessly abandoned. I was expecting to read Krishnamurti committed suicide at the age of ninety, after that nonsense. These people allow a far greater insight to the soul and our connectiveness than most psychiatrists and other programmers passing themselves off as healers will ever do.

Please read the passage carefully and note all the pejorative words and ways they demean without fair reportage. Do some research and study hard or you will continue to be made more of a sheep for the paradigm. Ask yourself what role the Masons had in all of this on both sides of the issue including the Mormons, Hitler and other real mind control cults like Scientology.

Author of Diverse Druids
World-Mysteries.com guest ‘expert’
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine