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Namaste and welcome. So it's nice to see you all and also to feel our extended

field of people listening to the podcast and those who have joined us on the

live streaming. We're doing the second class in a row on depression and when I've

done a kind of hand raise it's pretty much everybody and I can say this from

myself. Everyone I know has had some experience of depression. Many have had

major depression and all of us know someone, usually someone very close

and dear who suffered a lot from it. So it's this really ubiquitous part of

our culture and it's an important question. How do we find depression as a

portal for spiritual awakening? How does it fit and be included and addressed on a

spiritual path? And so this is part two in that and as I described in the last

one, many many different causes but generally some form of stress where it's

too much trauma for parenting. It leads to a severed belonging, a loss of

connection and it's connection with aliveness, a connection with love and with

other people. Often it's a connection with our own body, connection with all of

the potential of who we are. So it's a real kind of severing. We're no longer part

of the flow in those moments. It's a very stuck, contracted, internalized feeling

and I likened it to a log jam when I especially I think of the Northwest where

these logs are floating down a river and they jammed up and in that log jam in

terms of depression, the jamming continues. It reinforces itself with looping

thoughts, rumination, you know, what's wrong. It sustains itself with the whole

...