#channel/bodhi-light-teachings  Today I'd like to talk to you about depression. Why am I talking about depression? Because I used to be very depressed myself and uh I want to educate you about how to overcome your depression. I used to be depressed for hours, days, months and nowadays this is how long my depression tends to be. Ready? So we all know about the clinical definition of depression but the majority of the cases I found they're undiagnosed and it's very alarming. We see young people who are so depressed they kill themselves even adults with something called highly functional depression. They can function in society. They can do their jobs, then have a family life and somehow all of a sudden they decide to take their lives because they fail to understand the depression is basically a series of negative thoughts and they don't know what to do with those negative thoughts. It starts first with say I'm not happy. So it adds one more thought and one more reason. So you sing lower and lower and lower. So you build up this vast network of thoughts that justify to yourself why you should  feel morose unhappy. When you allow yourself to get to that point is very hard for you to get out. So what do people typically do when they have the depression? What works for many people is they go see a therapist. They take some medications. They try mindfulness meditation. They try exercises,  but you basically are distracting yourself from those thoughts. And unfortunately, medical approaches to to treating depression is hit and miss because they don't go away. They only numb your reactions. They don't fix the problem. For us, instead of distracting ourselves from thoughts of depression, we overwhelm the thought of depression. For example, we use mantras. Mantras are very powerful uh thoughts, if you will, that can easily overpower the thoughts of depression. or our people recite the Buddhist name and they find that it helps them restore peace of mind, makes them feel better. And we usually teach our people chan meditation and they are taught to sit in full lotus and when you cross your legs they hurt a lot and these intense leg pains actually can chase away thoughts of depression. When you practice meditation, the common mistakes that people make is they they seek to be comfortable. They seek to feel peaceful. They seek to feel better. And that right there is the impediment to their experiencing more peace, more bliss. Whereas if your goal is to increase your peace and your bliss, then you want to learn to endure the difficulties. And furthermore, with more advanced chan meditation, you be able to stop the thoughts of depression. Meaning when you have thoughts of depression, you crush it. You stop it right away. Doesn't go any further than that. Chan meditation is much more advanced and will yield results a lot faster than mindfulness meditation. I promise you. And number three for even higher skill people is early detection of thoughts of depression. You recognize patterns of thoughts that bring on depression. So with your meditation skills, you'll be able to detect them a lot faster so that they don't have time to grow and therefore it's a lot easier to shake them off or destroy them. I'm reminding you that it's not okay to be depressed and you should do something about it because it spreads through you. You are carrier of depression. We are spreading our depression to our loved ones, our children. Here's how depression spreads. When you have compassion or fondness for a depressed person, it's like opening the door for the depression to enter you. And therefore the people who are close to uh depressed people tend to also be depressed about the same level of depression. But depression is a motivator for us to learn to develop the skills to rise above depression to beat back depression. Remember depression are basically negative thoughts. So if you learn how to control all thoughts positive or negative then uh with that uh type of meditation skills you'll be able to control your depression and rise above it.