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    • Your Mind Is Not Always Your Friend

      An excerpt from When Antidepressants Aren’t Enough by Dr. Stuart Eisendrath

      Seventeen years ago, Dr. Stuart Eisendrath piloted research into the therapeutic effects of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) on people experiencing clinical depression. Ever since, he has been helping those who struggle with depression dramatically improve their symptoms and quality of life by changing how they relate to their thoughts and feelings.

      In When Antidepressants Aren’t Enough: Harnessing the Power of Mindfulness to Alleviate Depression (New World Library, October 1, 2019), Dr. Eisendrath outlines an easy-to-implement MBCT program that has been scientifically proven in a National Institute of Health study to bring relief to chronic sufferers of depression by helping them realize that their thoughts are not their reality. We hope you’ll enjoy this except from the book.


      The mind tends to do things it is particularly good at: thinking, problem solving, worrying, judging, and analyzing. But these things are often not in your best interest. It’s somewhat like reading an article from a website or newspaper. What is written may not be accurate. If you suffer from depression, memories and thoughts tend to be biased toward the negative, which diminishes your problem-solving abilities. These factors may lead to misinterpretations, inaccurate assessments, and inappropriate decision making.

      For example, Carol was walking down the street and saw a friend walking the other direction on the other side of the street. She waved to her but got no response. She felt rejected and depressed. Only later did she learn that her friend had been preoccupied by some bad news about a problem in her own life and hadn’t noticed Carol. As she later learned, her friend was watching for an important business email she’d have to respond to.

      Bill assessed himself as being incapable of completing a marathon. Only after joining a special training program did he realize he could be successful.

      Sam thought of refusing a promotion, because he thought his boss was setting him up to fail rather than having confidence in his ability to handle the new position. Such an approach could have severe consequences for his career.

      A key step in coping with such thoughts is trying to decide if such situations are facts or just thoughts. Mindfulness gives you the space to look at the situation from multiple perspectives and without judgment. Then you can decide how to respond to the situation skillfully. You can evaluate your thoughts in several ways. One is to hold back on acting on a thought while you gather more data to assess whether the thought is a valid one. Another way of assessing a thought is to ask yourself how you feel in thinking it. If you feel more depressed (for example, “Yes, my friends really don’t like me”), there is a very good chance the thought is being driven by depression.

      One time, I was teaching a beginning class in meditation. One woman said, “I can’t meditate as well as everybody else here.” This is one of the most common thoughts of beginning meditators. Then several other members of the group expressed a similar idea about themselves. I asked them how they knew this, and as we assessed the situation, it became clear that such a thought was based more in the critical voice of depression rather than in any fact. Since none of the members had had any prior experience with meditation, it would be hard to expect anyone to be “better” than anybody else. Moreover, there actually is no competition in meditation; there is no score as in a game of basketball or golf. Mindful meditation is more about being present than about doing something better or worse than someone else.

      So the woman’s thought that she was somehow worse than others in her meditation practice was a valuable lesson about how her mind generated negative thoughts that were unnecessarily critical of her. She could begin to label them as such and become more able to bring her attention back to a neutral object like her breath. Perhaps just as important, when she was able to recognize such thoughts for what they were, she would not feel compelled to act on them by doing something such as dropping the class.


      Stuart Eisendrath, MD, is the author of When Antidepressants Aren’t Enough and the founding director of the University of California San Francisco Depression Center. Visit him online at www.stuarteisendrath.com.

      Excerpted from the book When Antidepressants Aren’t Enough. Copyright ©2019 by Stuart Eisendrath. Printed with permission from New World Library.

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    • Double Vision: Beautiful Glowing Face Appears During Pregnancy
      wishfulthinking

      I’d like to ask a question for my mother. Recently, we were talking about paranormal phenomena and spiritual matters. My mother is very practical in her thinking, and she said that she doesn’t believe in ghosts and entities and such. Despite this, she mentioned that when she was pregnant with my older sister, she used to see a beautiful glowing face. It was the face of a man, and she would see this both when her eyes were closed and when they were open. After she had my sister, the face went away and she hasn’t seen it since. She says it was not disturbing, and despite her beliefs, while she was seeing it she never thought the experience to be odd. What do you think this was?

       – N.

      Astrea:

      During pregnancy, many women are more tuned in to other worlds and incarnations. This apparition was someone your mother had known before. It could even have been her daughter appearing to her as she had looked when they were together in another lifetime.

      I’ve had long and interesting conversations with the spirits of babies while they were growing in the womb before being born in this life. My goddaughter even picked out her own name, and though she wasn’t named that by her foolish parents, she insists to this day on being called by that name. She knew who she was long before she came into this incarnation, and she also knew who she wanted to become.

      Of course, a lot of that leaves us at birth, and we lose even more when we cease being babies and learn to communicate with the people who surround us in the here and now. Language blocks a lot of our other world memories, and that can’t be avoided.

      Every old soul changes from one sex to another and chooses different life circumstances for different lifetimes. It’s highly likely that the old soul that became this daughter chose to be a girl before she was born into this lifetime.

      We are all mother/father/sister/ brother/lover/friend to the many people we incarnate with lifetime after lifetime. Our gender changes for some lives and stays the same for others.

      While our relationships to one another can and often do change from one life to the next, our karmic family or Ka-Tet remains intact.

      As long as your mother and sister keep feeling each other with their hearts and minds, they’ll be together forever in some way, and keep reincarnating into each others’ experience. The apparition she saw during that pregnancy was a sign of this unbreakable bond.

      I’m sure your mom senses a different sort of connection with this first child. I wouldn’t be surprised if they often experienced telepathy, such as knowing when one of them is down or in trouble, or when one is calling on the phone.

      *****

      Susyn:

      The incident your mother experienced when she was pregnant is more common than many people think. When a woman is with child, all of her senses blossom. This is especially true with a first pregnancy.

      This hones the mother’s intuition, which will be vital when the new baby comes into the world. This keen intuition enables her to tune in to the well-being of her first child as well as any future babies she may have. This might explain why your mother only recalls having an experience of this type once, when she was pregnant with your sister.

      Everyone has spirit guides and guardian angels that are assigned to watch over and protect them. This is true both prior to our births and after. I have no doubt that spirit your mother saw is connected to your older sister, though I feel this spirit watches over your mother too.

      It’s possible that the entity was someone she knew in this lifetime, though it’s more likely this was someone from another life.

      It’s important to note that this experience wasn’t distressing. The fact that this seemed totally natural to her suggests it was designed to be heartwarming confirmation that everything would be okay. Once your mother gave birth to your sister, there was no need for the spirit to show himself again.

      Neither you nor your mother need to worry that it might have been an entity of a negative nature. If that were the case, your mother wouldn’t have been so matter of fact about it, and wouldn’t have felt so good at the time. When a negative spirit is near, you don’t have to see it to be able to tell if it’s of a light or dark nature.

      You don’t mention if you are a mother yourself yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you have the same sort of experience your mother did when you are pregnant.

      Oftentimes intuitive gifts are passed down from one generation to the next. You can also develop these abilities on your own at any time you want through prayer, meditation and the study of metaphysical subjects that interest you.

      I hope this helps answer your question. Thanks so much for writing!

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