“The reason you suffer from your depression and your anxieties is that you identify with them. You say, “I’m depressed.” But that is false. You are not depressed. If you want to be accurate, you might say, “I am experiencing a depression right now.”
But you can hardly say, “I am depressed.” You are NOT your depression. That is but a strange trick of the mind, a strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking – though you are not aware of it – that you ARE your depression, that you ARE your anxiety, that you ARE your joy or the thrills that you have.
Clouds come and go some of them are black and some white, some of them are large, others small. If we want to follow the analogy, you would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer. You’re not interfering. Don’t “fix” anything. Watch! Observe! The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be UNDERSTOOD. If you understood them, they’d change.”
Fr. Anthony DeMello, S.J., in “Awareness”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
