Sadness

The speaker discusses the topic of melancholy, depression, and sadness and whether meditation can help. They mention that while meditation can be beneficial, it may not be enough on its own. Chanting and physical activities like yoga and exercise are suggested as alternative techniques to address sadness and unhappiness. The speaker emphasizes the importance of finding what works best for each individual and suggests starting with preliminary exercises before diving into meditation. They also mention that resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms like overeating or excessive drinking is not a productive solution. <a rel="me" href="https://qoto.org/@Lobster">Mastodon</a> Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk a little today about melancholy, depression, being sad, however you like to describe it. Most people have episodes or are sad about certain things, they find certain things difficult, so that's what we're going to describe in the context of meditation and whether that can help. It can help, a lot of people who are overwhelmingly unhappy about their, internally, whatever they say externally, whatever they say to others, they may have this overwhelming sense of sadness. Now can meditation help with that and how? I think one of the things is it can actually be detrimental to just sit in very contemplative types of sitting because people who are often sad in themselves have that as a quality that they can do. Other people avoid sadness, this is quite a common thing, they avoid the internal sadness by doing things and keeping themselves occupied and that actually works very well for a lot of people and there's different things they fill the void within them with and that helps. So there's different things, but I think to think that just doing meditation in itself will be useful is not necessarily so, you have to use techniques that will work and that are useful and one of the ones that is particularly useful is chanting, I find this works very well for people because it keeps the mind occupied in some way and you can, I remember doing this with somebody doing quite a long and quite an advanced practice and there was a particular point where I said, you know, try and find something positive within yourself that makes you happy and this really upset them because they couldn't find anything within their experience. This was something that was completely impossible for them to do because nothing made them actually happy and if that is the condition that you're in, then you may have to look at other things that are going to be helpful. For example, yoga is very good, any form of exercise is something that works on the physical manifestations of the unhappiness within you. It actually gives you a feedback where, you know, where is, it's literally, you say where is the sadness, where is the, what is the manifestation of the unhappiness and you look for it in the body and you go to the body and you try and heal that sadness. So this is one way of doing yoga, you'll hear people talking about relaxation and asana, postures, where you're staying within a posture for a long period of time. Most of the yoga is a form, the way people do it, is a form of exercise in the West. That seems to be the prevalent way that it's done and it's really, it's about maintaining a posture and finding how you feel about that. Does it make you unhappy? Does it make you uncomfortable? Is it difficult? Are you relaxed in it? And if you do, if you do it in that particular way of maintaining a posture, very gently, very calmly and saying how do I feel, how do I feel in this moment and how can I put something, how can I smile, you know, you'll hear yoga teachers talking about smiling and relaxing and things like that. So this is one aspect of doing a practice in such a way that it is useful for you and every person uses different techniques, different tactics and meditation is not always the best way to start. It's sometimes better to start with a preliminary system of exercise. Another one is, you know, qigong and tai chi which we've talked about previously. And if you, if you just, like some people do, you know, they're depressed so they think well I'll just eat myself to death, the sooner I die the better or I'll drink myself silly. That's not really dealing with the situation. But that may be the best that is available and that is, that is sad because there's lots of things that can be done that are useful and helpful. Okay, that's all from me for today. Bye now.