Elemental Help for Depression (tips for Kapha)

I was hoping to share some happy thoughts about spring, renewal, bird songs and budding flowers but as I looked out the window at snow falling and scanned my iPhone to see sub zero temperatures I knew I just wasn’t feelin’ it. 

The truth is, l’m actually feeling a little depressed. Who wouldn’t be given we are now in our second year of the pandemic, the current, already tight lockdown is not only tightened even more but extended and it feels like somehow we’ve missed summer all together and it’s already winter again. 

I know others are feeling this way too. In fact, my daughter called at 12:30 saying she was still in bed and just wanted to stay there all day. She’s smack in the middle of final essays and assignments at Concordia University so I can see why staying in bed might seem like the best way to spend a snow day in April. 

Feeling a little depressed right now is understandable. The question is, how can we pull ourselves out of this? One thing I know for sure is there are ways. 

In Ayurveda, an ancient healing tradition, they say it is pretty normal to feel a bit sluggish this time of year. Ayurvedic practitioners refer to this as an elemental overload of earth and water or “kapha dosha”. The combination is sticky and heavy and thick. A perfect description of what it feels like to be a little depressed! The Ayurvedic solution is to bring in more of the other elements to counter the excess winter earth-water “glue” that keeps us stuck in our beds until noon. 

Bring on Fire! Bring on Air! Bring on Space!

Here’s how that advise translates into things you can do to feel better and it is what I did to feel better. 

Once I got over the shock this morning that winter had revisited, I dragged myself out of bed and hauled my yoga mat out of the closet. Knowing what I do about Ayurveda, I choose an active practice that makes the large muscles feel like they are on fire  (think dynamic vinyasa flows that keep the body moving). Okay…feeling a bit better…

Next I checked in on my mental perception. Hummm. Still a little “kapha”. The remedy was, first a little perspective. Things could be a whole lot worse, I thought. Our parents and grandparents went through two world wars. Each lasted about five years and waaaay more people, most of them young, died. When you think of the war against the COVID virus, we are in some ways very, very lucky. We have a secure food system, we can get even the non-essential things we need delivered to our door courtesy of Amazon and we can Zoom with friends and family for free. 

Gratitude, I realized was a big contributor to feeling better.  So next, I listened to a meditation that is really a story about a women who goes out in the night in her slippers and tattered housecoat because the moon and the ocean beacon her. She makes her way down to the beach and looks across the great expanse of ocean and the great expanse of sky and speaks her gratitude to the stars as she feels the wind off the waves kiss her face. 

The meditation was only about 30 minutes but I got up from it feeling like, now I could look out the window and truly feel joy as I noticed the trees beginning to bud and the rabbits in my neighbour’s yard bounding around in play and the daffodils shaking off their caps of snow. “So what!” they said and just kept beaming their happy yellow glee out at me.

So between the fire of my yoga practice and the windy ocean air and expanse of space in the meditation, I managed to unstick myself from the earth-water glue that was weighing me down. I may get stuck again, but I’ll just keep calling on fire and air and space to help me transform my heavy mood and make me feel a little lighter. 

If you don’t feel like you have the energy for a vigorous heating yoga practice (sometimes I don’t either) Ayurveda suggests restorative chest opening postures. I have a few examples that you may have seen in my February blog. You can find them again here. 

Know there is always some little thing you can do to feel just a little better. Have your toolkit on hand and pull it out when you need to. I will continue to share my own real life stories with you which I hope demonstrate how and where you can find short and easy practices.

Sending you sunny daffodil smiles and images of bunnies bouncing around (maybe they’re mating but that’s all about renewal so that works too!)

Hang in there. We’ve got this!

=)
Lori