Question: Would you give me some specific strategies to help me when I start to feel depression pulling at me and dragging me down?

Answer: Here are three bright new actions for you to take. Each is designed to help you bring the light you need into the present darkness of what you have yet to understand about your depressed states. Use them all together and you will soon command the very forces that once compelled you to believe that your dark states were inescapable.

1. The next time depression takes you over, think toward it instead of from it. What this means is that you are to realize in the moment of being taken over by the darkness that you are simply wrongly involved in thinking about your state from the state itself. This is exactly how negative states take us captive. See the depression as a temporary imposition instead of accepting the position the state is telling you that you must accept. Work at this. Your efforts will be rewarded.

2. In that same moment when you realize that something painful has again pressed its way into you, holding you hostage to a hated image or painful regret, here is what to do: right there, right in that Now, instead of capitulating into that familiar state of feel­ing yourself to be a captive of what this pain tells you that you must remember (along with all of its suggested solutions for ending the suf­fering), choose to remember the Light. Instead of being drawn into a struggle with that unwanted sense of conflict, complete with its cast of supporting characters drawn from your past, intentionally withdraw your attention from that stage show. And at the same time as you close the curtain on it, bring all of your reclaimed attention into the Now. Come awake to the sense of your own physical body. Observe what thoughts and feelings are pressing themselves into your awareness and, while working in the Now like this, welcome into you a conscious remembrance of the Light, of God’s Life, of the whole truth as best you understand it. Choose to remember the Light. Let it fight for you. Instead of a life of endless resistance, you will learn the timeless secret of how to replace any form of darkness with the Light you have chosen over it.

3. When you feel some kind of darkness coming over you, you must muster the courage to consciously doubt the reality of this condition, even though your feelings are pow­erfully trying to convince you that what you feel is true. Here is a special short poem entitled “Ten Words With the Power to Help You Walk Away From Useless Suffering”:

The “feel” is real,

But the “why” is a lie!

Let this liberating insight into the secret nature of unhappy feelings find a welcome home in you. Dare to apply its wisdom to any moment when some negative state tries to brew up a storm in you, and watch how you can make even the most stubborn sufferings disappear.