Why are spiritual people often depressed and suicidal? The link between your spiritual journey and mental illness

In this article we unpack the reasons behind why souls on a spiritual journey often have to face the dragon of depression and suicide.

If you’ve moved in spiritual circles you’ll have noticed that spiritual journeyers often battle depression and suicide, or are diagnosed with other so-called mental or psychiatric illnesses. In fact, you often see this in people who start any kind of personal development journey… so why does it happen?

If you think about it, it really doesn’t seem to make sense that the spiritual journey causes depression, especially because most people start it because they want to be happy, or at least happier than they were previously.

At the same time the spiritual journey is famed for being filled with happiness and love, with journeyers moving towards a place of greater love and acceptance.

So how does that land up translating into depression and so-called mental illness?

Seizures & Panic Attacks – System Overload

As someone who experienced this stage for myself, I’m starting by putting it out there that it is really scary when seizures and panic attacks happen to you, and I don’t blame you for thinking that your body has caved and really needs medical help.

However, you’re wrong – it doesn’t.

Seizures and panic or anxiety attacks are both a form of overwhelm, and depending on what you allow in your experience they’ll manifest as emotional overwhelm (panic and anxiety attacks) or physical overwhelm (seizures).

What causes the overwhelm?

Usually new sensory experiences that you can’t accept or wrap your mind around, such as hearing voices, seeing visions, astral traveling or even channeling in some cases.

The spiritual journey is about change, and the further you go along the path, the more rapidly that change takes place, until you’re at a point where you can facilitate instant change – otherwise known as a miracle.

In a nutshell, a miracle is an instantaneous change of usually large proportions that you are able to accept quickly – but it takes getting used to, and practice to wrap your head around change that big.

In the beginning, mostly because of your lack of self worth and doubt that anything this spectacular could happen to you, your body launches defense mechanisms that make you clock out so that you don’t have to face what is happening in front you.

Your body and system however, can only use the mechanisms that are available to it, so it shuts down your emotional processing (panic and anxiety) or your electrical system (seizures).

Can it be cleared, released and healed?

Yes it can be, but if you’re at the point of this happening to you, you will need help from another healer to release it before you are able to begin further healing work on yourself.

Bipolar – Grandiose & Impulsive

Speaking of miracles, have you considered how being quick to accept and roll with change looks to people who are stuck and have never had an awareness in their life?

It often looks like instability, impulsivity, grandiosity and delusion. Bipolar anyone?

At a point in everyone’s spiritual path you realise that this journey is all about healing, and so you begin accelerating towards a pace where you can facilitate faster and faster change in yourself and others – but that seeps through to every area of your life.

From the outside you can look crazy though… I mean who could ever believe that you can be entirely pissed off about something today, go home and answer a few questions or tap, and come back tomorrow like it never even mattered to you at all?

For people who are stuck and don’t believe in change, they can’t even begin to process this idea.

All they land up seeing is that your moods swing wildly – you’re pissed off one minute and happy the next. Well yes, because I can forgive in an instant.

Or you have brilliant ideas in an instant and they fire you up, filling you with drive to get something done that you know you are destined to do… and from the outside you look full of grandiose and unreachable plans that you can never quite commit yourself to.

Why does that happen? Why don’t you follow through on those plans?

Usually because you change again, often realising the lesson of the plan without the need to live the experience associated to it. Once you have the lesson the experience becomes redundant, your next level of desire launches and you get a new idea, a new plan, and a new direction to follow.

In fact, A Course in Miracles (www.acim.org) defines a miracle as a collapse of time that means that future events (karma) no longer need to take place in order to redress or rectify a perceived imbalance. That can mean you no longer have to endure an illness, finish a relationship or go through with a plan, because it has nothing left to teach you.

For people that specialise in one task and one area, and don’t change at all in their lifetimes, the idea that you can evolve that quickly – and absorb information and experience without it needing to take time – well, that can only mean you’re insane.

They can’t do it, so you must be lying about the fact that you can.

I mean, to be fair, the average psychologist or psychiatrist considers ONE SINGLE awareness in the space of a couple of YEARS to be progress with a client.

At our level, we’re processing multiple changes of that magnitude daily. In fact, many of us would feel lost if we didn’t have at least one of those changes a day.

You’re just learning to perform miracles actually… and you are reducing the processing time between the arrival of an energy and its release, until you can facilitate it instantaneously… or become a miracle worker in other words.

Ego Deaths & The Ego Cycle

In a nutshell the cycle of ego and evolution looks like this:

You launch a desire
You begin working towards that desire
At a point you either achieve, give up on or let go of that desire
You experience an anticlimax
You launch the next desire to fill that hole of disappointment

You’re always disappointed at the end of an ego cycle; in fact the point of the entire journey through Ego is to realize that nothing here, including special relationships, will ever fulfill that hole, causing you to turn to a Higher Power and actualize your soul potential.

Whether or not you achieve the desire is irrelevant – except that achieving the desire usually makes the Ego cycle last longer; so by flooding you with a whole bunch of disappointments, the powers that be can greatly accelerate your learning curve.

As you go further along the path though, your lessons get bigger, asking of you to release more emotion and pain at once, often accompanied by bitter disappointments in almost every area of your life.

These moments of rock bottom disappointment are known as ego deaths.

Ego is the idea that you are separate from the rest of creation, an individuated being. In order to become one with Source and ALL-that-is, you need to give up that sense of individuated identity.

The universe helps you release that sense of individuated identity by making you realize that you don’t matter and your needs don’t matter.

Basically these disappointments just keep getting worse and worse, and the ego deaths harder to face, until you realize that it’s not about you, or you getting what you want.

Getting what you want often just gets in the way of your journey and distracts you. The pain keeps pushing you forward… but feeling like a failure all the time does make you want to die too.

Suicide & Depression

Speaking of death… wow there are a lot of depressed and suicidal people in the world right now.

At present there are about 121 suicides a day, with suicide being the tenth leading cause of death in the USA, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Around the world anti-depressant usage has doubled in many cases. Between 1999 and 2012 alone, the number of Americans using anti-depressants grew from 6,8% to 13%, says a 2015 American Journal of Medicine report.

That’s a lot of depressed people wouldn’t you say?

When something needs to be released, it happens as an expression, hence you’re told to own and feel your emotions, or claim your pain.

Thing is, this doesn’t just happen to YOU as an individual though, it also happens at a collective level to the ‘body’ of humanity, if you will.

The 2012 Shift

That’s what the famous 2012 Mayan shift was really about – shifting the collective consciousness of humanity. So effectively a lot of the stuff we’re releasing and healing doesn’t actually come from us, our lives, or our karma.

For the more advanced souls reading this, you’ll probably have an idea of what I’m talking about – especially if you’re an empath: someone who absorbs pain and trauma from others in order to release it through him- or herself.

One of the lessons that the world and humanity is currently learning is that this life, as we live and know it currently, is not actually worth living. As a collective we’re realizing that we want something better and more from life.

But like all human beings, often we need a kick under the bum to make us start moving – and an away-from motivation that drives us AWAY from a bad experience is often the only thing that gets us to move and change.

The mindless zombies that many people are, are so content in their comfort zones that nothing short of their lives falling apart is going to stop them from being selfish and thinking only for the benefit themselves.

So we need to make the whole planet really depressed so that there is a collective decision to change the way we live that takes place simultaneously across all of humanity.

Before it gets better we’re probably going to see a whole bunch of people getting more depressed and suicidal – I could even foresee the ‘mass extinction’ concept being played out as a spate of suicides across the globe. Something like a percentage of the world wakes up and decides to all commit suicide on the same day.

It’s not always about you

Other lessons that may be playing out in your experience include a soul contract to save another soul that may be choosing to end itself, which seems to be a common lesson that’s coming through for many now.

So in this case the suicide urges are to remind you to save someone else, but because we personalize everything in our experience, we see it as ourselves being suicidal.

We don’t fear death

Finally, for many of us, we were born knowing – unequivocally – that this is NOT all there is. There is something greater – and so we have no fear of death.

For many people, the fear of death is really driven by their belief that this is all there is, so they are desperate to hold onto this life and this identity and experience.

When you’ve really lived something more, no one can take that experience away from you, and no one can shake your knowledge of what is out there – even if it’s just a feeling for now.

Without the desperate need to hold onto life and this identity, you can easily reach a point where earth feels like a trap and you long for the freedom of what you know lies beyond – and you can only reach that through death.

It’s very difficult to hang on to life when you see death as a release from a place you’re trapped in.

Spirituality & Mental Illness

Until people walk their own path and gain the experience for themselves, the miracles of healing that we perform in our own lives – and the lives of others – will look impossible.

I mean, do you remember back to a time where you couldn’t heal? Remember how far away it seemed that you would ever attain that level of Mastery?

Likewise, without experience of the journey, us journeyers will look impulsive, grandiose, delusional, depressed, suicidal and more… because people are quick to label and judge what they don’t understand.

Take heart that this has nothing to do with you – it is purely driven by their fear and lack of understanding, and your responses to their judgement are the only things holding you back.

You are a beautiful, wild, messy and free soul…

You feel your love, you own your pain and you can effortlessly navigate through change and the full range of your extraordinary emotional experience.

You deserve a standing ovation – not a God-damned pill. (Pun fully intended LOL ☺)