Depression: why it is so common and effective lifestyle changes that reduce it

In this 22 minute TED talk Stephen Ildari explains that depression largely results from us living busy, stressful lives that our bodies are not designed for. Our DNA and bodies are basically still geared for a hunter gatherer lifestyle, where there may be moments of stress such as when you are facing a bear or tiger, but then once you have run away or fought the predator, the stress reduces and your body gets to relax.

For most of us today our lives are constantly stressful and busy, resulting in a prolonged stress response and being in fight or flight much of the time. This is detrimental to the body and over time results in depression. Our bodies simply have not adapted to this massive change of lifestyle yet, and the result is the epidemic in depression. One in nine Americans over the age of 12 is taking an anti-depressant.

Stephe Ildari advocates for a change in lifestyle to reduce stress, improve your body’s neurochemistry and decrease depression. He outlines a 6 step Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC) program to beat depression without medication.

His research has demonstrated that the TLC program is an effective treatment for depression, with over 70% of patients experiencing a favorable response, as measured by symptom reduction of at least 50%. That is a lot of relief!!!!! The 6 steps are:

  1. Exercise – he claims exercise is more effective than any pill. Just brisk walking for 30 minutes, 3 times a week can help a lot.
  2. Omega 3 Fatty Acids – our bodies can’t make Omega 3 and 6, we need to get them from our diet. He recommends a supplement that gives you a 1000 mg of EPA and 500 mg of DHA per day.
  3. Sunlight – he recommends that people get at least 30 minutes of bright light exposure per day.
  4. Healthy Sleep – at least 8 hours sleep a night is needed
  5. Anti-ruminative activity – stop yourself ruminating on negative thoughts and feelings. Focus instead on doing something pleasant, calling a friend, exercise or journalling.
  6. Social connection – resist the urge to isolate, reach out and connect to people, socialise and you will feel better.

Doing the above will help your body to relax and return to a greater state of peace and happiness. To learn more about Stephen Ildari’s program visit his Therapeutic Lifestyle Change website.


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Positive experiences reverse impacts of trauma

This is a great 2:37 min podcast explaining recent scientific research that has found that the impacts of trauma experienced in your life or trauma inherited from your ancestors through changes to their DNA that are passed onto you in their sperm or egg, can be reversed through positive environmental experiences.

In this study, which involved mice who had been traumatised, they found that the trauma behaviours such as depressive behaviours, cognitive problems, anti-social behaviours, and risk taking all stopped after exposure to positve environmental experiences. Furthermore the trauma markers on their DNA healed and were not passed on to their offspring.

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How to accept divine timing and your growth rate?

It is not up to you how fast growth occurs. It takes a lifetime to achieve the growth your soul has come to experience. Events will occur to create the shifts needed, for awareness to dawn and self love to occur. This will all happen at the destined time. You can not influence it. You think you can by going to that workshop, doing that healing, but we tell you it still occurs as needed. It is your soul guiding you forth. It is your soul giving you the urge to do the workshop or healing. It is all occurring as it needs to.

Let go of the judgement, the impatience and flow with the process, accept what comes and what goes. It is not up to you. People will come and go out of your life, behave in certain ways to trigger you. Everything that is needed for your growth will come, because it has to for you to evolve as needed this lifetime.

You can’t get it wrong or miss an important event or person. It will all occur as it needs to. You just judge it with your mind, assuming you should be doing more or be more advanced by now. There is no more advanced, there is no better than or worse than, don’t compare your self to others. Don’t assume how you should be is anything other than how you already are.

You humans make it so hard for yourselves. You are determined to see yourselves as not good enough, but this is just your thoughts, just your conditioning. Change it, so you are accepting of yourself, so you know you are exactly where and how you need to be right now, so you can be kind and loving to yourself. That is what is needed so you can enjoy the process more, so you can enjoy the journey.

You will get where you need to be regardless, but you affect your experience of it with your thoughts. You create suffering and angst with your thoughts and judgements.

If you’re struggling to cope with the stress of your daily life you can use a wide range of tools to help yourself release the stress, lighten up and enjoy life more. When you do this it is easier to accept what is, as it is no longer all consuming, all pervasive. the challenge is balanced by your doing more relaxing and enjoyable activities as well. Whether it’s time alone, time in nature or with friends, whether it is exercise, dance or doing something creative. Find what makes your heart sing, helps to cheer you up, refuel you so you can keep moving forward day by day. Do what you love and it makes it easier to bear nearly any circumstance you face.

If you’ve experienced heartbreak, trauma and loss that has devastated you then you may need a different kind of support. Whether that be guidance and support from a counsellor or use of embodiment activities like Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) to help you reconnect with your body, shift out the stress tension and trauma, so your body and nervous system calms and you can finally have peace within. There’s lots you can do to support yourself as you face whatever challenges life brings you.

Accept what is and flourish. Deny it and struggle. Rally against it and feel helpless, depressed or worse suicidal. Accept what is, knowing it will pass, that it is just a phase of growth and you will have peace. Accept yourself and your journey and you will have joy. Accept those around you and trust they are guided forth in their process, that they are all doing exactly what is needed for their evolution and growth, then you will have love overflowing in your life – from you to others and from others to you. Accept what is and have peace.

Foster greater acceptance and trust, faith that it will all work out okay and you will have excitement, anticipation and positive feelings of the future. The choice is yours create negative feelings with your thoughts or positive ones. The same outcomes will occur, just your experience of it, your sense of joy or suffering will differ. Which will you choose? It is entirely up to you. Blessed BE , Amen.

By Jodi-Anne M Smith (21 April 2017).
Further free guidance on healing techniques and self love are available on the Life Insights and Healing from child abuse pages of this website.

How does Family Constellations work?

How does Family Constellations work? It works by calling in information from the field of the family soul. You do this by the client asking a question such as “I just can’t seem to make a relationship work, I want to know why”. The field will then provide information relevant to that topic. After a short discussion the facilitator will suggest to the client that they look at a specific topic – a selection of people who are most relevant.

For the question above they may look at the client and his current relationship to see what information is reveealed. In this case they would set up representatives for the two people involved and allow the field to show the dynamics including any blocks. Another option would be to set up representatives for the client and each of his major relationships to see the pattern and gather information and insightes from throughout his life. A third option would be to setup representatives for the client’s family of origin – Mum, Dad, and siblings to see what gets revealed that way.  There are many options.

Once setup the field will reveal insights and clues as to why the client is having difficulty. It could show a blockage between the parents that is affecting the client or an identification, an entanglement with a past ancestor who never married or who was heartbroken by a partner and never trusted another. The client could have a hidden loyalty with this ancestor and it would impact the client’s ability to have a successful relationship.

These loyalties, entanglements and identifications occur at the soul level, the subconscious level. The client may never have heard of the ancestor or what they experienced, but energetically they are intertwined. The field will reveal this, enabling it to be acknowledged, respected and let go of. The entanglement can be resolved, any unfelt pain or trauma felt and released. This benefits all involved.

The family soul is looking for harmony and peace, to have the pain released, for love to flow. It recruits current family members to do this on behalf of the ancestors. Once it is completed all are free from the burden. The Family Constellation process enables this to occur.

Trust your intuition and inner guidance, it will tell you whether this is a process you wish to undertake to free yourself and those you love. It is well worth doing so love can flow freely between you all. So be it. Amen.

By Jodi-Anne M Smith (26 March 2017).
Further free guidance on healing techniques and self love are available on the Life Insights and Healing from child abuse pages of this website.

What is Family Constellations?

Family Constellations is a method for clearing our blocks to love within families. When the blockages are cleared, all members of the family feel stronger, more supported, more connected to who they are, where they come from and they know they belong, that they are okay, good enough and a necessary part of the whole.

Much of the pain that people feel comes from a sense of not belonging, of having been rejected or not accepted in some way. Many people feel not good enough in some way. This comes mostly from their childhood experiences, but it can also come from further back the ancestral line.

Unhealed wounds within the family soul will affect how the current generation feel. It will affect how much of their energy is available now to use as they please and how much of it will be entangled with their past experiences or their ancestors’ past experiences.

Family Constellations helps to clear these entanglements so that more of your energy is available for you now. This helps you to feel stronger, clearer and to be able to focus on achieving your goals, living your life and raising your kids.

By clearing out the wounds, traumas and entanglements within the family soul it stops the transmission to the next generation. It frees them of the burden to complete it on behalf of the ancestors. You are being of great service to all of your family when you do this work to free them all from the chains of past trauma – rejections, exclusions, unspoken of tragedies, losses and early deaths.

Pain does not disappear. If trauma is buried, life does not just go on as before, it is tainted, limited, the life force choked and diminished. Freeing it back up, feeling and completing the trauma, lets the life force flow more fully again.

Family Constellations is a technique for identifying blockages within the family soul and clearing them. It helps individuals to break free of the entanglements that have impacted them and enables them to move forward with greater peace and harmony. It is a powerful process, sacred in nature, with its respect for the bigger movements of life, destiny and evolution.

It is a process worth doing, not just to benefit yourself, but your whole family. They may not consciously notice the effects, but energetically they will and you may notice changes in their behaviour, their thinking, their sense of self. For their energy will be freed up enabling them to move forward in whatever is the best way for them, for their highest good.

Family Constellations enables love to flow throughout the family which benefits all. I recommend it and have experienced powerful shifts myself through its use. No longer do I judge my parents or my family. No longer do I resent their choices or their lack of love shown to me. I have seen their pain, their entanglements and accepted they couldn’t do any better with the burdens they were carrying. They did the best they could with the situation they were in. Each had pain and felt unable to move, to be present, to give to me what I needed. The pain I felt was theirs and others in our family lines – it passed on through them to me. This continues to occur until it is healed. In doing Family Constellations I have resolved much of this, so my children will be less burdened than I was or my parents were. This is the gift of Family Constellations, to free yourself and your loved ones, so all can feel more love, more acceptance, more peace. Blessed BE, Amen.

By Jodi-Anne M Smith (26 March 2017).
Further free guidance on healing techniques and self love are available on the Life Insights and Healing from child abuse pages of this website.