Hi want to grow,

Looking back, I can see that I was suffering from depression starting when I was a child. I had a major 'breakdown' when I was 10. I discovered alcohol and drugs when I was about 15 and was hooked immediately. Self medication. It didn't make me feel good. It allowed me to feel.

I stayed drunk for decades, though I was good at my job, so able to support myself legitimately. Eventually I found a therapist who I stayed with for about four years, but who was basically crap. I stayed with him because I thought that I was 'resistant' or something along those lines. I wasn't. He was rubbish. I can see this clearly now, and I do not say this out of vengeance. It is true. I also spent many years on antidepressants.

What saved me was doing yoga, but only after I had tried it and given up many times. One time it just clicked, and it is now central to my existence. I have taken a few classes, but have gone largely on the principal that if it feels positive, do it, and have evolved, over the last decade, a regime that works for me.

My life is not perfect. I sometimes have too much to drink. I sometimes get depressed. In fact, I'm normal, (in these respects anyway!) But I do not spend my entire life orbiting the twin poles of alcoholism and depression.

I am sure that a more competent therapist would have helped me. The medication that I took merely blanked out the underlying problems. They were never going to disappear of their own accord, and inevitably returned when the meds were discontinued. What has made the yoga and meditation practice work, for me, above all else, is a pig-headed determination to make it work. To fail would be my failure, no-one else's. There would be no-one else to blame. And I needed to move on from the pile of crap that my life had been. There really was no alternative.

Yoga/ meditation is probably not for everyone, and some therapists may be crap, but IMHO the most important element to moving on with your life is a grim determination to do so. Find something that works, and dedicate yourself to it, as if your life depended upon it. Because, it does!