Sufism, Depression, and the Meaning of Life

Have you ever experienced depression?

Do you have loved ones, like a spouse, a friend, a child, or a sibling, experiencing depression?

You’re not alone. Over 17 million Americans experience major depression in any year, not to mention the millions experiencing daily, low-grade depression from a stressful life and being stuck in patterns of suffering.

Why is it so prevalent in our society and in our lives?

Ibrahim answers that question and others about depression in the video below, including:

• How is depression an opportunity for spiritual growth?
• What is the root of most depression?
• What is “core spiritual energy” and how does it relate to the deepest depression?
• How can we heal from depression?
• How can we help others with depression, especially as a Spiritual Healing practitioner?
• How do gender and sexual identity struggles lead to depression?

Depression, and indeed, all illnesses or struggles in life, are opportunities for rapid spiritual growth.

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It’s an opportunity to de-program ourselves from old habits, mental pictures, or ideas that are limiting our ability to deeply experience Love and Union with the Divine, and through that, with all things in Creation.

Are you ready for transformation in your life? Are you ready to learn and practice new patterns of thinking about yourself, and the world, that will radically transform your health and happiness?

Then you’re ready for our 18-month, Level 1 program. It’s for people who are ready for that next step into growth and healing.

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Ibrahim talks about Depression form a Sufi and Spiritual Healing perspective:

Ready to learn more?

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE EBOOK: Sufism’s 7 Secrets for Transformation

Learn more about Sufism with our 18-month, Level 1 program. Click here for more information.

Transcript of the Interview:

IBRAHIM: Our lives are driven by meaning; meaning that what we decide is meaningful is what gives us purpose in life. So, for example, if meaning is taking care of a child and then the child dies, we’ve lost all meaning, and we become depressed.

So, healing depression at the first level is establishing meaning, what is meaningful to a person?

The second thing I have found is that people have core energy. In spiritual circles we call it Kundalini. Freud called it sexual. There are different ways people look at it, but when the core energy is frozen or blocked, people get very depressed.

My experience is that a lot of the deeper depression people see, that kind where they had to have electroshock therapy in the past, were due to these deeper kinds of blockages of that core Kundalini energy.

The second thing is how do we open that up? How do we deal with that?

Today, of course, a lot of people are struggling with all sorts of things; gender identity, sexual identities, you know things like that, that can also lead to all sorts of problems in people where they don’t feel like they’re living who they are and when people don’t live who they are they also get very depressed.

These are all things we can look at. For me personally, what I do with depression is I help the person find what’s in the deepest part of the heart that’s causing the depression, and what I find is that most of the time, there is an experience that they’re witnessing that’s unresolved in their heart, like let’s say their girlfriend left them or their wife left them or their husband isn’t treating them right, or something like that.

Then out of that experience, they become hopeless, and they find despair, and once they can find that experience and walk them through that experience, usually the depression will go away.

So for example let’s say that you’re feeling hopeless because you never think that your husband will love you. If we can get you to find that place of hopelessness with your husband and change it then we can actually take you out of the depression and give you hope, and that hope itself is often actually the magic key that helps depression disappear.

QUESTION: What are the steps we can take from a medical spiritual healing perspective to heal ourselves from depression?

IBRAHIM: Well a lot of times, in depression, what happens is people feel the depression, they’re in the emotion but they don’t get behind it to the experience that is causing the depression, hidden in the subconscious.

So for that we have to help you get to your own place of subconscious. There’s something going on in there, where something happened and you interpret it some way, like you said, “Ok, well I lost my husband or my boyfriend, I must be bad, I did something wrong, I’m not good enough or something like that.”

So what we have to do is we have to get you to that experience and we have to help you find your interpretation of that experience and understand what’s causing your depression which is: am hopeless or I’m lost or I’m no good and I’m hopeless about it.

And then again, using certain methods we can transform using God’s light. We can take those things out of you. We can change those things within you very, very deep down inside your heart and your soul where you’re no longer feeling hopeless because God will show you a different way it would be.

It will show you a connection to love or connection to light or compassion or mercy or trust. Those names of God that we call, when you bring those lights in, you’ll see that that place of hopelessness will change in the core of your being and when it does, you won’t be depressed you actually come to Joy. You will actually find joy in yourself.

The other thing we can do is that we can actually teach you how to receive joy directly. Joy is a frequency of light, and there’s ways of actually bringing joy into your heart and your soul so, we can actually teach you how to connect to those reservoirs where joy comes from, and you can actually absorb that light directly. So these are different ways of going at it.

QUESTION: What can a medical spiritual healing practitioner do for someone who is suffering from depression

IBRAHIM: spiritual practitioners work is to get to the heart of the matter and of course later to get to the soul of the matter. You have a heart in your chest, but your heart that loves, where’s that coming from? Not coming out of your physical heart it’s coming out of something else.

Well behind that heart is a soul, that soul loves much deeper than your physical heart or your spiritual heart. So the medical spiritual healers are trained to be able to access the heart and be able to open it and heal it and then the medical spiritual healer is there to teach you to go further to access your own soul.

The soul is where your spiritual teachings are going on. This is where you’re really learning who you are as a spirit. Spirituality means our return to spiritual consciousness. The consciousness of our spirits, our souls and ultimately the consciousness of God, that’s what spirituality is. A lot of people think that spirituality is gaining spiritual powers or occult powers things like this. That’s not real spirituality, that’s actually kind of a corruption of spirituality. Real spirituality is our ability, ultimately, to stay in the presence of God and manifest that presence.

That’s the highest level of spirituality. So the medical spiritual healer is trained to help people find that, to return to the one, to return to God, to return to a divine truth, to wash away the self, the ego, the emotions, the false beliefs, the pain inside of a person, the hidden experiences, to bring them and to release them from a person so that they can have that direct experience of divine-like flow. Once you have that I promise you, you’ll never want to leave it.

QUESTION: How does dealing with depression help us walk more deeply into the divine reality?

IBRAHIM: Well, depression, at a certain level, you could say is being cut off from God. So if you really understand at the core of depression is hopelessness and hopelessness is from being cut off, and if you reestablish the connection, then you have hope and then the depression slowly disappears.

So the spiritual walking of depression is actually the establishment of hope and the connection to God, and to realize that that you’re never alone and you’re never separate and you’re never hopeless. There’s always help on the inner side but you have to establish that. So this is how it helps us spiritually.

Ready to learn more?

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE EBOOK: Sufism’s 7 Secrets for Transformation

Learn more about Sufism with our 18-month, Level 1 program. Click here for more information.