We often avoid feeling sadness. But allowing yourself to feel healthy sadness can bring with it deep relief. It takes a lot of emotional energy to push sadness away. Allowing yourself to feel your sadness is allowing those muscles to relax. This can be part of moving through your sadness into the more emotionally expansive life that will exist for you beyond.

It’s easy to point to people who are more depressed than you are. You may be getting by fine, even though life feels challenging. But perhaps the question should be: Would you like to find relief from the depression, the weight, that you feel? Would you like to expand and enrich your life so that you feel again a sense of pleasure and meaning, expansiveness and growth?

Depression can manifest in many ways—as a persisting sadness that blots out enjoyment, a sense of emotional numbness, as a heaviness across your emotional and physical experience.