Q: Why am I depressed, Aaron? What do I do about it? If my learning doesn’t have to be painful, why is it painful? I think I’m paying attention, but there’s still so much pain.

My dear one, you are light. Each thing seeks its own kind: light seeks light, darkness seeks darkness, joy seeks joy, and sorrow seeks sorrow. When you’re fully able to enter into the experience of yourself as light, everything seems lighter around you. You know yourself to be part of that Ground of all love, call it God or whatever you prefer.

If you have a beautiful flowering houseplant with lush green leaves, and you put it in a dark closet and forget about it for several weeks, except to open the door and pour in some water, what happens to it? Will it thrive? Each of you takes yourself for hours or even for days at a time and shuts yourself off into a dark closet. Your fear and anger are walls that enclose you and shut off the light. Then you ask me, “Why am I depressed?” How can the light get through?

What is this darkness? Your fear is opaque. It assumes solidity. You find it so hard to have compassion for this dear being who is afraid. When fear arises, it is followed by judgment, “I shouldn’t be afraid.” Then the fear is suppressed and you move into anger or greed with the same, “I shouldn’t.…” By this time the light is thoroughly walled out.

It is not the emotions that bring the darkness, but your reaction to them. To feel heavy emotions and have compassion for the being that you are, in pain, does not block light but invites it. To feel heavy emotions and dwell in those without awareness shuts out all light as effectively as if you were the plant in a closet.

Connection reconfirms light. Separation enhances darkness. When judgment against feelings arises, it separates you from yourself and, of course, from the light.

Can you begin to see the depression not as a cause but as a symptom, so that you begin to recognize the process? “I’m depressed, I need light.” Perhaps that recognition can lead you to see the walls of fear, anger, shame, jealousy, judgment, or greed with which you’ve surrounded yourself and to ask yourself, “How can I open some window shades and allow light in here?” You can do that, but in order to do it, first you’ve got to recognize that the shades have been drawn, that the walls have gone up. For many of you, that is the most difficult thing to do. The judgment is so thick. The darkness offers an illusion of a safe hideaway.

Why is it so difficult? If we are beings of light that yearn for the full experience of light, what is this attraction to darkness? In your pain, you seek that which will confirm your feelings. When anger arises in you, and you judge that in yourself, saying, “I’m no good, I shouldn’t be feeling anger,” that “I’m no good” seeks to confirm itself through experience. It actually makes you reach out and find those experiences that prove, “Yes! See? I really am no good.”

Anger protects you from the pain of feeling judged and from all your self-judgment.

As you judge your heavy emotions and deepen the anger at yourselves, the walls get thicker. Not even a glimmer of light can shine within.

It is as though you hide in a safe tunnel, putting up strands of protection in the doorway. They wall out all that you fear would harm you, and thus serve to defend, but they also wall out the light. For example, feeling another’s judgment, you move into anger. Anger protects you from the pain of feeling judged and from all your self-judgment. It separates you from yourself and from the one who judged, and it blocks the light.