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What I'm beginning to realize is the internal world is a foreign place to many people.

This has become apparent to me through all the talk about Robin Williams killing himself due to depression. 

I keep reading articles by people with depression who keep correcting people who don't have depression about their confusion about how he could take his life when he had so much and he was so loved. 

Shouldn't these things have made him happy, they argue?

Those things don't matter, the people with depression say. Therapy and medication helps, and that's it, and only sometimes.

I think both viewpoints get it wrong.

No one seems to be acknowledging that it's the internal landscape, not the external, that determines one's happiness.

I don't see depression as a problem of the mind, but rather a knocking on the door of the ego by the soul.

I've never had clinical depression, so maybe I'm not in a position to know. But I have experienced situational depression. I don't think the two are that different in experience.

I don't cast aspersions on anyone turning to therapy and medication for help. If it helps, then you've got an answer.

My suspicion, though, is that depression medication is to depression what sleeping pills are to insomnia. They don't allow you to sleep. They put you in a state that doesn't have the same restorative properties that natural sleep does.

As far as talk therapy, I'm all for talking things through and getting an objective opinion. But I don't see why it needs to be ongoing. It's important to be heard and feel understood. But maybe we need to create relationships where hearing each other is a regular practice so that we won't have to pay a stranger for this.

Thich Nhat Hanh says if you need to go to therapy, it means there is no one in your house who will listen to you. Marianne Williamson says we don't get to the light through endless investigation of the darkness. 

I'm referring to depression and only depression. Of course, people who are victims of crime who feel they need professional help should get it. But even then I don't think it needs to be forever. 

I first had situational depression in my early to mid-twenties. I was convinced I'd ruined my entire life with my poor decisions. I was getting deeper and deeper in debt, paving the way to a lifetime of servitude to pay for graduate school, which I detested. The relationship I had entered after I broke off my engagement had failed, to the surprise of no one. I was an adult, so it was time for me to create a life for myself. But nothing I put together managed to stay together, and these uncomfortable circumstances were the ones I had to live in until I knew how to change them. 

I didn't know what to do. So I tried yoga. The asanas were nice. I liked them. But it was at the end of the six-week session when the teacher gave me a tape on meditation that I'd gotten my answer.

I listened to this tape every night as I lie in bed falling asleep. It was of a man named Swami Satchidananda going over the question/answer method to meditation. He said, ask yourself this question, am I my arm? I would ask, in my head, am I my arm? No, he would say, I am not my arm. No, I am not my arm. And it went on this way until we got through the body parts and agreed we were not those things and then we got to the mind. 

Am I the mind? It seemed like an easy question but I wasn't sure. No, I am not the mind. Who am I? 

I am the pure self. The sat chid ananda: truth, knowledge, bliss, absolute. He then directed me to see the thoughts coming to my mind. To stand apart from them and watch them coming to the headspace of the body lying on the bed. And I understood what he meant. The drama that was making me miserable - the decision to go to grad school, the failed relationships, the mounting debt - this was a show some actress was playing a role in. It wasn't happening to me. I was just living inside the actress at the moment. And I was in charge of the script - the reaction to the circumstances she was in. They had no power over me. The circumstances had been decided by ego and karma. The reaction was up to my soul. My soul could abdicate and defer to my ego. But, having done that, I knew this to cause pain and suffering. Better to leave the soul in charge of reaction.

It was freedom.

Has life been problem-free since? No. Every day you make a choice to live from ego or the soul, and the ego is less work and gives instant gratification. But it's like having too much dessert. You want it in the moment, but you regret it in the long run.

In my years of practicing yoga and meditation I've had some fascinating experiences with ego and soul. 

At the end of one yoga workshop with Mahan Rishi Singh, he played a huge gong as we relaxed in savasana. It was louder than anything I could've imagined. The sound raced toward me and engulfed me. At first I was afraid. I wanted to open my eyes and protect myself from what was coming, but I knew it was only sound. So I kept my eyes closed. It was as if a tsunami were coming toward me, that's how scared I was. But when I allowed the sound to wash over me, I became part of the tsunami. Then it was a hurricane coming at me, and I became the hurricane, a tornado, I became all of it. 

After the gong meditation I felt elated in a way I never had before. I knew that I was one with all. That I needn't fear anything. Not the scariest thing. The next day, this beautiful experience changed into a terrible depression. I felt completely disconnected from myself. No matter what I did, I couldn't get back into my own skin. It felt awful.

I think the experience with the gong meditation was one of letting go of the ego and knowing I was more than that. It felt ecstatic. But the other side of that is a detachment from who we believe we are and the identity we project into the world. Which is scary and unsettling. Our personality is how we define ourselves, and we feel an attachment to who we are. Severing this attachment before we are ready can feel intensely isolating, and this is what I felt. I couldn't connect with myself or anything. It was as though my skin were a leather suit. Which is true in a sense. It is what my body will be when my soul no longer animates it. But for now, I feel an attachment to my skin.

I have a theory that this is what people who have clinical depression feel. Perhaps it's their soul saying to their ego, you are not who I am. It takes the reason for being away from the ego, and that causes suffering. It's confusing to the ego and makes it feel unvalued and lonely, especially one that isn't ready to let itself go.

It's like thinking about ourselves reincarnating as another being. When I see myself as a different being in another lifetime, I feel no connection to that other person. It feels like it isn't me, even though it is me. It isn't my ego, but it is my soul. This is how I see clinical depression. It's your soul, but it can't connect to the ego.

How much should we identify with our soul and how much with ego? Do realized beings only connect with soul and not at all with ego? What's the right percentage of ego to soul identification as we live on the earthly plane in a carbon-based bio-body suit?

So what do people with clinical depression do? What did I do? I rode it out. It didn't take long. I didn't have to suffer through it for more than a day, and I know that clinical depression lasts longer than that. I don't know what people with clinical depression should do. Definitely reach out for help making sense of it to someone with more answers than I. And then maybe meditate. Separate from the show in your mind, the drama script your ego has written, and see it for what it is. Circumstances that have no power over you. 

You are the powerful tsunami, the hurricane, tornado. 

You are all.