A recent article in Time Magazine has sparked a lot of discussion in the spiritual community.  Mother Teresa’s spiritual advisor published a book that discusses her  prolonged crisis of faith. Through many years she struggled with feeling unable to connect with the spirit of Christ. This began shortly after her arrival in India and continued throughout her life.
See: Mother Teresa cover story

Several of my medical colleagues commented  that  Mother Teresa might have had a totally different experience in life if she had had an antidepressant.  I agree that depression is a likely component of Mother Teresa’s travails and that antidepressants might have been helpful. During 3 decades of working as a psychiatrist I saw many people come alive with antidepressants, when nothing else had helped them.

I would have hesitated, however, to make this a first recommendation. There are people with familial history of mood disorders, or with cyclical mood disorders in their own lives, where antidepressants might have a higher priority on the treatment options list, but I have seen nothing to indicate these in Mother Teresa. On the contrary, there is the strong suggestion that her depression may have been in response to circumstances surrounding her work with severely ill, impoverished and dying people.

There are now methods available for rapid relief of stress and distress, such as WHEE (Wholistic Hybrid derived from EMDR and EFT), that enable people to release their symptoms rapidly and deeply. WHEE also invites and facilitates opening and deepening of spiritual awarenesses, as well as helping to remove blocks to spiritual awareness (or to anything else one is pursuing in life).

The process of using WHEE may be life transforming. My experience of helping people with WHEE is that when there is a strong reaction to something in one’s life it is possible to address that issue directly. Often, however, the issue sits in a ‘file drawer of the unconscious mind’ that already contains similar issues that have been locked away there. Often, these issues were sequestered from childhood, when this was the best option for a child to deal with them. When the clearing that is done in the current time addresses the old materials in the file drawer along with the recent ones, a more thorough ‘inner housecleaning’ is achieved.

In fact, some people find that their current issues will not relinquish their hold completely until the older issues are released. In my understanding of the human condition, overcoming these blocks may often become an important part of our spiritual path. This is what I call ‘clearing the vessel through which healing flows.’ Our buried hurts, fears and angers often block us from actualizing our full potentials because they lead us to be defensive and to avoid growth-enhancing interactions in our current lives because of unconscious defenses against experiences that might stir our unconscious mind to get in touch with the buried materials.

Taking this a step further, I believe that our buried issues seem to actually invite us into situations where they can be released in these ways. When we don’t release them, we end up in repetitions of old patterns. For instance, with buried anger, a person might keep having angry interactions with people that seem to be initiated by them. With buried fears, a person might repeatedly end up in frightening situations. In such instances, it may not be apparent to the person that she is inviting these experiences into her life. But looking backward over a series of such apparent coincidences, one is often struck by a realization that one might have attracted those experiences through one’s unconscious inner needs.

Going a step further yet, from a perspective of reincarnation that is a process of lessons over many lifetimes, our entire life may be a similar process. That is, we may carry buried, unresolved unconscious issues from one or more previous lifetimes that are asking to be uncovered and released in our current lives.

Much more on these processes of unfolding awareness in our spiritual development in Healing Research, Volume 3, Personal Spirituality.

Blessings

Dan Benor
WHEE MD