When The Light Begins To Fade: The Spiritual Significance of Seasonal Depression

#SeasonalDepressionSZN

It's officially SpookySZN—monsters, vampires, witches, ghosts, and ghouls rejoice! This time of year always invokes mixed feelings in me. While I'm grateful for the cooler weather and for being able to witness the beauty of autumn leaves changing colors as they die, it won't be long until 'cooler' turns into 'cold' and 'dying' turns into 'dead.' October is also like the gateway into the holiday season which, for me—and maybe you—brings a lot of mixed emotions on its own. The holiday season means sweet memories with family, good food, maybe some gifts, and just an overall sense of coziness with the people we're most comfortable with. But it can also mean the exact opposite of those things when we don't have family, have strained relationships with family, or just generally find it difficult to be happy during the darker seasons of the year. SpookySZN is also seasonal depression season, and seasonal depression is something I've dealt with during most Fall and Winter seasons of my life.

The way I understand it, there are two main types of depression: endogenous depression, or depression triggered by biological factors, and exogenous depression, or depression triggered by external factors. My experiences with depression have always been of the latter variety because they have all been triggered by life circumstances. However, to be completely honest with you, I think depression, as well as many other illnesses, has spiritual origins. I can't speak for anyone else, and I definitely don't intend to invalidate anyone else's experience, but the reason why I feel my bouts with depression had spiritual origins is that, on the other side of each of them, I felt lighter, more at peace, more aligned with my truth, and closer to being who I know in my heart I'm meant to be.

In my experience, depression is a dying season, and these seasons only have to last as long as we're unwilling to let go of an outdated version of ourselves or an old way of living that has simply met its expiration date. Just as Mother Earth takes a couple of seasons each year to intentionally die so that she can be made anew in the Spring, the depression that often comes with the darkness of shorter days brings with it an opportunity for us to die to the year that has passed so far—rest, reflect, suffer a bit so that our capacity for experience can expand, and then be reborn as something new once winter breaks. Now, of course, it's much easier to say that now when I'm not in a season of depression. When we are in the thick of depression, it often feels like it will never end. But as someone who has had almost as many bouts with depression as I've had years on this earth, I can confidently confirm that they always end. And I hope that what follows will serve as evidence that depression has a purpose and that it's not meant to destroy us but rather to destroy what we're not, so that we can grow more aligned with who we truly are.

My First Existential Crisis

Like many spiritual seekers in the modern era, my spiritual inquiry started with a Google search. I was in my room, lying on my bed, in the dark, in my apartment in Oklahoma City. About two months prior, I’d gotten a call from my mother, who told me that her doctor had diagnosed her with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. In the two months between receiving that call and lying in my bed in the dark, I’d done a ton of research on pancreatic cancer, trying to find shreds of hope to cling to, but I didn’t find many. The majority of what I found essentially boiled down to, “It would be a miracle if your mother lives five more years.” It was the summer of 2014, and I’d just recently turned 24. My mother was 48, just barely old enough to be considered “middle-aged,” and I was being forced to face the fact that she possibly wouldn’t be a part of my world for much longer, along with everything that grim potential implied.

But I couldn’t face the fact. It felt like a constant war within me, between grief and denial. The denial was being used to chase off the grief because feeling grief meant that I’d accepted that my mother was going to die—and I just couldn’t. I’d grown up with people regularly telling me how smart I was, to the point that I’d adopted intelligence as part of my identity. But no matter how smart I may have believed myself to be, I just couldn’t comprehend my mother being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. So I did what I always do when I can’t comprehend something: I started asking questions. Those questions included, “Why is this happening to me?”, “Why does God hate me?”, and “If we’re all just going to die, what’s the point of living?” But the question that I feel really ignited the fire of my spiritual journey was, “Why do I feel spiritually lonely?” That search returned many results, but the top one—and the one I clicked on—was an article on “existential loneliness,” a phrase I’d never heard before, but it turned out to describe a reality that I’d lived with for most of my life.

I find it hard to express to people who didn’t know me before 2016 that I was not always someone who was kind, positive, or peaceful. I had a generally negative outlook on the world for a long time. I remember once in college tweeting that “everyone doesn’t deserve love” and being scolded by my girlfriend at the time for how evil it sounded. I’d inherited a lot of my mother’s pessimism and a lot of my father’s selfishness, and though outwardly I was usually pleasant enough, inwardly I was often negative, dark, bleak, and empty. There’s something about me where I’ve always felt like I couldn’t quite fit in. Even within groups where I was invited and welcomed, I still always felt like I existed in the margins, never quite able to get as close to people as I wanted. This means that despite the friendships and relationships I’ve had throughout life, deep, deep down I always felt lonely. I just wasn’t always aware of it.

And maybe I would have never become aware of it if finding out about my mother having cancer hadn’t made me so depressed that I couldn’t find pleasure or joy in anything. I was so depressed that I couldn’t believe in anything. So depressed that the “fear of God” no longer meant anything to me. In fact, I felt abandoned by God, which is why I felt spiritually alone. What I’ve discovered is, for me at least, the darkness within overwhelms only when I lose sight of the light for so long that it starts to feel like the light isn’t there. And the gift that depression gives is that it cuts off the value in all external stimuli, so we have no other choice but to turn inwards, face the darkness, and work to remove whatever is obstructing the light.

I Feel Like Dying

My longest bout with depression lasted from June 2014 until January 2020. During that period, I discovered my mom was sick, dissolved the band I had moved to Oklahoma to form, moved to a new city, changed jobs six times, lost my mom, buried her, lost my hair, and then began and ended one of the most magical and intimate, yet simultaneously stressful and toxic, romantic relationships of my life. The girl I was in this relationship with and I definitely had a spiritual bond, but what was much more prevalent in our connection was our trauma bond. We had suspiciously similar childhoods and family structures, and we were both very much hurting at the time, which meant that we spent a lot of time taking turns triggering each other's wounds and then wounding each other in our reactions to being hurt.

I'm not ashamed to admit that a big part of the reason why I was even looking for a relationship at the time we got together was for comfort, and maybe even a distraction from my grief. For much of our relationship, I got just that—not only comfort but some healing as well. But our dynamic also brought me a lot of suffering and even more grief to deal with on top of the grief of my mom's loss and the grief of going bald in my 20s. Even though I'd experienced a spiritual awakening prior to meeting her and found newfound peace and understanding through that awakening, eventually, the weight of the cumulative grief I was experiencing blocked out the light I'd found within, and I found myself in the deepest depression of my life.

One of the revelations my spiritual awakening brought was that "nothing really matters," which honestly brought me a lot of peace within the context of my mother passing because it made it seem like less of a big deal. But this knowledge can also be a slippery slope—especially for someone who's already depressed—because depression takes the meaning out of life, and if I'm suffering through something that both has no meaning and "doesn't really matter," then why the fuck should I live at all?

Waking up every day to predominant feelings of grief, despair, loneliness, and meaninglessness triggered the first—and thankfully last—time I frequented thoughts of wishing I were dead. I'd go to bed depressed and wake up in the morning even more depressed that I hadn't died in my sleep. I was among the walking dead—alive on the outside like everyone else, but on the inside, I saw no point in anything, no purpose in anything, no reason for anything, and no hope for anything. Though the Sun often shone as bright as ever on the outside, it did nothing for the darkness I felt within. And what was causing that darkness was a pit of grief—not just from the loss of my mother, the loss of my hair, or my difficulty in maintaining relationships, but from feeling so disconnected from myself, from God, and from life in general.

Grief is one of the biggest obstructions to the light, and it's also one of the most difficult to remove because it is so extremely difficult to grasp. Grief is much like a ghost in how it haunts you—it's elusive, impossible to pinpoint, as if it's everywhere and nowhere at once, always lingering in the background, casting shadows and a heavy weight on everything we experience. Yet grief itself seems transparent, formless, and intangible. So, when we attempt to remove grief to reclaim our joy, we often find ourselves struggling to locate it, even though it is a regular part of our daily lives. This is because grief is a symptom, not a cause. To remove the obstruction of grief, we have to confront and resolve what causes the grief, not the grief itself.

One of the pitfalls on the spiritual path is that it often brings moments of divine joy that can make us feel as though we're 100% healed or that we don't need to heal at all, but this is an illusion. Those fleeting moments of divinity are not meant to convince us that healing is unnecessary, but rather to inspire us to heal further by showing us that a different experience of life is possible. What I discovered is that even though I had a newfound connection to the Universe and to my own spirituality, until I did the work to heal the emotional wounds I had accumulated over my life, I would never be able to fully embrace my divinity within—because those wounds would act as clouds, blocking the light.

Though, at the time, I blamed my partner and the Universe for dealing me a shitty hand, the truth is, the main reason why my grief persisted was not because my mother died, my hair follicles died, or because my relationship with someone else had died but because my relationship with myself still needed a lot of work. And what ultimately resolved this extended period of depression was not my mom coming back, me getting a hair transplant, or that relationship working out but instead me going back to my childhood, to my earliest traumatic memory, and starting from there to heal all of the open wounds I'd left behind. And me consciously doing this work led to 2020—one of the worst years for the world collectively—being one of the best years of my life.

The Final Fight

My latest bout with depression started in January of 2023. Six months prior, I had quit my job of four years in finance because it was so soul-sucking, and my original plan was to start teaching yoga full-time, as I thought this would be more fulfilling. But when I started teaching yoga, even though it did bring a heightened sense of fulfillment, I noticed that the depression didn’t go away. I was in a relationship at the time in which I found it very difficult to be my full self because my partner’s expectations and desires for me often did not align with my own expectations and desires for myself.

On top of that, I felt stuck in life—blocked from living up to my fullest potential, from creating the things I am destined to create, from being the person I know I’m destined to be, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. But this blockage was definitely making me depressed. So, much like during my first existential crisis back in 2014, I started asking myself questions again. Questions like, “Am I happy in this relationship?”, “Do I really want to teach yoga full-time?”, “Why do I have such a hard time staying committed to projects?”, and “Why do I often give up before giving 100%?”

Upon asking these questions, it seemed that the Universe immediately started to meet me half-way, providing opportunities to uncover the answers to my inquiries. This is a vast oversimplification of the process, but with the help of some golden teachers, the admiration of an elder, and the insight of an angel, I discovered my core wound—the wound that lay at the root of every depression I’ve ever experienced, and that wound is the wound of unworthiness. This unworthiness wound was at the root of what was blocking my progression and fueling my self-sabotaging, self-destructive behaviors. When we feel unworthy and undeserving of our highest timeline, we feel that there’s no way we’d ever be able to sustain it, so instead, we subconsciously work against it.

This unworthiness wound is what kept me stuck in jobs that I hated just because they paid well enough and in relationships that didn’t feel aligned simply because they were comfortable. This unworthiness wound kept me locked in a cycle of “good enough” and the complacency of always existing as a pool of unrealized potential because if I never tried my hardest, then I’d never have to risk failing and confronting the deeply rooted wound of inadequacy that I’ve carried ever since my father abandoned me as a little boy. This unworthiness wound kept me on a hamster wheel, chasing after something that has always been mine and could never be taken away from me—my own light. A light that can’t be found in a career, a relationship, an experience, or anything worldly, but only in my Self.

When I discovered this unworthiness wound, confronted it, and called it out as the imposter that it is, the depression that I’ve cycled in and out of for most of my life seemed to end permanently. Don’t get me wrong, I know I titled this section “The Final Fight” but I don’t truly know that I’ll never encounter depression again. What I do know is that I feel so directly connected to the light now that even if it were cloudy every day for the rest of my life, I would never doubt the light’s existence again. And my life is better now than it has ever been before—not because of what I’ve gained, but because of what I’ve lost, and that is the illusion that the presence of darkness is the absence of light. Instead, I’ve discovered that the presence of darkness is only ever an invitation to discover and remove what is blocking us from the light that is always present so that, eventually, all obstructions are removed, and we can return to Union with the light that was never truly separate from us in the first place.

So if you currently find yourself in a depression or sense one impending, try not to wish it away. What we resist persists, and I’ve found that with depression especially, the only way out is through. Try not to see depression as something that randomly happens to you, but rather as something that intentionally happens for you—an opportunity to stop, take an audit of your life, uncover what needs to heal, release what needs to die, and allow yourself to be reborn as a higher version of yourself. We can only know a thing through contrast to something else, so when the light begins to fade and the darkness comes to take its place, remember that the darkness only exists so that you can come to know yourself as the light.

What's Going On With Me?

For whatever reason, this year has been gifting me with the memory of a lot of lost treasures from my past in the form of songs that I once loved but had forgotten—the bulk of which are 90s RnB. This past week, the song that has been playing on repeat in my mind is 'Body and Soul' by Anita Baker and it has been such a welcomed visitor because it's such an amazing song on its own but it's all the more special to me because it reminds me of my mother. My mother loved Anita Baker and used to play her Rhythm of Love album to death in the house and in the car. So I've really been enjoying the nostalgia of hearing this song along with her other bangers such as 'Sweet Love', and 'I Apologize', and it's been inspiring me to listen to more 90s RnB too.

In the upcoming week I'm really going to focus on recommitting to my practices. This is something that I find necessary to do every-so-often because within time, I'm not sure a permanent commitment exists. I think we often see commitment as a 'set it and forget it' type of ordeal but I've found that commitment is something you have to do on a regular basis. And despite what convention may tell us, the only way to stay committed to something is through consciously recommitting to it over and over again. But this also gives us the opportunity to consciously release past commitments if we find they don't resonate with us anymore. My intention is to start sharing my handstand practice again soon so if we're connected on Instagram or Threads, you can hold me accountable there 😬

I feel inspired to make a new offering that is still very much in the planning phases so I don't want to speak on it too soon but what I can say is that, despite how difficult it has been to get this newsletter done at times, staying consistent with it has been so fulfilling to me and when you all let me know that you've enjoyed it or that it has helped you in some way, that's been the icing on the cake. So, thank you for helping me stay in my purpose and I assure you that as long as I live, I will continue to offer what I can in some way, shape, or form for the collective's healing.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜