About Azriel ReShel

Azriel ReShel is awWriter, editor, yoga Teacher & healing facilitator.

The Root Cause of Depression and How to Heal It

Stopping the Dark Slide of Depression   We all know it, that dull ache of pointlessness, overwhelming sadness and a deep lack of interest in life. The fog of listless pain that blows in and then settles, trapping us inside it. Most of us have suffered at some point in our lives from depression. Be it a mild version following a major life event, or a more prolonged episode that can get so severe it entraps us in an ever compressing world of hopelessness to such an extent we consider ending our own lives. Depression is one of the biggest issues in our world today. With record numbers of people suffering from the dark cloud, and soaring suicide rates, depression is a crippling disease reaching epidemic proportions. Well-known author and journalist, Johann Hari, suffered from depression as a teen, taking anti-depressants from a tender age. Told, like so many others, his depression was the cause of a chemical imbalance in his brain, he later studied social sciences and embarked on a quest to discover the truth about the cause of his depression. He swallowed antidepressants like millions of others, and after 13 years of pills, without much change, and a broad investigation into the true causes of depression, he is calling for a different approach. The Chemical Imbalance Myth His amazing journey involved hundreds of interviews in over a dozen countries and led him to discover that almost everything we know about depression and anxiety is wrong. I started to research my book, Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, because I was puzzled by two mysteries. Why was I still depressed when I was doing everything I had been told to do? I had identified the low serotonin in my brain, and I was boosting my serotonin levels–yet I still felt awful. But there was a deeper mystery still. Why were so many other people across the Western world feeling like me? Around one in five US adults are taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem. In Britain, antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in a decade, to the point where now one in 11 of us drug ourselves to deal with these feelings. What has been causing depression and its twin, anxiety, to spiral in this way? I began to ask myself: Could it really be that in our separate heads, all of us had brain chemistries that were spontaneously malfunctioning at the same time? He says that between 65% and 80% of people on antidepressants are depressed again within a year. We’ve been telling ourselves this chemical story for 35 years and every year depression and anxiety gets worse. The Power of Connection Searching for answers to his own depression, he began a quest to solve the depression puzzle. To find the answers, I ended up going on a 40,000-mile journey across the world and back. I talked to the leading social scientists investigating these questions, and to people who have [...]

2018-10-25T11:23:57-07:00By |

The Five Pillars of Intuition

Learn How to Develop Your Sixth Sense   Intuition is as natural as breathing, sleeping or eating. All of us have intuition. Some of us are more open to this capacity, and connection to higher information, than others, but we can all deepen and develop our intuition with a few simple techniques and daily rituals. Intuition is the spark, or gateway, to higher knowing and to living a fulfilled, flowing, effortless and peaceful life. Each day we are bombarded by an avalanche of information, demands and pressures, that squash our vastness into a tiny reality. This data smog and information overload swamps our intuition. Now more than ever, we need this innate capacity to guide us. The more lost we are in the pace of modern life, the more we need this anchor. Our Sixth Sense Intuition is very much a natural and inherent part of our natures. When you strip back all the learned stress behaviours, pressures, mental projections and layers of baggage, we find the radiance of our true self. This authentic nature is peaceful, blissful, and intuitive. Each one of us has this ability to know things, to sense things, to feel things, see things and hear things, beyond our conscious awareness. The origin of the word “intuition” is the Latin verb intueri, which is usually translated as to look inside or to contemplate. There is a growing body of research suggesting there are underlying non-conscious aspects of intuition. Among these aspects of intuition involved in intuitive perception are implicit learning, or implicit knowledge. Science is now showing that the heart is involved in the processing and decoding of intuitive information. Emotion and intuition seem to be also rooted both in the heart and the second brain in the gut. This is where the term, your gut instincts, comes from. Intuition is like a secret, inner jetpack that helps you make quantum leaps in your life, a map that reveals the shortcuts, opens up the pathway and holds the keys to your happiness. Is this building up intuition too much? I don’t think so. Even the military is studying the secrets of intuition. In the wake of snap intuitive judgments in the field of combat that saved many lives, US researchers are studying the power of intuition. Sensing impending danger, deciding whether objects are missiles or airliners, or detecting bombs, are a few situations where a snap judgment needs to be made and where lives are at stake. The US navy studies, with experts in neural, cognitive and behavioural science, were attempting to discover what gives rise to our so called “sixth sense” and how they can train marines to use it. A former US navy seal has even written four books on the subject and he believes that tapping into our intuition helps us to excel at light speed. Understanding what intuition is, can help us to recognise it. The basics of Intuition Intuition is an instinctual awareness. Actually, intuition is a mysterious and curious thing a [...]

2018-10-08T12:25:42-07:00By |

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