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In Barefoot Doctor's own words -

My own experience with depression

My role is to help you and/or anyone who wants it live and love your own story more – it’s all about you, not me in other words. 

But I feel impelled to share my own story to strike a chord of empathy with everyone who’s suffering from depression, rather than possibly being thought of as just some Taoist chancer peddling tools to fix conditions he couldn’t really care less about. Not that I would care, but it would be doing you and potentially everyone a disservice were it not made clear that what I have to share can truly help you. 

Between ages 14-17, with hormones in flux and raging hard, and being no stranger to the inner world, I’d been training in aikido, meditation and healing for 3 years before the full hurdy-gurdy of puberty was upon me – I’d even taken my first acid trip before I was 14. Yet even this nascent armory was no match for the hormones and I’d regularly succumb to bouts of intense depression, so deep I’d touch the very foundations of the primordial swirl of existence, mind tainted with such dread, it was all I could do to function day-to-day. These were followed by bouts of such exhilaration and excitement it was impossible to keep any semblance of feet on the ground as I soared to the heights of existence and gaze into the face of God (Tao – who doesn’t really have a face, save the ones we ascribe it – obviously). Once the cyclic nature of these alternating bouts became evident I also noticed around halfway through the up-phase I’d start succumbing to increasing anxiety about the inevitable next down-phase.

 Fortunately for me, back in those antediluvian days people around still had the common sense to tell me, ‘don’t worry, it’s your hormones, it’s normal, it’ll pass, you’ll get through it – you’ve just got to keep going’. These days I’d have been taken to a doctor, been diagnosed bipolar, clinically depressed and/or even manically depressed, and be prescribed anti-depressives, which would have attenuated the intensity of the existential crisis I was going through enough to make me not bother doing the actual work I so needed to do to correct the condition.

 And had that been the case none of this fine work I’m proud to say has helped well over the million-plus people I’ve done one-to-one sessions with, not to mention the incalculable millions who’ve benefited online and via all the books and retreats and workshops and talks, and TV programs and radio shows and all the rest – none of it would have happened and we’d not be here now discussing the potential for attaining to the state of unfettered personal magnificence we’re each here in this lifetime to embody and enjoy.

Towards the end of the hormonally driven bipolar phase I was in, I’d finally acknowledged and acquiesced to the fact I’d grow by a quantum leap through each bout of down, so that rather than resist the down, I might as well welcome it, enjoy it even. 

And that’s when depression became no longer depression, but it’s opposite, a form of expression the Tao of me was deploying to get my attention and train me. I went through many stages to reach that and had I had the psycho-energetic efficiency I now enjoy it would all have been a lot easier and swiftly passing, and I’d still have attained to the blessings hidden in the folds of each dark night of the soul. Had I gone the modern way of masking the condition I’d still be inwardly terrified of depression and would be doing all sorts of modern and in my opinion inefficient ways to avoid it. I would still be terrified of depression. But I’m not because I’m 100% protected from doing that to myself now.

 However, if you or someone you know who needs this, are trying to avoid or are in a bout of depression, whether chronic or passing, whether bipolar, manic or steady, whether clinical or non-clinical, indeed no matter which descriptor has been used to shackle you to.

Change the way you see yourself and your life.

In the training I take you through the psycho-emotional components of depression and show you how, by addressing each factor comprising the condition, determining where you originally made the choice to be defeated by each of them, and then actively choosing differently, the so-called depression lifts.

We’ll be examining exactly which factors comprise the condition for you, and addressing them and showing you how to exercise different choices for each.

We’ll also be examining the moments of trauma that occurred to trigger those initial choices in the first place, because awareness of these and revisiting the scene of the crime so to speak is essential for making different choices.

And as well as this obvious psycho-emotional level of operation there are also further levels to consider.

The physical-energetic level

A certain degree of compression of the wild self is normal, but when the mind is cluttered or prejudiced against simply enjoying being here, or when societal conditioning has had such an impact you’re living a total pretense, and the self-exerted control is so in excess you find it impossible to experience catharsis or express yourself freely to any extent, your flow of life-force is in dire need of stimulation to reduce the self-compressing tendency – hence we’ll be learning all relevant ways to stimulate the liver energy.