I, occasionally, maybe twice a week, get listless… List·less(of a person or their manner) lacking energy or enthusiasm.
“bouts of listless depression”
synonyms: lethargic, enervated, lackadaisical, spiritless, unenergetic, lifeless, vigourless, lacking energy, limp, effete;
So I have been looking into what this listlessness really is. Is it an emotion? Is it a feeling? Where is it coming from?
It’s an unpleasant feeling. Not restful… quite the opposite, it makes me want to get rid of it.
I have, a few months ago, started to pop a tiny 5 mg Lithium Orotate when this listlessness comes, and in a few minutes it is gone… so that made me think.
Lithium is an essential nutrient, a mineral, that should be in your diet every day. In areas where there is no Lithium in the soil, people are more angry, drink more, and kill more.
Bipolars need Lithium to be well… and I have bipolar tendencies.
I am starting to see that the depressive phase of bipolar is not real depression: it is listlessness, a no spark state, disconnected from yourself and from life. Running on empty. A lack of self nurturing. 1
In the manic phase the sparks are spent… and no energy was fed to the system, or not enough.
Exciting things take energy and give none. They leave you in a listless state.
Maybe even postpartum depression is listlessness: the anticipation, the excitement, and then nothing… just a baby who needs… doesn’t give.
Ever since I wrote my first “running on empty” article years ago, I have been paying attention of making sure I don’t run on empty… and sometimes, of course, it is a challenge… a long coaching call with no echo can do it to me. Replete me to the degree that I need a longer recovery.
I prefer not to have to recover.
It is not ordinary energy that you need for the spark, the opposite of listless… it is spiritual energy. But how do you get it if you feel like you have nothing to give… or you don’t want to give anything?
- Affinity, warm feelings for another fill YOU up.
- Generosity… surprisingly, fills you up. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t true generosity.
- Finding things funny… laughing… fills you up.
You don’t have a big cup to hold your spiritual energy… so you have to fill it regularly… find your favorite and most natural way to do it. You’ll find that the episodes of listlessness will be less and less…
But, to your chagrin, all the ways you recover your lost spark is through giving. And people who most suffer from listlessness and the frequent loss of the spirit are the ones who least want to give: whose entire existence is vested in getting, and getting and getting.
The insatiable, the black hole type… entitled…
But, because without the Life Force, without that spark nothing is worth anything, you, even the black hole, needs to learn to give. You need to be “spiritually greedy” as Rav Berg used to say…
You don’t want to give, but giving buys you more than not giving, so you are smart enough to do it…
So what do you give?
It most depends on what is your favorite way to access the “divine”… Mine is goodness.
I am aggrieved by evil, by “homo homini lupus”… 2 and uplifted by “either everyone counts or no one counts”.
You could be a beauty person, where harmony and perfection lifts your spirits… but you have to recognize it… and be generous to allow it… in spite of your self-righteousness of what constitutes beauty.
You have to give up your fixed idea of what is perfect, so life’s perfection can reach you… the “divine”…
When you catch yourself seeing something imperfect, not the way it should be (according to your majesty, yourself!) you need to let go… and allow “the divine” to shine… Because what robs you of the spark is your insistence on your own opinion of how it should be.
This is, by the way true for the goodness person as well… I have to give up how humans should be, and love them the way they are, however painful that feels… Because, surprise, everyone wants to be right… including myself.
And the truth people… same thing. Letting go of how truth should look, and allow truth to look the way it looks… Mighty difficult, if there is any comparison with goodness.
The more “spiritually greedy” you allow yourself to be, the more Light, the more spark it earns you when you let go of your personal opinion how things should be… allowing the people you profess to love to be the way they are… Ugh… right?
I didn’t say the medicine will taste good… And…
I can’t promise that the episodes of listlessness will disappear… they haven’t disappeared for me. Watching TV, even if I watch it on Amazon or Netflix can be really draining for me. As are books that have nothing to inspire, nothing to ponder about.
It is not easy to find entertainment that is nurturing… If it is too titillating, it is draining. If it is boring, it is draining. It has to have beauty or truth or goodness.
I am a goodness person… I need the entertainment to have goodness… no goodness? it is draining me of my spark.
You may be a beauty person, or a truth person. Pay attention what leaves you more flush than when you started…
And even in giving… I am most nurtured by love, affinity, warm feelings for another… even if I can’t or don’t show.
Now, if your tendency is to look for a reason why you feel listless… stop now. You are making something bad worse… just do something that has the chance to give you spark… spark is missing. That’s all.
So what is MY process?
- First: I identify what example of “evil” is sucking me dry.
- Second: I allow myself to grieve it. Preferably consciously, or I will have some sleepless nights… the unconscious fixing machine (the mind) will keep me up at night.
- Third: I consciously allow all the evil to exist exactly the way it does. It is a struggle, but it can be done.
- Fourth: I give a little love, or a lot of love to even the evil… Embrace it… and now it is done.
Heaven, the spark, returns to Earth… and I can sleep, I can work, I can laugh… all is well.
- Lithium Orotate is banned in Canada… Why? I have a personal opinion about that: a nation that is kept in listlessness is a nation of sheep… Huh? Yeah, when the spark is gone, and it does go, occasionally, no matter who you are! then you can pretend… and smile, and be holier than you, but will be miserable. And a miserable people is sheep… That is what Canada is aiming for. Why? I guess they want to be special… And they are succeeding. The haughtiest, most pretentious prize goes to Canada and California.
- Man is a wolf to man… Which, truthfully, mis-characterize the wolf, who would not kill for no reason… humans do. [weep, weep]
Sigmund Freud agreed with the proverb, writing in his Civilization and Its Discontents, “Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
