Francis Weller offers a reframing of depression that challenges the cultural addiction to speed. He suggests that what we often call depression may be the soul’s refusal to live at a manic pace—a quiet, insistent no to a world that equates worth with constant motion.
Francis speaks to how speed is useful for staying on the surface of life: for efficiency, productivity, and survival in modern systems. But depth, he reminds us, requires something else entirely. Depth requires stillness. It asks us to slow enough to feel, to grieve, to sense what has been lost or left unattended. When the soul longs for depth and is denied it, depression can emerge—not as pathology, but as protest.
In this light, depression becomes less a disorder to be eradicated and more a signal to pause. A message from the psyche that the pace of our lives has outstripped our capacity to metabolize experience. Healing, then, is not about speeding back up—but about learning how to dwell, to descend, and to listen.
Thank you to everyone who gathered with us and helped hold this slow, necessary inquiry.
#FrancisWeller #SoulWork #DepthRequiresStillness #DepressionReframed
#GriefAsTeacher #SlowingDown #TimesOfUncertainty #SANDFilms
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