Sixteen days on Effexor XR, seven of them on the higher dose of 75 mg in the morning. I decided to not lower Luvox quite so quickly. I am taking 25 mg in the morning and 37.5 mg in the afternoon. In three more days I will increase Effexor XR to 112.5 mg and lower Luvox to 25 mg on both doses. I have had short periods of time where I feel the depression symptoms are lifting. I am still not feeling side effects or withdrawal, which is a huge positive!
I am still hopeful. I am trying to take life a day at a time. Prayer and faith in my Higher Power to give me direction are sustaining me. Listening to Eckhart Tolle every day helps me stay focused on the Now, not spending much time in the past or making up a possible future. Chapter 8 in, The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Tolle explains what he believes salvation is.
"True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to 'know God' --- not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. (I believe this is my spirit, which Tolle calls the inner being. I believe my spirit is a literal offspring of my Higher Power.) True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.
True salvation is a state of freedom --- from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency and therefore from all wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging. It is freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. Your mind is telling you that you cannot get there from here. Something needs to happen, or you need to become this or that before you can be free and fulfilled. It is saying, in fact, that you need time --- that you need to find, sort out, do, achieve, acquire, become, or understand something before you can be free or complete.
You see time as the means to salvation, whereas in truth it is the greatest obstacle to salvation. You think that you can't get there from where and who you are at this moment because you are not yet complete or good enough, but the truth is that here and now is the only point from where you can get there. You 'get' there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God. So there is no only way to salvation: Any condition can be used, but no particular condition is needed. However, there is only one point of access: the Now. There can be no salvation away from this moment.
There is nothing you can ever do or attain that will get you closer to salvation than it is at this moment. This may be hard to grasp for a mind accustomed to thinking that everything worthwhile is in the future. Nor can anything that you ever did or that was done to you in the past prevent you from saying yes to what is and taking your attention deeply into the Now. You cannot do this in the future. You do it now or not at all."
Fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness ... a state of freedom --- from fear, from suffering, from a perceived state of lack and insufficiency, wanting, needing, grasping, and clinging ... freedom from compulsive thinking, from negativity, and above all from past and future as a psychological need. This is what I want. I am getting better at Living in the Now everyday.
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