There are peo­ple who wake up every morn­ing, go to work, pre­pare meals, an­swer their phones, pay their bills, smile when nec­es­sary, care for their chil­dren, ful­fil their re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, car­ry on with or­di­nary life—and yet, some­where deep in­side, they feel as though they have dis­ap­peared. They feel some­thing is miss­ing.

They de­scribe it in dif­fer­ent ways:

“I feel emp­ty.”

“I am just go­ing through the mo­tions.”

“I don’t feel like my­self any­more.”

“I’m not de­pressed. I just feel dead in­side.”

“It means noth­ing to me whether I live or die. I’m not try­ing to die; I just don’t know what I am liv­ing for.”

“Some­times I feel like my body is car­ry­ing me through a life that my heart has al­ready left.”

An­oth­er de­scribed her mar­riage: “My hus­band was be­side me, but emo­tion­al­ly he seemed miles away. I be­gan to re­sent him. And the more I re­sent­ed him, the less I recog­nised my­self.”

Emo­tion­al empti­ness can be pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the end of a re­la­tion­ship, years of dis­ap­point­ment, an un­ful­fill­ing mar­riage, un­em­ploy­ment, fi­nan­cial hard­ship, re­jec­tion, be­tray­al or dreams that nev­er ma­te­ri­alised. Some­times, how­ev­er, there is no sin­gle event to ex­plain it. Life sim­ply be­comes some­thing we en­dure rather than some­thing we in­hab­it.

These per­sons may not meet the clin­i­cal cri­te­ria for de­pres­sion. Some peo­ple de­scribe this as “high-func­tion­ing de­pres­sion,” al­though that is not a for­mal psy­chi­atric di­ag­no­sis. Clin­i­cians may con­sid­er Per­sis­tent De­pres­sive Dis­or­der, al­so known as dys­thymia, a chron­ic, low-grade low mood last­ing for two years or more.

Re­cent­ly, two peo­ple spoke to me about some­thing that helped re­vive their lives: spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. It pro­vid­ed a deep­er mean­ing, pur­pose and di­rec­tion in their lives. Both, though of dif­fer­ent faiths, found spir­i­tu­al­i­ty with­in their re­spec­tive re­li­gions.

They came to be­lieve that there is more to the uni­verse than meets the eye, and more to life than the phys­i­cal body. Re­li­gion of­fers shared be­liefs, tra­di­tions, prac­tices and com­mu­ni­ty; spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of­ten em­pha­sis­es per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence, re­flec­tion and a con­nec­tion to some­thing greater than one­self.

One spoke of the Bha­gavad Gi­ta, where Ar­ju­na stands paral­ysed by grief, con­fu­sion and de­spair, ques­tion­ing his pur­pose and abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue. Kr­ish­na re­minds him that he is more than the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing him.

That can be psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly mean­ing­ful.

You are not mere­ly the mar­riage that failed, or the job you could not ob­tain. You are not the dream that did not hap­pen or the chap­ter of your life that has end­ed.

Psy­cho­log­i­cal care and spir­i­tu­al wis­dom can some­times meet, both invit­ing us to cre­ate space be­tween our­selves and our present suf­fer­ing.

The Gi­ta al­so teach­es the im­por­tance of ac­tion with­out be­com­ing com­plete­ly con­sumed by the fruits of ac­tion. For a per­son who feels emp­ty, this can of­fer a gen­tle start­ing point.

You do not have to know ex­act­ly where your life is go­ing be­fore tak­ing the next mean­ing­ful step.

Get up. Wash your face. Eat some­thing. Walk out­side. Call some­one. Ap­ply for the job. Go to ther­a­py. Med­i­tate.

Help some­one.

Some­times mean­ing is re­dis­cov­ered through move­ment be­fore it is re­dis­cov­ered through emo­tion. Here we have a ther­a­peu­tic tool called be­hav­iour­al ac­ti­va­tion, al­ready ex­plained in the Gi­ta more than 2,000 years ago.

The oth­er per­son, a Chris­t­ian, turned to the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet is tak­en to a val­ley filled with dry bones. God asks, “Can these bones live?” It is a re­mark­able ques­tion be­cause it asks whether what ap­pears fin­ished might not be the fi­nal word. From a hu­man per­spec­tive, every­thing ap­peared fin­ished.

The peo­ple lament, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is gone; we are cut off.”

It is a pow­er­ful im­age of suf­fer­ing—not on­ly los­ing what we loved, but los­ing the fu­ture we imag­ined.

A woman may lose a mar­riage and grieve for the fam­i­ly life she thought she would have. A man may lose his job and lose his sense of com­pe­tence, dig­ni­ty and pur­pose.

Yet, the sto­ry does not end with dry bones. The bones were not mere­ly giv­en a sec­ond chance at life; they be­came a pic­ture of God bring­ing a dead, hope­less peo­ple back in­to life and pur­pose.

Per­haps that is the mes­sage for those who feel dead in­side: this may not be the end of your sto­ry.

We do not al­ways need to res­ur­rect our whole lives at once. Some­times we need on­ly to ask: “What part of me is still alive, and how can I care for it?”

What mat­ters is find­ing a path that leads one back to­wards life. The val­ley is not nec­es­sar­i­ly the end.

Some­times, it is where the search for hope be­gins.