How to cope with depressed emotions?

If you receive a large sum of money……

In the nineteenth century, a pious missionary and his two daughters lived in an isolated Danish village. The sisters inherited their father's religious business after his death and lived a life of renunciation of worldly desires. One day, the kind sisters took in a woman called Babette, who had come from Paris for refuge. Babette actually was once a famous chef in a French restaurant. She, fortunately, won 10,000 francs in the lottery, and she decided to use her winnings to cook a real French dinner for the two sisters and all the believers on the day of the sisters' father's birth anniversary. Before the dinner started, all the Puritans were accusing and suspecting each other. But as they enjoyed the delicious meal prepared by Babette, they slowly came to peace with themselves and with others and their hearts are surrounded by love again.

what do we pursue in life?

Sometimes people are so obsessed with pursuing goals that they think will lead to happiness that they get lost in overwhelming and depressing emotions and ignore the simple pleasures in the moment of their life.

In order to achieve "happiness" we tend to set many goals for ourselves. When I look at my report card, I felt that a perfect score can bring me happiness, so I start to set goals for myself. I will wake up early every day to review my French vocabularies, I will go over extra math problems by myself outside of class time. For me, every day starts to feel like going to war; every day I got out of bed and went to fight. And one day, I just felt exhausted. I found I became irritable and sometimes I would just fall into depression for no reason. I would question myself "What am I pursuing exactly?" Because I wasn't so sure I was pursuing happiness anymore.

In the film, the Puritans were pursuing their inner moral goals, believing that physical pleasures and worldly goods would corrupt their souls and that living a simple, ascetic life would bring them true spiritual joy, so they reject love and sex, they only eat the unpalatable ale bread, and when Babette's feast began, they even decided not to say a words about the food, not even to think about it. But what did they get? They would accuse each other during every congregation, they became narrow-minded and suspicious of each other. We all feel that we will get the true happiness when we have achieved a kind of self-fulfillment, and of course there's nothing wrong about this thought. As Aristotle state in his theory, true happiness is when you continue to develop your potential and constantly improve yourself in the process.

A truly happy life is intellectual contemplation. But I think that in the pursuit of "true happiness" we also should not neglect the pursuit of the simplest and most accessible happiness in the present moment of our life, which could be tasting a rum baba.

Rum baba – our lost part of joy.

The fluffy cake body is drizzled with golden brown rum syrup and surrounded by a variety of candied fruit and leaf-shaped fondant. The moist cake with a slight sweetness of fruit and bitterness of alcohol slowly melts in the mouth of the Puritans.

They are immersed in the ultimate enjoyment of the senses, and their deliberately repressed body consciousness is gradually awakened. They began to talk and recall the good memories of their lives, and after finishing dinner, they went outside, holding each other’s hands, and start to sing hymns under the stars. Babette's feast has helped these once-depressed Puritans regain the part of the joy they once lost and reignite their passion for food and life.

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To find out about the expressive therapy of this session, you may check out the link here: "Expressive therapy- Rum baba~"