Finding My Sacred Self By Sylvia Clare

 

Image | Tina Nord

Finding My Sacred Self

In 2008 I have a complete breakdown, following my father’s death. I am rigid with terror. I am diagnosed with complex trauma from childhood, PTSD and eventually ADHD. It lastsfor six years as a constant struggle to overcome the terror that is such deep trauma. It takes another ten years to get over the triggering of that trauma. In those years I learn a lot about myself and about life. I am lucky.

I already have a number of years of both practising and teaching meditation and mindfulness, the practice and the psychology of it, applied to normal living and emotional experiences. I started writing books based on those insights and learning in 1996. I know how well my meditation and mindfulness background are keeping me going throughout the breakdown, even though I find it too intense to practice any specific meditation. I return again and again to the healing Dharma truths. Impermanence, nonself, interbeing. ‘In this moment all that is real is David’s love for me  - in this moment I am safe’. 

Those help me get through the darkest moments, always just getting me through them. Most of the time I feel such revulsion at myself. It isn’t mine though. It was the emotion my parents poured into me from a very early age. I wasn’t what they wanted.

I’m struggling to stay alive – to believe I have the right to stay alive. My husband David goes through every single day of this with me, loving me, holding me, trusting I will eventually come back to him. I come back from the brink so many times.

I decide to give mindfulness and meditation a deeper go, with some intensive immersion. I book myself on four retreats with the Thich Nhat Hanh community in UK and Plum village in France and embark on four intensive healing retreats.

Each one lifts the darkness a little more, but when I come back from the final one at Plum Village something has truly shifted in me. I have reached bliss. I don’t exactly feel the moment when it arrives. I just started noticing things are different in me. Everything is just the same, and yet, everything is completely different. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

It is astonishing but I gradually notice all the back chat and noise in my head has gone silent. Not just quieted down, butvanished. All the tightness of fear has gone from my body. I notice I have no sense of I, or me or an independent separate self-identity. I feel instead as if I am part of the flow of everything. I can watch my body go through the motions of any task and there is no agenda attached to it. I am observing my body doing whatever it is doing, and it is not ‘me’ anymore. I have let go so completely that I have let go of myself too. I keep thinking it will end. One week, two weeks, A month, two months. It continues to feel as if I could just do anything and nothing would matter. I am but a molecule of golden light, in a vast ocean of similar such molecules. Everything and everyone is in the same ocean. Except this ocean is an abyss, an endlessness that it is impossible to fathom. Anything else isn’t real, only this is reality. I am simply there in perfect balance and harmony, in pure consciousness, floating through a materialistic, incarnate life, and nothing really matters.

It feels amazing. I think this is it, it’s over, forever, I’m healed. I feel invincible, reborn and astonished.

This is as challenging for David as my breakdown was. I seem to have no attachments of any kind, not even to him, the wonderful husband who has helped me get through it all, who has encouraged my trips to meditate and heal and who is now being left behind. I know I still love him and want to be with him, but it will be different, there is no dependency or attachment, just love and a decision to make for the future of this selfless body. 

I have that zen moment of realisation. Quietly and gently I realise that this is it. Life with all its messy annoying devastating experiences and all its deep joy and tenderness too – this is what it is all about. Not just one without the other, but all of it. It feels complete. Life makes sense. The purpose of this life is just for the experience, nothing more and nothing less than that. Getting too caught up in the material reality or the details misses that point completely. I feel remarkably free and liberated and wonder if I’ve achieved ‘some kind of enlightenment’, or am developing a brain tumour.

After four months or more, it changes again. I start to feel things differently. I cry out when someone accidentally digs up a favourite part of my garden. The death of the plants causes me great pain. I feel as if a knife has been stabbed into me, over some snowdrops and hellebores. My favourite plants. David comforts me and I cling to him in confusion. I need him suddenly, to be there, my solid wonderful husband and soulmate. I love him but now I need him again. It is changing. First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is. 

It is the final stage. I must feel everything, but differently. I know I have a choice. I can close myself down once more, as I did as a child, to survive this openness in a world that does not value it. Or I can stay open and take a chance. I know, this time in my life, it is safe, I am safe. I stay open. That choice is closed to me. Now I will forever be open, Now I must learn to cope with this way of being in the world. I start to love everyone and everything, but the fears return. I cannot feel safe in this world, not yet. Only in this house, with David. I start writing again, writing everything. Writing my story. Writing to reach out to others.

But we must sell the house after a while. I am re-traumatised by the whole process of moving. I work hard to stay sane and eventually, some three years or so later, I am stable once more. 

I move on. I start to relive parts of the life I had before I met David. I go solo overland travelling once again, to Africa.  Our relationship has grown so close we are both entirely free to be and do whoever and whatever we are. No one can find a tiniest space between us. We are one mountain together. 

He tracks me online to share the adventure from the house we now live in.

I come back from Africa and sleep far more than I have done in decades. I am sleeping long nights and afternoons as well. No more endless insomnia. After a week I start to sleep more normally. I know the trauma has finally gone. Africa showed me the world is a safe place, David’s love showed me it was worth living.  I am still in love with everything, I am still open, and still sensitive. I am still here.

© Sylvia Clare

Sylvia Clare

Sylvia Clare came into writing later in life as result of her journey to find out who she was, having struggles with mental health herself for most of her life, and wanting to help others too. She mainly writes memoir and poetry, or essays about mindfulness, mental health and living well. She cares passionately about kindness in the world, developing compassion and caring for the environment. She is a deeply spiritual free thinker and does not adhere to any single religion, but believes everyone should seek to explore their own deeper spiritual natures and find their own truths. She lives with her soulmate and spends much of her time gardening organically, growing her own food and writing. MY books can be found on Amazon here: Amazon.com: Sylvia Clare: books, biography, latest update. 

Her website is http://www.clarity-books.com/.

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