by Paula Keogh
One morning, Rowan tells me that she dreamed she took a big bite out of a nice red apple and found a horrible fat worm inside. She feels cheated and cross, and will not eat her breakfast.
Not long after, I pack up our belongings in our Toyota station wagon. We drive to Melbourne on a straight route along the highway, trying to make it in one day. Rowan and I are soon living in an inner suburb just a couple of kilometres from my sister Annie and her family.
Late one afternoon, Rowan and I go walking around Merri Creek, just down the hill from our place. The light is fading but it feels wild among the trees, and we don’t want to leave.
As the sun sets, a full moon rises, and magic is in the air. Rowan throws a stone into the reflection of the moon on the surface of the creek. As the stone lands, the moon’s reflection breaks into thousands of fragments, rippling and shining in the darkness. A river of stars among the trees.
Gradually the moon re-forms, and Rowan laughs and throws another stone at it, watching as it disintegrates again. She continues to throw stones at the reflection, and each time as it re-forms, she calls out, excited, ‘It’s coming back!’ The silver plate of the moon, shattering and then re-forming, and shattering again.
We’re eating wild fennel seeds. I see the flash of light on a bird’s wing, and hear birds calling and twittering. My daughter says, ‘Mum, the trees are filled to the brim with birds.’ And I am filled to the brim with love. Rowan and the world. Like the moon, I break. And I re-form.
*
Survival isn’t enough. To endure isn’t everything. I want more. I’m on a quest to be healed, and my quest-ion is: Can I free myself of madness?
With immense effort, I can be sane on the outside. When required, I can arrange my face, walk through the door and come out the other side smiling. I can play that role but, on the inside, the madness attacks the person I’m trying to become. The strain and stress of keeping the sane, smiling woman separate from the mad noise is like fighting from the trenches, every day trying to keep the enemy at bay. It’s not the way I want to live.
I’ve been meditating for about four years now, ever since Rowan was two years old. A friend told me about a meditation group he was part of and the healing effects he experienced following his initiation into it. An image formed in my mind of a mandala, of wholeness, of being healed. I started going to the meditation sessions, then chanting and meditating in private as well, and later I placed a photo of the guru on my desk.
So I go to India. To reconcile the dualities of madness and sanity. To open myself to grace. To pray.
Dawn is breaking as the bus stops outside the front gate of the ashram. Through the windows I glimpse a large gong suspended from a metal frame at the side of high ornamental gates and a stone wall. A woman in a sari is kneeling on the ground in the semi-darkness and drawing a mandala on the path, and people are gathering around the bus. Rowan awakens quickly, excited. As she picks up her small backpack, and I collect my larger one, a man in a lungi beats the gong with a mallet. I smell incense in the air. We stand there, surrounded by the sound of the gong and the animated voices of men organising the luggage.
The sky is luminous behind the whitewashed ashram buildings, and in the small trees along the road, birds are singing. Hindus believe that the world was created with the sound of a gong. I imagine that the world we’re about to enter has come into existence at this very moment just for us.
Some days later, I enter the ashram temple for a special intensive meditation session. The marble floor is smooth and cool beneath my feet. The long hall with its high ceiling and wide-open windows is filled with rows of people sitting on floor cushions. Incense floats in the air like veils of gauze. I breathe in, absorbing the atmosphere of excitement and anticipation. Just as the bhajan group begins the chant, I find a place for myself.
Before long I’m lost in the music. The resonance of the sacred words, om nama shivaya, om nama shivaya, opens my mind and drowns out the mad thoughts. As hundreds of us descend into meditation, the chanting ceases and a hush descends on the temple. Time opens into a silence that’s filled with grace and love, and I give thanks for my life. As the guru passes by me, she brushes my head with peacock feathers. I lean towards her to touch the hem of her robe, and my heart is pounding, my face is wet with tears. I feel like the woman in the Gospel who said within herself as Jesus passed by, ‘If I may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be whole.’
Rowan and I settle easily into life at the ashram and stay there for two months. My day starts at three-thirty when I pull myself out of sleep and slip into the temple for chanting and meditation. Afterwards, as dawn breaks, I stand in front of an outdoor fire sipping hot chai under a muslin sky. As I warm my hands on my cup, I watch the leaping flames light up the faces of the people around me, catching the white of their teeth, the gleam of their eyes. I breathe in the dawn, the gentleness of the light, its stillness and its promise.
Later in the morning, Rowan joins the other children at the school where they’re told stories from the Bhagavad Gita, and they draw mandalas and pictures of Hindu deities. In the afternoons we join a group of parents and children in the lush ashram garden to do our seva, the work that’s our contribution to the ashram community. We water the plants – and sometimes the children – and together play games as we take brooms to the crisscrossing paths, ensuring that not one leaf remains on the smooth stones, not one weed in the garden beds.
I feel immersed in a spiritual reality that gives substance and meaning to my daily life. I honour the image of the guru as the teacher who can help me connect more deeply to this reality, and free myself from thoughts and feelings I can’t control. I believe that if I just keep meditating, I’ll be healed.
*
On our return from India, Rowan and I start creating a life in Melbourne. She goes to the same school as her cousins, and we develop a weekly habit of having a spaghetti dinner at Bakers Cafe on Brunswick Street. During the day, I work part-time cleaning houses and gardening, and attend classes in Naturopathy at the Southern School of Natural Therapies. I continue to meditate, and I embrace the teachings of the guru with even greater devotion.
At times I’m able to connect with a state of being that transcends the personality I create to get me through the day. I think of this state as pure consciousness, not unlike the Buddhist understanding of emptiness: a seamless reality that pervades everything and is everything. It’s the immanence of the mystics, the love of Rumi, the inspiration of the poets. It’s the music that Julianne discovered: the music that lives in us and is the world playing. It’s the ‘somewhere else’ that Michael’s poems came from. When I’m able to immerse myself in this reality, it becomes the ground of my being, linking me to an inner sense of self.
But I haven’t been healed; there’s been no miracle. While I’ve added a spiritual dimension to my life, my daily struggle with hypercritical thoughts and a hypersensitivity to other people’s energy continues. It makes being with people a constant strain, if not impossible. I’m exhausted from dealing with feelings of being attacked and undermined as I try to hold my life together. My mind twists and turns and will not let me rest, but I hold on to the hope that meditation will eventually free me of tormenting thoughts.
Eighteen months after returning from India, I discover that my guru’s guru, the teacher who brought his sect to the West, has been involved in sexual exploits with female members of his circle and sexual abuse of young girls. I’m devastated. A number of people from the group, including a former female swami who is now a friend, corroborate the stories that are circulating.
My faith in the guru, and in the concept of a guru, collapses. I stop attending meditation and chanting sessions. I feel like I felt when I lost my Catholic faith – I’ve lost the ground beneath my feet.
*
My breakdown this time is less violent and more gradual. As I become aware that I’m losing touch with reality, I recognise that I need professional help. I can’t tolerate th
e thought of seeing a psychiatrist, but I find a psychotherapist who’s willing to take me on as a client. He is eclectic in his practices, drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Fritz Perls, existential humanist philosophers and others. When I’m acutely psychotic, he administers lemon juice to my eyes, a technique he observed being used in the Philippines for people suffering delusions and disorientation. The effect is immediate – it briefly shocks the brain out of psychosis, giving me some time to process the thoughts that overwhelm me.
Therapy with this psychologist involves a long journey through my inner world. I explore my delusions and illusions, trying to find their meanings and learn how to manage them. Throughout, I struggle with noise, the mind’s incessant talking at me, and mad voices and images. I can’t turn the madness off. But, in time, I learn to talk back to it, even converse with it, and sometimes I just write it out of me, like lancing a boil, to ease the pressure in my head. At other times, I walk hard and fast around Merri Creek, or curl up in bed with the curtains closed.
During the day, I’m aware only of the need to be functional by the time Rowan comes home from school. Around two-thirty, I focus on physical activities in an effort to get my mind to slow down. When Rowan arrives an hour or so later, I become the mother: I walk through the door leaving the mad woman behind me. I smile; I give Rowan a hug. The mother knows what to do. She takes Rowan shopping, does the washing up, then cooks dinner while Rowan reads books and does her homework.
Together we watch Hey Dad..! and A Country Practice. For me the tension is almost unbearable – just to keep my mind on track, hold the mother together. Bedtime is the hardest because Rowan has trouble getting to sleep. The mother tells stories, massages her legs, slowly counts backwards from a hundred. But I can’t hold the mother together for much longer. I walk out of Ro’s room, leaving the door ajar. Hoping she’ll sleep.
I worry about how my mental state is affecting her. She’s now eight years old and always has her nose in a book. One day as I drive up the road to our place, I see her coming home from school, her bag on her back and a book open in her hand, reading as she walks along the street. She seems so contained, so self-sufficient. But another day while looking through my books, I come across a torn piece of paper wedged between two pages. Written on it in child’s writing is: ‘Hullo. Is anyone there? Is there anyone I can talk to?’
I know something of what it means for Rowan to have me for a mother. I know there are good times. We have stories, songs, wild and playful adventures, cuddles and games. And we have a dog, a black kelpie cross named Pippa. When we brought Pippa home, Rowan said, ‘We’re a real family now.’
Sometimes my daughter goes to Adelaide for holidays with Sean and comes back with new songs she’s learned. Once she came back with a guitar that she immediately set about learning to play.
I also know that life can be very hard for Rowan. She endures long stretches of loneliness. Through these times, she looks after herself; she reads books and tells herself stories. What she endures beyond the loneliness, I can only guess.
There’s one imperative in my life: to stay sane for the times that Rowan is with me. When I can’t hold it together, she goes to Sydney and stays with my sister Irene, a Brigidine nun who’s now the principal of a primary school. More regularly, Rowan stays with Annie, who is a constant support in our lives. I don’t know what I’d do without Annie and Irene – their ongoing generosity, their sensitivity and care. This isn’t just a figure of speech: I literally don’t know what I’d do without their help. I worry that I’ll fall off the cliff and lose Rowan. Become homeless, go to prison, lose my life.
I keep working with the psychotherapist on my delusions and hallucinations. The more I examine them and tell their stories, the more I’m able to integrate them with my emotions and with language. It’s a long and painful task to bring sanity into the chaos, to moderate the irrational with the rational. Madness is cruel, and sometimes I have no idea what sanity is or what it feels like. It’s essential to have the support of a professional who knows the pitfalls of the journey and can handle psychotic imagery.
While I’m immersed in psychotherapy, books become another lifeline. My eyes don’t leave the pages of Martin Buber’s I and Thou as my mind is opened to the concepts of dialogue and the I–Thou relationship. He believes that this open and responsive relationship is the existential reality through which the self comes into being – in other words, the self isn’t something you’re born with; it’s created through relationships with others.
I realise that my self isn’t an object, an entity, but rather a process, always in flux. My self is a mutable flow of energy, my inner world intersecting with the world around me – adapting, choosing, responding, initiating. Creating a fluctuating pattern that I recognise as being me. My identity is an interplay between being and becoming, stillness and movement, opening and closing.
I’m venturing into new territory. I read Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be and discover ideas about anxiety, non-being and being, and the importance of having the courage to bear these states. I see that the pain of my existence is an experience that belongs to me as a human being. Suffering is part of the deal. I remember Michael saying that the only true things are love and suffering. I take deep breaths and learn to endure.
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning changes me too. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna before being interned in Auschwitz and later Dachau by the Nazis. His primary question was: When faced with unimaginable suffering, why do people not commit suicide? Frankl quotes Nietzsche, ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’ He concerns himself with how people make larger sense of apparently senseless suffering, how they find meaning. I read his book from cover to cover in a few hours, and then I read it again and take notes.
Inspired by these writers, I enrol in a postgraduate diploma in Psychoanalytic Studies. I study the work of psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva. This study brings to my experience of therapy a structure and a discipline that, while not as inspiring as the existentialists I’m reading, gives me a sense of the complexity of the human psyche. I see how I can make choices that affect both the unconscious and conscious dimensions of my mind. I read every theory about madness that I can find, and I try to understand my life’s trajectory.
*
During a psychotherapy session, I remember an original trauma of temporarily losing my mother when I was very young. When I ask Mum about it now, she tells me that I was hospitalised for six weeks just before my second birthday – I’d contracted measles, mumps and chicken pox simultaneously. I have memory fragments from that time; one involves an unbearable sensation of air being blown on my skin from a fan at the end of my bed. Even now I can see the ward: the arrangement of the other children’s cots, and the door through which the nurses came and went.
I also remember the day my mother arrived to take me home. She was carrying a baby in a pouch on her chest. The shock of her holding a baby. Me. Not me.
When I ask Mum if she visited me, she says, ‘We knew you were being well looked after.’ I was at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, and she had no doubt that visiting me wouldn’t serve any purpose and would probably upset me. There were also practical reasons: the hospital was a long way from where my family lived, and she was heavily pregnant with her fourth child and had two other young kids to care for. She gave birth to my younger brother while I was in hospital.
At the time, there was very little understanding of the depth and importance of a child’s attachment to its mother. I know that Mum would never have left me alone if she’d thought for a second that it would cause me the grief it did.
In this original experience of separation from my mother, I lost the confidence that the presence of a primary carer gives a child. Even though Mum came back, another baby was there in her arms, not me. My child self couldn’t integrate this experience of loss into my precarious and unf
ormed sense of self. For six weeks, I was cut off from everything familiar, and I was ill with delirium and physical pain. When Mum left me at the hospital, my whole world disappeared and, with it, my self. When it was time for her to bring me home, she had another baby there; I never recovered my place in her arms.
I now believe that this early trauma is the origin of my extreme response to loss and the threat of loss. In my breakdowns, I revert to the hallucinatory state and psychological disintegration that I experienced as a twenty-three month old. This experience is at the core of the anxiety that I carried as a child, and of the madness that first erupted into my life with Julianne’s death and then again when Michael died.
*
Although I pledge myself to sanity, at times during psychotherapy the madness spills out again, but with enduring support from my family and friends, good professional help and good luck, I’m able to avoid hospitalisation.
But while I’m immensely grateful for the healing and insight that psychotherapy brings me, it hasn’t been an ultimate cure. I’ve come to the view that, very possibly, such a cure doesn’t exist. Still, I’m not ready to give up, and I’m stronger now. I can manage the madness and develop a more cohesive and fluid pattern of energy that I can depend on to be myself in the world. I’m building a hut in the middle of the river where I can rest.
It’s my fiftieth year, and I’m still on my quest to find a quiet mind. I begin to think that if I move out of the suburbs to the countryside, maybe the green energy of the bush will soften my sharp edges and quiet the noise.
This urge coincides with the end of Rowan’s schooling. For fourteen years we’ve lived together, just the two of us, and now we’re restless and want to discover new ways of being. Rowan’s been awarded a University of Melbourne scholarship and wants to live in a share house, so we decide that she’ll stay at our place and share it with her friends, and I’ll take off to the bush.
