While you take someone through the timeline therapy, you ask them to recall the very first memory of the negative emotion. Once you have confirmation, you ask a clarifying question. Something like, Was that before, after, or during birth? As you are going through the process, you want to be a blank canvas and allow whatever is in your consciousness to come to you.
I was surprised when the words “before birth” came out of my mouth, floating up above the event before the event occurred. A crystal-clear image appeared of a middle-aged man with a beard, wearing long grey trousers and a whitish, long-sleeved shirt. He was chopping wood. It seemed like the 18th century, four or five generations back. He’d had an argument with his wife. It felt like he had said something hurtful and had lost his temper. He was talking to himself. I faintly heard him berating himself, muttering words of how stupid he was. Upset, he was chopping wood near a cottage. The undertone of his vibe was one of guilt. This genealogical experience was revealing. It highlighted that the core of our struggles over the generations has remained the same. As the famous UK 1960s and ‘70s singer Shirley Bassey sang, “It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.” Talk about an emotional liberation!
“People get really interesting when they
start to rattle the bars of their cages.”
~ Alain de Botton
Looking back, knowing what I know now, I see that NLP training is a valuable experience on many levels. Often, we have points of pain trapped in our bodies and consciousness that are trigger points for emotional reactions that we struggle to control. Seemingly small incidents can mean the end of the world, and all of a sudden, the sky is falling down and we have a big drama show on our hands. To be free from the hold that our emotions can have over us, to liberate our consciousness and live a full expressive life, means to do the inner work. Releasing trapped negative emotions that lie beneath the surface like an iceberg drifting out to sea waiting to bump into any obstacle that comes its way.
Since that time in the NLP training, I learned that Scientology has a process similar to the one I went through in 2012. It was a weekend course called Dianetics, a system created by the founder, L. Ron Hubbard. I won’t go into too much detail, but the process is similar to Time Line Therapy. One of the main differences is that in Dianetics they encourage you to go into the emotion, reliving it and releasing the charge. The program specializes in clearing negative emotions experienced while you were in the womb, also from past lives, known as past-life regressions.
I don’t know who is right or wrong—NLP or Scientology—from my experience. I have found them both to be effective ways of releasing heavy toxic emotions from one’s mind and consciousness. Each time I have been taken through the processes, I have felt lighter and emotionally free. I have no resentment towards the NLP facilitator at all; he was doing the best he could with what he knew at the time. Holding a grudge would be like carrying a heavy load of wood in summer for no good reason or benefit to me at all. Best to let go and move on.
It was such a gift to go through the Coach the Coach training program. Before I discovered personal development, I struggled to come to terms with the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse I had experienced as a child, often suppressing my emotions and authentic feelings, partly because I didn’t know how to express myself. I was too afraid and perplexed. Using recreational drugs helped me manage the pain, which was too much for me to feel and deal with on my own back then, almost 19 years ago now.
It doesn’t matter who you are, we are all equal emotionally; we all experience a full spectrum of emotions—ups, downs, happiness, sadness, bad days and good days. The question is, who are you most of the time? What is your set point? Dying to our old limiting self is necessary in order to evolve into a better version of ourselves. You can do this by reaching past your struggles up for the stars, moving beyond your crippling fears.
“Embrace the struggle and let it make
you stronger. It won’t last forever.”
~ Tony Gaskins
Recently I attended a monthly event just outside of Ubud. Akasha holds monthly full moon consciousness parties. The venue is out of this world: nestled in the rice fields, this two-story epic bamboo structure, plush pool, a stage for performers, DJs and their famous cacao ceremonies. Going to the full moon parties by myself is generally a bit of a stretch. All the different energies coming together, although a beautiful thing, challenges my heightened level of sensitivity around large crowds. I force myself to go anyway. I have a good time as well, bumping into friends and making new ones.
Dealing with struggles is like developing muscles in the gym. Taking yourself out of your comfort zone and into activities and situations that are good for you grows your resilience and stretches your capacity to handle stress, increasing your ability to solve problems. Ideally, you want to do something every day that scares you, making your heart beat a little bit faster. Start small, look at all areas of your life—health, relationships, work life, etc. You’ll be amazed at your progress with small daily steps into the direction of your fears. We’re looking for progress over perfection. Cut yourself some slack. You deserve it.
Back to my struggle with anger. Note to self: you are not your thoughts or feelings; you are the thinker of your thoughts and the feeler of emotions. I’ve learned through awareness that anger is an emotion that is expressed or bottled up; it’s not who I am. People don’t describe me as an angry person. There is an aspect of myself that gets angry, but I’m ok in my imperfection. I’ve learned that I’m not going to get rid of it, but I can manage my emotional states and uncover the triggers that set it off.
Mindful practices are your best friends when you are wanting to learn about yourself by charting unexplored aspects of your personality. Daily meditation is a habit I’ve had for several years now. It’s helpful to track your practice daily.
I personally use the app insighttimer.com. It’s fantastic and offers a huge range of various styles of meditations. Mostly I use the timer and focus on my breathing. It has excellent guided mediations as well. Yoga is another unique way to keep in shape and is fantastic for laying a peaceful foundation for the rest of the day. I like to drink a minimum of 1.5 litres or 50 ounces of water a day. Again, I measure this daily by using a 1.5-liter drink bottle. As I mentioned before, I attend a men’s circle that helps me to speak about my emotions. I also attend sing-alongs, kirtan, Toastmasters, and improvisational theatre, and I and do these consistently.
Above everything else, I’m looking for balance in all areas of my life. If your emotions are stable, it is much easier to achieve harmony with everything else in your life. You learn to give yourself a break, cut yourself some slack, allow yourself to be happy, letting go of your struggles. And when you get to live life on your own terms. That’s freedom. As Dr.Hawkins mentions it’s valuable to know what level of emotional frequency that you are vibrating, using your feelings as a gauge. Taking short exercise breaks through the day helps shift your vibration into a higher frequency. Notice how much better you feel as a measurement. Going on our emotional journey it’s easy to forget that we are not alone with the various struggles that we might be going through. While the form can be different the underlying emotion is the same, our ancestors have felt the exact same emotions. May you be blessed on your journey, echoing in the words of author Caroline Naoroji; forgive a little sooner, hug a little longer, love a little stronger, and smile a little sweeter, because it is all just a little bit of history repeating.
“Stand in faith even
when you’re having
the hardest time
of your life.”
~ Unknown
CHAPTER TWO
LAND LIES BENEATH WATER
By Georgiana Zor
“What now, oh Govinda, might we be on the right path? Might we get closer to enlightenment? Might we get closer to salvation? Or do we perhaps live in a circle—we, who have thought we were escaping the cycle?”
Quoth Govinda: “We have learned a lot
, Siddhartha, there is still much to learn. We are not going around in circles, we are moving up, the circle is a spiral, we have already ascended many a level.”
~ Hermann Hesse, Siddartha
I have been back and forth many times, but I do not see the struggles that tried me over time as running around in circles. I see them as organic evolution, the ‘necessary evil,’ and not an evil loop. As Hermann Hesse explains it in his book Siddartha, we can see this process that feels like a repetitive orbit as a spiral that brings us to a higher level with each experience and each lesson learned. Even though I managed to find solutions to some of my problems, I do not believe there is a universal answer, but this was MY answer.
One thing that I am certain about is that nothing is final; the status quo is perpetually changing. Thus you can always find yourself in what feels like square one, or at the other side of the coin, in charge of your life all over again. In his book Wabi Sabi Simple, Richard Powell says, “Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” I believe this summarizes the beauty of life’s imperfections and the delicacy of human messiness. It also tells us not to get our expectations high. So, this is what I pray of you while reading this chapter: take every word and experience I describe as it is and withdraw the beauty from its imperfection.
Each person is different; hence I am aware of the fact that what worked for me might not necessarily function for you. There is no one key to success, no main step-by-step recipe to follow which would guarantee your freedom from burdens. In life, there are no guarantees. We just have to try everything until something works. The problem-solving process of life’s conundrums is based on a perpetual trial-and-error mechanism, and when we draw the winning ticket, we move on and add the knowledge to our personal problem-solving structure which we’ve built brick by brick, sometimes sweating blood.
Thus, my primary purpose is not to promise you the magic recipe to happiness and make all your problems disappear through a) b) c), but to hold your hand through hardship while you—hopefully—find my experiences relatable and inspirational. I want you to know that you are not alone in this; you are NEVER alone—you have yourself, and you have to turn yourself into your best friend. Whatever problems you might be facing, I assure you that you are not the first and definitely will not be the last person in your situation.
Keep this in mind and never think that you are not normal or that no one can understand you. If you gather your courage and speak from your heart, you will find people who can understand you, people who used to be you, or people who are you. I’ve heard it said, “Silence hurts more than truth.” To be fair, this also works for me right now. By writing about my most difficult moments and undressing all shame and resisting the instinct to hide behind curtains, I am seeking absolution from myself; I am seeking liberation from ghosts of the past. In sharing my most intimate thoughts and struggles with you I see a valuable form of bidirectional therapy.
“A hero is one who heals their own wounds and then
shows others how to do the same.”
~Yung Pueblo
It was around 3 a.m. I woke up feeling horrible chest pain. My limbs were numb and shaky, and I was hot and cold all at once. I could hear my teeth grinding from the shaking, but I could not control it no matter how much I tried. I thought I’d had a heart attack, so I called the ambulance. Apparently, it was just a panic attack. My first real panic attack ever. I could not believe that such aggressive physical symptoms could stem from an aching mind.
I had been finding myself in a tense situation for months. I was restless. I could not sleep. I could not think. It was like I was stuck in a torturous purgatory. I felt I couldn’t bear living in my head for a second more. I knew I was going through some sort of crisis or depression, but I didn’t have a clue about how to deal with it.
I had finished my master’s degree a while back, and I had no idea what came next. My entire life was built on stepping stones, on pre-established thresholds designed in advance and that offered me a sense of security—a safe haven. In those moments, I felt under attack and I was missing the right antibodies. So, I procrastinated my life choices hoping that it would all fall into place sooner or later. But I had no plan, and that was causing me a great deal of anxiety. The possibilities were endless, and I felt nothing short of paralyzed.
At that time, I was still living in the Netherlands, where I had moved from Romania for my studies at the age of 19, and the only certainty I had seven years later was that I needed to start over somewhere else. But where? Do what? How? When? I was feeling completely lost, and I didn’t know what I wanted and hence which direction to go. So I was standing still and at the same time thinking I wanted to go everywhere and nowhere, really. I was like Chidi Anagonye, a character from a popular Netflix show called The Good Place, facing the trolley problem, but in my case with an infinite number of tracks and unknown outcomes. What was my purpose? What was the purpose of it all? I hoped that I would come up with an answer before the Five People will have died.
I slowly fell into the trap of intoxication. I would numb my senses with alcohol and drugs hoping that when I would wake up to reality, I will have gotten that brilliant idea which would save me from the abyss, and all my problems will have magically vanished. I knew this phase could not go on forever, but it felt comforting to say “tomorrow” day after day. I was choosing instant gratification relentlessly: snoozing over waking up early, hiding over shining, crying over laughing, drinking over staying sober, being shy over speaking up, coffee over tea.
My confidence was low and my hopes even lower. I also got into a very unproductive relationship to diminish my loneliness, a situation which would offer me company and short-term entertainment. I knew he, or the relationship, was not right for me, but this fit in so well with my postponing of facing life and making more robust, right decisions for my life.
The pleasure was temporary, however. I should have known that if it feels too easy, it’s a bait and not a real solution. When I was going to sleep, all that panic came rushing, cumbering my breath. I would imagine you could get this sort of fear if you found yourself in a boat in the middle of the sea with no land in sight. At times, I thought I was going to lose my mind over contemplating all the options which I did not know if I wanted or not. I desired everything and nothing. I sometimes even wished that somebody would tell me what to do, be it the right path or not, just to unburden myself from that maddening tension.
I was also checking social media compulsively and comparing my failures to others’ shiny lives. That, of course, made me feel even more like a castaway who could not figure out life. And not being 100% financially independent was also a huge burden on my shoulders. I was crushed under the pressure of expectations–from myself, from others—because it felt that any choice I could have made would have influenced the rest of my life and that I would have never been able to undo. The clock was ticking in my head from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until I was finally able to fall asleep.
Anyhow, I started researching my behavioral patterns and came across the term ‘post-graduate depression.’ I found blogs where people described going through the exact emotions I was experiencing, and I had already started feeling more hopeful that it would indeed sort me out too.
According to one article I came across in Her Campus (18 August 2018), the signs of post-graduation depression are: feeling disorganized, diminishing motivation, compulsive use of social media, and a feeling that you’re at a standstill. Another article in the Washington Post (6 August 2017), also reported negative perspective of life, a general sense of hopelessness, substance abuse, and loneliness as possible symptoms. What is more, according to Sheryl Ziegler, a professional counselor and writer, post-graduation depression is underreported and understudied. Juli Fraga, therapist and author, says that this phenomenon happens “…because graduation is like motherhood: culturally seen as a seemingly joyful time, which makes it even more shameful for someone to admit that it’s
not.”
As you could already see, I had ticked each one of these symptoms. It was time to take action. On one of the rare occasions I left home, I met a good friend of mine who sensed how lost I felt and offered me a book called The Defining Decade: Why your Twenties Matter—and How to Make the Most of Them Now, by Meg Jay. In her book, Dr. Jay explains that we believe that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later, “but not making choices is a choice all the same.” The author also talks about the illusory expectations twentysomethings have for their thirties, assuming that whatever they do not accomplish in their twenties will still be possible later. According to the same author, this can damage and postpone the life we actually want for ourselves. After I read this book, I realized I needed to act, and I needed to act fast. I had to start. As Raleigh Ritchie put it in one of his songs, “…we should try to go outside ‘cause if we don’t we overgrow and overdose.”
The period of applying for jobs was most frustrating because I was doing it chaotically, with dread and desperation. I would apply to any job that I thought I had the skills for, in any part of the world I thought I would have liked to live. After the interviews and some positive answers, the panic I felt thinking of the prospect of actually accepting the job indicated that the role was not the right step in my career path. I decided to follow my intuition because I had regretted each time in the past when I hadn’t.
Thinking about the future still terrified me. The verse from “Time” by Pink Floyd (the opening quote of Dr. Meg Jay’s book) was on a loop in my head: “You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today/ And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you/ No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”
I decided to change the environment and go live with my father in the UK for a short while. I sent all my things back to Romania, moved out of the apartment in the Netherlands, and broke off the unrewarding, dead-end relationship. Things did not settle right away, but I felt I was on the right path. I took better care of my health: I stopped any source of intoxication and went to yoga events in proximity to my home. I even went to a yoga session held in a nearby church. I would explore the surroundings and the cultural aspects of the city, jog in beautiful parks, meditate on the bench, and notice beautiful details on buildings and interesting cloud shapes. Once I paid attention to little details, the colors seemed to get brighter.
Liberate your Struggles Page 3
