A Story of Pain and Transformation - Supernatural Writing Contest (SWC)

A story of pain and transformation

I kind of wish I had a near death experience. Something huge and big that turned my life completely around and since then I didn’t have troubles anymore. I don’t know if it is that easy for people who actually have an experience like this. I also wish I could say I did it without drugs or without making a mistake twice, but I seem to make things harder for myself often until I really grasp a lesson completely. So this is my story of spiritual awakening and it stretches over a long period of time, maybe my whole life and it isn’t over, yet.
Since I was little, I was sometimes sad for no „apparent reason“, they said. I thought my reasons were very apparent, but my social surroundings weren’t able to understand me. I was sad for nature, for animals suffering, because of a sad vibe that came from sad people around me. Somehow I am able to feel energy and especially pain on a very different level than most people I know.
I read something and that, which is unsaid between the lines, breaks my heart.
Speaking of breaking hearts…
I think hearts grow more beautiful the more they are able to feel for others, to be compassionate about others. I once read a story about a man who had a perfect, beautiful heart, that had never been broken and he took pride in it. Then he met an old man whose heart was torn and ripped apart, but he had gotten pieces from other people’s hearts, which lives he had improved. It was mended and stitched together, but it was evidence that he had lived and loved. In that moment the first man took a piece from his heart and exchanged it for a piece of the old man’s heart.
I hate pain and I love pain. It makes sense to me, it is transforming, but it is still highly unpleasant.
So I am hyper-sensitive to things most people aren’t aware of at all. That is why everybody wanted me to toughen up, to not take things so personally. They thought they were doing me a favor, so I could deal with living in this world.
In fact, they crippled me. I learned to suppress my feelings. I hid them away, even though I was suffering a lot, because at the same time my family started to break apart for various reasons that don’t matter very much. I made my peace with my family. I was eleven when my body revolted against this clinging on to (an illusionary sense of) control by manifesting type one diabetes [– a connection I found out a couple of years ago. A theory (for example by Louise L. Hay, but a lot of people researched on this subject) says that every symptom you develop has a specific reason, maybe a fear or an unhealthy belief on the inside].
From then on I felt my body was against me as well and I started to spiral downwards into a depression. It wasn’t treated until I tried to kill myself at the age of eighteen. A lot of stuff happened in between and it feels strange to just sum it up like that… but for my story it isn’t really relevant. I was a teenager, so nobody took my pain very seriously and I was totally fixated on it. I wished for my death almost every waking moment and cut myself, too. I hated myself and my body and felt like a failure on every level. On the weekends I drank too much, after the role model of my mother, I even started smoking – a habit I just couldn’t understand and loathed when I was a kid. I really wanted to hurt and punish myself in any way I could think of.

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After my suicide attempt my transformation began. I was in the clinic, sitting outside on a bench and looking into the sky. It was amazingly blue and no cloud stained it. It was so beautiful that it forced me to step away from myself for a moment and ask myself what the heck I was doing. This was not the way I wanted to live and die.
I cried for myself then and promised to me that I wouldn’t do it again.
This year (2018) in September it will be ten years since that and I’ve gone a long way from there. I went to therapy and always tried my best to take care of myself. I went back and forth sometimes, had unhealthy relationships and fell back into unhealthy habits, but in all this I learned so much and, take out two exceptions, I didn’t cut myself again, even though my mind yearned for it like the forbidden fruit itself.
It wasn’t discipline, I was just gaining a sense of how I was to treat myself if I wanted to live a better life. And with that I started to expect others to treat me better as well.
My spiritual journey was full of ups and downs as well. My grandmother, which I dearly loved, made me believe that only good children go to heaven and it wasn’t until two years ago that I realized, I still had a picture of a punishing, vengeful God in my mind. I talked to fairies and God when I was little and enjoyed going to church until I was fourteen, fifteen. Then I lost my faith, maybe I hid and suppressed it like my other feelings. I felt void and a lack of sense.
In that moment of clarity in the clinic I felt that sense, but it faded again.
One of the best things that happened to me then, after a few years of therapy, was my apprenticeship as an occupational therapist. I learned that I was capable of something, I enjoyed gaining knowledge and felt good by helping others. I liked my classmates and teachers and not only gained a lot of knowledge but self-esteem and confidence, too. And I learned Yoga. My teacher gave a course in Yoga at the end of the apprenticeship and it had such an impact on my journey which I cannot emphasize enough. After the first two lessons I started to cry badly in school later that day and a knot loosened inside of me. Since I’m really not that disciplined I sometimes did it on regular bases and went then again months without it, but this made very clear to me how helpful this simple practice is and I would like to recommend it to each and every person on the planet, whether they’re interested in spiritual stuff or just want to relax from work a bit.
I was always a philosopher and needed a reason to live. Just going to some work until I’d retired was and is like the worst nightmare a human can possibly go through in my opinion – and I don’t want to insult anybody who does! If it is okay for them to always be waiting, then that’s nothing I’m going to judge, I just hear so often “until the next weekend, vacation, until I retire I have to keep going and then I can relax and have fun”… But when they finally have their weekend or holiday, they get sick, because their bodies had to endure so much before and when they retire they get depressed, because their whole life they identified with working the job. My mind wasn’t my friend, either. Often, when I was confronted with overwhelming situations, I fell back into suicidal thought patterns.
But my teacher was really amazing. Besides Yoga she told us about Louise Hay and other alternatives to the western medicine. It was then as well that I started to look at myself more closely; how I still treated myself badly in some senses, where I was suppressing myself – especially my feminine side and things like that. After a while and three attempts I quit smoking for good, I started to enjoy my body and feel comfortable with it and got together with my many aspects, like the inner child. Through meditation I found a bit peace and I started to attract more literature and spiritual teachers everywhere on my path. My ex-boyfriend flirted with an awesome young woman while we were at a festival (where I started living my polygamy) and which is still a wonderful friend of mine. She taught me a lot about these things and helped me evolve on a spiritual level, sometimes just by believing that I could do it. (Her ex-boyfriend is able to see auras and a reiki practitioner and he told me that I am a crystal child. This is something I wouldn’t want to go deeper into now, because I don’t know too much about it myself. All I know is that the description matches my hypersensitivity and I really like the picture ^^)
I started questioning words I had known my whole life but the true meaning was some blurry thing I had actually no clue about. Things like love and hope and belief / faith. I stopped being the victim of my experiences and other people and started to look for the lesson I could learn from it.
I read books, for example from Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now, and fought my social anxiety with living in the moment. With more and more understanding of how the Universe works, how we create our own realities, I really started to live and attract situations that matched my new beliefs. Even if I still have pain, still have doubts occasionally, am still afraid of people sometimes, I know deep down that I’m connected to all and I learned methods to stop myself from spiraling downwards again.

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Then I would like to talk / write about drugs, as it is part of my journey and recovery as well as it was an obstacle I had to overcome. I won’t recommend taking drugs to anyone, but I judge no one who does. What we call “drugs”, by which we mostly don’t mean coffee or sugar, was always used as a tool throughout history to induce higher states of consciousness and get in touch with the “other-world” and there is no reason to criminalize it as it is done.
I started smoking cannabis and during periods of my life I did it every day. I know people who still do and as I said, I don’t judge it as wrong, but I didn’t have the feeling that I was in control of myself anymore and other side effects occurred which I didn’t want for the rest of my life.
I didn’t like the idea of taking antidepressants. I rejected them during most of my therapies and the one time I finally gave in and tried it, they made everything worse for me, so I quit after experimenting with different tablets over an adequate time span. They messed with my system how no drug I took ever could and made me apathetic and lose interest in things like sex altogether, which was a huge no-go for me.
Cannabis on the other hand, which was my natural alternative to an antidepressant, helped me stabilize my mood in a way which seemed healthier to me. I was addicted, there is nothing to argue about, but you get hooked on the tablets they give you in the psychiatry as well and sometimes they give you a needlessly high dosage and then suddenly cut it off overnight, leaving you with cold turkey symptoms (which happened to friends of mine). I didn’t only smoke pot everyday and through that got better, just as you don’t magically get better through antidepressants or going to a clinic. You need to be motivated to get better and you have to actually work on yourself, on the way you think and do things because they led you there in the first place and if you don’t change these patterns no person on earth can help you, because you will always manifest the same experiences until you do.
So the long-term usage stabilized me over a period of time while I changed my thought patterns and then I had a few experiences which helped me leap forwards in my spiritual awakening and connected ideas with experiences…
The first real great thing happened to me at a festival after eating a hash brownie. My ex-boyfriend left me at the camp for what felt like an eternity, but it was only half an hour. I grew impatient and anxious and started to meditate in the tent and suddenly I lit up. My spine felt like a chord connected to the Universe and I just… felt everything at the same time It is hard to describe, but it changed my life for the better. For the first time the concepts of spiritual teaching were connected with an overwhelming experience of oneness and love. I felt all the feelings you could feel, like love, anger, fear, sadness… just everything and by feeling it at the same time I realized that everything is inside of me, I am not these feelings but something more that experiences them.
The next experience like that was after eating “magic mushrooms”. This time I first merged with the friends I was with, on a level I never believed possible. I always had a feeling of separation from the people around me and this evening I lived the concept of connection. My brother, a friend of ours and me were like one being. Someone had a thought or a feeling and the others understood and felt the same without a word spoken between us. I always longed to belong and this experience taught me that I could not not belong. I felt love for everyone and later everything, as I discovered that everything was consciousness as well. That the energy most of us call “God” lives in each and every thing, like the bed I was sitting on or the door… I also experienced an enormous speed of thoughts that night when I was alone for a while. I wondered if I could think like a person in the middle ages and suddenly I thought thoughts of people I imagined, as if I was remembering thinking them myself. I thought I could “hop into” every thought there was and in a flash I just thought every thought there ever had been. It felt as crazy as it sounds… I wondered if I could do it again and I did – until I realized that this was what we were doing all the time; thinking old thoughts we always chewed on. I had this awesome experience but I got bored of it and wished for new thoughts. I imagined this was why we were on the planet; what the great consciousness wanted from us. New thoughts!
The last experience I’m going to write about is not too long ago. I stopped smoking cannabis every day last year in April but every couple of months, maybe half a year I sit with my friends and brothers and just have a smoke. I think it’s okay and it doesn’t harm anyone. Since I don’t have the tolerance anymore even a little bit totally knocks me out and I was really stoned, so I went for some privacy and meditated again. The past months I read a lot of books and learned new great things – for example, I found interest in quantum physics and the theory of relativity, biogenesis and much much more - and then suddenly everything connected inside of me. This time I understood everything … I realized that the truth is everywhere and that these things can all happen at the same time. I understood mathematics and the Dalai Llama, Jesus and his story, I just understood the mechanics of the universe. I understood how you really created your reality by the thoughts you think and the energy you therefore send out. It is in the microsystem the same as in the macrosystem; we are like the cells in our bodies and transmitting messages like hormones. We can choose the message we transmit. And there is a hidden mechanic of nature to make sure the parts that don’t work in the best interest of all get cut off, like polluting the planet creates more illnesses like cancer. It is all connected.
I was totally flashed by my insights that evening and I tried to explain it to my brother. Since he never really cared about spirituality, it was kind of useless and he thought I’d lost it completely now, but when I called my boyfriend everything made perfect sense to him (which was quite relieving).

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Two weeks ago I had an insight that wasn’t drug induced. I was thinking about the path I had walked until now and the lessons I learned so far and somehow the logical connection of all cleared the way for the next level. First, I felt everything. Then, I was connected to everything and everyone and thought and remembered everything. After that I understood everything (everything I’ve learned so far) and the next logical step for me was being.
So I am everything.
The words “I am” always had a major meaning and hold great power. That was nothing new for me and I already knew that I could use them to transform myself, for example by saying “I am love” and things like that instead of “I am stupid, ugly” and all the things I’ve been telling myself during my puberty. A lot of people still don’t recognize the power of the words they choose about themselves. But I again made an experience out of this “I am” and it is amazing to think (and feel) the Source is essentially me. The Universe is me.
And the Universe is you.
We are love and light.

I thank you very much for reading. It was a long text, but I felt it was all important for my transforming process. I still have emotional pain and feel sad for people who don’t really have anything to do with me, but instead of thinking it is wrong to be sad, I just let it be. I feel the emotions I have in that moment and let them flow, because it is much healthier for my system and I am not ashamed to cry in public anymore. I don’t think it is wrong, either, to have these emotions and be sensitive to other people’s pain. And all of this made me grateful for my experiences and even my depression. I am happy with the way I am now.
Have an awesome day :)