More to Life

Sometimes we need to hit rock bottom in order to make a genuine change. We have to experience the darkness before being able to accept and experience the light. We must break down, reaching our lowest point to learn to surrender and give up the need for control. And to break our addiction to fear and be ready and willing to forgive ourselves and others. When a person hits rock bottom they are desperate. Ready to change. Ready to choose to do things differently. We need to make a decision that we are ready to heal, ready to transform, ready to grow before any meaningful change can occur. It is extremely painful to move out of our comfort zone, our conditioning and our regular patterns. Especially the destructive ones. It involves great strength and, often, a lot of pain, for a person to become ready to break the patterns. I had finally come to that point. I had sunk into such a deep bout of depression that I took myself away from daily life. I found myself sitting on a bed in a strange hotel in an utter state of panic. My body was tense, I was having palpitations, I felt sick deep in the pit of my stomach and my neck was sore from tension. I had booked a massage and was panicking about how I was going to fit in a shower, walk on the beach and eat breakfast in a local cafe before my massage. I’m even embarrassed to write this. Suddenly, I realised the craziness of my irrational anxiety and began to laugh out loud. And then sob hysterically. The situation must be pretty dire if I am so anxious about such things. I was suddenly able, for the first time, to step back and see clearly how irrational and out of control my anxiety was. Up until that moment, I always rationalised my anxiety, believing it to be a justified response to the events that life presented to me. Now I could see it for what it was. And here I sat, at rock bottom, fully aware that there was no other problem apart from a major anxiety and depression issue. I knew that I couldn't go on living this way. I saw no way out and no way of continuing either. My anxiety was at an all-time high, and my depression had engulfed me. There were days when I would lie naked on the floor for forty minutes at a time, unable to pick myself up and get in the shower. Something needed to change. How much more could I take of this? I had tried everything. I had to finally resign myself to the fact that there wasn't going to be a magic cure that would erase years and years of suffering and ensure it would never come back. But that is what I wanted more than anything. I wanted to live a normal life. Or else die. Carrying on like this wasn’t an option anymore. I kept trying to meditate. I concentrated on deep breathing for five minutes and then spent the rest of the day mostly unaware that I was automatically breathing deeply. Every time I noticed my deep-breathing, I realised this is what God wants from me. To be here. Present. Living. God wants me to be my true self, the real me. Not the “me” caught up in endless rumination about who or what I should be. I needed to stop with the incessant thoughts and just BE. Then I would be able to emerge into my true identity. I needed to strip off all the masks and layers and be who I was, who I am. How could that not be what God wants? But how would I ever get there? I somehow knew that this dip into deep depression was going to be different to the others. It was going to change me. I would never be the same again. Not just in the sense that I needed to slow down, look after myself and reduce stress, but something fundamental was going to change. And when I was able to be mindful by breathing or walking, I knew that this was the place I had to keep myself in. To stay out of the tornado going on in my mind. I had tried virtually everything - every drug, every therapy. I was aware that my self-limiting beliefs were destroying me and that therapies and other interventions had not managed to replace and remove these damaging beliefs and thoughts that were sitting deep in my subconscious.