Embrace Your Inner Self

Chapter 1:Rediscovering My Inner Child- “Be the change you want to see in the world”~ Mahatma Gandhi For almost eighteen years, the emotional and physical pain of the car accident that killed my little brother and left me unable to walk had ruled me, inside and out. The loss of Niraj…The pain in my left foot was so excruciating that I could not stand for more than three minutes at a time. Every few months I had to undergo arthroscopic surgery to vacuum out the bone chips that had collected in my left ankle, where I had no cartilage. Why me? Why? Angry with God, I cried my eyes out. After all of the years of surgeries and painkillers, I was not getting any better. My health was only getting worse, and I was putting on weight at an alarming rate. I felt numb from all of the suffering—I could not even feel emotionally attached to my children. I was up to my throat in grief and anxiety. Please… no more medications. No more surgeries or needles in my body. I felt like a volcano, ready to blow up. It had gotten so bad that I did not want to live anymore. I did the only thing left to do: I turned to the universe and prayed for a miracle. In 1989, my husband, our young son and I went to India when my mother-in-law passed away, to put her ashes in the holy river of Ganges as is traditional for Hindus. My husband came back early to go back to work, but my son and I stayed a little longer so we could bring my younger brother Niraj, who was finishing his exams, back to the U.S. with us for a visit. Niraj and I—along with one of my father’s employees—were on our way to pick up Niraj’s passport at about 7:30 in the morning when a huge truck, an eighteen-wheeler, swerved head-on into our lane from the opposite side of the highway. Our small car was suddenly under the truck, its roof sliced off, exposing us to further damage. My brother had been driving. My father’s employee was in the front passenger seat. They both flew out of the car, while I remained stuck, my legs crushed and broken under the seat, my broken bones sticking up out of my skin. Covered in blood and broken glass, I was rushed to the nearest hospital, where doctors treated me for head injuries and prepared to chop off my legs. My father was making funeral arrangements for his employee, and for my brother. When my father was finally able to see me, he had me shifted to a bigger hospital in the city, where I remained for the next eight months while surgeons tried to put my legs back together. They reconstructed my left foot and ankle, and put a rod in my left leg from my foot to knee and twenty screws in my right leg. I could not see my two-year-old son during this time, because the doctors thought it would be traumatic for him to see me scarred and bandaged from waist to toe, hooked up to machines with my shattered legs suspended in the air. I missed him terribly. My family waited months to tell me about my brother’s passing, fearing that the trauma would be too much for my injured brain; it might have cause me to go into shock and coma. When my father took my hand in the hospital room and said gently, “Sangita, I have something to tell you,” I knew that something was very terribly wrong. As he spoke, telling me how—and when—Niraj had died, I felt totally disoriented, like I was listening to someone else’s story. What do I feel? How do I feel, when all there is to feel is pain? I had no one to talk to. This loss, on top of the physical pain and the loss of my brother—and my former life—was too much. I shut down. After that, I was again shifted to yet another hospital, where I started to learn to walk again, haltingly, with a walker and crutches. I felt like a baby, having to learn everything all over again. Once I had the hang of my wheelchair, my family brought me back to the U.S. For the next seventeen years, I underwent surgeries every few months—taking screws out, putting new ones in, taking the rod out, putting the new one in. By 2005, when I finally reached my breaking point and began to pray for a miracle, my emotional and physical health were so bad that I could not stand living in my own body anymore. I wanted to die rather than have another surgery. But I had also recently begun reading self-help books, by Dr. Wayne Dyer and others, and I had an inkling that there might be another way. So rather than let the volcano threatening to erupt inside me sweep me away, I turned to the universe and prayed: Help me heal. All of a sudden, as if my prayers had been heard, I started getting mail about non-Western healing practices and strategies. I researched the practices, and organizations. At a retreat, I met Qigong Master Lin. His vision is that we are all natural-born healers, and that anyone can heal one’s own body. That caught my attention. Qigong is an ancient Chinese healing modality. “Qi” means “energy,” and “gong” means working with energy. There are two energies, yin and yang, female and male. When there is an imbalance between these two energies, illness, organ dysfunction, stress, even cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure occur. Qigong exercises give positive information and affirmation to one’s body again, so one can start finding balance. Since I could not stand, I could not practice yoga—I had tried, but the experience was too physically painful. However, I could do Qigong exercises sitting down or even lying on my bed. As I started practicing Qigong, I was also doing a spiritual course with Master Jeddah Mali, who was teaching about self-awareness, expansion, and living in the moment. Combining these modalities, my life changed completely. I started to heal inside and out. I had always heard a faint inner voice—it felt like a heaviness in my chest, like someone trying to talk. I began a conversation with that voice. What’s happening? How am I feeling? At the same time, I was having dreams in which I saw myself as a little girl, six or seven years old, crying in a dark corner. Exploring my inner self, I found my inner child; that lonely six-year-old whose parents had sent her away from home to school in a city hours away. I had missed the love from my mom and dad, and from Niraj, so much. At eighteen, I moved away from India to the U.S. to be with my new husband, in the marriage my grandparents had arranged for me. Niraj was eight years younger than me, only ten when I had left, and we had just begun to really know each other. We never got to bond the way I had wanted to. The darkness that surrounded the little Sangita in my dreams was the absence of the love that I had always craved, and what I had lost in Niraj when the accident took him and my old life away from me. I grieved for what that young girl—I—had lost. I reached out to her. I said, I love you. And then I cried for about three months just from the relief of letting go and practicing EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). It was then that I finally processed Niraj’s passing. He is gone. There is no going back. Liberation. Even in my dreams, everything changed. My internal vibration started to raise, and I started to feel more confident, even excited about my life. Okay, I’m here for a purpose on this planet. I’m not just here to cook and clean and suffer. Physically, I improved significantly as well. The inflammation in my legs decreased, and I could stand up for long periods of time—when I could stand for more than half an hour, it was a huge accomplishment! Clarity finally came within: I have to share this gift with the world, this limitless possibility for healing. All those years I had thought that my future held nothing but pain, began to dissipate—I could now see this gift which was made clear to me. My present health, both physical and emotional, is incredible.