This was a term that one of my best friends coined. He’s very observant, annoyingly so sometimes. He had noted the various sources of information and disciplines I was trying, a little from here a little from there. I guess it was a rite of passage really. I owned a lot of self help books which I read over and over. I prayed. I had a manifestation board. Somewhere along the line I studied Reiki. I graduated to angel cards and putting some hope in crystals, perhaps the correct one next to my bed would somehow fix me in my sleep?!
As you can tell from my light tone of self mockery, I had very limited success with all the above. The self help books were great, but somehow I felt that although the authors seemed to be happy and successful with their new found peace that I so envied, their advice failed to translate to me.
All of this ironically led to me feeling worse about myself. What was so wrong with me that nothing I did helped. Was I cursed? Stupid perhaps? Maybe God hated me and didn't want me to fix myself, ever. The future looked bleak and that monstrous consciousness of mine grew louder in its awful predictions, and judged me with increasing ferocity.
Times and chapters came in my life where my depression ebbed and flowed. Different jobs and challenges came and went bringing either distraction from my problems or sometimes situations that would spur on that negative inner monologue.
I’m currently not of the belief that you can outrun your problems. I tried. Distraction worked to a certain extent. I spent four years working at sea, and those were some golden years. But when life changed directions and shit got real again, there were my old emotional problems and insecurities dogging me again as if they had never left.
I’m sure I’ll share various allegories of these times with you in my blog, I want to piece it all together in the way that it unfolded for me.
Getting back to the subject of this blog however, the spiritual picnic really levelled up when I took my first trip to India in 2016. India, the home and birthplace of yoga. Many there have capitalised on people like myself who are going to that continent to “find themselves”. I do not intend to disparage any person or institution. The ones I encountered really had the best intentions and I would say that the experiences I had there did help to open me up so that I could finally be ready for some real healing.
As I write, I believe I shall cover my experiences in separate posts, there's just too much to write about India alone. Some I shall include on the travel section and some in the “real healing” section.
The main thrust of the India trip was to get my yoga teachers qualification. I had been interested and had practised yoga for years already, off and on, and harboured a belief that maybe that was where I could find my healing. I still believe that yoga has its place on the path to real healing and Ill cover that in more depth another time.
I trained for a month in Rishikesh, a very amazing and spiritual place. I visited temples, chanted Sanskrit mantras, attended satsang's, bathed in the Ganges, received blessings, gave money to beggars, had numerology readings, discussed my problems with new friends, and looked into even more courses, workshops, texts. One of them was bound to do the trick, right?
The spiritual picnic was in full swing, I travelled North to Dharamshala where I found even more spiritual fodder, I was still ravenous for it. Silent retreats, Kundalini yoga, crystal healing and invoking dis-incarnate gurus; more temples, chanting, ecstatic dance and even my first foray into LSD.
I cannot say if any one thing was more or less effective than the other, as I mentioned, I believe the mixture of practices at least may have opened me up to a point where I was ready to actually put in the ground work for real healing. Was it because I was so tired of not getting anywhere with the other stuff? Maybe. The one thing I observe from most of the healing methods I tried was the lack of actual work that was down to me. Even many years previous to India, I had tried that great psychedelic medicine Ayahuasca, In the hope that I would be magically cured from my issues in one sitting. Certainly the crystals, reiki, prayers and invocations really didn’t require much of me, I hoped always with these practices that a miraculous healing would occur and then it would be just plain sailing for me, no more problems and challenges just bliss, and a life that flowed well. Yet again I was dead wrong.
How did I find out that none of these ventures really made a difference? It was all very well swanning around India pretending to be a hippy with no care in the world! It came when life again heaped on its challenges and my seeming inability to cope with them. The underlying emotional issues rose again and I utterly crumbled under the pressure. This is definitely worth a blog entry of its own which I shall call the crumbling.
To sum up this blog entry, I want to be clear that I did enjoy the picnic! It was enjoyable to dabble in this and that and would I pass up on those experiences? No. It seemed to be a rite of passage and sometimes as humans we just need to get a bunch of things wrong before we find something that works. Looking back from where I am now, I see that the most powerful, profound and “real” healing that I have undertaken in my life, like most effective things, has taken work and discipline and perseverance.
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