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Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness

~ Recovery from PTSD & depression + yoga, silliness & poetry…

Svasti: A Journey From Assault To Wholeness

Tag Archives: Struggle

Low

06 Friday May 2011

Posted by Svasti in Health & healing, Hypothyroidism, Learnings

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Acceptance, champion, hero, hypothyroidism, PTSD, Sadness, Struggle, vitamin deficiencies

Tonight is not one of my better nights. Sparkly thoughts are lacking.

Devastation rules the playground and I’m sad. Angry, too. Times like these, I wonder just how much more I can take.

I’ve worked my ass off to get to this point and it feels like there’s always another slap in the face.

Another pothole to stick my foot in while flying a-over-t.

Y’know, I’m actually somewhat good at this whole acceptance thing. I’m like: hey, if this is just how it’s meant to be then I’m good with that. Bring it on!

And then I learn I have hypothyroidism (been scaring myself silly doing internet research), a major iron deficiency, and a couple of other vitamin deficiencies. As a direct result of fucking PTSD.

So I wonder out loud when the hell it’s my turn to not be the punching bag any more? What else to I have to lose in order to move forward? Do I even get to move forward any more or is this as good as it gets?

For five or so years now, I’ve really tried my very best. I have. I’ve mostly kept my chin up during the worst of it all. But there’s never, throughout any of this, been anyone for me to really turn to. To rely on for support. I’ve had to drag my sorry ass one foot in front of the other the whole freakin’ way. And I’m tired. Exhausted and dizzy even, but apparently that’s to do with both the lack of iron and the thyroid stuff.

Now that I’ve come this far, I try to be a good yoga teacher. I mean dang, I was surprised to find that I’d done my training! But now that I have, I constantly question whether I’m really recovered enough to be teaching at all. Regardless, I continue my studies and I’m keeping it super-real with myself and my students. I tell myself that everything I’ve been through is all useful for teaching. But sometimes, even that isn’t enough to keep me going.

At my kinesiology appointment earlier this week, I realised I’m in this place where for the life of me, I just don’t know what to do next. I’ve no idea how to keep things moving forward now that the more obvious signposts have been tackled. I’m just sorta treading water instead.

Today I started reading “Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga”. In the forword, Peter Levine calls healing from trauma a “hero’s journey of recovery and vibrancy”. A hero’s journey. Yes. With so many battles to be fought and won, that’s certainly how it could be described although I never really feel like a hero myself.

That said, a hero doesn’t always have to work alone.

So I’m just gonna put it out there to the Universe (even if I do feel a little silly about this):

What I’d really like right now is a flesh-and-blood-here-in-person Someone to support me. A Champion, if you will.

I don’t care who it is, whether they’re male or female. But I really, really need someone in my right-here-right-now environment who gets me (and I, them) and who can be here for me (and vice-versa). I’ve got plenty of great friends, but most of them don’t live where I do. Those that do are otherwise occupied with being newly married or having babies etc. They’re great, but they’re not available and available is what I need.

Don’t get me wrong, my blog friends – all of you – are awesome.

And Miss Cleo the Kitteh has been brilliant, too.

Really, it’s just that I need a hand. A flesh-and-blood and very literal one.

So dear Universe, please hear my call coz I’m feeling mighty low right about now…

~Svasti

-37.814251 144.963169

Bottomed out

19 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by Svasti in Learnings

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Depression, Disaffection, Frida Kahlo, Samskaras, Sorrow, Struggle, Wasteland

Did I have to come this wasteland? Place of no-things, loss and aloneness, just so I could really see?

Even once I’d arrived, was it necessary to strip away any last vestiges of safety and comfort? Key lifelines, no matter how tenuous, taken too?

Nothing grows here. Nothing happens. There’s a silence I can hardly stand.

A dusty dustbowl, static frozen representations of what my life once was. Kind of like those movie special effects, where someone has the power to stop time. I can move around, but nothing else does. You think it’d be cool for a while, and it is. Then, it’s more horrifying than anything else.

There’s no activity. Nothing to say or do.

Just try going about your regular (haha!) activities. Go on. Nothing here is conducive shielding the eyes from clear understanding.

Distractions lose their lustre. No shine or pleasure. Can’t hold my interest, I have no interest. Its nil, zilch, de nada.

There’s many tears, as always. But I don’t know what I’m crying for any longer.

Much as I’ve always respected crying for the great relief it offers, just maybe I’m getting a little sick of that, too.

I’ve heard it said before, but you should never reveal your secret identity, coz it always backfires somehow. And now I’ve learnt that lesson for myself.

Seems at the heart of the matter, are my over-powering desires that still, after all this time, rely on some kind of confirmation. The samskaras that rule my disposition in this birth push so hard, especially now.

It’s enough to drive a person insane.

The harder I try, the more confusing things become. Or is that, the less I try? The difference appears to be lost on me right now.

So I’ve stopped. I am stopping.

Is this all that’s left?

Funny how, people can show such disaffection and/or lack of care, isn’t it? But take part of their life away, and they’re devastated. Even if that part was only tiny and relatively unimportant. It was still something that contributed to their view of life, how they relate to everything and everyone.

Really, if there was an easy way, I’d take it. No hesitation. I’m so familiar with struggle these days, perhaps I wouldn’t recognise it now, even if it did show up?

The worst thing about all this is that no one can help me. No one. I want to be helped so badly – part of my problem, actually. I want to be able to rely on other people, but repeatedly I’ve seen how that just leads to more heartache.

I am an ocean of intensity and neediness. I am relentlessly in need of love and affection that never arrives. Or when a facsimile appears, I’ll take it. But later I always discover it was just a copy… because it never lasts.

Nothing ever does.

There’s no hand, no shoulder, just… other people also in pain and struggling and they can’t help me either. It’s understandable, really.

So I take it all back. I have to. Because I didn’t know that heartache could make your entire body hurt.

Just gonna hang out here in nowhere land a little longer…

~Svasti

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