My financial security trial came to an abrupt halt when I had an intensive healing session and so much began to shift in me. After the session, which, incidentally, was for financial security, I was suddenly able to write a poem I had been wanting to write since last March. Day by day, as I rested after that healing session, my attention shifted to more spiritual endeavors.

After writing that poem, I realized that there could actually exist work I could do that I would love and be both confident and competent at – something which I had come to believe was impossible in this world. It would have to be work that was close to my soul, and I also realized that I had come a far distance from my soul over the traumatic decades.

Now, a month after that session, I am beginning to think that I could even do the kind of work I have been doing, translation and proofreading, and feel very good, just as long as I always focus more on my spirituality, and the work takes a back seat in my life.

I have abandoned all concern and worry and I have no idea what will happen to me. I have too little income to even buy food these days, have savings to last about 6 months, am looking for a cheaper apartment and have no idea what will happen or how this will change, if it does. I’m just meditating every day and doing spiritual things, doing work when it comes. I figured that for 8 months I was worried and scared about how I would live and pay rent and did all kinds of stuff to get more work, while absolutely nothing panned out. Why should I be in a tizzy all my life, frantically trying to secure an income for myself to no avail, when I could at least enjoy the money I have for as long as it lasts? The worst that can happen is that I will lose my apartment and have to either sell or find free storage for my things and become homeless.

Who cares, at this point. I’m dead sick of struggling to live. If life wants to kill me, let it.

Never Underestimate the Value of Delusion

Never underestimate the necessity of self-delusion in the life of a seriously depression or suicide-prone person. Self-delusion may be the very thread by which a suicidal person’s life is hanging. Self-delusion can save lives, literally.

In retrospect and through repeating the experience, I have realized that I got into love relationships that were so bad for me that I could never speak to another person about them, because I could not trust anyone to not be cliché. I could not trust anyone to see the real situation for what it was, nor to appreciate the situation as I saw it. I could not trust anyone to respect my perspective. I could not trust anyone to not immediately react emotionally.

The world is full of clichés who think they are special, unique, independent-thinking, tough people who “won’t take no shit from no one.” When I would desperately search my social surroundings, in the thick of this misery I was in with the guy I loved, it seemed like every person on the face of the earth was some kind of walking machine that had been pre-programmed to respond to my story in exactly the same way as everyone else. It was discouraging and tiresome.

I was in absolute and utter desperation to talk to someone about the mess I was in, but the times I dared to attempt to trust someone, I was barely able to speak more than two sentences about my boyfriend before all final judgments were passed by my listener. This happened time and time again, until I finally just determined to keep everything to myself.

If there had been someone in my life who would have listened to me, without judgment and without putting in their own 2 cents-worth of cliché and predictable garbage—without even having listened to a fraction of the problem—my situation might very well have gone differently, better.

The Folly of the Reality-Pushers

People feel like they are really clever when they think they are calling you out on your self-delusion. They feel good about themselves when they try to slap you out of your perspective, even when your perspective is literally keeping you from killing yourself. What such egomaniacal individuals don’t understand or care about, is that their harshness, their trying to beat their perspective of reality into the depressive person, could result in that person killing himself. People who look at a suicidal person who may be involved in some form of self-delusion and feel pity or feel hostility towards that person for being in self-delusion are playing with fire if they try to shake him out of his self-delusion.

I am a master at self-delusion. I have lived in both self-delusion and dreams ever since the violent divorce of my parents—and many years before that I believe. I may be living in self-delusion even as I write this. But you know what? I need my self-delusion in order to live!

If a suicidal person is in delusion, there is probably a very good reason for it. For me, any time something happened to challenge my perspective on the relationship I was in, those were the moments that I came crashing down. It was those times I began planning my death, those times I would research successful means of suicide. Indeed, it was the reality of my own devastation that the reality-pushers were trying to push on me.

What reality-pushers don’t know, is that people like me have no ground to stand on beneath their feet. So in order to stay alive, we weave an imaginary ground out of whatever shadow of good presents itself in our life. When a reality-pusher comes along and sets about destroying that ground, because he thinks that we have to see life and reality from his perspective, even in cases when he knows virtually nothing about the situation, he could be effectively hammering a nail in the coffin.

As an avid self-delusionist, I have struggled ad nauseum to grace the reality-pushers with the dismal and devastating experience of the reality they push me into when they start poking holes in the imaginary ground I have woven beneath my feet.

If I could just make anyone standing in judgment of me feel what it feels like to be suicidal, desperate, depressed, devastatingly frightened and alone… If I could have traded my heart with them for a day to make them have an ounce of compassion for me, or to whack them off of their egotistical soap box, to stop calling me selfish and self-centered, to stop shaming me into discounting myself and my own heart yet again by telling me to think about how other people will feel if I kill myself – stop trying to steal from me my life-sustaining delusions…or, if nothing else, just to leave me alone with my fate…

if somebody loved me
i know i would not cling to You
so unrelentingly
as these, the writhing limbs of the cursed,
tighten their grip
constricting wrathfully ’round my ankles
dragging me off with them
to eternal hellfire and damnation.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not clutch so desperately
onto Your shoestrings
fraying threads
dangling me over this wailing bottomless pit
sucking me violently into its black hole of eternally lost souls.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not grasp so frantically at Your heels
in futile attempts to save myself
from the fright of my living death
as i sink into my inescapable oblivion
momentarily pulling You with me
down beneath the line of sanity.

if somebody loved me
i could release my bleeding fists
too severely rapt in anguish
freeing You
laying to rest at long last
my abused heart
in a healing
bed of love

if.

So if you think you are going to rescue anyone from their self-delusion, you’d better make sure that you give them a soft and solid landing to fall onto when you cut the cord, because you don’t know to what extent their delusion is keeping them sane and alive.

Do you know what hell is? People seem most often to believe that hell consists of some form of physical pain being inflicted on the earthly body. Perhaps physical pain is the worst kind, or even only kind of pain that many people can imagine. However, most people who might believe in hell or an afterlife will also believe that the body dies and that it is the non-physical elements of people that live on in the afterlife.

Our non-physical elements comprise, at the least, what is in our hearts and minds – what you feel, what you think, what you desire – from these stem all of our actions and words, our behavior and the reasons for how we treat others, the acts we choose to engage in in our lives and so on.

What do you love? What emotions do you cling to? Why? What emotions do you hate and want to flee from? Do you spend more time in ill-will, hating, disliking, criticizing, judging, psychologically or emotionally breaking down or destroying yourself or others than you spend in good will, loving, liking, complimenting, accepting, psychologically and emotionally building up or nurturing yourself and others? Now consider this; just imagine that once you die, you will be stuck for eternity in that ill-will or good will and in those negative or positive emotions that you carry inside you towards yourself and others…would you try to change yourself before you die?

Throughout my 20’s, I told myself, hell is here on earth and I am living in it – my emotional experiences were my agony and I strove in desperation to escape my agony. The emotions we choose to foster inside ourselves can be of heaven or of hell, and they can bring the agony of purgatory or the joy of heaven.

I had the following dream during a week when I was in the midst of what had been the single-most horrible and traumatizing ordeal of my life to that point in time. Believe as you wish, but for me, this dream showed me without the slightest doubt a true and accurate dimension of hell and the emotions that lead one there:

Evil woman spirit:

Some hours ago I had a horrifying “dream.” It was more than a dream though; its emotions bore a depth that was intense with reality, more intense and profound, more penetrating, in fact, than emotions I experience in people in reality. It’s the worst, scariest dream I’ve had since the one I had right before Jude [my pet] died. Elements of it were too real and felt far too deliberate to merely have been a fabrication of my mind.

I was in the large spacious room of a new house, light with windows, happily occupying my mind contemplating what sort of rug to put in it. Maybe it happened as I was thinking to myself…I’m not sure—but I felt an evil woman present, and I mean once trouble started, I could hear and even more FEEL her, not see her. One second I’m blissfully contemplating interior decorations in a silver-colored room, the next second I am being sucked under the floor and feeling this evil woman. She was evil to the core and I felt a blood-thirsty hatred that she had for me inside her. THIS and the aggressiveness with which she was trying to bring me down to her hell and destroy me were the things that made this feel more real—usually dreams and those in them are more passive. This woman was actively, deliberately and passionately trying to destroy me, and she had great power at her disposal to do so and she was exerting it all on me.

I found myself, like 2-3 meters under the floor, like in some other world, like hell, and this woman was pulling, TRYING to pull me deeper and deeper. The hell were the emotions—horrifying emotions, maybe they were hers—I couldn’t bear them and I felt her pulling me in deeper, so in desperation and horror I immediately began saying out loud “GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD” and I said GOD louder and louder, focusing on God in my mind, maybe I was shouting by the end GOD GOD GOD. And I felt I was pulled up out of that hell and stood in the room again in shock and, I think, very angry at that woman. I left the room to a different part of the house to try to get away from her. But I felt her beginning to try to suck me back into her dimension of hell again and again. This time, also in anger at her, I began shouting GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD. Somewhere in me I was worried neighbors or someone else might hear me. Again, also with my more aggressive shouting, she went away and I woke up, just barely. And, drifting off back to sleep, I could still feel her presence in my “dream-mind,” so I woke myself up as best I could and asked God to please don’t let me have anymore bad dreams tonight. And so I didn’t.

But I felt there was more to that dream than just being a dream, so before I began writing in here, I asked God to please protect me from that woman and all others like her. This dream scared the hell out of me. The horror and depth of the emotions in it defy description. I believe they were hers, and I felt that, in addition to being directed towards me, she lived in them. They are feelings I don’t wish to revisit, and I may not even be capable of revisiting them in order to even attempt to put them into descriptive words that you can feel. There are words though, they just don’t cause you to enter into the profound and extraordinary hell of what they really feel like: HATRED, FURY, ANGER, VENGENCE, BLOOD-LUST…this woman had some kind of power—she used it. She was power-hungry, blood-thirsty, murderous.

My name means light. I wonder if that’s why I inevitably feel even just a hint of despair come creeping into my soul as the Scandinavian autumn ushers in the darkness of winter. The days gradually get swallowed up into the darkness, more and more with each passing day.

Darkness is a black hole of unknowing, unseeing. It emphasizes your loneliness and makes you cry to hear a friendly voice beside you, to hold a warm hand. You can’t see in darkness. You can’t see what is in the very same space you’re standing in. Snakes could come slithering around your feet, wrapping around your ankles, constricting, to pull you off into the depths of hell. Or something could lash out at you and bite you with its venomous fangs. In the darkness, evil can see you, but you can’t see evil.

Light dispels evil. Snakes don’t dare show themselves in the light of life. There is nothing to fear when light is shining around you, for you can see everything that is there clearly. Nothing can sneak up on you and capture you away to the underworld. Dark beings and creatures of the night fear the light as I fear the dark.

I love autumn as a season, but no matter how happy I become, I just can’t shake the lingering loneliness and the cold that comes with the darkness of the Scandinavian autumn.

There would be one solution to that, I suppose – get a husband.

Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely alone; I have a pet fly named Stanley.

P.S. Stanley escaped out the door a while ago.

Every month a screaming fear stabs me through from back to front, like an inextinguishable jagged sword of flames searing me in two right through the middle. As if my body is doubling over inside itself in anguish and screaming “For the love of God, don’t leave me!!” Wringing itself into a knot, gripping onto my insides with such a violence!

My body seizes up, writhing in despair within itself, as if it is straining to grip excruciatingly onto elusive and denying parents, onto something loving and soft, something safe, gripping onto an illusion of love and screaming “Don’t go!” Oh God it hurts!! Reduces me to a little child, in agony, lying on the couch, weak, worn, crying.

“I need love and softness and warmth,” the little girl said “And I need hugs. Since my birth, my agony and fear have been insufferable without these!”

And my body, desperate for love and softness and warmth, hasn’t understood, that physically torturing me every month does not bring love and softness and warmth.

Why do I fall apart when he stays away for days and days? More importantly, why does he stay away from me, why does he leave me…alone…wondering…writing…

“I sit alone here in my dark, silent room, writing to you by candlelight and staring out the window at the falling snow; each little snowflake living its brief moment in the light of the street lamp, lingering or hastened through this limelight at the whim of the wind, passing thus away, back into the dark space of night, becoming again invisible, forgotten.

Here I wait for you. I’ve waited for you all day. You said you would come. You did not come. I ask myself in my solitude ‘Did he forget me?’ I ask myself ‘Why does everyone forget me?’ like a small girl left waiting alone outside in the cold after her school has closed for the day and all her classmates have long since been picked up and taken back home to the warm embrace of a family. The small girl stands alone, shivering in the cold, unclaimed, abandoned, orphaned…scared. Nobody wants her, nobody remembers her – not even her own parents.

As I stare into the night, white with falling snow, deep inside me I feel this pain – my brief time in the light of your love is done.

I ask myself, ‘How many days will he desert me for this time? How many weeks?’

I ask myself, ‘Why did they forget me? Why did they leave me alone, waiting?’ Time after time, I only find one explanation – I am not worthy.”

*Finland-050505

The Finnish autumn is setting in again, and with it, the usual feeling of emotional desolation, fear, loneliness and despair come creeping inside me morning by morning, more intensely with each passing day. What is it about the dark morning chill that seems to torment me with my solitude and fill me with emptiness? What is it about the Nordic autumn that leads my thoughts to the edge of dying and overwhelms my once love-filled heart with a desperate fear that all society, all family, all humanity has left me behind and forgotten me?

I wake up alone in my bed morning after morning, like every day of every season, but only with the onset of autumn does the full reality of my alienation and estrangement in this world come crashing down on me, filling me with ever-increasing despair and loneliness, replacing my hopes and sense of meaning with a desperate sense of futility and abandonment.

The dawn comes later and later, the darkness extends ever-farther into the day, ever-so-gradually snuffing out the light of life…and the chill in the air…how do these things bear with them these tragic emotions and place them into my heart? And why am I always alone? Why always excluded on the outskirts of lives?

This time last year, I sunk into a deep depression for weeks. I cried profoundly, every day, I don’t even know why, there was no logic. I could not control my tears and, of course, being alone, there is never a need to even try.

This year I am so much better. My depression was so severe last autumn, and my inexplicable crying so frequent and intense that it drove me right into the arms of my fiancé, at least in my imagination. Still now, I am only in his arms in my imagination, but at least we are close in heart and in mind. That is the only thing that keeps me from falling apart again. Still, I am left with an intense loneliness, a yearning to be with him that is tearing at me more and more each autumn day, and the fear growing in me of the autumn’s foreboding of a cold, dark and wintry death.

10.10.2005 Finland

Diary entry 10

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

After my experience with the “mother of all healing crises,” I was afraid to do reiki for a period of several months. I went on “reiki hiatus.”

I continued to see my psychologist, but without the aid of reiki. It felt as though the monumental shift that had taken place in me as a result of the last healing session had eradicated the source of my suicidal depression, and cleared me out enough emotionally that I could begin to intend some good things for myself without the interference of subconscious self-sabotage. All the same, I knew I had a lot more work to do on myself before I should pursue or accept a new love relationship. I was still profoundly attached to my previous love, Lucifer, even though the attachment no longer had any form in outward reality. I still felt spiritually and emotionally attached and committed to him to some extent, and couldn’t fathom how I could ever move on. Therefore, I deduced that nothing good could come of a relationship I entered or was coaxed into at that point.

I felt, however, that I was free of the bulk and most severe of my depression. This, indeed, was true, however, there was more left to heal than I had known. I furthermore realized that, all of these years, I had not been making a distinction between my depression and my anxiety; I had been experiencing them together all this time, but only thinking it was depression. However, it turns out that you can have depression and even suicidal thoughts without anxiety. I’m happy to report that at least my anxiety seemed to be, perhaps, 98% gone. As for my depression – let’s just say it was no longer a permanent state or my default response – let’s say it was 90-95% gone.

Yearning for something completely different

In my desire to escape myself and my life as I had known it, I had always known that a radical change would jolt me out of my prevailing state and possibly give me direction as well. I thought that what I really needed would be to spend some months in an Indian ashram meditating, doing yoga and learning about spiritual wisdom from yogis, so that I might rise above my emotional issues with wisdom and composure, grace and beauty, instead of the fits of shouting and tears I was prone to.

Well, I could not afford such an endeavor. Unexpectedly, I managed to happen onto the next best thing, right here in New York City. I had been looking on Craig’s List for months trying to find a yoga center where I could volunteer in exchange for yoga classes. That’s how I found a Naam yoga center in Manhattan. It was practically a yogic ashram in the middle of the city.

The center I found practiced Naam yoga, which has been explained to me more accurately as Kundalini yoga with the addition of Kabbalahic theoretical teachings and beliefs.

The benefits I derived from this yoga center, which comprise another major step in my healing and development, were in some of the different meditations.

In early summer, 2009, I had taken a Naam yoga class, in which the instructor provided a certain meditation; a certain mantra to chant and a certain mudra (hand position), which he said would increase our capacity to love and to heal others merely by our presence. His words appealed so much to me, that on that very same day, I went home and began that meditation.

I did that same meditation every day for more than 40 days. I noticed changes taking place in me as I was meditating. I could feel myself vibrating, as I did when I channeled reiki, after chanting the mantra.

As I continued the meditation day by day, I noticed myself going through a process, as if the meditation itself were setting my healing in motion, just as the reiki did, or clarifying my mind, bringing me wisdom or a greater connection with wise, spiritual sources, talking to me.

Sometimes thoughts of painful things would come up during the meditation and I would start crying—sometimes so much that I couldn’t speak to chant the mantra anymore.

After doing the meditation for an extended number of days, I began to get wonderful, wise thoughts and ideas in my head while meditating. Finally, I was getting so many, that I started a “meditation journal,” where I would write down my thoughts as I had them, because otherwise they would escape me, like smoke vanishing into the air.

Unconscious Love

While I was no longer an unconscious lover of someone else, as I had been of Lucifer (Who is Lucifer?), I was being “loved” unconsciously by several young men from afar, whose advances I had made many efforts to thwart.

But what is unconscious love? Without my inquiring, this is one of the many answers that came to me in my meditations:

Conscious Love Vs. Unconscious Love

August 29th, 2009

Conscious love is self-sacrificing,
Unconscious love is self-serving.

Conscious love respects its beloved’s will,
Unconscious love imposes its own will on its beloved.

Conscious love results in freedom,
Unconscious love results in bondage.

Conscious love is constant,
Unconscious love is erratic.

Conscious love seeks only the highest good for its beloved,
Unconscious love seeks its own immediate gratification.

Thus, strive only to love consciously, or not at all.

As someone who has been both a giver and a receiver of unconscious love, yet who has also experienced the giving of conscious love, I feel qualified to observe that unconscious love is what happens when we love someone sincerely and then pass that love through the dirty filter of our psychological, emotional problems and behavioral patterns. Suddenly, our love is not pure anymore, but becomes tainted with manipulation and selfish desires and requirements which are not of love.

I call this “unconscious love” for two reasons. Firstly, it must be called “love,” even though it may more often resemble or feel like hatred. Many-a-time, for example, I had wished Lucifer, who loved me, would have just killed me to put me out of my misery instead of continuing to love me. Occasionally I would ask him, how would he be worse to me if he hated me. It was clear in his response that he was a tortured soul.

The unconscious lover will swear up and down that he loves, indeed, when I examine myself, even now, in the times I have exercised unconscious love, I know I did love the man. I loved Lucifer, but we tortured each other.

Secondly, it must be called “unconscious,” for this is the element that makes this kind of love torturous, for both the lover and the beloved. “Unconscious,” because this love is implemented and expressed through us by means of our unconscious behavior, which has been formed by all of our past pain, beginning, but not ending with, that given to us by our parents.

The cure to unconscious love is to become conscious of and then to eliminate the causes of our programmed behaviors. This almost always necessarily involves emotional release, which is what I effectively achieve by using reiki.

This realization was important for me, because my entire life has been driven by the singular desire and yearning to find a true love with a man, which will prove impossible if I continue to love unconsciously.

Further, I have had the insight that, when you stop focusing on yourself in a love relationship, or in any circumstance really, when you let go of your self-concern, only then are you free to see the truth – be it favorable or not – and only then, if need be, can you offer the love your beloved may need.

Psychotherapy – a very slow, but helpful process

In therapy and healing, explanation and understanding for your feelings and behaviors are gradually unfolded to you, and week by week, not all at once. All my young life, I was 110% certain I was a “basket case” (as my father used to say) specifically as a result of a megalomaniacal, emotionally abusive and manipulative father. It is only to my surprise that I have been finding out through my reiki and my psychotherapy, that roughly 95% of my own dysfunction in love relationships has been passed to me from maternal neglect, and not paternal psychosis.

Diary entry 9

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

Having pinpointed the source of this hole as being my mother, I was able to focus a reiki session on this issue with the intention of healing my heart and mind from the trauma of growing up with the hole of perpetual fear, despair and loneliness inside me, which, probably, in combination with the other inhospitable conditions of my childhood, was the greatest source of my adult suffering. Once healed, I thought, I ought to be able to function in life on a more level playing field with other people, thus, hopefully, ceasing the perpetual series of waking nightmares that I was trapped in. Thus, I set aside a reiki treatment for myself in which I focused on this “hole.”

I carried out this reiki session on myself thoroughly. It was the longest session I have ever done. The results were immediate, effective and surprising.

I had already been reiking myself with quite successful results for a month or two. I had been feeling very optimistic and “up,” feeling I had left my depression and suicidal thoughts in the past, with the one exception of waking up in the mornings before the beginning of the day with the usual sinking feeling of doom and despair, fear and futility. Despite these relatively mild morning experiences of this “hole of doom,” I felt relatively happy and optimistic during my waking hours.

The Mother of All Healing Crises

So, I reikied myself concerning this hole on a Monday morning in February, without specifying a source or a cause for the hole. By the time I went to bed, unbeknownst to me, I began to feel the effects of my reiki session. I felt a cold coming over me. During the night as I slept, I became increasingly ill. I developed a fever with full-blown flu symptoms and a horrible headache.

When I woke up in the morning, I was hopeless and depressed. I woke up realizing that, after barely surviving the devastation of Lucifer and after coming within a broken foot of killing myself, I was pursuing a new life purpose, which was not truly my heart’s desire. I realized that my heart’s desire was a dream that fate and the nature of my past would not allow, or at least I acknowledged that I had this belief. I acknowledged in that moment, as I lay in bed with my eyes still closed, my belief that the spiritual love I had dreamt and lived my whole life for could never be. Thus, I basically woke up crying, and sick.

Not only this, but I fell as deeply back into suicidal depression as I had been the preceding spring when I had planned to kill myself (see My Suicidal Foot). I stayed in my room all day crying inexplicably and feeling horribly ill. Emotionally, I had regressed to how I had been throughout my 30’s—I would burst into tears with no sign of a reason, perhaps something on TV, something that was not even visibly sad. I cried a lot that day and for the days that followed. I learned soon that this sickness was no usual cold for me, because it did not follow the pattern of a cold. It did not let go of me easily. It stayed for over a week, going away very slowly.

On the Thursday of that same week, I had an appointment with my psychologist, during which I had a complete emotional break-down. I just cried and cried. It was on that occasion that my psychologist observed that my depression was suppressed anger I harbored towards my mother. Her observation seemed to support the previous observations I had made of my own behavior in the context of love relationships and of the inner feelings that gave rise to my behavior within love relationships.

During that week, I should mention, I was also engaged in a struggle with my mother, which magnified the depth and intensity of the hole, leaving me feeling scared and alone, desperate and abandoned again. The hole was sucking me up again, sucking me up.

Due to the massive emotional breakdown I had suffered the previous year, during which I quit my long-despised job and that had led me to therapy in New York City, I was being supported financially by my mother, who, along with my step-father, preferred not to have me residing in their home, despite the cost of rent my mother was paying for me.

At the time I did this reiki session on myself, my mother had begun to express vexation and resentment at me for having to sacrifice some of the abundance of her money to support me. I felt myself falling through that really thin film that was supporting my weight as I stood upon that hole. I, with no ability, emotional or otherwise, to take care of myself, began planning my death again, or at least began planning a life on the streets, which would inevitably lead to my death.

The Blessed Light at the End of the Tunnel

After one week, my sickness had subsided and after about 2 weeks, my depression began to subside. I noticed a new emotional experience in myself—or lack thereof. I was waking up in the mornings in an emotional void—a true hole. What I had always believed to be a hole, I saw now had really been a black hole, a vacuum that was actively sucking into oblivion all things positive, for what I was experiencing these mornings was a true hole—a hole is empty, not filled with fear and despair. I was now awaking with emptiness—no fear, no despair, no doom, not even a little tinge, but there was no good feeling present in the hole either. It was a marked improvement over a hole of despair, or a black hole that sucked up positive thoughts and feelings and left me with the most horrible, devastating feelings, thoughts and fears about myself and my life. I felt the nothingness was quite ok. It left me feeling a certain kind of relief.

A few days after waking up with emotional emptiness in the place where used to dwell the greatest doom and fear of my life, in a meditation, I felt Angel Mother begin to fill in the new void in my heart with love. I felt it more and more every day.

And this is the story of how I healed what I believe to have been the greatest source of my suicidal depression. This constitutes a massive milestone in my healing process.

Diary entry 8

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

With my new-found healing treasure, I began reiking myself for everything I could think of, starting with my most prominent issues and sources of continued and most poignant suffering, including my ingrained behavioral patterns or deep-seated, self-destroying emotions and thoughts which had become states of existence for me since childhood. My experience in psychoanalyzing myself and my continued visits to my psychologist enabled me to understand and articulate angles of my issues which, in turn, enabled me to target certain multi-faceted, self-destroying attitudes, beliefs or past experiences in my reiki.

My Living Death

The greatest and most firmly ingrained and most devastating state I had been imbued with was a state which had grown in me from my youngest formative years, my toddler years, prospering and transforming, like a viral bacteria in its ideal reproductive environment, into increasingly invincible strains, as I became more and more laden and buried down day by day beneath the traumas and neglect that came to constitute my childhood, and then my adolescence. By the age of 20, this state had taken the outward form of ever-present suicidal depression.

Over the years, I observed that this state was limitless in its degrees of intensity and in the situations and aspects of situations in which I would feel it rearing its ugly head within me. I came to view the two extreme degrees of this state as two separate images. When I was at my best, this state felt to me as a hole deep in the core of my being, manifesting most often in mornings, as recently as this past winter, when I would wake up alone in my bed, no matter what the weather, what the country, what the city, what the situation, and, before thoughts of the day ahead would begin to fill my mind, deep in the pit of my soul, I would feel this hole; a hint of doom, despair and futility, which I could perpetually find at the very nucleus of my being. It brought worry and fear to my heart and mind. On the best days, I would get up feeling the hole and then begin my day and the hole would be covered over with daily concerns and activities. On my worst or more sensitive days, it brought me to endless cascades of tears.

At its worst, this state was my living death. By my definition, “living death” could be said to be like being slowly and painfully tortured every day to within inches of death, just close enough to death, that you may wake up the next morning, barely functional, to again be tortured to within inches of death, day, after day, after day, after day.

My living death found its expression in me regularly in my poems, but, in time, more and more it was expressed in plans of suicide, in suicidal depression, in floods of tears, set off by God-knows-what, or by nothing external at all, consumed in fear, in despair and loneliness, the intensity and depths of which you simply cannot imagine.

My living death consumed me with fear and despair each time I would love a man—fear that he would abandon me, or pull away from me. I would feel the slightest hint of discontent in his voice, or in his email, or in his behavior and feel and fear him pulling away from me, and I would feel that shakey, precarious floor I had finally almost found my footing on being pulled out from under my feet again. Again, I would be alone and insane with desperation, in tears, falling again, losing my grasp on something safe, something stable, over and over and over again.

This, fear, however, did not solely surface in love with men, but in all aspects of my life. From as far back as I can remember, I have been afraid for my safety, for my very survival, especially and above all the survival of my heart—it did not begin with men. Nothing in life had ever been stable or safe. My heart and mind were in pieces long before I was a teenager in love, but I had no idea there was something amiss.

This state, which I believe took root in me as an emotion of profound loneliness and desperate fear from a very young age, at first in absence of a mother and in absence of any source of even a small fraction of safety from the violent emotions and neglect of the family around me, found a permanent home in the core of my child-soul. It had become the roots from which I grew. I had no idea of the nature or vastness of this state, much less its power over all my life, but I became mildly aware of it in my 20’s when I was seeing a psychologist, who, according to society, is somehow supposed to fix my broken heart and mind, uproot the weeds that had been so deeply planted, which had now solidified and over-grown in my child-heart, or enable me to uproot them myself.

This state, from its cozy hiding place, wedged deeply in my subconscious, was the thing which was most profoundly sabotaging my efforts to survive, let alone succeed, in this world. Everything from finding a job, from having a loving relationship and friends to … finding a home … I can’t even begin to express on how many levels this devastating state was influencing my life and every effort I made at finding a peaceful, happy existence.

Realizing the Damage and its Extent

It took me decades to come to a sufficient understanding of the true nature of my plight and of my internal reality—that I had been formed from a tender age within a state of doom and fear and how this formation came to pass. I went through several misguided beliefs concerning this state of doom. Throughout my 20’s, when, as I mentioned, I was able to begin to perceive this state, or “hole,” I believed I had been created by God with a melancholy soul, because, even in the best situation I could imagine, I felt this melancholy, this hole, was so profound in me, that it was actually part of my eternal soul. At a later point, I believed this hole was the result of my medical condition, PKU, and the fact that, as a result of this condition, I had too much phenylalanine in my blood, which is a cause of depression and other psychological conditions (some of which I do suffer and have suffered from) and which is known to reduce serotonin in the brain, which is the chemical cause of the feeling of happiness.

Over the years, being perpetually misunderstood and looked down upon by the “emotional elite,” as I called “happy people,” I have endeavored in vain at least to be understood, since there was no compassion or help to be had from anyone, by describing this particular state in such a way that “the happy people” might be a little kinder or more understanding, at least that they might stop reacting in ways that made me feel worse about myself and about my life than I already did. This was a Sisyphean undertaking, however. Even a willing person, and few were willing, could fathom the experience of my living death, but my best attempt to date can be found in the poem If.

During the years I had to live with family, the years during which I was being formed in this state of doom, I would escape the outward hell by withdrawing into my mind, dreaming of love, of a special husband who I could love and take care of, someone who would love me, who knew me on a profound, spiritual level that no one else was capable of. I had daydreams of perhaps forming my own little family of love with him, never having to speak to anyone from my biological family ever again. My father further punished and chastised me for my escapist tendencies and most interactions with family members were of a negative nature and only served to make me even more determined to escape those people and that wretched reality once and for all.

Outsiders said I was a dreamer and that I lived in my own world. True, but their observations were useless; not one person ever endeavored to understand or to help me deal with the real world. I was on my own, as in my living death, left up to my own undeveloped and inadequate devices to survive alone in this world.

Life After the Family

Once freed of the destructive familial environment, at age 20, the axe of despair fell upon me with a vengeance. When you are in the fire, your body reacts involuntarily in such a way as to protect you from feeling the full force of the pain, but once you are out of the fire, God help you; the pain of having been in the fire floods every cell in your body and the sensations of excruciating agony sweep over and through your body like a salt-sea wave on raw, burned flesh. This applies on the physical level, and I have observed the same phenomenon on the psychological level, with the brain providing defense mechanisms to dull the impact of the psychological devastation of the immediate situation. You cannot heal while you are in the midst of the fire that is burning you. Once out of the fires of your familial hell, your body and all of your senses awaken to the reality that it was living in hellfire and now it must suffer the aftermath in an environment that will only coat you with more salt and not offer you any first aid–or such was my experience. Once I was out of my “familial hellfire,” I fell into suicidal depression within a few months, and remained there until a few months ago, 21 years, roughly.

In more recent years, however, due to observation of myself as I was suffering through relationships, and due to my own self-psychoanalytical abilities, it dawned on me that this hole/living death seemed to be directly related to my mother. By January of 2009, however, thanks to sessions with the psychologist that I had begun seeing in New York City in the summer of 2008, I had become quite familiar with the cause of this hole/living death; it was all about neglect, the lack of a mother, lack of love, lack of security, lack of being cared for as a very young child and right up until…

And this realization paved the way for my grandest reiki healing experience – the next milestone on my healing path.

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