Discovering My Light

As we welcome in a new month and the start of a new season, I wanted to share an extract from my book ‘Understanding Human Nature – A User’s Guide to Life’. In the extract below you will discover how I found my light in the darkness and discovered my passion for Holistic Wellness, Yoga and Acupuncture.

All I really remember now is falling down a deep depressive hole that lasted about four years, save for a few chinks of light when I started to discover holistic therapies and working in nature. The good thing about chinks of light is that they give you perspective and catalyse the mind to try and work out why some things work, and some things don’t!

Looking back to that time, I had no clue what I was doing. I had no clue how life worked, no understanding of my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, no awareness of how to look after my body and certainly no clue about understanding what was going on in my mind or relationship dynamics. And as for learning a set of appropriate language, a narrative to explain my feelings, forget about it!

I now know that the constant ‘pushing out’ into my zany drunken character was me trying to force myself to be constantly ‘yang’ because I was deeply uncomfortable with retreating into the depths of my ‘yin’. Yin is where we go inside and regenerate, clean ourselves up and make peace with our inner world. I didn’t want to be in my inner world, as it was troubled, but there’s a problem with this. Yin and yang naturally balance each other. It’s a natural law, part of the matrix of life. And when you don’t you become fatigued, and a few years later this became a big problem for me.

I was constantly in a state of ‘mindfucking’, as one of my teachers used to call it! At the tip of the iceberg of emotional unhappiness was my mind constantly trying to work things out. But trying to understand what my mind was actually trying to tell me about what I needed, forget about it! It was just like a giant argument going on in there. Fast forward to the present, and now I can perceive the subtlest shifts in my mental state and what it means on an emotional and lifestyle level, and help other people to do the same.

And as for the idea that behind all the painful chaos there was an actual intelligence at work – the intelligence of the soul, playing witness to what I was doing and trying to actually give me direction – well, forget about that too! It might have sounded like a nice idea if someone had been able to explain it to me, but I still would have had no clue how to actually access or interpret that part of me. These days tuning into that level of my being is a core aspect of my work.

I also had no perspective. Now I can see my parents’ separation – amongst the sea of other experiences that can also be a source of pain – as actually a catalyst to make me explore life, to make me who I am today, and for that I’m grateful.