The breakdown

Sea of emotions

Falling apart 
I have to be honest, I didn't just leave the corporation I had a breakdown. It had been a long time coming and I can’t even remember what day it was but I was feeling really terrible and was sat on the beach with my friend J who is one of the most intuitive, emotionally intelligent people I know. I believe you meet everyone for a reason and I met her to help me make my escape plan a reality and start the journey of reconnecting with my heart. There is a celtic spiritual tradition of anam cara or soul friend that believes when you deeply connect with another person your souls can flow together and I feel my friendship with J is based on this kind of connection. It feels very special to me.  

I started crying and she said you’re not well, let’s go to the doctors and get you signed off. I resisted at first as it’s not something that I would have ever thought of on my own but she was so right. I was in such a bad state I didn’t realise how ill I was. I walked up to the surgery and said I really need to see a doctor and got an appointment first thing the following day. It felt very awkward and embarrassing to have a meltdown in the doctor’s surgery but she was, as doctors go, pretty sympathetic and she gave me a sick note for a month. I felt a mixture of shock, guilt and shame surely I wasn’t the type of person to get signed off ? I was strong, hardworking and dependable…but I also felt relief as I realised I would finally be able to rest. I suddenly felt the extreme tiredness of someone who’s been running on adrenalin for a very long time.  

The first week after I got signed off I continued trying to keep ‘doing the right thing’, like a clockwork toy I was slowly winding down but still the tyrannical mind nagged me ‘you should be using your time effectively, you should be getting fit, you should be working out how to have a career change ectera. The end came after an ill-conceived trip to the power plate studio, after the session which left my muscles in spasm, I felt about 99 years old and practically had to crawl home. I remember lying spread eagled on the bed feeling utter exhaustion, I had used every last drop of energy and this is the way it had to be for me to finally STOP by reaching the point where I no longer even had the energy to think and that was it, the start of the big sleep...

The big sleep
I spent most of the next month asleep in bed and don’t really remember much about it other than every few days walking down the road to the co-op to buy food. You know you have broken yourself when a five minute walk uphill feels like you’re climbing a mountain.  During my short periods of consciousness I was crying a lot, a seemingly bottomless well of tears that had been building up for a very long time, feelings of sadness and despair that had been bottled up for years were finally being released. Even though I felt extremely weak and vulnerable I didn’t want people around me as I knew the instinct to avoid pain through distraction was not going to help me and what I really needed to do was finally face myself and find a way to be free of the negative patterns of thought that had created a prison in my mind, I wanted to heal myself, I wanted to be free!

Gradually I felt more awake and found myself drawn towards the seafront, looking out at the vast expansiveness of sea and sky always gave me an instant feeling of well-being.  At first I couldn’t understand what this feeling was as I had become so disconnected from myself but slowly I realised it came from deep within and was a brief connection with my inner being shining through the darkness that enveloped me the rest of the time.  It was a relief to have this feeling of well being rising up through the blackness as I knew I wanted more and that it was only me who could bring it back into my life. I wanted my thoughts to be free, joyful, loving and peaceful. I wanted to escape the tyranny of my mind and the self-limiting beliefs that had held me back for so long.

The sea of emotions
The image at the top of this post is from a journal I started to reflect on my inner journey which has been a very healing way of re-connecting with my creative inner being after my breakdown or breakthrough as I choose to think of it now. It's called 'The sea of emotions' and my friend kate said I should write out the words beneath it because you would want to read them so here they are.

"My inner being in a boat of consciousness floating calmly through the sea of emotions, even in stormy weather I can keep my course steady using the lighthouse of my soul to navigate. Most of the time I feel like I exist in a sea of emotions and sometimes they are relatively calm but other times without warning they can well up from somewhere deep inside and overwhelm me. I used to be scared when this happened and feel out of control but now I understand it's part of me and how I sense the world. In addition to the physical world there's the emotional energy field that's invisible but very tangible to me. It's taken me sometime to learn to differentiate between my feelings and other people's emotional energy that my 'emotional radar' picks up" 

Wisdom of your inner child
When I was four years old someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I remember it being the first time an adult had treated me as an equal and not as a child. I answered quickly without any hesitation "an artist". The funny thing is I was clearer then than I have been as an adult about who I am and what I'm here to do. If you are willing to look inward it's actually not difficult to connect with the wisdom of your inner child because they have always been there, it's just they get lost in the world of socially conditioned adult. Try it for yourselves now, connect with that inner voice the 'oughts' and 'shoulds' of society tell us to ignore, have a listen and let me know what it's telling you?