Surrender to the Light

Disclaimer: I am not a medical practitioner, I have never been professionally diagnosed as having Post traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, the following entry is my experience and is in NO WAY meant to serve as diagnosis or treatment of ANY mental disorder. If you have experienced any symptoms of  PTSD or any other mental illness please seek medical care from a trained professional. If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts call 911 immediately.

I call them panic attacks, I call them that because that it easier to say than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) flashback. I do this for 2 main reasons; one, because not very many people know what a PTSD flashback is and two, describing them can sometimes set me off into one. So I’ll try to give you a good idea of what they are like without going into extreme details of what mine are like. Imagine your worst night mare. Now I don’t mean a figurative sense like, “oh, my worst nightmare would be falling into a pit of snakes.” Or “my worst nightmare is being chased down a dark ally.” No think of an actual nightmare you’ve had, one that you woke up from crying or too scared to go back to sleep or messed yourself. Yes that scary, so real you can still feel it with you when you wake up. Now imagine being trapped in that nightmare but to make it even more terrifying you know you are in a nightmare, you know that if you could just do something to wake yourself up you’d be ok. But no matter what you do you are trapped and everything you do just feeds into your terror, everything you do just makes you more convinced you are trapped in this nightmare forever.

That is what a PTSD flashback is like. It is in actuality nothing like a panic attack; in fact mine come complete with visual, auditory and sensory hallucinations. And I’ve had them since I was 16 years old. That was at least until I found yoga. 

A few years ago I went through a period when I was so connected to my yoga that I would have moments or spontaneous meditation. I’d be driving my car and see a hillside bathed in light or the way a shadow moved over the fields and i would have to pull over and let the image wash over me, it would fill me with joy and I would slip into a meditation where I could feel my heart expanding and bursting with contentment and peace. It was way cool! During this time I had an experience where I was in my house and I felt moved to go lay in my bed and meditate, so I did. It was like being wrapped in a blanket, all I could see around me was the color yellow. In color therapy yellow is sometimes connected with overcoming fears. I didn’t recall this at the time but when I came out of my meditation I knew in the pit of my being that I was cured of my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and I would never be slave to flashbacks ever again.

I was right for almost 2 years. And then 10 days ago they came back. They came back quickly, out of the blue and forcefully. And they have eaten up any sense of security I have, they have stripped me bare of all confidence and self reliance. Since the day they came back I haven’t had a day when I didn’t feel them lingering on the back of my neck, like the cold hands of a serial killer just waiting for the right moment to tighten and maybe this time he won’t let go. So, exactly….

WHY THE HELL AM I WRITING ABOU THIS ON MY YOGA BLOG?!?!

Because I’m pretty certain that if it wasn’t for yoga I wouldn’t have made it through this week, at least without being hospitalized or on anti-psychotic medication! When it all started again I was riding back to town with a friend, we had gone to see a movie in Madison. Nothing strange or unusual not even a glass of wine with dinner, but on the drive home before we had even made it on to the highway I fell into a flashback. I knew it was happening but I was too scared to tell my friend what was going on so I closed my eyes and started breathing. It was the only thing I could do, surrender. In yoga it is called Ishvara Pranidhana, surrender to god. Maybe this is a very extreme interpretation of the practice but once I started slowing my breath down I just knew that what I had to do was surrender, ride this wave no matter where it took me. Once I stopped trying to fight my flashback I felt the tiniest pulse of peace somewhere deep inside me, deep in the base of my brain and from there I started chanting the Gayatri Mantra. 

Om bhur, bhuvah, svah
tat savitur varenyam
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yo nah prachodayat

And that did it, the panic started to ebb away, the hallucinations started to fade back into reality and finally I let loose and cried. Crying means my adrenaline has crashed so it’s actually a good thing. My poor friend having no idea what he just witnessed asked if he should pull over, but I said no I just need to lay back for a while and I laid the passenger seat down and chanted silently in my head the rest of the way home.

I can’t describe the way it feels to be battling something like this, I just know that I don’t feel well, my body is exhausted from the rushes of adrenaline and pounding heart rates, I’m not sleeping to well because sometimes they happen in my dreams, and overall I just feel heartbroken. But that’s really all the mental story around it, those are just symptoms so there’s not much to be done. What I need to do is figure out why these are back and fight them off again, I have a sneaky suspicion why and an even sneakier way to combat it, but more on that long road later. Right now I have the best weapon I could imagine for the moments I really do feel like I’m trapped in hell. When my brain switches into a flashback and I can’t grasp onto anything real I can slow my breath and start the Gayarti Manta. I can, amid my nightmare be grateful for the light and know that the light will wake me up.

What is Believing Anyway?

I have the word “believe” pasted on a collage in my yoga room at home, currently it’s situated on so that with every lift and swan dive I see that piece of art and the word ‘believe’ swimming in a sea of yellow. For the past few weeks believing has been my theme, I was in the midst of a great awareness and peace, and keenly attuned to just how many things were possible for my life. And then I got knocked off my game, I lost my peace and my sense of possibility. It was a low that took my breath away; as deep and dark as my previous weeks had been light and high. So what does a yogi do, practice. Sure my body was in pain and my brain was ticking like a metronome on speed but this is the work, this is the practice. So to the mat I went. I stood in front of that collage of all the things I hoped to manifest into my life and looked for something to dedicate my practice to. In this collage there are words like “keep is simple” “meditative state” “blessed be” and of course “believe.” I stared a that word for a few moments almost feeling betrayed by it, I felt the heat of anger stirring in my abdomen, like it was the believing that lifted me up only to drop me back to earth with vengeance. But ‘believe’ is only a word, so I closed my eyes, took a few deep breathes and began my practice with the simple breath mantra: “accept, surrender.” With every inhale I accepted where I am and the responsibility I have for where I am and with every exhale I surrendered to where I am and let go of the struggle to move forward.

So the yoga ended and sat for a few moments sealing my practice with a little meditation and what I felt was fear. I checked in with fear, which I will say is a very scary thing, to go into that fear to revel in it in hopes of understanding why it’s there. I took an inhale and accepted my fear, I took an exhale and surrendered and let the tears come forth. I had realized that it was fear that was keeping me from believing, fear keeping me from jumping off the cliff and believing I can fly. And for a moment I felt lifted, no I didn’t immediately fall back in to that blissful state of existence I’d been in weeks earlier, but this is the work, this is the practice. Every moment builds on the next, every time we touch on something good it gets a little easier to find out way back there. Just like in our physical practice, we work on arm balances and inversions even if we think they are beyond our reach. We practice, we accept that our feet or still on the ground and we surrender the effort we are making to lift off. I have had quite a few students come to the mat for the first time (or first few months even) with fear and over time I watch that fear transform into believing in their selves and their practices. And on really good days I see their first flight.