Bildcollage: Markus Werner / Pixabay /CC0

When everything changes

“Imagine you have everything set up for the next five years, and then suddenly it all goes wrong. You end up losing everything. One day you lose your money; on other days you lose your friends. finally, you lose the safety of your home. […]”

A young Syrian man called Mike
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/excerpt-a-glimpse-into-the-more-beautiful-world-our-hearts-know-is-possible-the-art-of-hosting-conversations-that-matter/

Some words that deeply touch me because they are a reminder of my own way of planning my life like thousand other people do. Every day we are putting something into practice that should lead us forward towards an aspired goal.

What happens when all of our dreams suddenly disappear because we wake up on one morning and realize that something profoundly has shifted?

It happened to me when a doctor diagnosed some sort of a chronic blood disease. This was in early October last year and it was like a punch right into my face. Today I remember that there are millions of people with a diagnosis like cancer, people who are involved in accidents or people who have to survive their very days by begging for food because they’ve lost their job and are on a downward spiral on the social ladder.

Everything changed from this moment on. I myself changed most. I suddenly found out that no doctor could help me with a life situation that almost overnight turned out to be a reminder of my inevitable death. I studied Youtube clips about people with the same disease. I’ve tried to reach friends of mine that I’ve trusted and I myself withdrew from many friends where I thought that they wouldn’t be of much help. In the end there were only a few people left. I had to fight a depression over the winter months. I first declared myself to be ready for a time off – time off from work – time of from so-called normal life. These have been hard months.

I did a therapy and was laughing about the method – the method of bloodletting. Thinking about being placed back right into the Middle Ages I had to see myself loose energy every day. I was very tired at most times and the really annoying fact was and still is the dizziness and the rotary vertigo that appears out of nothing.

I had time.

I had time to look onto the last months of life. Every little experience came back into my mind and with it the question of WHY. I had time to sleep and I slept a lot. I had time to look at my friendships, time to look at relations. I checked the circumstances I was living in and had to ask myself whether it was still ok to go on living. Was this the end?

Here I had the most painful experience to swallow. I felt lonely and left alone even with a partner who tried her best to support me as much as she could. It’s a basic loneliness – something I didn’t want to see beforehand. Even when being with people – in the end I was left alone. I got tons of advices of what to do and what to expect. Friends told me where to go to search for help. It was almost overwhelming and sometimes it felt confusing.

First of all I’ve needed some space. I would call it a healing space. It was difficult to find and even more difficult to build it up in my surroundings. I was looking for stillness and I was desperately searching for the only contact that was there for me at any given moment – an opening to my inner realms and a connection with my heart somewhere deep down inside of me.

Now I was in the situation that I was so afraid of to face: no job, only some savings, no one to help me to recover and a lot of misunderstanding of people having no clue what it feels like to deal with a chronic disease like mine.

FEARs in all kind of facets where showing up in my mind stream. I lost control over my body and my body was not controllable any longer the way I wanted.

In 2009 I was attending a workshop of the PACHAMAMA ALLIANCE – called awakening the dreamer. I sat in a circle. We’ve been watching film clips about the earth suffering. We’ve been discussing and searching for the causes and I’ve felt that I somehow missed a connection – a heart connection to fully embrace the situation.

Today it is different. I feel like I am Mother Earth. I’m sharing a part of her suffering and it hurts me most that human beings have turned out to be species behaving like robots. Feeling disconnected or separated is not the way of how nature works. Human beings are striving into this direction. It might be greed. It might be fear. However we want to call this phenomenon it creates sickness and unbalance. Now I was this earth and it was and still is my body that’s out of sync.

Today I understand that it’s not easy for a system that is destroying the biosphere to change. It’s a fear driven system. It was my fear that kept me producing all kind of output. It was my fear that was keeping me up being effective in modern life. It was my fear of falling out of the system, of losing the acknowledgment I’ve needed to feel ok and respected. I understand.

Sometimes I imagine that there is someone who could stop the whole process. I visualize a break in doing just for a millisecond and I enjoy prolonging this gab in time. It’s like a big exhalation. There is peace and rest in it. If there is a gift in my disease it must be that: time and space. I feel like slowly arriving where I belong – with me.

Will humanity have a moment in time when it will rest and breathe and sense what’s going on? Will it be painful to feel the suffering of people in this man-created paradigm of capitalism and materialism?

How to go on?

Since a few weeks I am following a kind of an inner knowing.

I am questioning myself. Is this all really me? Sure – something is having all these experiences and I cannot deny certain symptoms that all fit to the diagnosis of the doctors. It’s a silent voice that pops up from somewhere inside my inner realms. It feels like a forgotten land – like a mirage or a dream that I’ve had long time ago. Still it is here. It’s more of a feeling. It’s an intuition. It feels very close but fragile – something that wants to approach “me” and it has not to do with the so-called outer world.

For the first time in my life I am questioning my identity to the fullest extend. Who am I? Where does the fear come from? Why is there no change in old structures? What’s the change inside myself?

All of a sudden I feel like being pushed onto another journey. All I hear is: It will be a healing journey …