BEFORE THE BREAKTHROUGH

Since I’ve known myself, I’ve always lived on the extremes. My highs were over the top, and my lows were incredibly dark. I’ve had many moments in my life where I felt immensely happy, successful, lucky, beautiful, hopeful… However all of these moments seemed to be short lived. No matter how hard I try, happiness was slipping through my fingers and I couldn’t do anything about it. And soon after my peaks, my darkness would come in.

I’ve met the darkness within me at a young age and I’ve fought a battle with it throughout my entire life. I was 11 years old when I told my teachers at school that I wanted to die. They couldn’t make sense of it, why would a kid who is at her play age would want to die. I had no idea either. I had a good life and a good family. But there was this excruciating pain and unworthiness within me that I couldn’t understand or resolve or run away from. So death seemed to be the easiest solution. Yet I was very young, so I had hope. There could be many reasons why I was suffering and there could be many ways to understand it and find my way out.

I spent my following years, through adolescence and young adulthood, trying to find the reasons of my suffering and different ways out. I’ve tried to drink my way out of it and became an alcoholic in high school. I got sober at the age of 16 and I thought I found my salvation in sobriety which definitely helped me a lot to become a better person but yet darkness still found its way to creep back in. I’ve kept struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts throughout my sobriety. I got on meds and I thought this was it! I was sick and antidepressants were going to make me better. I was on meds for 10 years, they didn’t make me better. I was still the same person, so the pain and the darkness stayed the same. I was just taking pills on top of it. The dose of the meds kept increasing but the pain stayed equally excruciating. So I kept spending my years rising and falling. I’d have very happy moments full of hope in between my falls and those moments kept me going. Yet I was always left with a deep dissatisfaction and disappointment about myself and my life.

Year 2022 was a classic example of my rise and falls. Throughout the year there were moments where I felt very happy, connected and full of hope about future. Then there were the moments I felt depressed, anxious, hopeless, dark and dead inside. My months went by working a lot and then coming home, trying to disappear on my couch watching Netflix series to distract my mind from myself. Through tv shows I was able to escape from my reality of how dissatisfied I was with my life. I’ve always been a highly empathetic person where not only I can easily understand what others are feeling but I can fully feel their emotions and even merge with them in the process. So merging with happy tv characters and live their lives in a different world became my greatest coping skill at the time. Yet my own life was just passing by. At the end of each tv series I had a harder time going back to my own life and facing the void inside me which I didn’t know how to fill. (Later I’d learn it is not about filling the void but it is rather about removing everything other than the void. It is about leaning into the void and becoming one with it that gives our sanity back.)

After spending months in depression I got sick. My stomach was not able to digest food. In time I stopped eating because I would get so bloated and nauseous when I eat even small portions of food. I lost a lot of weight. I saw many doctors, none of them could help much, test results were coming clean, there were no ulcer in my stomach and they didn’t know why I was not able to digest. They were not very interested anyway, they only prescribed bunch of unhelpful meds and sent me away. Except one of them really took the time to understand and he did help me get a bit better. He said that my stomach was not producing the digestive enzymes and therefore I was not able to digest food which is why I was getting sick when I eat. My body was starving for nutrients but I wasn’t able to eat because of my stomach. He told me I wouldn’t be able to have a baby before I got better. I was 30. He told me unless we resolve this issue, I would probably be Alzheimers at the age 50 because my brain was also not getting the nutrients it needs to function.

I got on a strict diet, mostly vegan and raw food. I started using digestive enzymes. All of these helped and I seemed to get better. However I got worse again later on because I was stressed out at my job, working too much and not giving myself the space to heal. As a result I had an internal bleeding in my stomach. My doctor was worried, he didn’t understand why this had happened. He warned me to be very cautious with everything I’m eating. He said if I didn’t watch out, this could become chronic which meant I could regularly bleed internally and that would obviously be horrible. Not something I would want to deal with on a constant basis at such a young age.

Bleeding was a big wake up call for me. I looked myself in the eyes for the first time in a long time and I got brutally honest with myself instead of sugarcoating what had been going on. At the age of 30 I was grappling with depression and sickness. I looked old, I felt dead inside. I loved the people I worked with dearly and like a family but I couldn’t find meaning or purpose in my job. I felt like I couldn’t adapt to the modern way of life and the capitalist way of working. I hated the business world. All the titles, ego driven conversations, solely money, profit and growth focused goals… I just couldn’t make sense any of it.

I looked at the modern man and his way of life; and I saw madness. We are waking up early to rush into the office without any time or space for our self-care. We are working from 9am till 6pm, mostly sitting on our desks not moving and staring at screens. We try so hard to feel important with what we’re doing, but deep inside we know most of the things we do on a regular basis are complete bullshit. Yet we sacrifice so much of ourselves to excel at things that doesn’t even truly matter to us, to nature, to world, to life. But we still keep going. And for what? It is not giving us joy. We are unhappy, dissatisfied with our lives and physically sick. We, as human beings, are not designed to live like this. We are supposed to move, we are supposed to be in nature, we are supposed to be together and we are supposed to do things that are meaningful to us. How did we, as society, get to this point? We are basing our self-worth on a title written on a small piece of paper. We are working for years in agony to be called ‘manager’ and feeling so important to be called a word that doesn’t have any value in it. We are appraising ourselves with the branded clothes we are wearing, the house or the car or million other things we have that we don’t even need. Then we are using those titles and things to separate ourselves from the rest of the people to feel special. Yet at the end we are left disconnected, lonely, depressed, empty and shallow inside. And all of these negative thoughts and beliefs and feelings emerging from the way we live is making us sick. So we are rushing to doctors and using tons of meds but none of them are really making us any better. Because it isn’t our physical body that is broken. It is the way we live, it is the way we think. I couldn’t make sense any of it, yet here I was in the midst of the madness, dragging along, desperately wanting to escape but not finding the courage to do it.

Throughout my chaotic and stressful life, I’ve always remembered the vipassana I did in a Buddhist temple in northern Thailand about 4 years ago. I’ve always had a privileged life, I was blessed that I’ve never known poverty or never really had to worry about financials, I went to private schools, nice hotels and trips. However everyone who knows me can tell you that I only talk about one experience among all my travels and it is the one in this Buddhist temple. This is a buddhist temple where they welcome every guest with no fee. Once you enter the temple, someone welcomes you, gives you a thin mat to sleep on, a pillow and a blanket. You sleep on the floor on your mat. You wake up everyday at 4am, help with the breakfast, do the morning ritual with the monks, meditate, have a simple vegetarian breakfast, then keep meditating throughout the day, have your second and last meal at noon, wash the dishes, help with the chores at the temple and then meditate again and again until its dark in the evening and its bedtime.

If you want to, you can be in total silence and that’s what I did. From the moment I went in the temple till my last day I was in silence for about 5 days. I did not speak, I did not use my phone, I did not read, I did not look at any screens. I was completely with myself in silence, just sitting and hanging out in nature. The first two days were hard in terms of adjusting. My back was hurting a little from sitting on the floor all day and I was desperately craving any stimulation at all. I felt irritated and restless.

Then on my third day something happened and I woke up different. Suddenly my mind was quiet. My thoughts were not screaming anymore. All there was the moment. I’ve never known this kind of inner peace. I was feeling the heat from the sun with all my being. Not only I was feeling the heat, all there was the heat. I don’t know exactly how to put this into words but it wasn’t even ‘I was the heat’ because there was no me left. All my ego vanished and I experienced the divine oneness with my whole being. There was no separation between me and the life out there. We were just one. There was only life; there was only light; they was only love. This moment is one of the rarest, most precious moments of my life and it changed me deeply. I’ve never known peace and joy as in that moment. For the first time in my life I felt whole. For the first time I didn’t feel the void within me because there was no me, I was the void and it was beautiful. In that moment I truly understood what they mean by ‘all we need exists within’. Peace, power, joy and happiness are all within. As long as we don’t learn how to connect within, nothing out there, no materialistic possession, no job, no relationship, no one and nothing can give us any peace or happiness. I felt like I found my super power. Outer life events, my past or my future didn’t matter anymore because I was exactly where I wanted to be when I closed my eyes.

I left the temple as a different person. At that point in my life I’ve been on antidepressants for about 10 years. My psychiatrists believed my depression was major and that it would be a miracle for me to get off meds. So in their opinion I’d probably be have to be on meds rest of my life. I got off meds when I left the temple, after only five days of silence and meditation. My psychiatrist had a hard time believing it but I was doing great without the meds, no side effect whatsoever. I was full of joy. She first asked ‘what are you doing?’ I answered ‘I am just meditating every night, staying present and enjoying the moment’. She told me ‘well I don’t understand it but keep doing what you’re doing, it seems to be working wonders.’

This was also the first time I started losing confidence in western science of health. Western way of health was about labeling you with a disease without even really listening to your story (and charging a good amount of money just for labeling) and making you believe that label is real and set in stone. So you have to use bunch of pills just to not go insane (and again charging tons of money in the process just for keeping you not insane but the thing is: it made you believe you were insane in the first place and also charged money for making you believe you were insane). Throughout all of this process I found myself paying tons of money to different psychiatrists, using increasing doses of medication, and yet ending up equally depressed and sick. All the while owners of the antidepressant companies kept getting richer.

(A really good book to read on depression and anxiety is Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Johann and his book changed my life. Also check his newest book Stolen Focus which is also amazing.)

The brief yet powerful experience I had in that temple proved everything the western science had been telling me wrong. I saw that I was not destined to false diagnostics and labels that were forced onto me. I saw there was a way out, a way that is truly healing unlike the pills which are just temporary numbing band-aids in my opinion.

That being said I just want to say here that this is my story and my truth which might not necessarily work for you. If you’re on pills and they’re working great for you, then that’s amazing and you should keep using them. I’m not necessarily against all medication, I just have a problem with the way system diagnoses you without taking an interest in your story and doesn’t offer you any alternatives or narratives. I have a problem with the misleading diagnostics and prescribing just to sell. And I have a problem with the western perspective of health that is so dismissive of all the other cultural alternatives as if western health perspective is the one and only authority in the world when it comes to health. Which is so sarcastic because in my opinion people overall don’t seem to be getting better or more well since the western/modern way of life and medicine is prevailing. On the contrary I see more and more people who are deeply depressed, anxious and sick.

But I’m not saying my perspective is right. There is no right or wrong. This is only my story and my truth. And I am responsible to share my story because I know there are many people who are going through the same struggles. That being said you should not just listen to me. You should listen to your own heart and you should decide what your own truth is. Don’t let others decide for you, because only you know you. Do whatever works for you, whatever is truly making you feel better and well. Do whatever is giving you true joy. If that is western psychiatry and pills, then that’s amazing and you should do that. I’m only saying that was just not working for me and I know it is not working for many people around the world today. And people like me deserve an alternative narrative instead of just being dismissed and coerced into status quo.

I never went back to meds and I’ve been as good as I was when I was on meds. For a long time I was able to keep my inner joy through my meditation and self-care routine. Then I started working in the business world and abandoned my self. I started getting consumed by the madness of modern way of life again. Therefore my depression and anxiety slowly came back. But I always remembered my moment in the temple and dreamed that one day I would leave everything behind, go back and be a monk. Since my time in the buddhist temple I’ve always felt like I had a calling in the spiritual world. But I was too afraid to leave. What would people say? I was a highly educated, successful, career driven woman. I was someone who defined herself by her resume and achievements. Woman of science and logic. To leave everything behind and become no one. To fill her life with the crazy talks of energy and spirits (which I used to think was complete nonsense). What would people think of me? It seemed impossible to find the courage to just do it even though I was blessed by all the resources and privileges to do it.

Internal bleeding gave me this courage. So I’m eternally grateful for my sickness and the bleeding for they pushed me towards my dream life. I looked at myself in the mirror and I said: ‘I’m not gonna do this to myself anymore, I’m not gonna keep living a life that is making me sick and unhappy just because it’s comfortable. I’m gonna live the life I want, a life that is aligned with my values. I’m gonna create the life I want. I refuse to believe in the lie of powerlessness. I refuse to believe that I’m obligated to live a certain way because that’s just the way system or society or life is. I’m not obligated to do anything. I have power. I am not powerless, I am full of power and I will make my dreams come true’.

I decided to sell my house and travel around the world until I decide what my dream life looked like. I’ve always loved traveling solo cause it gave me the space to go further within and explore myself. Every time I traveled to a foreign place on my own, I had gained profound insights about myself. So I put my house on sale, guessing it would take at least 2-3 months to be sold with the price I’m asking which realtors said it was impossible to sell with that price. The house was sold in two weeks as if the universe was approving my decision and telling me to leave. But I was not expecting to be out of my house so suddenly. And I was still very sick so I didn’t know if I’d be able to travel.

Then funnily I started having anxiety attacks once everything started becoming real. Was I crazy! Where was I gonna live? I didn’t even know where I was going. I didn’t make any plans. I was not ready, how did I make this radical decision. Was I even sure? Did I think about it twice? Was I out of my mind? I’ve been a controlling workaholic my whole life. So leaving everything I know behind and going into complete unknown of course freaked the hell out of me. Right at this moment of sickness and anxiety, a dear friend whom I trust very much told me she knew someone who could help me with my anxiety. She said ‘you’re going through many major changes. There is this spiritual advisor I know, he might be able to help and guide you in this process if you’re interested’. I said ‘yes of course, I’d love to!’ And that’s how I found my dear Roko <3