Discovered at Age 7, Forgotten for 40 Years
My journey back to Me
[Trigger warning: Abuse and mental-health struggles.]
I made this connection during the come-down of a recent psychedelic journey. I realized that I now, at age 55, understand – for the first time as an adult – what I discovered spontaneously at age 7. This story of forgetting and relearning over a lifetime illustrates so many things about the ego, the nature of suffering, and the path to inner peace.
My full-body anxiety manifested early. I have memories of lying in bed awake, unable to sleep, squirming with unrelenting discomfort in my nervous system. The thoughts were endlessly looping: people bullying and rejecting me at school, intense stress over how I'd mishandled interactions yesterday or what I might face tomorrow. I didn't realize (it'd be 15 years until my first therapy session) that this social anxiety sprang from the abuse and neglect I'd experienced at home since infancy.
Torment! 7-year-old me, feeling like I wanted to jump out of my own skin. The thoughts won't stop, the anxiety keeps churning away, the possibility of sleep as distant as the stars. And then, wham!
I would suddenly stop thinking. Just for a moment. No thoughts. I remember doing this as sort of a desperate experiment – Why not try… not thinking? Just for a moment.
And in that moment – I recall this so vividly – peace would descend on my entire being. Suddenly all the agony was gone. No more loops of embarrassing moments from yesterday or possibly terrifying scenarios of tomorrow – no thoughts at all. My mind stopped and suddenly I was free.
The Ego's Trap
What came next reveals the nature of the ego and how it is constructed in our earliest years. I would simply return to the agonizing thinking, the dire treadmill of stress. There was no subsequent thought after that astonishing moment of total bliss: "Whoa! I can cultivate this, explore this, attain this state of freedom more often," nothing like that. My mind went right back to its painful business-as-usual, ignoring the incredible thing that I had just experienced!
Because – I realized this in my recent psychedelic journey – I had already bought whole-hog the assumption (most of us are making in this Age of the Individual) that my ego, the constant drumming of thoughts and associated emotional responses, was ME. "I am these thoughts and feelings – I wish they weren't so disturbing and painful, but alas that's me."
So the moment of peace – nothing less than a brief dip into samadhi – was considered a brief distraction from My Life. Rather than an encounter with the real Me amidst the churning of my false identity with thoughts and emotions. Even though it happened several times – suddenly, no thoughts, no suffering, just bliss and peace until the thoughts rushed back in – I saw those episodes as glitches in the "reality" of my nerve-wracked young life.
(I think of the 20th Century yogi Ramana Maharshi, who encountered his True Self through a thought experiment about death at the age of seventeen, and stayed there forever. No possibility of that for little Henry, who'd been served hefty doses of "Here is what you are – these thoughts, opinions, likes and dislikes, nothing more," along with his first words.)
And so I forgot about these moments. For forty years.
The Return
In my late 40s, I fell into an unexpected k-hole, having incorrectly assessed the amount of ketamine left in the bottle. I had been practicing various forms of yoga for many years, as I tried to feel more comfortable, less constantly stressed out and despondent. But even breathing deeply in Child's Pose, I couldn't let go of that core anxiety.
However in the k-hole there was no "me" to constrict and clench around the ancient pain. The pranayama (yogic breathing) I'd been diligently practicing spontaneously began – there was no "me" to make a decision. Waves of breath, long, surrendered exhalations. With no identity, no words, I could finally come home.
No thoughts. No sense of body, of being anything. Just a swirling unfolding of indescribable hallucinations (I was in the pitch black, sitting on a meditation cushion), and the breath pulsing like the rhythm of the universe. Hours later, when I came down – when I again possessed a body and language in my head – there was an incredible peace I'd never known.
Or at least that I hadn't touched in forty years.
My lifelong depression and anxiety were reduced 10-fold. I was filled with gratitude, love, confidence, energy that felt so new. Since that unexpected k-hole, I have explored a wide range of psychedelics, integrating whenever I can all these beautiful yoga practices I accumulated over the years.
Essentially what I'm doing, when I disappear into the mystery of 5-MeO-DMT for example, is traveling back in time. I bring love with me – all this newfound energy and confidence – to help that little 7-year-old feel safe and secure, able to really take a deep breath and relax. What a blessing!
The Connection
It's funny that, while I was doing plenty of conscious Inner Child work during many of these Ayahuasca ceremonies and Bufo launches, I only made this particular connection last week at the tail end of a ketamine journey.
I realized that those moments I had instinctively arrived at forty years ago, awake and boiling with stress, were not glitches, but the Truth. In the language of Yoga, my life of anxiety arose from the false identification with the chitta vrittis (the thinking mind or ego), and when I somehow stopped my thoughts I could rest – if only for a moment – in my True Nature (the natural mind).
Wow. What a mistake to make for four decades – whoops! I try to have a sense of humor and compassion for myself. And unlike Maharshi, I have not "stabilized" this realization for very long, let alone permanently. My body and breath still get swept up in the thoughts, I feel waves of anxiety now and then when certain old mental habits surge.
But now I know. I know what I am. I know what the thoughts do, I know the ego's game, the ceaseless feedback loops of words in the head and feelings in the body.
And now I can touch that bliss of no-thinking – that is to say, "touch in" with my True Nature – almost at will.
It's hard to express the gratitude I feel for being able to make this connection with my child self – to draw this braid of love and understanding across forty years of my life. To make that connection with little me, both of us abiding in the Self. To heal so deeply and be able to finally relax.
If this piece resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from this perspective on healing and self-discovery.