Journey to the Centre of the Self - An Expedition into the Soul, Understanding the nature of the self and overcoming emotional trauma through holistic healing, spiritual practice and psychology - 1. Rough Waters

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” – Genesis, 1:1

My creation story has some close similarities to that of Genesis in the Bible. My life, like the world, began in darkness, and the darkness that was my home was filled with a roaring tempest of emotional turmoil. I will not proclaim to have had the worst childhood imaginable, for such a statement would do injustice to all who have grown up in the third world, all who have suffered abuse and all who have been raised as orphans. No, my childhood did not see abject poverty, epidemic or civil war, but it did bear witness to one of the most understated and misunderstood blights upon modern day society; domestic violence.

I grew up not knowing my real father, and instead I went for my earliest years being raised by my mother, who in her younger years was a neurotic, alcoholic, depressive drug addict with a draw to less-than-gallant men. one of my earliest memories is of my uncle collecting me from our home after a neighbour called to report that I had been left unattended for hours as my mother had fell unconscious. From an early age I witnessed drug dealing, animal cruelty and physical and verbal abuse, though always as a frightened observer. I was raised with the values of my grandfather's generation and learned early that to hunt and kill an animal was necessary for survival and was part of the natural order. But as I grew up I came to realise that this was wrong of course, and only applies in situations where one is lost alone in the wilderness with no contact to civilisation; a realisation which only added to the depth of my self-hatred. After some years of constant emotional torment from a string of different men, my mother finally moved away with me to start a new life in a new town, but due to her own childhood traumas she could not help but attract all of the wrong people, and frequently found herself in relationships with more violent men and drug addicts, from which I witnessed more depravity. During my teenage years I enjoyed a brief period of security after my mother married a kind and respectable working man, but the marriage eventually broke down due to her alcoholism and refusal to cut ties with her old bag-head buddies. A year after their divorce I nearly lost my life whilst trying to defend her and my half-brother from her latest psychotic and murderous boyfriend. This resulted in me being sent to stay with a legal guardian, who proved very difficult to live with. What didn’t help was that my mother chose to take her murderous boyfriend back after he returned from prison, and after I had already moved back in to her home to find some semblance of comfort in my own space in which to thik and come to terms with everything that had happened, space which I lacked in my temporary home. This of course was the cause of numerous arguments between myself and my mother which often ended with us physically fighting each other, and on one occasion with me restraining her from trying to stab me with a kitchen knife. I began to slide into depression and suicidal tendencies, damaging relations with family and friends; I needed to get away. Needless to say I moved out at the first opportunity to live with my partner and her family.

Now, I don’t want to depress anyone, for I have emerged from the stormy waters of my early years with a resilience which most of my friends could never have gained from their calm and sheltered upbringings; and I am now grateful for every heart breaking memory that I have, for they have made me stronger. And in the same way that God said “Let there be Light, and there was Light”, I found the light of my life in my partner who has saved me from those painful recollections as well as from myself on a number of occasions. However, while I endeavour to remain as positive as one can possibly be regarding this subject, I must confess at this early stage that I am far from unscathed by the traumas of my youth. I, like so many people around the world, suffer from a number of deeply rooted emotional issues ranging from anxiety to low self-esteem, bouts of deep depression and most devastatingly…anger management problems. It is said that violence begets more violence; well in this instance it is true, for I have as much control over my emotions as a hamster has control of a runaway freight train. At any moment in time, with the minutest push of the wrong button, I could come off the rails and potentially destroy everything in my path. In recent years I have been able to quell the flames inside of me to some extent, with the eventual stabilisation in my hormone levels and entering into a steady relationship with someone patient and understanding. But I still find myself quick to anger, and occasionally I become Mount Vesuvius and erupt with pent up rage and frustration. The most recent occasion, and the one that has finally convinced me that something must be done, occurred when I was 21.

I shared an apartment with my partner and a friend from college, as well as a number of furry quadrupeds. One of these said quadrupeds of the canine variety had a rather tense and distrusting relationship with my old college buddy, and they were often at odds over small and insignificant things such as the ownership of empty chocolate wrappers, or the liberty of the four-legged one to move from one room to the next. On this occasion I had, up until the evening, had a good day and I was happy. However, within a matter of minutes my mood went from the top of mount Olympus to the darkest depths of Tartarus, seemingly without any provocation. I retired to my room to brood in an attempt to shake off the melancholy, but after a short while I heard the familiar sound of war brewing in the living room. Taking my proverbial sword in hand I marched headlong into the fray and instantly ended the conflict while inadvertently starting one of my own. I did not realise that as I entered the room I demanded, apparently in a less than polite tone, to know why my flatmate was pestering the dog to the point of receiving aggression. When he responded with what appeared to me to be belligerence, my already low mood began to boil. It only took a few seconds for my tone to rise and for his to follow before we came to blows, physically. From then on I could not stop the tirade of verbal abuse and aggressive posturing, frightening him into submission (I’m 6’ 4” compared to his 5’ 6”, so it’s not surprising), and before I knew what had happened he had donned his jacket and left the building. It was in the quiet aftermath of this short-lived battle that I had time to think about what I had said to him, and it struck me how I had spoken to him like a delinquent child, referring to him as “boy” and telling him that he needed to “grow the f**k up and learn from [his] mistakes”. I knew then that I had been the biggest hypocrite in the world, for it was not he who needed to grow up, it was me, still trapped in a pit of rage that was dug twenty years ago; and if anyone needed to learn from their mistakes, it was me. I had already driven one of my old friends away some years before, and had a less than loving relationship with my parents, all because I could not take the reins of my own chariot before I crashed and burned.

The answer to my problems seems obvious, does it not? "Get some help! See a psychiatrist or something." But on that score I am way ahead, for I have already received "counselling" while in secondary school. This feeble attempt at curing my affliction consisted of one hour a week, sitting in a cold, plain white room with a woman who to my mind was utterly unqualified in child therapy, talking idly about why I can't concentrate in classes and why I headbutted a boy in the lunch line the week before. The conclusion drawn from those exhaustive sessions was thus: low self esteem. According to a psychiatric professional my short attention span, anxiety, migraines, flashbacks and propensity for violent outbursts were all due to the fact that I was shy, introverted and a loner who had a low opinion of myself, resulting in emotional stress which manifested through the above outlined symptoms. If anything my shyness and lack of friends were symptomatic of a deeper cause, a fact which I attempted to make her aware of but to no avail. From then on I came to the conclusion that conventional therapy from so-called professionals was not going to help me, especially since the whole saga had simply given me one more thing to be angry about. How could she think that it was my fault? I wasn't angry because I was lonely, I was lonely because I was angry, and I was only angry because I had accumulated a decade and a half of more than adequate reasons to be.

It was my loving wife who suggested, over a year ago now, that I write this blog to document the journey to understanding myself, the root of my emotional issues and the myriad causes of emotional instability of people in general. I have always been a deep thinker and thus inclined to explore the hidden and mysterious realms of spirituality, and it is through these realms, as well as those of mainstream psychology, biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and alchemy that I intend to travel in my quest to better understand the reasons why we feel negative emotions, and try different ways to treat the symptoms and heal the root causes of these emotional and spiritual afflictions. I will be exploring a range of therapies, including meditation, breathing exercises, Tai Chi, Yoga, crystal healing, sound therapy, Chakra healing, past life regression, soul retrieval and many more. It is my hope that by doing so I will be a few steps closer to being the man I want to be, and perhaps be a help or inspiration to others who feel the same way that I do. My aim is to heal the world, but first I must heal myself, for as Rumi said, “When your inner world comes into order, so too does your outer world come into order.” Until my next installment, I wish you peace, love and illumination wherever you may be. Namaste.

Enki Endymion. O(