Bringing light to the shadows

Having two autistic boys has not been the issue as such. I see ‘autism’ very much as validation of excess Vata and deep sensitivity - think Indigo, crystal and rainbow children - who have come in to show us another way of being and living in this.

No, it’s more that as someone who works in a healing capacity, I made the error of being hyper sensitive to their every ailment and imagined (or indeed real) traumatic experience, desperate to minimise their longer term suffering and falling into the trap of trying to ‘fix’ them.

This caused unnecessary stress for me and for them too probably, yet has helped me to realise the extent to which our mind creates our own suffering with its projections and imaginings, let alone the manner in which it falls into the trap of perfectionist thinking. I know I am not the only mum to experience this and so I thought it might be helpful to share my experience.

I have become increasingly conscious that we are each of us here as individual souls with our own karma and past life history and our own experience in utero and through birth, which influences our experience of life on Planet Earth, even before we’ve taken our first breath.

Then there’s the impact of whether we are first, second or third born, to say nothing of the time of the year, the cultural, political, economic and social environment we grow up in, and the impact this has on our caregivers, let alone what our caregivers have going on, in response to all that they have experienced in their lifetime .

And as each experience influences our perception of reality because of the impact it has on our mind, let alone our physical, emotional and spiritual bodies, then of course it makes sense that we can each be in the same family but having a very different experience of being in that family.

Furthermore, as mothers, we have to consider that we might well be imagining our children’s suffering and trauma because we are viewing it through our own lens, not theirs – as in we are viewing it from our own trauma and experience of suffering – and they are mirroring in us what is still unresolved and undigested.

This was brought home to me when my youngest, Eben, was diagnosed with separation anxiety. The kindly man at CAMHS (the local child and adolescence mental health service) suggested that the anxiety may be due to Eben’s experience in utero and the effect of extended breastfeeding (he was almost 5 when he finally weaned). Initially I was a little thrown, but I could see how yes, my anxiety during pregnancy may well have played a role.

Furthermore Eben was born six weeks early and separated from me at birth, spending the first few weeks of his life in NICU. It was everything I didn’t want for him and while I tried to minimise the perceived harm done by fairly much having him attached to me thereafter, in a sling or my arms, co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding, this of course made separation trickier when he began pre-school and later school and had to be separated (literally at times) from me.

It didn’t help that his older brother also suffered separation anxiety in those earlier years, and Eben witnessed this at pre-school and school drop-off, which might well have given the impression that separation from mummy was not safe. However, it took me a long time to realise that perhaps the boys were merely reflecting my own separation anxiety as I was in denial of this, not realising that I was as anxious as they were about my separation from them.

This to the extent that I rarely travelled or met anyone else without having them with me, even taking them on the yoga retreats that I ran and the study courses I attended off island. Partly this was due to the extended breast feeding, but I see now, that it was driven by my need to have them close, because of my fear of the feelings of separation.

Still, it wasn’t until I took my first solo trip all the way up to Orkney that I realised that separation was an issue as I found myself in a high state of anxiety. This continued when I started taking solo trips to visit my yoga teacher in Scotland and the anxiety became an issue for me. Initially I assumed everyone felt this way, but then it dawned on me that something deeper was going on and in many ways, Eben’s formal diagnosis was helpful, as it validated this.

I set the intention to get to the root, and started delving deeper into the shadows through yoga and healing sessions. In the latter, I kept getting a recurring vision of a past life where I was separated from those I loved. Then there were memories from this lifetime too, of childhood separations from my parents which caused me angst, then the homesickness of the separation which university brought and the heart-breaking separation from my brother when he moved to live the other side of the world.

I realised then that the travel separation was bringing up deep unresolved pain in my heart, of loss and loneliness and the uncomfortable feeling of emptiness in my stomach which accompanied this. It was a very uncomfortable feeling and I noticed that I did all I could to avoid feeling it and when I did feel it, it made me extremely anxious – I realised then that this feeling, or my avoiding of it, inevitably led to disordered eating.

There was then the recognition, that as much as I love spending time in solitude, there is an underlying fear of being all alone in the world coupled with a fear of the pain of losing those I love. This is not unusual, if we all delve a little into our fears we will likely find the same theme as this is around survival ultimately, and our feelings of helplessness in earlier childhood. 

An uncomfortable realisation followed – the recognition that there were many ways that I had let this fear run my life, from my choice in partners, to my fierce independence and yet at times the complete opposite, with patterns of co-dependence. This fascinated me – I realised how much our sub-conscious fears run the show, how our unresolved pain dictates our choices and cause us to keep stumbling up against the same obstacles, blaming the outside world, until we finally realised this is just a reflection of our inner world.

This also helped me to realise that there is a huge difference between fixing and healing. I had been trying to ‘fix’ my boys for a few years by then, and perhaps the quest for diagnoses was part of this – albeit these have been helpful and while ASD diagnosis is increasingly common place it has helped all of us to understand more of the boys’ nature, of the hyper and indeed hypo sensitive behaviours, the latter often getting confused as naughtiness.

However, what I hadn’t appreciated was that ‘to fix’ implies that something is broken, and my children are not broken. Sure they hated school and over time that could have caused far more trauma than it did, but they were never broken by it. And there was also nothing wrong, because for there to be wrong, then there has to be right and for there to be right there must be perfect and of course we all know there is no perfect as such.

Yet so many of us waste far too much of our precious energy trying to live to this notion of ‘perfect’, which is illusionary and keeps us disempowered, because what does perfect really mean? On the whole it’s an idea we have been fed by media, or Disney, or society, or our culture, or our education system, that somehow we can get it ‘right’ and then all will be well in the world (really it feeds consumerism and materialism but that’s a whole other story).

Furthermore, getting it ‘right’, also means getting it ‘wrong’. And at the end of the day, what’s ‘right’ for one person, might be ‘wrong’ for another, and vice versa - this because there is no rule book, despite religious doctrine.

And that’s half the problem, our conditioning, which gets in the way of our peace, like we carry around this voice in our head which is constantly telling us that we did that ‘wrong’, so we’re ‘bad’, our heart sinks, our spirit flags, or the voice, which tells us we did it ‘right’ (for once) and so we must be ‘good’, hooray, we feel better about ourselves until we get it ‘wrong’ again. And on it goes, ‘good’ day, ‘bad’ day, all because of a perception in our mind about good/bad and our judgement, yes our judgment of ourselves over and over again.

Furthermore, if we’re having a ‘bad’ day and judging and criticising ourselves excessively then without doubt, we will seek validation of our badness and worthlessness everywhere. We are likely to be hyper sensitive to perceived criticism and assume people are judging us even if they are not. It is incredible the stories we tell ourselves – someone looks at us ‘funny’ and we assume they have a problem with us, when really they were just getting on with their day oblivious to us. No wonder so few find any inner peace within their inner judgement system.

Yet inner peace is there for us, if only we can free our mind of this conditioning, which feels like a foreign installation, as if it has been put in us by something outside of us, like a game, to keep us dumbed down, until we manage to find the insight to break free, to realise that our greatest limitation is a conditioned mind with all its endless, unhelpful and generally self-depreciating thinking and erroneous and limited belief system.

It's not always easy to know though what is sitting deep in the shadows. It took me a good while to get to the root of the separation anxiety, to notice the Samskaras, the patterns and start to get a sense of the underlying reason – the scent or impression of previous experience. It was this process that helped me to finally digest and make peace with some of the experiences, like university and the separation from my brother, which still sat inside me, and continued to inform the separation anxiety, and kept showing up in the recurring dreams.

We should never overlook recurring dreams – they are potentially powerful in highlighting an experience or situation, which has not yet been processed and healed within us and has been pushed into the shadows - the unconscious.

So I sat with the pain during yoga and healing sessions as it surfaced to be seen and felt and therefore digested and witnessed – I was able to then notice the stories which accompanied the experiences around abandonment, rejection, unlovability and lack of worth, and the false self-image and identity that arose because of this.

In this way, the previous contraction - think of tension in the body, which is the physical holding of the mental and emotional aspect of an undigested/processed experience, which is the reason changing our movement patterns can be so helpful as then we release the relates thinking and behaviour pattern, which are likely formed to ‘hide’ (or trap) an uncomfortable feeling/experience from this lifetime or maybe it came in with us – eased and I began to feel a new aliveness.

I was no longer bound by my (false) perception of the past (after all, no one really abandoned or rejected me, any more than I am unlovable or unworthy, and I am not unsafe either, but these were literally stories my mind created around the painful experiences). In this way my present and future began to transform. To anyone else, family, friends etc., nothing will appear to have changed, but for me everything had changed as I could let go now of the need to fix, which was extremely liberating - and I am now to acknowledge the separation anxiety when it arises and not push the feelings away.

The healing process had helped me to let go of carrying around so much of my undigested past, which kept informing my present and therefore shaping my future. It wasn’t that I meant to, but I can see clearly now how much we keep repeating more of the same, until we let go of the unconscious driver, but of course we have to bring the unconscious to the conscious, bring the shadows to the light of awareness.

And this is where our judgements can actually be helpful, because more often than not, we are judging in others what is not yet resolved in ourselves. Or to put it another way, they are mirroring something in us that we might look at inside ourselves. We are brilliant at projecting onto others and making them ‘wrong’ and ourselves ‘right’, which merely feeds judgement.

At the end of the day, life touches us all in our own unique ways and leaves an imprint, a  trace. This imprint will cause us all to see and relate to the world differently and this will inevitably affect our choices as much as our behaviour patterns. We might not agree with other people’s choices and behaviours, but that is because we are literally seeing the world differently.

And the reason we are seeing the world differently is because of our different life experiences and interpretation of those experiences, which will be dependent on our psychology, our emotional resilience, our mental imprinting, our hormonal state, let alone our level of consciousness in that moment.

Of course we’ll make mistakes, and other people will likely try and highlight these to us. But again, life is not perfect, and the only way we learn is through doing it one way and realising that isn’t working, so that we find another way. Because if we are getting it ‘right’  you can be sure that at some point we will get it ‘wrong’.

I have witnessed far too many clients berate themselves for years over their perceived failings and wrong doings, living with regret and stubborn lack of forgiveness, which keeps them trapped in a pattern of self-hatred, guilt, shame and remorse – as my Dad has said to me on many occasions “let it go!”.

Instead, just for today we can begin anew – we can weed out the negative thoughts, beliefs and mindsets and transform them into something more positive. Being on our mat helps, meditation is ideal, or a healing session with someone who can help us see into the shadows, so that we can gradually understand more of our patterning and the root of this. In this way we might let go of false notions of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect, and see things as they are, without attaching a story, an opinion, or a judgement. 

This journey with separation anxiety, has helped me to see how clearly we create our own suffering and how simple it is to set ourselves free. At the end of the day, none of us need fixing. But we can probably all benefit from some healing. And we can all benefit from more self-loving. Plus a healthy dose of accepting reality as it is, rather than fighting against it and trying to fix in into something more…ahem, perfect.

 Love Emma x