Where Has Three Years of Searching Brought Me?
An update to "Two Years Ago I Quit My Life"
Hello! I’m so glad to be back in your inbox! Maybe you’ve been wondering where I’ve been. Let me try to explain . . .
In the middle of the road of our life
I awoke in a wood,
Where the true way was wholly lost
—Dante, Divine Comedy These opening lines, says David Whyte, express Dante’s despair of exile from Florence and reflect "the difficulty we all experience of trying to make a home in the world again when everything has been taken away." They inspired the poem that opens his own book, Essentials, which was standing on the windowsill, alongside a small vase of flowers, when I visited a friend a few weeks ago.
Start Close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
—David Whyte, “Start Close In”
When everything is lost, we must begin not on some “outer ground but from the very center of our being,” Whyte writes. “The temptation is to take the second or third step, not the first, to ignore the invitation into the center of our own body, into our grief, . . . to forgo the radical and almost miraculous simplification into which we are being invited.”
I have definitely been trying to jump ahead to the second or third step, but my body kept dragging me back to center of myself, the place I had been avoiding going but knew I’d ultimately need to go.
Looking for Peace
Leap ahead to a few days ago, I heard David Whyte talking on Instagram about transformation. He said:
“The world has had to fall apart around us for us to actually fall apart. So what would it be like to be at the center of the disappearance, to be willingly disappearing, in cooperation with the seasonality of the world? We change because we have to, because the world around us is changing. . . But we’re often 7-10 years behind the person we’ve actually become. Transformation is to hit present reality with high velocity and to break apart on impact.”
I had to laugh upon hearing that last line. That is exactly what I did, back in 2021. The following year—three years ago now—I retired early from academia and began packing up my house while the lawyers sorted out my divorce. And I began the long process of putting myself back together again.
So many times I’ve thought, I should be whole again by now, I should have my shit together. I should be settled somewhere—in a new home, a new career, a new relationship.
But it’s also true that I’ve resisted the urge to slip into a tidy, new life. Something in me has known all along that being unsettled, unmoored, and unattached were necessary to find the path I was meant to take.
But I haven’t accepted this easily. A tug-of-war has been going on inside me, which is the recipe for feeling stuck and getting sick!
When I broke apart in 2021, what I wanted more than anything (my heart’s highest hope) was PEACE. I wanted to be content, happy, joyful even, if that was possible again. But how would I find it? What path would take me there?
Running off to Europe seemed like a good start, since many of the happiest times in my life (apart from those with my daughter, who was off to college) had taken place there. But I realized at some point that I wouldn’t find a path to PEACE on a map.
Something in me has known all along (again) that the path is not an external one, nor is it visible. I hoped that, eventually, I would be able to loosen my grip on this world and not need to find external reward or validation, or the external conditions necessary for happiness—a home, a relationship, a visa, and a book contract. I’ve tried and failed at all of these in the past three years!
The universe wasn’t going to let me just drop into the perfect new circumstances. It was going to hold my feet to the fire until I figured it out for myself.
Finding the Path
The real journey has been about settling into my own skin and going into the heart of things, taking that first step that David Whyte writes about.
A few months ago, I remember talking to a friend about how I had stripped away—and then regained and lost again—everything the egoic self needs in order to define itself: home, career, relationship, outward identity. Again, I was nobody! In a way, I had done by accident what the mystics and spiritual seekers had done for millennia on purpose—divested themselves of the trappings of this world in their search for transcendence or enlightenment. All I had left, I said half-jokingly, was to become a nun or a monk.
I have to admit that I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with the monastic life. I’ve yearned to withdraw from the world and turn inwards, in search of something more than ordinary life has to offer.
When I re-read Eat, Pray, Love a few years ago, I found myself drawn to the “Pray” part of it for the first time, fantasizing about going to an ashram instead of feasting on my senses in Italy, as I had done before. If I sat long enough in meditation, perhaps I’d find the thing—PEACE, happiness, pure love, whatever it was that felt so desperately absent from my life.
The past five months haven’t been as picturesque as a retreat in India. I might call them a dark night of the soul, except that sounds too dramatic. It’s been more like a grueling slog through the detritus of my psyche—and ultimately an airing out of the corners of my mind.
In the process, I’ve become attuned to my inner chatter and finally learned how to quiet it and replace it with loving thoughts and feelings. I’ve figured out how to turn down the volume on my anxious left brain and to allow my right brain to light up with new activity.1 I’ve allowed anxiety and negative beliefs to naturally dissipate, instead of fighting them.
And lo and behold, a wide space has opened up inside me—a space where PEACE lives, independent of any external conditions that may seem necessary for happiness. It’s a space that was there all along but had become too cluttered, kind of like an abandoned storage locker on which I kept paying the rent instead of finally clearing it out.
Ultimately it was my body that made me fling open the door to that locker. It knew what I needed, and by going into vertigo over and over again, making me curl up on the couch or the bed, barely able to leave my apartment, it forced me to find a way out of the downward spiral.
The Way Out is Through
How did I do it? I could write a book about it, to be honest. And I’ve wanted to tell you all so much more about it, but I’ve found that talking or writing about what I’ve been going through has only made the vertigo worse. I needed to stop talking about it to heal.
But here are the people and the techniques that have helped me on my journey:
I started with trauma-release therapy with Sandy Newbigging, using his Mind Detox technique as well as Quantum Energy Coaching (QEC), which was created by Dr. Melanie Salmon.2 During the past few months doing this work, things got worse before they got better. I had periods of feeling so free and light—and so I would write a post for you and sound hopseful—and then periods of the worst vertigo I’ve ever had, when I went silent again. It was a bit of a rollercoaster. Or a spiral, really. There was not a simple, progressive path out of the woods.
In recent weeks, when my nervous system got into a vicious cycle of fight or flight and freeze, with vertigo happening again on a daily basis, it was the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) that pulled me out of it. (Yes, this simple exercise actually pulled me out of vertigo attacks, which is incredible to me!)
I learned EFT, as well the Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT), from Emily Arin Snider, whom I’ve met through the Cummari Women’s Almanac. Emily is a coach trained in energy psychology and somatic practices. She helps her clients “transform the old emotional energy, limiting beliefs, and outdated programming that has been keeping them feeling stuck, small, and drained.” I cannot recommend Emily enough. She is such a kind and supportive person, and her work has made such a difference to me!
I’ve come to learn that all of these modalities—Mind Detox, QEC, EFT, and TAT—are helpful in shifting the psyche out of negative patterns and freeing the mind. EFT Is the simplest and you can easily do it by yourself. Here is a short video of Emily demonstrating it.3 They are all powerful, though, and I highly recommend all of them! (QEC is probably the best for deep trauma or old patterns we learned in childhood. And it’s so much more effective—and faster—than talk therapy.)
There is no one path for everyone. This has been my path, and these practitioners have been very successful with many other people as well, so I feel confident in recommending them. You may know other paths and practitioners. If so, feel free to share them in the chat.
Have you been avoiding taking the first step, hoping to leap ahead to step two or three? What voice inside of you have you been ignoring or hoping would go away?
As always, I hope you’ve found something thought-provoking or helpful here. And I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments.
I’m so happy to be reconnecting with all of you. I’ve missed you!
Until next time,
Anne
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If you haven’t yet read Martha Beck’s new book, Beyond Anxiety, you simply must.
For my vertigo, I said simply, “Although I am feeling dizzy (or anxious and dizzy), I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
It sounds like you had to surrender and lay everything aside before you could find that space inside of you where peace lies. When I was first diagnosed with Parkinson's, the thing I longed for most was for my body to lie still. So I consciously laid out on my bed on my back with my head slightly uplifted and I listen to prayers and participated in them and felt my body go still, and it felt so wonderful. That was 5 years ago and I still think of that time as a very special one when I discovered what stillness was and how beautiful it is. These days when I have my episodes with my legs where they hurt so bad that all I can do is lie down on my bed and curl up just like you do with your vertigo, I pray the Rosary in my head and let the rhythm of that prayer soothe my aches and pains and calm my nerves, and bring me back to that peaceful center that I would find when I lay still 5 years ago. I'm glad that you're finding your peaceful center and I hope it helps you.
I wish I could gather my thoughts in words to share how much your post resonates with me.
I am at the start of my unraveling and untethering. I so badly have wanted to move quickly past the painful and uncomfortable parts. To get to rediscovery and clarity about my new career, my new adventure, my new life, my new self. Yet the only way is through.
I am embracing the gifts of this season, the answers to prayer, the support of loved ones, the provision for each day.
I am trusting that this time go round I’ll build on a more authentic self not the one who created and accomplished from a place of achievement, “supposed to,” and fear.
Be well in your journey.