I remember opening my eyes and seeing the fireplace in front of me. The colors washed and blurry, I must have been crying.
Sitting on the leather ottoman, I felt heavy, winded, and I realized I had been handcuffed. I could count four policemen in the room with me. I was 11 years old. This must have been another one of my rage outbursts, one of my meltdowns. I don't know how it happened or why.
And so I began, as I always did in these situations, to apologize for something I didn't remember doing, something I wasn't present for. Feelings of shame well up, but are quickly stuffed down by an overwhelming confusion and sadness.
I was told the police came to our house every day for two years straight. These meltdowns, however, continued on through my adolescence despite medications, therapies, and every treatment approach that may be considered conventional. One hospital visit after another. One medication combo after another for over a decade.
I had a body that felt like it was made of bombs that wouldn't stop exploding, and a mind too loud and fast to keep up with. Underneath it all were sickening depths of depression and self-hate, a twisting anxiety, and tic attacks that always seemed to wriggle their way through. Those were painful and relentless: headaches, neck injuries, and more.
I began meditating in my early teens as a way to escape. I don't know where it came from; it was purely an impulse. Nevertheless, I kept a cushion on my floor at my bedside, and every night, I'd sit and meditate for as long as I could manage and muster.
I fell deeply and swiftly into a nothingness that would consume every symptom and every iota of what existed above the darkest expanses of my internal conscious awareness. Every burden, every affliction, silenced, even if just for moments. It was this death of everything I understood to be me, everything I identified with, that I sought night after night.
And entirely on accident, something else began to light up. A network underneath my symptoms. Strings connecting one dot to another. It began slowly to make sense. So much so, I started to feel empowered. I felt like I could reach out and touch a web of chain reactions that ultimately manifested on the surface as mood disorder, tic attacks, and more. Ways I held myself. Mindsets and self-understandings. The weight of symptoms and syndrome.
And so I became my own science experiment, thus beginning many years of trial and error, failures and self-discovery. This process bled into every facet of my life. Indeed, my life became one of stained glass. All the pieces painstakingly tended to and placed back together again to create something other than before.
What became my life's work guided me down interesting avenues. I've met and worked with neuroscientists, Zen masters, gasotransmitter and gut-brain specialists. I earned a degree in Chinese medicine and became nationally board certified. Everything I learned, I refined and found a way to integrate into what I was already doing. Every puzzle piece shaped just so and added to the final picture.
Decades later, and I can share with you a single program composed of a few methodologies borrowing from every fruit of my life.