What no one tells you about rock bottom

For months after surgery I was living in survival mode. Chest pains, persistent headaches, swollen legs, and a mirror I was avoiding. This episode is about what it actually looks like to hit rock bottom in recovery, not dramatically, just quietly and completely.

There's a David Hawkins idea I came back to during this time: that it's not our emotions that cause the most suffering, it's our avoidance of them. I talk about the moment that landed for me, lying on the floor, and what I decided to do with it. Which was the opposite of what every instinct was telling me.

This episode goes into what happened when I stopped moving away from the pain and moved directly into it instead. What I found there, and what was left after. It's one of the harder episodes to describe. Worth listening to rather than reading about.

LINKS:

• Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ 
• Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/
• Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

Transcript

0:58

Welcome back. In the last episode, I talked about that horizonless gray stretch where the crisis is technically over cr-recovery is technically underway, and you're still somehow deep in the shit pit. Today's different. Today's the episode I told you was coming, the thing that I haven't talked about publicly before, because some things need to be held in the dark before they can be shared. And what I'm about to describe felt so fragile, so new, I kept it close for a long time, like a seed protecting it from anything that might dim its light before it could take root. Today, I'm bringing it to the light Before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together Remember, the information I share here is my own personal experience, and none of it is medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional By this stage, it had been months. Months of the chest pain, months of the tight legs pulling with every step, the headaches that never fully left I was still in survival mode, just trying to make it through to the end of each day without falling apart, still miserable and still fighting it I thought I'd surrendered. I'd talked about surrender. I'd thrown that self-help book in the bin in episode three and decided to stop managing my experience. But underneath all of that, I was still wishing I didn't feel so bad. I was still trying to feel better I was still, to be completely honest, refusing the experience I was having I was lying on the floor with my legs up the wall, staring out the window. I spent a lot of time on the floor, feeling sorry for myself, wallowing like a pig in the shit pit. The elevation helped the swelling in my legs, and the lying flat helped the headache. That's all I had. I was looking at my legs, the 40 centimeter scars running down both thighs, legs that I didn't recognize. Tim was away, Ruby was at kindy, the house was quiet, and I was still doing it I'm still resisting Still avoiding the reality of where I was And David Hawkins writes that the fear of life is really just the fear of emotion. That we spend an enormous amount of energy avoiding feeling what we feel, and that avoidance is what prolongs the suffering. He says that if you go into the pain and truly become it, the resistance stops. Letting go, he says, is one of the most advanced things a human being can doing because it goes against our every instinct. I'd exhausted every other option. Months of trying to feel better and none of it working. Waiting for the pain to ease wasn't working. The chiropractor was helping incrementally. The movement was helping incrementally. But my underlying state, the suffering inside the suffering, that wasn't moving. So lying on the floor looking at those legs, I made a decision I was gonna go in I let my consciousness travel into the pain, into my bones, into my chest, into my skull plates that still hadn't settled. Like going inside myself, my awareness becoming something that I could move inward and inhabit the specific places that were searing and throbbing, and the pain intensified. It got hotter and stronger. Every instinct said pull back. I could hear my pulse in my ears, and I kept going."More. More, please." Like some masochist asking for more pain, but something in me understood that this was the direction I needed to go, that the only way through was exactly where it hurt. So I went right into the pain where it hurt the most, and I sat there and asked for more Then there was a rush, like goosebumps moving through the body, a warm feeling, almost pleasurable The pain was still there, but something had shifted in my relationship to it. I was inside it rather than fighting it And then it's like the pain became its own entity, like it had its own presence, and that presence turned around and left Just gone. And in its place there was a vast open emptiness And I started to fall You know that feeling when you're about to fall asleep and suddenly you fall and your whole body jerks and wakes you up? Humans are born with that reflex, the hypnic jerk. It's one of our oldest, most primal responses. It's our body registering a loss of support and firing every alarm it has That was the feeling I was having, but I didn't wake up. I was falling off a cliff into infinite space, falling and falling with nothing to grip, nothing below I wanted to grab onto something, but there was nothing there. It felt like I fell through some infinite wormhole, like space itself had opened. No walls, no ground, no ceiling, no reference point, just vast directional darkness. and the sensation of moving through it at a speed with no idea when it ended. It was terrifying, but the terror wasn't just the falling, it was something deeper. Something that has no name in ordinary experience It's like my sense of self was dissolving The thing that I call I, the personality, the preferences, the fears, the identity It was all coming apart Nothing mattered. Everything that I'd been holding onto was falling away. My opinions about my situation, my ideas about who I was and what my life was supposed to look like, it was gone And that's what was terrifying. Not the pain, the pain was gone. Not the falling through space. It was the dissolution of the self. It was the complete loss of control, that I was ceasing to be a coherent thing And underneath the place where the pain had been, underneath the dissolving self, I found what the pain had been covering Y Not a fear of anything specific, just a raw, formless fear, the deepest layer, the kind that has no object and no solution. And the pain had been sitting on top of it all this time, giving the suffering a shape. Now there was just this. So I kept going Get falling And then something happened Something swept up from beneath me like a current rising, like being caught by something vast, and I came to a stop. I came to a landing. Suddenly there's something solid beneath me where there'd been nothing And then I felt this warmth, this presence, like something holding me, but not with hands or arms, nothing I could point to But it felt like an aliveness that was not mine and was not separate from me either. I was on solid ground again And what remained when everything else had fallen away was this There was a deep sense of peace Not relief A genuine peace that the situation had never touched and couldn't touch A sense of being connected to something, of not being alone in the universe, of something else holding the whole thing together long before I noticed A sense of time and space collapsing into just here and now. This moment on the floor It's like it all suddenly slot into place as though this was exactly where I was supposed to be, that all of this was meant to be And there was an overwhelming sense of being loved Not by a person or some external thing, but this pervasive, unconditional love that had always been there, waiting at the bottom of everything And knowing in my bones that everything was gonna be okay. Not maybe, okay And something ignited in my chest There was a small spark there that was new and real And I started crying. Not grief or sadness. It was this uncontrollable leaking of love from my heart I'd gone beyond myself, beyond my pain, my body, my preferences, my psyche, my persona. All of it had fallen away And in that transcendent space, I was being held by what felt like love And I remember the first time I felt that And it brought me back to my experience with Guru Das Khalsa I found Guru Das when my heart was broken, when I'd left my husband, and I was in real pain, the kind that cracks you open and leaves you raw. I found my way to one of his workshops back in 2014, and I wasn't prepared for what I encountered I bawled my eyes out when I first met him. There was something in his eyes, a beautiful, kind softness. His energy was timeless. He could have been 40 or 75 or anything in between. But he mentioned that he played at Woodstock, which told you he was older than he looked But age didn't sit on him the way it sits on most people. He was just fully present, and it was the first time I'd ever been in the presence of someone truly enlightened. And I don't use that word lightly There's a quality to an enlightened person that's difficult to describe and impossible to miss. It's just a presence, and Guru Das had that He didn't try to fix me or redirect towards the positive, but just being in h- his presence, something cracked open. The armor that I'd been holding and bracing cracked. The raw emotions I'd been carrying, half contained, started flowing through. I hadn't been able to feel them properly until I was with someone safe enough to feel them That's the gift of an enlightened teacher. Not what they say, but what happens to you in their field It was also the beginning of my love affair with kundalini yoga. That was my entry into the energy-based practices, into working with the body, not just as a physical thing, but as a container of energy that can be moved and cleared and transformed I practiced with Guru Das for years until he died in 2017. In that time, the bhakti practice, the devotional chanting, the music, the surrender of the personal into something vast opened my heart in ways I hadn't known were possible. The first time it happened, love overwhelmed me. Uncontrollable, unstoppable. That was the first time I'd been touched by it And what happened on the floor that Wednesday had the same quality, but deeper, more complete, more real In 2014, I touched it, but this time it touched me In the Inanna myth, when Enki hears that she hangs in the underworld, he doesn't send warriors to save her. He takes dirt from under his fingernails and creates two small beings, the Kubara and the Galatur, and he sends them down with one instruction:"Go to Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld, and mourn with her." Not to rescue Inanna, not to pull her free, just be present with the darkness. In being truly met, something in Ereshkigal shifts, and she offers them a gift, and they ask for Inanna's body, and the food and water of life are administered, and she comes back to life. What came to meet me on the floor didn't come to rescue me either. It descended into the same darkness. It met me where I was, and in being met all the way down at rock bottom, something opened And to understand why this was different from anything I'd accessed in meditation before, I need to tell you about the koshas, the five layers of the self in yoga philosophy. The outermost layer is our physical body, our bones, our flesh. The next layer in is our energy body. This is our breath, our nervous system, our vitality, and our emotions. The third layer in is our mental body. These are our day-to-day thoughts and concerns. The fifth layer in... The fourth layer in, rather, is the wisdom body. That discerning intelligence, that higher intellect and insight And inside of all of that is the bliss body. Not happiness Just a deep contentment, the bliss field. I've been there and it's real And I want to stay on the energy body for a moment, kosha, because I think it's the most important and the most overlooked. The energy body is the link between the physical body and the mind, and it's often the missing link. We can't calm our minds when our energy is chaotic. Think of it like a lake. When the surface is all stirred up, you can't see clearly to the bottom. It doesn't matter how much you want to see, the surface has to settle first. And here's what I know to be true. People can instinctively feel their energetic state is more than their physical body and state of mind. Most of us have had these moments where we're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix or wired in a way that rest doesn't touch or carrying something that we can't quite name or locate. Modern living has hijacked our energy body, and we're all feeling it. We know something's off. It's not physical, it's not mental. It's a sense, something deeper, something that runs underneath both, and that's the energy body asking to be attended to But the Upanishads, some of the oldest yogic texts, teach us that the bliss body is still a layer. It's not who we ultimately are. Beyond all five layers is the witness, pure conscious awareness, the Atman. Not another layer. It has no edges. It's infinite. It's the awareness that has been watching from behind your eyes ever since your first memory. That awareness that watched every version of you and has never once been any of those things. only ever the awareness behind them. Unchanging, untouched, not afraid And the Upanishads ask, " Who is the seer of seeing? And when you think a thought, who is the thinker? And when you know something, who is the knower of knowing?" Follow that question inward past the bliss and you reach something that can't be known because it's the knowing itself And on the floor on that Wednesday when everything else dissolved, that's what remained Now, the scholar Harish Wallace or Christopher Wallace is one of the foremost Western translators of tantric philosophy. And in his book, "Tantra Illuminated," he lays out what he calls the view, the foundational philosophical position of non-dual tantric Shaivism. It's also my view.

And the view is this: 18:17

There is one reality, and that reality is pure conscious awareness. Not a god somewhere outside of you, not an abstract principle. Consciousness itself, the same awareness looking through your eyes right now, is the ultimate nature of everything that exists. Every being is not separate from this consciousness. Every being is this consciousness temporarily taking on a limited form. What we call "I", the personality, the history, the preferences and fears, is consciousness playing at being small. And the deepest freedom in this view is not achieving something new. It's recognising what was already true It's recognising that you are that and always were You are that consciousness. Not an intellectual recognition, but a direct embodied knowing Every one of us carries that same spark. It comes from the same source. Not similar sparks, the same spark. This is incidentally what namaste actually means. Not a greeting or a farewell, an acknowledgement that the spark of consciousness in me recognises the same spark of consciousness in you. The same source looking at itself through two sets of eyes On the floor that day, I didn't connect to that source. It came to me, and the difference between those two is everything. Lying on that floor, it wasn't me anymore. That's the only way I can describe it. The small self, the personality, the preferences, the woman with the scars and the headache fell away, and what remained was something infinite, something imminent, a presence so vast and so loving that it defied any category I had for it And it changed me forever. Not in the way that a good book changes you, but in the way that once you've seen something, you can't unsee it. I'd touched the ground of being, and I knew, not believed, I knew that it had been there all along Impermanence is a central teaching of yoga and Buddhism. Everything that arises passes. Every feeling, every state, every body. The scars on my legs, impermanent. The pain, impermanent. The numbness, the fog, even the bliss in meditation, all of it arises and passes. And we cause ourselves suffering when we attach to impermanent things, when we build our sense of security on circumstances that will change, when we make our sense of self out of roles and identities and achievements, all of which are impermanent. And when those things shift or disappear as they always do, we end up suffering Three times cancer had taken something I treated as permanent. My health, my sense of safety in my body and in the future. None of it was actually permanent. I had been building on sand and the tide had come in over and over And the yoga tradition points to the one thing that's not impermanent, the consciousness itself, the Atman, the awareness that has been watching through all of it. It doesn't arise and pass. It doesn't age, and it can't be taken away The ground of reality, the source from which every spark of consciousness comes, is permanent, unchanging, and always here And lying on the floor that day, I touched the one thing that I hadn't been touched by any of it, pure conscious awareness. And that contact was an injection of life that I can't overstate. Not because things improved for me, but because I'd found the only place that was never in danger. And that's where I got my spark back And something else became clear in the days that followed Not just that I'd got my spark back, but why all of it had happened. This was my initiation. I went first I went through it before I could choose not to, before I knew what it was for, before I had any idea I was being prepared for something. Three diagnoses, 50 rounds of radiation, 10 surgeries, the shit pit, all of it. This was schooling, the kind of understanding about suffering and transformation that you can only get from the inside of it and I came out the other side of it into this moment at this specific time in history The world is on fire right now. The level of uncertainty is higher than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes, and the second half of this decade is going to bring more change than we've seen in generations in our institutions, our economies, our sense of what's stable and what can be counted on People are in their own versions of the shit pit, their own versions of the horizonless gray, their own version of lying on the floor not knowing how to get up I didn't go through all of this for no reason. I went first so I can help others find their way through, and that's what this podcast is. That's what this teaching is. Not a wellness offering for people who wanna feel a bit calmer. It's a map for people who are in the dark and need to know the dark has a floor Looking back, I can see who guided me through it. Inanna led me to the underworld. That ancient story gave me a map before I entered, showing me that the descent was not a mistake, that the stripping was the point, that you don't go around the underworld, you go through it Yoga guided me through rock bottom. The Kleshas named the mechanics of the suffering. The Gunas named the energy I was trapped in. The Sutras gave me a framework when I was too depleted to build one. I wasn't just in the dark. I was in the dark with a map, and grace brought me back. Not through effort, through surrender, through the moment I stopped fighting and let myself fall all the way down, and something swept up from underneath The guide changed and I arrived somewhere the map had always been pointing to Now, what are you resisting right now? The feeling you keep pushing away, the grief you haven't let yourself have Or the fear you reach for your phone to avoid. We're all managing our experience from a safe distance, staying just far enough away from the thing we're most afraid to feel And that distance costs us something. It costs us our aliveness and our capacity to be actually present in our own lives The world is uncertain and the ground keeps on shifting. And in that kind of climate, the temptation is to grip harder, to control more, to plan more, to fill every moment with noise so you don't have to feel the uncertainty underneath But there's another option available. What if you went all the way in? Not into the chaos outside, but into the feeling underneath it The fear, the grief, the not knowing. What if instead of managing it from a distance, you let yourself fully feel it? What if you said more? Let me feel more David Hawkins writes that the fear of life is really just the fear of emotion, and that if you go into a feeling fully, if you become it rather than observe it from a distance, it transforms. Not because you controlled it, but because you stopped resisting it. I can't promise you what's on the other side. I can only tell you what I found. The part of me that had never been broken. The spark of consciousness that comes from the same source as every other spark. You have that too, and it's been with you since your first memory, and it's not in trouble, and it's never been in any trouble You're not your suffering. You're the awareness behind it And you were made for these times. Whatever you've been through, whatever your version of rock bottom is, it's been preparing you for something too And for a long time, I didn't tell anyone. Not because I doubted it. It was the most real thing that had happened to me in months. After being gray and horizon-less for almost a year, there was a tiny spark of light in my mind. I could see light on the horizon. It gave me hope It gave me a sense of meaning and purpose. But I want to be precise about what kind of hope this was, because I'd had false hope before. I'm very careful these days about being hopeful. I've had so much disappointment in life, so many curveballs thrown at me. To feel hope again after all hope had been lost felt vulnerable. I was afraid of being hopeful Second time I got cancer, I'd been clear for two years. The third time I'd been clear for seven. For seven years, I thought it was behind me I couldn't risk that again, getting my hopes up to have them dashed, to have something else taken from me felt like more than I could bear. So much had already been taken from me in the prime of my life. Opportunities I can barely bring myself to count. Medical bills that have topped over$100,000 over the last 10 years. Hope had cost me before, and I wasn't sure I could afford it, but this was different I wasn't hoping and praying that things might just get better. I wasn't wishing for something. It was a knowing, a wisdom, something that arrived not from reasoning, but from direct contact with what was real. I didn't think my way to it. It landed in me, and so I wanted to treat it with the care and reverence it deserved. I didn't share it because new things are fragile and a seed needs the dark before it breaks ground So I held it close and kept it quiet and let it be real in me privately for a while. And in the keeping of it, it grew in the next episode, I'll share what happened after. The practices that helped me to move what was stuck, the return to my mat, my body, my life. But for now, remember this: you are layered. Not just the body that aches or the mind that worries. Those are real, but they're layers, and underneath all of them is something that's never been touched by any of it. The part that's not in trouble and was never in trouble. Wherever you are right now, whatever you're carrying, however far from okay you feel, that part of you is intact, completely still and here. And you don't have to believe me. You just have to be willing to stop moving and go in. I promise you, the ground is there. Until next time, my friend