Being brought to my knees

Now I know how it feels for a person to give up.

DAY 5 of 21 DAYS sharing drawings from my book, I AM ALIVE: Creating Resilience and Healing Trauma through Art.

Until the experience of radiation treatment, I had a huge desire to life and a surprising capacity to manifest my goals in the material world. I would have a vision of something I wanted to achieve and would work relentlessly until it came into being.

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This was also my way of survival: I had trained myself to ignore my own needs since I was a child. As a result, I had no idea how to give myself space to listen to my own needs: I filled up my life with action. This was also how I was able to quieten the chaos within my own being and keep the residue of trauma silenced.

Treatment brought me to my knees, I could no longer recognise myself: I had lost my desire for life. I lost the strength in my body. I had finally understood what it felt like to want to give up. I had to learn what it meant to take care of my own needs. This felt like a foreign language. And it took me years to retrieve all the internal pieces and become whole again.

Meditation: What makes you feel whole?