By Sonya Rehman
It has been a strange start to the year. January blew the lid right off everything I thought to be true. Everything fell apart: the delusions, the cozy lies I built my life upon. I don’t want to go into the details, but I had it coming. Don’t we all? The self-deception reveals itself when you’re finally able to see things for what they are. And who’s to blame? You, and you alone.
This month, during a long distance hypnotherapy session over Zoom, I felt quite silly. Will this work, I wondered, as the sweet older gentleman on the other side of the screen asked me a list of questions before the session was to begin.
My mind was full of doubts while my heart was constricted with cynicism. But for once, I wanted to do everything in my capacity to heal. I’d been running for far too long. And I was tired.
I turned 40 this year…I needed to finally grow up. Take ownership. Yank open the closet and look at each and every skeleton in the closet – mine, including those of my ancestors. I had to be brave. If not now, when? Someone had to do it.
Thirty minutes in, I was swimming in my warm, soupy, subconscious self. Three memories gently revealed themselves to me, beautifully woven together, bobbing up to the surface. ‘Hi, hello, here we are,’ they seemed to say, beckoning me to take a peek.
The first: I was 5 in our apartment in Sea View (Karachi). I was wearing my step-father’s button down shirt (I loved wearing his shirts). The house was empty.
“How do you feel?” my therapist asked.
“Alone.”
“And how does being alone make you feel?”
“Like I have to get used to it.” Ah, I thought as I said those words out loud, that’s where my lone wolf ‘I can make it alone’ mindset stems from.
“What are you doing?”
“My father’s shirt comforts me. I can smell his cologne on it.”
Slumped in a single-seater couch, deliciously relaxed, I felt a lump rise up in my throat. My mind celebrated at the revelation as my 5-year-old self looked around the apartment feeling rather sorry for herself.
I see, I thought, no wonder I still love wearing men’s shirts, sweaters and coats – it’s a symbolic masculine shield! I grinned.
An hour after the session I felt more in my body. It’s hard to explain it – but it made me realize how the world, with all of its demands, and us, with our earnest susceptibility to constantly perform, deliver, give, become dissociated from ourselves over time.
The past few days have been beautiful. But I’m using the word rather generously, as a blanket term to be honest. I mean beautiful in a way that I’m quite enjoying the insights – the surprising ones, the painful ones, the interesting ones – as they ring my doorbell, politely asking me if they can come in?
We sip tea together. I analyze them with affection. There is no judgment. These are old companions after all. How can I turn them away? Friends I had long forgotten when youth, ambition and the hunger made me constantly reach outwards without once stopping to check in on them. I should have been a better friend.
A few days ago, I was one of almost 30 attendees at a Zikr prayer circle in Islamabad.
A group discussion blended into the remembrance of God. During the repetition of His name, I felt my inhibitions disperse like fidgety fireflies on a summer night.
There I was, back in my warm, soupy subconscious. Unraveled. While my mouth chanted The Eternal One’s name, it felt like a homecoming. Rumi was right when he said the wound is where the light enters. But it doesn’t just arrive to help you awaken, it reaches out to transform you. All the way. And once you realize that, understand its role, it’s hard to turn your back on a very important, beloved messenger.
I’ve begun to notice how many loved ones, acquaintances, strangers even, are on the precipice of what they consider self-annihilation. While some have jumped into the abyss – voluntarily and unwillingly – I would like to enunciate this is what every Awakening feels like. A rebirth. It’s never easy. But this rite of passage must be endured for novices like us. There is comfort after this. I’m certain of it.
Because this, this present emotional predicament isn’t serving us too well, don’t you think? Imagine remaining in one’s egoic, dystopian state…imagine dissolving in the stagnation of What Was Always Known? Haven’t the past three years been trying enough? Isn’t it time to shed something – anything – and take a different path, one that is unknown but that which may allow us to live a little longer?
Let the megalomaniacs do what they like. Step back, look at history: empires rise and fall, each scarcity brings a harvest, from nothing there is abundance, gold, the ebb and the flow is all that is constant…round and round, a silver spider’s web – a pattern broken and remade by The One. Precision, predictability and beauty in the chaos. A lesson in every kernel if held up to the sun.
This year, I want nothing more than to analyze my wounds, kiss them, place them back into the breast of mother earth and gently tend to them with a spade, a shovel and a watering can. I want to see what grows out of them.
I know I’ll be surprised.
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