Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

01/11/22

In my younger years, my sacral chakra was always aligned and ready to give me the power and confidence I needed to create. I could wield words like they were a slick double-edged sword and I was the greatest sword master that ever lived. I could breathe life into nothingness and paint a picture with words the way a potter molds clay. I haven't had the time to access that part of me or to sharpen that skill in years now so naturally, this post started off with me putting it off for days. Something about approaching my tiny laptop's keyboard made me nervous but alas! we move.

After 15 minutes of a yin flow to help align my sacral chakra, Svadhisthana in Sanskrit, I finally got off my yoga mat and dragged myself to the table, and just started typing and honestly, I have no idea where this is going. I guess the title for this one is very fitting. It's better that I try to explore this and see where it goes rather than put it off for another hundred days. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

I looked around one day in the middle of the year 2020 and realized that I had lost all complete sense of who I was. I had everything - great friends, a loving family, a huge support system, and a loving partner but I didn't have that connection that I always had with myself. Out of nowhere, I couldn't enjoy any of my hobbies, I didn't have the energy to go out and I was far away from God. I even questioned if at all I had ever had a connection with myself or if it had been just a figment of my imagination in order to keep myself from going insane. Being a teenager already feels like a death sentence so my brain could have really easily convinced me that I had the answer to the one question that all of humanity has always asked with not even an ounce of shame. 

Oh, the melancholy of self-awareness! The beginning of the worst existential crisis I've ever been through dawned on me and I wanted actual answers. Scratch that, I NEEDED answers. There's nothing that I was doing differently. I was feeding my soul and my heart as far as I was concerned so this dark cloud really caught me unaware and it felt like a rug was pulled from beneath me and I landed hard on my ass. It could have been that it was the academic year in which I was to write my philosophy final and so I was studying that a lot but you'd expect that with so much knowledge at my fingertips I'd know exactly what to do right? Wrong. I suddenly remembered how even as a kid, I had a lot of questions about everything under the sky and was often very spiritually troubled. This was nothing new per se but it had come back way more intense than when it was last seen and it demanded to be attended to.

At first, I attributed it to unhappiness within my relationship and so I decided to incorporate new things to make it more fun and interesting but before that, I knew I had something crucial to do first. It was summer and I was just about to turn 21 and so I planned a birthday trip to one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to - Russia's Anapa. I spoke to my parents about it and they gladly funded the trip as a birthday gift. Initially, I thought that I was gonna go alone cause I felt that maybe I needed space and to be alone and what better place than by the beach of the Black Sea? My then-significant other however insisted on coming with and so I let him tag along. I learned a lot about myself during that trip. I spent most of my time in Anapa alone taking long walks and experiencing new things. I took lots of pictures and visited many places, toasted to many blessings, and created some of my best memories. Before the seven days were over, I knew what I had to do. I knew what was bothering me.

I felt depressed and lost because I had lost my connection to the source of everything. I knew that before me stood a very long grueling path to adult self-discovery and purpose-searching. Just the thought of it exhausted me but I knew that at least I'd learn that which I needed to in order to find myself again. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. My journey to spiritual discovery began. I started off by journaling every day and the aftermath was amazing. My mind quickly decluttered and I found the energy to start working out again and that was the best part of it all. The next step was to learn meditation in order to find peace from within and that's when I started doing Yoga. Yoga really calmed me down and the support I felt through my home practice helped me through a lot of turmoil that followed that time. I started to understand the principles of morality and self-compassion better and I swear for the first time in my life, I felt alive! I realized my purpose and understood my existence better and better with each passing day and it felt so good! So I vowed to myself that I'd never let it go. I'd continue to try and grow as a human being and make even greater efforts to connect with myself and my spirituality. I understood that I believed in a greater power than I and that connecting to that power could teach me a lot about myself and how I can be of service to others.

It's been two years now, and I'm still on that path. I recently re-discovered my spirituality again because I found myself alone and my heart refused to feel lonely. Instead, it led me back to myself and reminded me that I am. Yes. I am. I think, therefore I am. I decided that I should go even deeper, perhaps even start afresh, and search some more and just as I was doing that, I came across a scary discovery: I don't believe that the power is what most people believe it is. I mean - not in the conventional sense. After doing a lot of research and reading, I have my own explanation of what it is to me and that scares me a lot, having been raised strictly Christian, but it's my truth, and not digging deeper would be doing myself a great disservice and doing God a great performance of pretense. So here's to many more posts *clink!* where we discover where this is going. It's scary and new but nothing ventured, nothing gained!