My name is Lily. I work as a family physician. My practice is situated close to a university and many of my patients are college students. I never set out to go on this path. It kind of all started in 2014. Well it had started before then, but I’ll cover that in a later blog. I’d booked to go on a medical communications course. I’d been following the teacher running the course for a couple of years and had read his book. I turned up with the expectation that I would learn something useful to help me communicate more effectively with my patients. I wasn’t really going for self development. At that time in my life I lived mainly in my head. I loved reading and cramming my memory with all sorts of facts. It was an addiction. I didn’t realise this at the time, it was just what I did. I think others found me quite irritating as I was one of those people who talks too much and wants everyone else to know how much THEY know. I felt more comfortable that way. Call it imposter syndrome – whatever, I was deeply insecure.
Anyway we had an exercise to do and of course I volunteered to go up to the front. The course organiser asked me if I had any issues? (well is the Pope Catholic?). I’ll try and steer away from bad cliches in future. I mentioned that I often experienced this really unpleasant feeling at the base of my sternum. It was so unpleasant that if it turned up when I was trying to work, I would be distracted by it and it would get in the way of consulting with patients. I’d even taken antidepressants to try and quell its strength (to some benefit). It was like an unwanted dinner guest. My colleague asked me to step back, observe it and just allow it to be there. This seemed too simplistic but I went along with it as I trusted him.
Something really odd happened then which changed the course of my life. As I observed the sensation, I felt it move, initially up into my chest, and then it became expansive and spread quickly into my extremities. As the same time it went from feeling unpleasant to ecstatic. Something shifted, all self-consciousness melted away and I felt connected to everyone in the room. It didn’t last long, but it changed me. I couldn’t understand how something so unpleasant (that I’d drugged in the past), could morph into something like that. And there was something else that happened, that I didn’t really have the words for at the time. This is often one of the features of these sorts of experiences is that people can’t find the words. If I were to describe it now, I kind of saw the “edge” of my world. I had this sense that my issues and problems and neuroticisms were small fry and there was a much bigger sense of expansiveness out there. And from that moment, I continued to read and search for information about “awakenings”. It became a hobby, almost an obsession. Little did I know, there was no-where really to go. I was, in a way, already there.
Losing "Me" - A Diary of a Spiritual Awakening 