A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Every day felt like... going to school felt like going into the battlefield I know now that I had complex PTSD stemming from chronic stressors in childhood There was a lot of instability and change in my childhood and early developmental trauma, missing attachment and being between cultures and languages had a big impact on me All of this unresolved trauma was manifesting in my adolescence as a whole bunch of symptoms like chronic depression, suicidal ideation, performance anxiety, social anxiety, perfectionism, and OCD.

But looking back, what I remember most vividly is the relentless striving It was how I related to life and how I assumed everyone was living life I truly believed that I was broken and that through intense striving, I was going to become someone worthy So I forced myself into things I didn't want to do I threw myself into things that terrified me I wanted to believe that if I suffered enough for the right reasons that it would eventually one day pay off I was constantly putting my nervous system into situations it couldn't handle that were way beyond my body's capacity I escalated between extreme emotional states and mistook it for progress When I was 19, I was sexually assaulted and it threw me into the deepest depression I'd ever known I could barely hold myself together let alone keep up with college My dad saw how much I was suffering and encouraged me to join a yoga teacher's training at an ashram where I stayed for 3 months This was where I first felt a sense of safety and consistency and groundedness in my nervous system This was also where I first felt a pull towards spiritual philosophy which at the time was Advaita Vedanta I guess on some level I felt that I needed to follow the masters instead of blindly trying to figure it all out on my own So maybe I knew intuitively on some level that intense striving wasn't going to be enough on its own I also came across Eckhart Tolle around this time I remember reading the first few pages of A New Earth and being like oh my god he's onto something here and this is also when I first came across tarot I mean I had a deck that I found when I was a teenager at a garage sale but I received a reading when I was at the ashram and it was so strangely accurate that it blew my mind and really opened me up to a sense of wonder and magic So I started practicing tarot So it was from here on that I began studying various mystical and wisdom traditions Focusing mainly on Advaita Vedanta still and yoga philosophy But I was doing all of this from a very cerebral place and from a place of striving, living in concepts, disembodied, and not knowing I was disembodied.

I simply assumed that this is what spirituality was, that it lived in thoughts and concepts and sheer willpower I was collecting maps without realizing that I actually had to step foot in the territory to use them and ironically everything I was learning was pointing to the body and direct experience and I was trying to absorb it all through my head At 24, living in Bali, I met an Osho devotee running a training in Osho meditations Something about his demeanor intrigued me so I decided to join I remember practicing neti neti together and not really getting it He laughed at something I said and it was clear that he was seeing something I couldn't which really frustrated me seemed like he was living in a different paradigm that I didn't have access to I was incredibly rigid and serious about the practices while he was playful and so unserious that it just it angered me And he also had this ability to effortlessly slip into a sort of trance whenever he danced Or at least that was what it looked like to me at the time Now in hindsight, what I was perceiving was someone who deeply trusted and followed the natural impulses of his body On the fourth day of his training, during one of the Osho practices called the dynamic meditation, something cracked open in me for the first time.

I went back to a memory of being a child in the middle of the street, my mom walking away from me and the feeling of abandonment so vivid and present in my body.

...

in his book A New Earth.

He speaks about this-

Didn't he do Be Here Now, or is that another guy?