Hi, My name is Sandra Anne. I have been reading and following Jed for a few years now and while doing the Nav Series I felt inspired to write. He encouraged me and must like my work because he suggested publishing it on the forum. I was delighted and am going to post one a week. It's kind of a stream of consciousness on the unraveling of me. If you are here reading this, then you were always going to read it, so don't ever wonder if you are in the right place. Where ever you are is the right place. That should be a relief. Likewise whatever appears here just appears but nevertheless, welcome, my heart goes out to you and I wish you the best in every conceivable but mostly inconceivable imaginable way.
Love, Sandra Anne
You are welcome to share your thoughts in the thread.
"You think you're lost, but that's not true. You simply lived a dream or two, you traveled all this way to find, you never left your home behind. Home is a place in your heart, every journey leads you back to where you start."
Already Home by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Chapter One
I'm not writing this, in fact, this writing is not even happening, whatever words you think you are seeing here are not really here, you can't read them and I can't write them. I am literally just a figment of an imagination in the one dreamer as are you so whatever I say here is not really being said. I don't have to worry about what I say here because I'm not saying it and nothing is being said, even so this writing appears to be happening, even though it's not. This is probably the weirdest way to start a book, if it is a book, which it isn't, there aren't any books anyway, not like you think there are. Weird isn't a thing either just another idea in the head that you think you have, which you don't but don't worry, any worry you have or have ever had is not real either.
That's the good news. This whole thing is actually good news, if you can grasp it, you might find out that everything is actually okay and always was and always will be. I suppose that's why I try to say anything even when I don't. Trying is not a thing either so don't even try to understand this, it is what it is and that's all.
Never-the-less, here's the story.
I had a sad life for as far back as I can really remember. I started crying, really crying, like when your heart is truly broken, like how you cry when you know that no one in the entire world loves or cares about you at all, like how it feels when you think that there is something so terribly wrong with you that no one could ever love you, totally forlorn crying, broken hearted crying at around the age of thirteen. At fourteen I was sure that I wanted to just die but I couldn't do it so I starved myself in hopes that it would happen on it's own and just in case there was someone who did or could love me there would be time for them to save me, time for someone to rescue me right before it happened. So I became both bulimic and anorexic and I started drinking and life became more and more intolerable. I don't need to go into it, just know that life sucked for me from a pretty early age and that's how it started. I was, however, wildly efficient and good at crying and though I couldn't have known it at the time, it was probably this blessing that saw me through.
Around the age of 18, I finally managed to get pretty thin and oddly enough I started to feel better about things. I remember thinking I didn't care anymore what anyone said or did after all I could die so what would it matter and that thought actually made me happy. Now when my parents yelled at me or during whatever
**** anyone was doing, I would think "go ahead, what do I care, I'm probably not sticking around for much more of this anyway." All of a sudden there was an innocence about me and I became rather childlike, unable to make sense of my situation I think I finally accepted it and somehow that freed me. To the world, it would seem I had just given up and I had but my total surrender brought relief and I was able to enjoy many simple things again. I was no longer looking for the future to fulfill me since I didn't see that I had one anymore.
Looking back, I don't think I was ever in any real danger of actually physically expiring but it was bad enough that my parents finally decided it was time to put me into some kind of treatment and my happiness was short-lived. Probably my "I don't give a
**** anymore" attitude and my utter non-reactivity was troubling to my parents so they sent me to this one month treatment program which managed to normalize my eating for the time I was there (then it just went right back). Nobody was addressing my drinking so on our nights off, I went out and got drunk.
Afterwards was a long draw out weekly therapy session with a lady named Anne whom I rather liked and looked forward to seeing. I don't really remember what we talked about other than my family, traumatic events, and how I could learn to deal with things better. She tried several times to bring my parents into the discussion but that was a no go since my parents wanted no part of it. My eating was back to being a mess and my drinking was absurd for someone my age but you know it was what it was. All hopes for me coming back to a resemblance of some kind of normal life were squashed. Anyway after about a year with her, everything rather suddenly came to a head so to speak and I had something of a nervous breakdown or looking back now probably a breakthrough. During this time, I became intensely fearful that I might disappear. What I really thought would happen was that my "I" as in my mind would somehow cease to exist and that I would be completely unaware of the fact that I was gone. Needless to say, I was drinking heavily as that was the only way I could keep the fear at bay but on one night it was so severe that I was certain that "I" as in my mind would die, it might happen at any moment, it felt like it was very close to happening. I was going to lose myself. I might go crazy and not even know it that was my fear. It was so intense that I simply became so utterly terrified that in the middle of a snowstorm my mother actually had to drive to the emergency room where I somehow explained the situation and I was given a sedative and sent home.
On contacting my therapist Anne the next morning, an emergency meeting was made for that or the next day. Now Anne was located in the next city over which was about 100 mile drive because at the time, eating disorders were so rare that no one where we lived specialized in them. At any rate, both my parents drove me to my appointment, which was odd because my father rarely (if ever) went along and for a time I actually was driving myself, but this time they were both in the car and during that drive I tried to explain to them that I could "see" why everything in my entire life had worked out exactly the way it had. I could see how this event shaped this event and how this feeling about this event had shaped my reaction about a next thing, on and on. It was like I could see the whole thing had just followed a path that naturally would have followed, I remember trying to explain to my parents how nothing was anyone's fault and that whatever happened just naturally happened on it's own according to what it had to work with. My parents of course weren't having it because I was saying things like "when you did this, and I thought that, then that's why I did this" and they still thought I was blaming them and they wanted me to see that nothing was their fault, that they hadn't been a part of any of it and that whatever misfortunes I had and whatever behaviors I had were all of my own making completely fabricated by me. Long story short, I was given a prescription at the meeting which greatly relaxed me and my "vision" disappeared and I went back to the way I was, misery intact.
What happened next isn't important (none of this is after all it's just a story) but my life was on it's own trajectory and according to what most people call "normal", it wasn't and never will be. Suffering and fear were my base emotions through most of it.
Fast forward 25 years, I'm now 43 years old and I have three small children, and a husband who wanted nothing do with us and had run off and I'm back to living at home with my parents. As it happened, my son was attending kindergarten at the local school and one of the parents of his classmates happened to "mention" to me that she had seen a book at Walmart that day or that week that "reminded" her of me. Now we were all in the habit of sitting outside the school waiting for our children to exit everyday and I do remember talking with this lady once maybe twice on the lawn when the weather was nice but we were hardly close friends and at best just acquaintances. Looking back, I don't really remember thinking of myself as a particularly "spiritual" person, I did think the whole religion thing was a crock of bogus
**** and I might have dabbled in meditation a few times but as far I remember nothing really stands out so why this lady thought of me when she saw "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle for sale at Walmart and mentioned it to me is just the way the universe works. It knows exactly what you need when you need it. As it happens, I thought it so odd that she thought of me at all that I immediately ran down to Walmart and purchased the book. I think I did take it as a sign that I was meant to read it so I guess that was kind of mystical of me. I had to borrow the money, had to talk my mom out of $10 bucks which was no easy task, she had plenty of money but it was "her" money and she had to think about whether I deserved it or not, go figure, but I think she did give it to me or maybe I stole it, either way I got the book straight away.
Anyway, I loved the book, really couldn't put it down and read it in like 2 days, then I realized that I had checked out "The Power of Now" about a month before from the library but I didn't read it because I couldn't get into it. I had no idea what it was talking about but even so something in me saw the pattern of it all mainly that I was meant to read it though I didn't really know why. I think it's safe to say I was in quite a bit of pain at the time though this was a normal condition for me by then as I've already said too many times. My parents were constantly berating me, what a loser I was for marrying a loser and now living with them. I was on food stamps which was literally the only source of income I had had in quite some time. I hated living with my parents but I had no where else to go. I hated them too. I had for some time actually hated everything about them, the pettiness of their characters, the total lack of even the smallest amount of compassion for me seemed to go all the way back to the day I was born. My parents were both from Germany and their cold hearted nature had completely baffled me all my life. Love and or forgiveness was not something I had ever experienced, not by them, not for myself and not by anybody else either but I had children now and I'd be damned if I would ever let anyone lay a finger on them or hurt them in anyway. I forgave my children for any and all misgivings, tantrums, anything at all with a ferocity that you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere. My father had once slapped my son across the face, he was just a baby about 2 years old and I had attacked my father with every riding toy in the room hurling them at his head. Half eaten dishes sitting on the table were thrown, missed and broken against the wall splattering food everywhere. I was asked to move out after that and left to be homeless with my children for a few months. Well, it hardly matters now but the
**** up nature of the life I was living can not be overstated.
Moving on, I was so enthralled by the teaching of Eckhart Tolle that I must have looked it up online and found out that there was a Meet-up Eckhart Tolle group nearby my home and I decided to go. I had never been to anything like this before but on the night in question my parents agreed to watch my children for me while I got out of the house. Well long story short that's the night it happened. That's the night I disappeared, completely. Seriously, when I got back from the meeting and walked into my parent's house I was no longer with us. The Sandra that I thought I was my whole life up until that point in time was gone. Sandra didn't even know she was gone so she wasn't worried about it because how could something that was no longer there worry about anything. The person was not there to do it. In fact, although I seemed to know the place, after all I drove home and knew how to get there, knew my parents and of course my children and the house and things like that, I knew these things but the "who" that knew these things was not there. It was like the body was there and even the mind was there but the entire history of this person was gone. I did not even know it but I was in heaven. I had no judgement about anything at all, nothing bothered me, I simply had no context for anything to bother me, no context within to judge anything as being better or worse than anything else, everything just was and what was was apparently all right with me. I did not want anything else, didn't need anything to happen or not happen.
For instance, two events still come to mind about this time. One was when I got home from the meeting to find my mother drunk and hurling cuss words at my father in the big living room with my children just wandering around playing with their toys, they were only 5, 4, and 3 years old at the time. Normally this would have pissed me off to high heaven as I was hell bent on giving my children a better early life experience than the one I had but I literally could find nothing wrong with the situation except that I possessed the thought to take my children out of the whole thing and upstairs to the room we shared and put on a movie so they couldn't hear it. This just happened naturally and there was no worry involved about children being scarred or traumatized. There was no thought that anything wrong was happening or shouldn't be happening, no thought that my parents were being horrible people and irresponsible, nothing like that. About an hour later, my mother knocked on my door and we sat on a small couch that was situated outside my room and I listened for about an hour to her drunken venting about what a complete
**** my father was. Now this wasn't a new behavior on her part and had I been in my "usual" state she might have been met with a "For God's sake, shut the
**** up and go to bed already." Well, they say the apple never falls far from the tree. However, I neither agreed nor disagreed with her, I think I never said a word but she seemed to want me there so I sat there with her completely unaffected, I neither cared what she said and I had no caring whether I sat there or not. This went on for a time until she went to bed and so did I.
The other event happened later that week, I was sitting at the computer and for some reason my mother came into the room and completely laid into me with every insulting remark you can think of, basically cursing at me and ripping apart my character from top to bottom. Once again, I just sat and stared at her, I had no feeling one way or the other about any of her words, I made no move to escape or to engage in my own defense. I was simply not there to do it.
Other than that, I vaguely remember laying down to go to bed each night with all my children cuddled around me and feeling the most exquisite sensations I had ever had.
This went on for two weeks until for some reason it occurred to me that I might want to stop smoking and so I tried to quit smoking and just like that Sandra was back, and bam, so was misery. I didn't know what happened, I had no background to know what happened just that I liked the way that I was then and now I didn't.
So that's how it all got going, not really, nothing is going anywhere but let's pretend it is. It's not a pretty story but it takes what it takes, anyway none of that really happened, sometimes you get a nice dream (probably people with nice dreams don't come here but you never know) and sometimes its closer to a nightmare, either way you're fine. Well, you might not feel fine, maybe you feel like
****, maybe you are sitting there comparing and thinking "
**** and I thought I had it bad" or "that's nothing, my life was ten times worse." Either way, it's all going to work out since you are literally dreaming, and sooner or later you can't fail to realize that you were never anywhere and nothing ever happened.
Unfortunately, the dream is basically all laid out for you in childhood and the only reason it feels like a problem is that you think it's real in the way everyone else does. Once you know it's not things tend to go in a better direction. The one thing I can say about my dream is that if some dreams are better at making their dream characters go in search of the truth, mine was exceptional. I couldn't have asked for a better story.
End of chapter