A few days ago I felt vertigo again. To be exact, it was the night of Sunday, July 23rd. I already started to notice it before I went to bed, I was lying on the sofa and tried to sit up straight. As soon as the pressure on the neck is alleviated, the feeling disappears. It happened to me three more times when I was already in bed, when I sat up as well. I calmed down because this time I perfectly knew what it was and I didn’t want to cause more anxiety, and I got back to sleep. In the morning I was normal.
I searched for the videos of a physiotherapist I already knew. He gives very good advice on how to deal with vertigo and he explains quite right how it originates in the majority of cases. He says that this is basic to treat it conveniently. He said that once you have realized anxiolytics are useless and you reduce your dependence on them, the best thing you can do is to take some medicinal plants and do some techniques to relax, besides certain self-massages and neck exercises to alleviate possible muscle cramps. Among these techniques there is a breathing technique he calls, literally, “abandoning yourself to death”. I did it while he was explaining it and I felt desires to cry... because that is the point where I want to take Roderic, but Roderic is stubborn like a mule and he doesn’t want to stop fighting. Roderic doesn’t want to die.
In this blog I only mentioned it briefly (The hanged man), because I usually prefer to wait a bit before I talk about my memories or experiences, I prefer to reflect before saying anything I might regret later. But sometimes I do speak about it with trustworthy people. On December 3rd, 2016 I wrote this in MPL:
Since I returned from my summer holidays I've been having a hard time dealing with anxiety. It's become almost as strong as it was when I first started to remember past lives. Well, maybe not that strong (at least I haven't felt the need to resort to medical help), and certainly not so frequent, but with different and odd symptoms, like vertigo and neck tension (which is probably aggravated by bad postures while working with the computer).
Also, since April I've been practicing yoga in a regular basis. It has helped quite a bit with migraines and neck pains, and it has made me realize how powerful it is. I haven't paid much attention to anything "spiritual" (in the bad sense) attached to it, but at the same time I'm learning a lot about the relationship mind/body. For example:
- Once in a video I heard a yoga instructor say: "Inhale deeply and take your breathing wherever you feel there is tension, and relax that area, as those points are the ones that need more attention and love". For some reason that sentence stayed with me, and I've seen it works. I've realized is not the "breathing" itself though, it's just your mind. Whenever I feel tension on the neck now, I focus my attention there and the pain gets better in a few minutes.
- In another occasion she said: "When you try to do balance positions, you'll see it depends on your mind's state. If you don't have a balanced mind, you won't achieve balance in your position". At first I thought this was quite silly, but then I had confirmation when I tried to do yoga while being anxious. You just can't achieve balance with an altered mind. And through the practice, you start to see how you gradually relax as you focus your mind on what you're doing.
- Then yesterday I found a video of a different yoga instructor, saying that it's very important there is communication between mind and body. The body can't be just a slave to which you give orders to move. There has to be a constant feedback, so that without the need to look, you are aware of the position of your feet, legs, hands... and can correct them if necessary, to achieve precision, alignment in the body, and then balancing your mind.
I tell all this because yesterday night I was feeling a bit anxious again, I decided to meditate and asked my guide for help to control my anxiety. It seems he came... or maybe it was my own Higher Self telling me the things I had already learned. I also aked him to clarify what he meant with "Stop fighting”. He said that I have to stop trying to prove I'm not weak, like Katrina might have been deemed by others. Or, I have to stop trying to prove I'm strong, like Roderic did all the time to stop the abuse. “All that is over”, he said. “You are strong, you know it, just relax, regain control, regain power. You know exactly what you want, so stop letting others disturb your inner calm and self-confidence. You don't need to build more walls around you. YOU are the wall. Let attacks and negative thoughts/feelings (both external and internal) flow through you, without affecting you.”
I also was reminded of the song "Power" by Marillion I once posted here in MPL, that says:
the stammer and the tremble in my voice
but don’t mistake it for weakness
or some kind of incompleteness
cause round about now
I can feel it tingle-tangling
it's coiled up inside me
and it's ready to blow
And then he guided me to stop the anxiety. I share these techniques just in case it can help someone here. He said:
- BREATHE. Consciously. This comes from yoga: the key to relax is that the exhalation has to be longer than inhalation. You can count: inhale 1-2-3, exhale 1-2-3-4. Pause. Repeat.
- FOCUS. There where you need it. Mind racing? Ignore your thoughts. CONTROL YOUR MIND. Remember you have to control FIRST your mind, so that you can control your body. Heart racing? Focus on your heart. A slower breathing will decrease your heart rate. Pain in a knee? Focus in your knee, try to bring harmony.
- TALK TO YOUR CELLS. Following my own theory that consciousness is in each and every cell of our body, could it be that the mind/mental body is not limited to the brain? Bring consciousness to ALL your body. Tell your cells what you want of them: release tension, release pain, "everything's fine". You don't control your body with the mind, you control your body through your mind (your mind is not you, it's just a tool).
- RELAX AND REGAIN CONTROL.
Almost without realizing it, I found myself completely relaxed and my mind was empty. I had stopped fighting.
Feeling vertigo is not serious, if it is caused by anxiety as happens to me. But it is indeed tremendously unpleasant and I understand it can be incapacitating for some people, especially if you can’t control the extra-anxiety it provokes you. I do try to draw the positive from everything, and as bad as it is, experimenting vertigo serves me to realize what I must have lived in past lives. Very few of us can describe what one feels when you are seriously injured, or when you have an accident, or when you have suffered some kind of trauma. We can’t describe what happens when your body stops responding or when you believe you are going to die, unless you have lived a near-death experience. Those of us who remember past lives can have a slight idea in some instances, as you get to relive everything in a regression in quite a chilling way... but of course, it is never the same as living it in the present, in your current body.
I haven’t told anyone this: the second time I experimented vertigo I starter to do yoga at the following morning, even when my legs were trembling and I thought I was going to fall flat on my face at doing Uttanasana (standing forward bend). I didn’t fall but I felt some kind of pinching in my neck muscles, which were tenser than the chords of a violin for a change. I felt the vertigo and that made me bend my knees, to avoid falling. I had to remain still, squatting for a few seconds, feeling the same vulnerability Roderic must have felt when, as a result of a head injure he got during his escape, he had to crouch, exhausted, and several drops of blood stained the snow red. For some reason, that image comes to my mind again and again, as when he received one of his first punishments, with his hands tied to a post, observing impotent how his strengths left him with every whiplash. What thoughts may pass through your mind when you know your life is on the hands of others? What level of anxiety can you reach after months of constant fight, always fearing more reprisals, and eventually being captured, judged and condemned to death? And even with all that, I didn’t want to give up. It is not the first time I say it: I think I fought quite a bit in the gallows before I died. They had vanquished me. But that is something I never accepted. And I refused to shed a single teardrop for everything that had happened. That is the reason I am trying to break Roderic. I am not referring to anything violent when I say “break”. It is a breaking as when you say “he burst into tears”; “he broke down”.
To this day, I keep wondering how it is possible all these feelings, these mental patterns we create as a consequence of traumatic events, these effects in our souls, come to us hundreds of years later. Though I have a hypothesis about the mechanism that makes it possible, the occurrence keeps amazing me. Normal people tend to think these memories are like something external that for some reason comes back to you. Unless you have been remembering past lives for some time, you don’t know it is not something returning to you, rather it is something that never went away, because it is written in your mind, your cells, your soul, and so you just can’t throw those memories away. As I sometimes say, there are no past lives. All your past lives are in you, even when you don’t remember all of them.
Experiences like this make me reflect about the reasons that make us remember, and the usual explanations that are given in certain spiritual circles don’t fit in. Thinking we remember as some kind of punishment, as if you feel guilt it is because you did something evil in the past and you must pay now, for example, is totally senseless. Thinking we have all those traumatic memories because there is something to heal, it also seems to me an incomplete explanation. As time goes by, I am more convinced that remembering past lives is something natural. Or, at least, we come back with these physical and mental “effects” because this is the natural process in all organisms, the same way a wound bleeds, heals and then the scab falls, sometimes leaving a scar, sometimes not. If we want to, we can use this process as a resource that life offers to us. It helps us understand ourselves better, it helps us understand what happens to us better, and it gives us a new perspective and new tools to approach problems in a better way. But doing it is not indispensable. In the case of Roderic, my guide couldn’t be more accurate: STOP FIGHTING. If I can make Roderic realize he must accept his defeat and loss, and abandon himself to death, I am sure I will have put an end to my anxiety.