Last year, I introduced on my blog something called as Listen to your Heart Song – handwritten notes from your wise child. It has evolved into a newsletter (for now) but thanks to that initiative, people who have known me came to know about a different side of me. A side that was into the esoteric. And someone asked me, why haven’t you written about it more on your blog?
So I thought now was a good time to start.
One of my favourite things that we say is, “You don’t understand what I’m going through.” Sure, I may not understand the specificities of it but if you explain, I would. We think we want the other person to understand us but what this dialogue classically means is, we don’t understand ourselves.
I hadn’t known this about myself, retrospect is amazing, but I have always been on a quest to figure myself out. If I could understand who I am and what makes me tick, I feel life would be so much easier – even for those who have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis.
My first stop on this journey of self-awareness began with pranic healing. I was 18 and I had no idea what I wanted out of life and I thought maybe learning this would help. I learnt about energy and how the depletion or excess of it could impact our health. It was great but sitting for 30-minute meditations was something I could never abide by.
So, I moved onto the second stop which was hypnotherapy. This was the time when Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr Brian Weiss was gaining popularity and everyone wanted to see a past life. Well, so did I, obviously. I joined the course and you bet by the time I reached level four, I was so ready to see a past life, I gave my partner who I was practicing with a whiplash by how quickly I “went under.”
I learnt about the secrets of the mind, and how when we don’t process a situation well, it can lead to inner children. And when we face a similar situation, we operate out of that child self instead of the adult self. While I loved the practice, what I disliked was the in-fighting and politics.
I dabbled in various other things and what happened as a by-product of all this learning was, I started to think I was superior, I knew better and I was better than those around me. Clearly, my self-awareness wasn’t that great!
What changed was I fell sick and when you’re sick for a prolonged period of time, it breaks any semblance of who you are.
To pick myself up and restart the process of arriving at “who I am” my third stop was to learn Bach Flower Remedies. They opened the world of emotions for me. Its central premise is, you find the emotion behind an ailment and when you administer the remedy, it reduces that emotional charge and hence your ailment also sees an alleviation.
It’s crazy how unaware I was, how deeply not in touch with myself. There is a remedy that is called Agrimony which you administer when you say everything is fine but everything is in fact not fine. I started calling myself an Agrimony personality because I hadn’t realized I was a messy human with messy emotions.
Point minus two for self-awareness.
This was also the time when I got into writing seriously and started therapy with my Bach Flower teacher. All of it helped me get closer to myself. Yes, despite spending a lot of resources and learning all kinds of tools, I needed someone else to guide me. I still do from time to time.
After Bach, I learnt how to read Tarot Cards, something I found magical. It was an online course. I took a while to understand how to work with them since it had a lot of rules and rules immediately irritate me. It was only through trial and error that it occurred to me I could create my own rules and build a relationship with my deck. We’re good friends now.
Yay for self-awareness, finally.
My most recent stop has been at the doorstep of shamanism. Something that had endlessly intrigued me but entered my life only in 2022. This brought my quest full circle and I will talk more about what I learnt and how it changed me in another post because I want to dedicate more space to it.
But here’s something I want to leave with you: in my journey, my favourite lesson has been that I’m a masterpiece and yet I’m a work in progress. I am enough the way I am in this moment and I have room to uncover more about myself.
tales of Suchita 
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