From feeling a victim to living a joyful life
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From feeling a victim to living a joyful life
For a long time I felt that I was a victim of life, of unfair and unlucky circumstances, and I was constantly anxious and mistrusting of others.
Since childhood and all through my younger adult life, I had many painful experiences of disappointments and being taken advantage of and because of that I felt that I couldn’t rely on anybody – that I had to do everything myself or at least be in control; when someone else did something for me, to make sure they did it right.
As a child I thought nobody actually loved or even liked me, as my family, teachers and everyone around me didn’t pay any attention to the deeper and finer parts of me. I had the feeling that the world was out to hurt me on every corner, especially as a teenager and after leaving school. I felt that I was not able to fight for my space and my rights in a world where everyone seemed so much stronger and more assertive than me and I thought that I didn’t get the love and attention I deserved. What I craved for and what felt so natural to me was love and harmony in the connection with others.
I felt I was different, an outsider, awkward and too soft and sensitive. Nobody seemed to value me or listen to me. I didn’t think that I could join the competitive and pushing way of life that was displayed in the society around me, where a career, financial security and having a standard form of family were the most important things in life, whilst disregarding all the abuse and lies that were attached to them. It seemed so loveless, there was no time to really connect and enjoy, to simply be alive. I just did not have what it took to live like that, the hardness, ignorance, the push and force; I didn’t know how to be with people on that level.
Therefore, I rejected everybody and built a protective cocoon around me, and I felt totally alone. I suffered from that, but I was afraid to step out of my cocoon, as the world seemed so hostile to me. It appeared to me that everybody was loud and fast, where I was quiet and slow. I could not find a way to fit in and I felt helpless; I didn’t know how to be more open and courageous, and I started to blame everybody outside of me for making life so hard.
At first I blamed my parents for my inability to fit in and cope with it all – they were the ones that had brought me up and according to me they didn’t do a very good job of it by not instilling more self-esteem and vigour in me. But as I matured, I came to understand that my parents did the best they could according to what they had learned in their lives. They had grown up in the horrors of WWII in Germany and worked extremely hard in post-war times to build a secure life for our family. I can’t imagine the traumas and the hardship they must have endured.
Who was to blame next? God, of course!
Isn’t He the one who made me what I am, who created everything – well that’s what I had been told and what I believed; that He is the one who runs and controls our existence as it is, with His unlimited power.
Why then does He allow all these lies – the lovelessness, the suffering, and the wars – and create all the people who behave in those unloving and downright atrocious ways? And why had He made me to be so awkward and afraid, so weak, contracted, and helpless? This was the perfect circle of entrapment, to blame God for everything, so that I would never get out of my prison of victimhood unless God intervenes or performs some sort of miracle. Believing myself to be the victim of God’s unfair and unloving doing was the ultimate abandonment and I felt devastated. I did not understand how God could let this happen to me.
No wonder I eventually had a physical breakdown, after spending my life blaming others and holding myself in such contraction and low self-worth, trying to control everything and being constantly in intense physical tension, and trying to compensate for feeling like this with drugs and alcohol. The breakdown came sudden and strong in 2004 when I went into menopause, with panic attacks, fatigue attacks where I had barely enough strength to breathe, and I experienced extreme tinnitus. Nobody could figure out how to treat this, it was way beyond the ordinary hormone replacement treatment, and it went on for a couple of years, which led to depression, insomnia, utter exhaustion and I eventually ended up in a state of seriously contemplating suicide. I now felt like the ultimate victim of everything, but I was so worn out I didn’t care anymore, I just wanted peace from the constant noise of the tinnitus and to get out of my tired exhausted body.
But I turned all that around.
In 2006 I was given a telephone number by a distant friend which led me to Serge Benhayon, Universal Medicine, and Sacred Esoteric Healing. Not only did I receive the loving assistance from many practitioners who practise the Esoteric Healing modalities, but I learned of the Ageless Wisdom from the presentations by Serge. Now life started to make sense. I understood that everything is energy and everything that happens has its cause in energy. And that this life is not my first and only life – that I have had a hand in creating this life and its circumstances by all my choices over the many lives I have lived. I came to understand that I have a choice how I will live every moment, how I will react or respond to circumstances, and those circumstances are always an opportunity to learn and evolve, or not.
Of course, first I needed to get out of the vicious circle of all those negative thoughts about my life and myself and the blaming of others or outside forces. I needed to connect again to my inner nature that was deep inside me and still had the qualities of the love and harmony that I knew life was supposed to be and that I had craved to see and feel outside of me in the world. The healing sessions that I received helped me tremendously. They brought up and made very clear all the layers of protective behaviour and escapist thought patterns that I had created for myself to cope with the pain and loneliness that I had felt when all the people around me could not see or connect to the deep love and tenderness that I was as a little girl – because they themselves had lost the connection to their inner love and harmony.
I discovered that to connect to my true inner nature, which is sensitive, tender, and sweet, I had to be more loving and gentler with myself.
This is what I had craved to come to me from the outside, other people and the world, but now I began to understand that the love and tenderness was within me, and I was the only person who was able to access that and give it to myself.
I regularly practised the Gentle Breath Meditation®. This very simple meditation supported me to build a tangible foundation of my inner qualities in my body and slowly my stance and behaviour towards myself and others became more loving and truthful. Whenever I felt that I had lost connection to that foundation, as when old patterns kept drawing me back into nervous tension and drive, I would make the choice to connect back to my body. Then I could feel what the energy or quality in my body felt like and make a few deliberate gentle movements to bring myself back to the marker of gentleness and harmony that I had established through the Gentle Breath Meditation® and the healing sessions.
I felt that I had to really honour my body and support it to recover from the deep exhaustion by allowing myself to rest when I needed to, instead of going into a drive to finish a task regardless of how I was feeling. Writing down all the realisations I had and what happened during the day was a great help to clear my head and come back to what really counted – to heal on all levels and to be and live the love that I felt emerging from my innermost, and to wholeheartedly appreciate that I was on the right path back to living my true being.
Observing my reactions to people and situations became a constant tool to learn what triggers me. From this observation I soon began to see that those triggers were my undealt-with hurts, patterns that kept repeating, coming from the same old issues – that I had no self-worth and that I didn’t love or even like myself. I had to learn to love myself, just as I am, with no need to do anything or prove myself to anyone. It felt like I was truly mothering myself, treating myself like I would a small child that needs help, love and support. It really was like there were two sides to me; the hurt, anxious and resentful child, then the wise, patient and loving mother, reassuring the child again and again that everything is ok and that we will get out of these fears and negative thoughts and feelings together. This was a wonderful time. I now felt that I was truly healing and nurturing myself.
I came to realise that there was a growing strength and wisdom in me behind all those negative thoughts and feelings. One of the practitioners had the idea that I look in the mirror into my eyes and say “I love you” to myself. That was an amazing experience, very revealing of my deep negative judgements of myself and the resistance to accept the beauty that I saw in my eyes. The first time I said “I love you” to my face in the mirror, I felt so much embarrassment that it was very hard to keep looking into my eyes. But I persevered, kept doing this exercise every day for about two weeks, and accepted more and more what I saw in my own eyes – that I am beautiful and full of sweetness, love and tenderness and the love in my eyes kept growing by the day. There was so much joy, once I fully accepted that I really love myself through and through, unconditionally like God loves me – that I am Love and always have been that Love deep inside me.
When I came to realise that my innermost qualities were still there, untouched by a life filled with loneliness, contraction, misery and blame, I was able to start to let go of the negative thought patterns and be more open and relaxed in my body and more loving in my outlook to myself and life. The medications that I took for depression, hormones and insomnia now worked much better and I gained in physical strength. The tinnitus became manageable, because the mental and emotional tension subsided, and rather than letting life control me, I started to breathe my own breath again.
I had kept myself away from the world with only a very small number of people in my immediate vicinity to speak and socialise with. Now I started to break out of my isolation and joined small groups, like garden courses and women’s circles, to explore how I can relate and connect to people. There was a lot of shyness and insecurity to start with, but I realised that people are not bad like I had always thought. In fact, a lot of them were protective and insecure like me, in their different ways, and I could sense that everybody is deep down, just like me, looking for the same true unconditional love and a sense of purpose. I consciously made the choice, again and again, to not listen to the recurring thoughts of judgement and comparison and instead stayed connected to my essence and open to seeing people how they really are. I realised that, if I deeply love myself, that love overflows to all others and as a result I now have a deeper understanding of where people are coming from. Connecting to people everywhere was, and still is, a big part of my healing.
Today I am almost free of all physical symptoms; I don’t take medication for depression and insomnia anymore and my connection to my innermost qualities is expanding and growing stronger by the day. I truly enjoy my life. I have beautiful relationships with many friends, and I know that I am loved by God, and always have been. I just didn’t think I was because I was too caught up in the stream of negative thoughts, which were spinning around and around in me endlessly.
I now understand that everything is energy, and everything that happens, happens because of an energy, and that I have the choice as to which energy I align to; either the quality of love and harmony inside me or the hurts and thought patterns of victimhood.
As a little girl, in reaction to the world around me, I had let go of my connection to my essence, the love that I am. That had created a hurt in me, a contraction, which was the opening for the negative thoughts of victimhood and blaming of others, to spin around in me like a merry-go-round. But now I know that in every moment I can re-align to the love and harmony that I am and come from, and I know that God and Soul have always been there, lovingly and patiently waiting for me to re-connect to, and express from, the love that I am – my essence.
Filed under
Appreciation, Connection, Essence, Self-esteem, Self-love
