At one point in my life I was close to losing myself.
The only thing I felt was pain, a pain that seemed to invade my whole body. As Eckhart Tolle calls it, the “pain body”[1] had taken possession of me.
I am familiar with the symptoms of depression (I’ve been there on a walk before 🙂 and decided I didn’t want to walk in that garden anymore).
I decided to help myself and approach things as I would do with another person.
A first attempt was to apply my “What advice would you give yourself now, from age 70?” technique. – It didn’t work! I felt like my whole body was hurting terribly.
The second attempt was to approach things from a different frame of reference! Being an emotional person, I looked at the EMOTION – ACTION – THINKING scheme and tried to get out of the EMOTION zone and deal with things using THINKING.
This change of frame of reference has been fantastically helpful to me at this point. I detached myself a little from the emotions I was experiencing and focused my thoughts on the things I know.
I said to myself: Cristiana, as you know, you are not defined by a strong emotion, you are not defined by an uncomfortable situation, you are not defined by the relationships you have, you are YOU….
Cristiana, try to remember when did you felt a great sense of happiness and freedom? And so I began my walk on my “Time Line”[2].
The internal answer came – When I discovered myself! I had just turned 30 and was celebrating my birthday in the hospital of Schladming, Austria, where I had broken my elbow joint in a skiing accident. During that week in hospital, I discovered myself. There I was ME! Forced by external circumstances, I was “stripped” of all the onion leaves covering my essence. All the outer aspects that defined me at home, here seemed to have disappeared: I was no longer the appreciated Training Manager in a multinational (I was a patient) , I was no longer the educated and responsible daughter from a good family (I was a Romanian – and that’s it), nobody needed my help anymore (but I needed the help of many), I was no longer the young woman living in DorobanÈ›i (I lived in room 35 of the hospital), I was no longer the elegant young woman (I was dressed only in a hospital nightgown, I didn’t even have my earrings anymore – they had been removed before the surgery).
Here I had nothing and I was nothing but ME, Cristiana, with a broken arm. I was just ME with everything I had in my mind and heart! I wasn’t afraid for a moment. It was a fantastic feeling! I was free, happy and peaceful! I discovered my essence…I was a serene and strong girl. This funny girl cheered up patients and nurses, this girl had the power to make an extremely painful recovery.
This girl became WHOLE and found herself – in the week she lost everything and broke!
[1] “The power of the present”- Eckhart Tolle
[2] Time Line: Technique used in coaching and NLP
