The Night that Meditating Saved My Life

This is a story that I've wanted to share for a while, but I knew that the words would need to come at the right time and that there couldn't be any rushing to this tale.

It's a story that is tender in my Heart; not tender in a "bad" way necessarily, just tender in the acknowledgement of a moment in my life where everything changed.

The kind of moment where seemingly disparate threads of my life suddenly converged and I had a clear, embodied experience/understanding of something that I had previously only understood in theory- that is, that spiritual practices are something we do to not only enhance our everyday existence, they are crucial tools to help us navigate life's darkest moments.

I guess that might sound a bit "duh" to some people, and believe me, I feel you on that one! I figured that I knew that already, but there is a world of difference in experiencing a theory in real life that can teach you how potent and true a general theory or philosophical understanding can be.

I can remember it so clearly- I was lying on my side in the spare bedroom of my youngest sister's home in Melbourne at about 3 o'clock in the morning. I was16 weeks pregnant with my first child, and my (then) husband had finally confessed to sleeping with another woman two weeks prior. This was really the climatic moment of a three week unravelling of our 6.5 year relationship and marriage, prior to which I had honestly had no inkling something like this was coming.

As I'm sure you can imagine, my mind was spinning so hard and so fast I could barely string a coherent thought together. It felt as though my entire world had been completely upended; what I thought was solid and true, wasn't. Not only was I just beginning to comprehend the massive changes to the future I had envisioned (from married family unit to single motherhood, among many other things) but the revelations of the night made me question my whole version of reality up until that point. Was anything from the previous 6.5 years real??

I was definitely in shock. My body was shaking uncontrollably and my breathing was all over the place. I can safely say that the level of stress hormones in my body at that point would have been off the charts. But this is where the moral of my story kicks in, because it was the anchoring and healing power of the previous 2 years of meditation, prayer and Qoya, that honestly helped me survive that awful night without at the least needing to be hospitalised.

And I know that it might sound like an exaggeration or clickbait to use the word "survived", but it truly felt like that. The shock was so intense and my body felt so very vulnerable. Not only was I shaking (solid, deep tremors wracking my body) but I was finding it hard to breathe and I could feel a full-blown panic attack getting closer and closer. I was alone (my poor, wonderful sister had finally gone back to bed to try to get some sleep before work the next day) and it didn't feel like I could do anything to take the edge off the intensity or to help me sleep (a part of me so wanted to get absolutely blind drunk or take a sleeping pill, but being pregnant they weren't viable options).

So I dropped into the familiar internal landscape of presence that I had so diligently cultivated over the couple of years prior, and I focused on my breathing. Each time an intrusive thought or image popped into my mind and started to derail my flow (and boyyy did that happen graphically and often), I would flex my meditative muscle and bring myself back to the present moment and the process of simply getting air into and out of my body. I did this for easily over an hour and finally my body relaxed enough that I was able to sleep for a couple of hours.

I needed to utilise this same level of concentration and anchoring many times over the weeks and months after this, as truths continued to come to light and I did my very best to process everything all while safely growing and nurturing my baby girl. It's something I've thought of often since that time, and I've wanted to share as it's completely changed my relationship to my personal spiritual practices.

I'm feeling that my journey with meditation itself is worthy of a post of its own, as I tried many different styles of meditation before finding the one that felt the most nourishing and powerful for me (Vedic meditation). My hope is that in sharing this tender and transformative moment in my life that it may inspire you to explore your own spiritual practices and/or help to affirm to you, that having a devoted practice and continuing to show up for yourself every day can truly come back to serve you so greatly in moments you least expect.

Thank you for witnessing me,

Klyne x

(this was first published on my instagram account 3/2/2021)