Maajhi (Boatman)

Who would you trust more to teach you how to find the shore when you’re lost at sea?

Someone who never got lost?

or someone you saw from your from firm ground on the shore,

someone in the middle of a storm who couldn’t see you or reach out to you from its eye;

someone with neither a map nor compass who had to find currents, surrender to them;

someone who had no idea whether they would find the shore again, nor what to trust except their own heart about which way the shore might be;

someone who the ocean brought back, having taught them what works when you’re lost;

someone who kept rowing with no idea it was even possible to come back?

When they come to solid ground after braving confusion and terror,

When they speak to you about it, knowing that you’re going to be lost just like them some day,

knowing you will eventually have to set out on your boat,

with no more choice than they had when the ocean called to them to find their shore.

Will you judge them for suffering for trying?

Maybe some day, the ocean will call you to find your shore, too;

and she will demand that you enter if you want to know what you’re here to do.

She won’t give you a map,

or a compass,

or a lifejacket for the storm.

but she’ll remind you that you know someone who found the currents.

Will you ask them how?

Nobody understood my ADHD in school, not even me. I was cast off as a problem child – a lazy kid who refuses to live up to his potential. At every parent-teachers’ meeting, the single dominant narrative was of my wasted potential. At the return of all my tests, I was shamed. When confronted with the fact that nobody understood I was struggling – that my mind might be a little slow, I can’t do math, I can’t sustain attention, I’m not trying to be a bad student – I shut down completely and dissociated from the very condition of being at school. This is a common experience for children with undiagnosed ADHD.

I couldn’t explain what I was going through because nobody ever asked what was wrong. I was never given the space to say that I’m not okay; all attempts would invite further shaming, labeling, and attributions of “not trying hard enough”, “not being focused enough”, “being disobedient”, “you’re just preoccupied with your thoughts”, and so on.

When a person’s apparatus of attention itself is not cooperating, these prescriptions are meaningless. They only induce a profound sense of failure in a child for not being able to do something that everyone around them regards as a basic skill. I could not do my homework, I could not pay attention in class, I could not study. My brain would not let me, and there was nothing I could do to make it do so.

This was immensely traumatic, and through it all, I faced the ridicule of both peers and teachers. So I dissociated as heavily as I could, I smiled through it all, I clowned around in school. I attached myself to the subjects that I could excel in. And it was enough to get into my dream college – which of course, nobody expected. When I went there, I finally had the opportunity to be diagnosed, to seek therapy and medication.

But the level of dissociation never left. The reflex of leaving my body in the situational contexts that triggered the same shame, self-hatred and escaping were programmed too deeply. I still couldn’t study, I still couldn’t function in the academic environment. I later found out that it was because I was studying something that wasn’t what my soul wanted me to do in this lifetime, but I found that out much later. The shame, guilt and dissociation came to a catastrophic crescendo and I failed out of my dream school. Because I still couldn’t do my homework, I still couldn’t study. I didn’t know how to make sense of the fact that it was because those activities still activated the traumatised self-model (definition: the part of your brain that holds your idea of yourself).

The suffering of it all was so pronounced that I had to break myself down to the atomic level psychologically and beg for assistance from something out there that could rescue me. I was at the brink of complete self destruction. And I don’t know how, but almost automatically, it was almost as if something else other than my mind took over. It gently and compassionately guided me towards becoming a therapist – a healer who knows how to heal because of healing himself. I had always been a deeply emotionally intuitive person, and I said that this skill was reserved for friends and family. I’d made up some story about how using it “professionally” would sully the sanctity of it.

Truth be told, I don’t know how to write about how I got here, because it all happened so fluidly that I barely caught it happening. All I know is that I aligned myself to the meaning that my suffering held, and the easiest one was that it was in service of those who are struggling the same way. I wanted to hold those who were misunderstood the same way I was, and maybe give them the love I wish I’d been given in school. To this end, I pivoted from my (”failed”) attempt at a computer science degree, because by this point, I was also literally broken by an injury at the gym. I acquired this by trying to push myself as hard as I could in a space I could actually perform in, and ended up without losing use of both my arms, developing what looked like early stage fibromyalgia. So I said fuck all of this, (as did my parents (mainly my parents)), and moved back to India: wounded, ashamed, unable to speak to anybody. I carried that sense of failure with me for a few years after.

But through it all, I decided to lean on what brought me joy. I expanded my awareness of the psychological sciences, and a sequence of serendipitous events occurred. When everything fell apart, I decided to anchor myself to what I loved and abandoned in my childhood – singing. And at my music lessons, my only classmate was the the person who would eventually become my therapy mentor. The magic of this is not lost on me. So I spent the next 5 years genuinely excelling at what I chose to study because I was learning how the human mind worked, how it interacted with the human body and spirit, made photographs and music to create a daily sense of joy and achievement, and responded with an emphatic “Yes!” to every calling of my heart. I had already lost whatever honour I held, so I had nothing to lose by leaning into what I loved.

At every moment, I committed myself to a simple mantra: “When I am unable to do anything, if I am doing nothing, it means I am not doing something that is taking me further away from my divinity.” From what my soul is here to express in this body. At every step, I did as much as I could to use the eclectic knowledge I was gathering: into neuroscience, into how the mind works, into how sound heals, and how things work metaphysically – to take me further into alignment with what it was this universe wants to express through me. I used all the knowledge that felt right and tried to apply it, and discarded what didn’t ring true or work towards my own transformation. Somehow, the right people to assist me with that arrived; it was like I was in a conversation with the Source Pattern – the first core consciousness that split and evolved into me over 15 billion years – through the other beings who came my way. This conversation continues with greater immersion, and all I try to do, past all my human obscurations, is to hold the light of compassion and knowledge of how phenomenal reality actually works, and how we can harness it for healing.

I like to think of myself as the boatman who found the shore, so that I can help other people be less lost at sea. If what I went through has any meaning, it is this knowledge: That complete transformation is possible when you find the calling of your spirit. That if you take accountability for your behaviour and treat your trauma with care and compassion, it will set you free. That if you learn how to listen to your heart and do the job the earth wants you to do – diligently, fearlessly – you find everything you seek simply by walking forward.

There is more to life than staying safe on land, because the intelligence in you wants new experiences, it wants the excitement of discovery. It is the nature of life expressed in the callings that come to you. And they will lead to you getting lost, to feeling like you will break apart, drowned and forgotten. But if you find the currents, you will reach new shores over and over again.

I want to help people do that, because it is what I’m uniquely suited to do: Holding a space of empathy and compassion for people who don’t function the way the world expects them to, who aren’t what those around them want them to be, and help them listen to the sound of the ocean. To help them traverse it.