Stress and Anxiety

My first memories of severe anxiety and stress occurred during my second primary school. The incident is still clearly etched in my mind. The female teacher, a large lady with a vicious temper, was attempting to teach me knitting; I kept getting it wrong and mis-counting the stitches so she kept me in late at school after everyone else had gone home and I still got it wrong. The more she shouted at me and sent me back to do it again the more anxious and stressed I became until my hands were shaking, my stomach knotted and I was fighting back the tears. In the end she completely lost it with me and slapped me so hard that I flew over a table, unable to withstand the violence.

Due to my mother’s survival struggle as a divorcee following my father’s return from war suffering from PTSD, then known as shell shock, she sought work as a housekeeper to provide accommodation and food in our bellies. Unfortunately she formed an unhealthy relationship with her male employer, a landlord of a village pub. There were heavy drinking bouts and drunken brawls between them and one incident resulted in my mother being axed on the head and running around the house screaming “you’ve axed me, you’ve axed me!” I was in bed and heard all this and crept out onto the landing and listened, my stomach tightened as I prayed hard for it to stop. Eventually a policeman arrived and told me to go to bed saying ‘Everything is alright now.’ That was the beginning of a sense of powerlessness. That incident on top of violent treatment at school formed my early impression of authoritarian figures and their response to my extreme stress states.

I have learned since that severe childhood trauma can rip open the energy field that is designed to protect us. Children have a porous energy field until they form their own identity and healthy ego. These incidents combined to open me psychically hence I was privy to invisible worlds which others do not see, but may sense or feel around them. In old language spirits, the modern terminology being units of alienated consciousness.

We have gone from survival stress when our goals were to provide food and shelter as described in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, see illustration, to an insanity of materialism and extreme spiritual deprivation. Our country is obsessed with GDP whilst Rome burns. We may wish to think that we are safe and protected from world events, but our psychic mind and emotions are not and unless we deal with our own stress issues and healing journeys we will be ill equipped to enter the turbulent future on the horizon. Superficial practices like Mindfulness and pseudo psychic healing methods are applying band aids when spiritual surgery may be required.

It was following achieving esteem needs of family, wealth and status during my second marriage, in the midst of extreme stress that forced me to “wake up” from the somnambulism material world I was dreaming through that caused a breakdown(read break through). I did not understand at the time that I was actually living a life of constant stress due to the high profile life I was leading, as I thought it “normal.”

This awakening process started with consciously leaving my body during resting on a sofa at a friend’s house. This first incident rapidly progressed to several Out of Body Experiences and other unworldly scenarios and perceptions of different time zones, including end of world vistas and many paranormal experiences. This drastic change of perspective was also accompanied by an extreme change in lifestyle where I went from living in a country mansion to temporarily living in a caravan while waiting for a council house, having left my husband. This resulted in my physical body drastically losing weight, my menstruation cycle ceased and a heightened sensitivity when I could not bear to be touched and my head felt like a gigantic mushroom and I was frequently receiving “downloads” of knowledge and information. Computer technology was an unknown in my world at that time. But I can now look back and describe it as my brain being a computer downloading information that came from goodness knows where.

All this demanded a search for explanations and eventually led to me forming a close friendship with Eckhart Tolle the now celebrated spiritual teacher and Author of The Power of Now and encountering David Icke author of Children of the Matrix and one time TV Sports presenter before his spiritual awakening and media assassination and UK’s mass ridicule for his wild conspiracy theories which time has proved some of them to be correct. He was seen at the time as a mad man with an over inflated Messiah Complex. These two figures combined to save me from the madhouse. Without their in-put and influence in my life I would have ended up sectioned, drugged and regarded as “mentally ill.”

We can either learn to swim throughout the turbulent times or drown in a fog of prescription treatments and drugs. I have now reconciled my experiences, faced some of my deepest fears and devoted my life to living purposefully and holistically to better face the times we are entering. Avril Meyler Author of “A New Human” and “A Multidimensional Paradigm”