In light of Darkness

 

In Memory of Maria Labeka Abankwah Larson - 06.03.1994 – 06.07.2024

On the 6th of July, a friend and truly beautiful soul left her earthly body by choice. Maria was a truly gorgeous person, both inside and out. She was soft, kind, sincere, empathetic, full of love, true, and truly authentic. My heart aches so deeply when I think of her absence, but at the same time, I recognize that she is not absent now; she is infinite now. These thoughts are dedicated to the Infinite Maria Labeka Abankwah Larson, who made the best brownies in the world, and I am absolutely honored to have tasted them.

In light of Maria passing on and my mother being very sick and in the hospital at the moment as I write this, I have been thinking a lot about life and death, suicide, and after death. I am not sure which topic will come out as I am typing now, but I would like to get some of it off my chest.

Firstly, some thoughts about suicide. Suicide is real. Depression is real. Mental illness is real. I grew up around mental illness when I was a child. I knew about suicide as I had an uncle and a grandfather who took their own lives before I was even born. My mother was diagnosed with bipolar depression when I was very young, and my childhood saw her in and out of the hospital, with numerous attempts on her own life. I remember as a little girl wishing I could make my mom feel better, wishing that I could save her in some way.

My parents anticipated that my mother’s mental health and absence in our lives would have some kind of effect on my brother and me, so they sent us to psychologists from an early age. I can attribute my own bipolar and borderline diagnoses to my genetics and childhood. I understand the deep, dark hole that depression is. I have seen it and I have lived it. It has been my companion in life, in so many different shapes and ways. During my own depressive episodes, the void has called me many times, and I made many plans, and even made an attempt on my life when I was a student in Cape Town.

After having my son, I never allowed depression to push me there again, always reminding myself that I must stay alive for him. I call him my little lifesaver because he truly has saved my life so many times in dark moments, by just existing as a responsibility in my life. As a result of having BPD, my emotions are extremely deep, erratic, and uncontrollable. During a depression, it really does feel like the end of the world. Like there will never be happiness again. Like I am completely worthless and like the world would be better without me.

It is only in the last four years since I started becoming conscious of myself, my actions, their effect on my life, and my mindset. In the last four years, I started doing shadow work and walking on a pathway of spiritual growth and healing. I am so grateful that I was given the opportunity to gain some kind of understanding within myself in the last few years because it has given me a whole new understanding of my experience here on earth.

I still experience depression. I still experience deep depressive holes and feelings of rejection, abandonment, sorrow, fear, and anger. When I experience those feelings now, I can observe them from a different perspective. Now I can understand that many of these dark feelings are an integral part of the grief cycle. When a person experiences any type of grief or trauma in life, big or small, it triggers a subconscious grief response. That means that you will go through the five stages of grief, which are denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. To overcome the experience that triggered the grief response, you have to feel those feelings for them to process and heal. I recognize that suppressing feelings in any way, by escaping through alcohol, drugs, games, scrolling, work, or any other form of avoidance or escapism a person chooses, only saves that grief for another day and prevents you from processing and overcoming the events that hold a person back and cause the pain.

So when I feel conflict, pain, anger, grief, or deep depression, I remind myself that even though those feelings are so painful and difficult to experience, they are totally necessary and needed in order to process a multitude of different, ongoing grief responses within my subconscious mind. I remind myself that, in the darkest moments, I am healing, overcoming, and growing the most. I remind myself that acceptance comes after depression. Sometimes I remind myself of that twenty times a day.

It does not take the negative feelings away, but it also shouldn’t take them away, and I am not trying to take them away because if I am not feeling them, I am not healing them. I am trying to allow them time to exist, and I am trying to be compassionate with myself for needing to take time from focusing on my life and goals in order to heal from the experiences of my life and my lineage. I do so knowing that healing is the only way to overcome the self-limiting beliefs that hold me back from pursuing and achieving every potential goal. Within that, there is already a silver light that surrounds the dark cloud.

Sometimes just existing can be so incredibly painful and difficult, and I just want to put the word out that IT IS OK NOT TO BE OK. It is OK to feel like you are in a deep, dark hole, and it feels almost impossible to breathe. It is OK if you need a day, a week, a month, or even a year. Be compassionate with yourself and allow yourself to take the time you need to feel and heal, however you might need to. Always remember to hang onto that glimmer of hope – “Acceptance comes after Depression.”

Now onto a different topic within this topic – life and death.

I often consider and reconsider the meaning of life. The purpose of it all. There are so many different perspectives to consider and think about here. Some might say that the meaning of life is to have a good time and enjoy it as much as possible, YOLO. Some might say the meaning of life is to make connections and bonds with your friends and loved ones, and others might say it is to make as much money as possible or to work hard and contribute to society. Maybe like the Picasso quote I always see floating around on memes, “The meaning of life is to find your gift; the purpose of life is to give it away.”

Personally, this perspective of mine seems to always be growing stronger. I believe that we are individual aspects within a much larger singularity. What I mean by that is that I think we are small pieces of a much bigger puzzle, so even though we are each individual pieces of the puzzle, and the puzzle would be incomplete without the piece that is you and your experience here on earth, you are still a piece of a much bigger picture that you cannot even comprehend. Every experience needs to be experienced. Every individual is an expression of a possibility, and within every experience, the overall puzzle picture gains more depth, detail, and understanding.

Let me think about some more examples that I can maybe use to illustrate my mind. Maybe I can relate it to a big computer, and we are each individual processes running to feed knowledge and experience into the motherboard.

What I am getting at with that thought is that I don’t think there is any particular purpose except to experience whatever experience this expression of source has to offer.

I don’t know if my “when I think rationally” can align or resonate with your rationalizing because everyone’s perspective and understanding are based on the knowledge and experience that they have gained so far in their experience from their own perspective. For this reason, I hope you can bear with me and walk along with an open mind.

What makes most sense to me with regard to existence and the Universe and everything that we are a part of is fractal geometry. Fractal geometry is a study of mathematics that would indicate that all patterns throughout the universe are repeated, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. From as small as we can study them to as large as we can study them, all the patterns are repeated. A very common way that this is often illustrated is through the way a tree grows, and this has been proven accurate. Fractal geometry has proven accurate on every level that it has been studied – from the way that veins in the body branch out to the way snowflakes freeze, the patterns are repeated from the biggest to the smallest that you can zoom.

If I follow this rationality of fractal geometry and use the example of the tree, then we are like lots of individual leaves that are still a part of the same one tree. As we zoom out, there are thousands of trees, but they are all a part of the same one earth. And we can continue to zoom.

I also like to use a body example. An atom is the smallest understandable building block that we know. From our perspective, an atom is nothing but a point that is buzzing with energy. When we get together millions and billions of these points that are individually buzzing with energy, they can take shape together and form a living cell. Each individual cell is a living, breathing individual, and each individual cell does its very best to stay alive and perform its function to the best of its ability. Those cells, bacteria, and microorganisms that live inside you and make up your body and your internal biome do not know that they are making up and creating an entire human being.

In the same way, you are one of millions and billions of animals, plants, and microorganisms that live on and make up the world and all together, live to give life to it. Our host, as you are the host of millions and billions of microorganisms.

All I am getting at is that we are definitely a part of something much bigger than us. I could call it God, but I don’t want to scare the atheists away, so let’s just call it Source Energy for now—the Energy that everyone and everything is a part of. I think everyone can agree that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in shape and form. Therefore, everyone can agree that the energy that makes you and your body existed before it was your body and will continue to exist after. It is only temporarily in the shape that is you. When you die, the energy that is within your cells can turn soil that nourishes the earth, or heat energy if your body gets burned.

This is where we come to my thoughts about after death. From the previous paragraph, you can understand that I believe in continuation after death; I do not believe in a great nothing. I believe your energy is transformed into different forms and continues forever.

I guess that explains the energy of your physical body carrying on forever, but it does not explain the part of you that thinks, processes, and chooses. This is a hard one that I have considered deeply, but I have never tried to explain my thoughts in a coherent fashion, so I don’t know if I will be successful in doing so here and now.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the term “the shadow self,” through which he explains how people have a physical self that experiences the world and a shadow self that processes and deals with all of the experiences. I have heard this shadow described with different names, and it is not quite how I want to separate the soul from the body, but essentially, that is what I guess I am trying to do... I believe the soul is separate from the body because so many near-death experiences result in a person being able to see their body from an outside perspective.

I think the soul or spirit is something that is both unique and individual while it is a part of your body, as it has your body’s unique and individual experiences to create a unique understanding and perspective of life while in this earthly, human experience. At the same time, it is your connection to the divine, because it is the part of you that absorbs and learns from the human experience, but carries on after your body has transformed into some other form. This part of you is actually a part of a much, much larger connected or universal consciousness.

“Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh

I encountered this quote a few years ago, and it really struck a chord because I had seen this vision during a meditation. In the meditation, I could see myself as a wave, coming up and out of the ocean. Being separated from it, yet still eternally connected to the water below. The wave travels with forward momentum as you go through life, and at the end of the push, the wave washes onto the beach and draws back into the ocean, to everything that it is a part of.

If you imagine the soul or spirit as the liquid grand universal consciousness of everything that we are a part of, and your body is like a vessel filled up to the brim. The consciousness permeates every atom within your cells. This consciousness here in your body runs a set series of processes through your life to see and understand the results and further expand the overall knowledge and understanding of the source that we are all a part of.

I think this belief for me, that we will return to the divine source that we are a part of, was reaffirmed by the experience of a woman called Anita Moorjani. I recommend that you check out her TED Talks or read one of her books. She is an amazing woman who was in the hospital, dying from late-stage cancer, and she went into a coma. Her organs had shut down, and her family was coming to say goodbye to her before she died.

During the coma, she experienced an NDE (near-death experience). During that time, she said she had full awareness of what was happening around her body. She could see her body, and she could see and understand things even beyond her body. She could see her husband sitting at her bedside, and she could feel his distress. She could see her brother on the plane, who was coming to say goodbye to her body.

She explains this experience further and says it felt like she had expanded out of her body, and even though she was aware of her body, she could see it in front of her in the bed, and she was no longer connected to it. Instead, she had expanded out of her body and had stretched to be everywhere all at once. Anywhere she put her mind, she would immediately be able to see and understand. She thought of her brother, and immediately she became aware of him and his emotions and feelings as he rushed to catch a plane from India to Hong Kong to say goodbye to her before she died. She said she was overwhelmed by unconditional love, like nothing that she had ever felt. She also became aware of her best friend and her father, both of whom had died. She could feel their presence with her, and she could feel them communicating with her and guiding her, and at the same time, she felt like they were also a part of her. Like she was a part of everyone, and everyone was connected by this divine consciousness... I won’t spoil the whole story, go check her out for yourself. She is truly inspiring and amazing.

I really love the connection that she explains with her father and best friend.

When I first read Anita Moorjani’s story, it felt like she confirmed everything that I had already believed about fractal geometry and everyone being a part of the big picture and so connected by the universal consciousness of it all, in the same way that your individual cells are connected by being a part of your body.

I am not afraid of death. In fact, I am more afraid of living too long than I am of the end... I think that a body allows the soul to experience many things, but it is also a very limiting structure. The body limits the number of wavelengths of colors and sounds that you can perceive, and if you were beyond the body, you would be able to perceive colors that you cannot even imagine now or sounds that are beyond the realms of your ears’ ability. For this reason, I look forward to my reconnection with Source Energy one day. The bigger picture is so much greater and more amazing than our limited thinking can understand, and you are a part of it! You and me... We are both a part of it, and that means we are both a part of each other in some way. And that also means that every other person on this planet is also a part of you in some way... Well, obviously, right, because we are all planet Earth... We are a part of this planet, at the very least. We don’t just live on the planet. Our bodies are made from the nutrients that we ate, which were absorbed from the soil by the plants that grow in it. Of course, you are a part of it.

I feel like this might be becoming a ramble now, and I am just repeating myself in different ways, but that is how my brain runs, so deal with it.

By now, I have spent more than a month writing this post in little bits every day, in-between my classes. It has been thoughtful and painful but also very healing and relieving. This weekend was my birthday, and I gathered with some dear sisters. On the group, I used the same photo as the one at the top of this post. This photo is of the very special Merkaba that I made for Maria's soul. It was her invitation to join the party, and I believe that she did. I could feel her there with us, as we sat around the fire, and looked up at the stars.

So for me, there is no real end. Maria will never truly be gone. She is now an infinite energy that exists everywhere in all things, just as we all are. The same goes for everyone who has passed before us. I have come to believe that every individual is a unique expression of source that never truly dies, and we are all living our lives and experiences in the best way we can, and then we reconnect to the amazing divine that we are a part of. 

If you are grieving, allow yourself to grieve and process the pain. Reach out to support systems, friends, and family. Seek help if needed. The International Association for Suicide Prevention offers resources and support for those who need it, and many online resources are available globally for mental health support.

Know that you are not alone in your struggles and that healing takes time. Remember to be compassionate with yourself and hang on to hope, even in the darkest moments.

If you are struggling, please reach out for support. There are many resources available worldwide. Remember, it is OK not to be OK. Be kind to yourself and give yourself the space and time you need to heal.

You are me, and I am you, because we are one, and we are love.