Before, during, and after the behavioral abuse we were subjected to through preschool to middle school, another factor was at play, the factor of spiritual isolation. Our spirituality was always important to us, and, while our mother was religious, her way of viewing the world did not sit well with us. We know now that our journey began before we were aware of it, perhaps in past lives which we don’t remember, and perhaps, for all of us, at different times. The word perhaps is strongly indicated here, however, since venturing intentionally into times before this life is a difficult process to trust. But we do know that, in this life, full awareness of what we were doing, and understanding of the things we found, started developing at body age ten years old after we typed a common sentence into google. Seven years later, we aren’t through. This article will detail what we know, what we think we know, and what we’ve learned and experienced in those seven years, and further back than that, covering events that shaped the foundations for our aware search. We will warn you now, though, there is a lot of graphic content, including talk of suicide, loneliness and various traumas, so if you aren’t stable while reading this, I’d recommend you be careful while reading, or wait until the situation that you are involved in has changed.
It’s never been our intention to hurt our readers. After all, we’ve been hurt, and don’t wish that on anyone. The start of it all began with the effort toward the foundations of this kind of peace by our mother, who bought a disk of nature sounds to help her, and most likely the whole family, sleep during the night. We were body age four or five at the time, and we loved that disk, although we didn’t know why. We were unaware that we were empaths at the time, and so didn’t realize the affect that nature sounds like those had on us. Through our whole life, subtle things like this came to us until 2010, where we began seeking them out on our own. This is where the story truly begins.
In some time between 2009 and 2010, we were visited by a yoga teacher in training, and we did yoga together with her, which, for the most part, we very much enjoyed, happily unaware that it was an improper form of the spiritual practice, and that what we were doing was causing as much damage as it was. We’d often find ourselves practicing the breathing patterns outside of the sessions, despite the cat box smell filling the small house we lived in at the time. Our willingness to do everything wasn’t always there, but we still formed the foundation for a long-lasting search, even though the improperly done yoga sessions were abruptly stopped without warning at some point, and never resumed in the same way again. For reasons I, Maria, don’t know, practicing the things we’d learned in yoga felt strange and wrong to some of us, including me, unless we were guided into them, at least after the sessions stopped and we were left to do things on our own. In 2010, when we began to search independently, this fear only grew, and seven years later we’re still working to overcome parts of it.
In those seven years, we stumbled upon a lot of things, but we were always alone in the search in the sense that nobody but ourselves saw what we had seen in that process. We had friends who came and went, as was the nature of the group that shared our body age at any given time, and those friends led us deeply into this part of our life, but did not stay to see the results of their ventures. At body age ten, we typed, “Take a deep breath,” into google. That was our first step on the path to the rest of our life, motivated by the behavioral abuse we were being subjected to at the time, and driven further by the need for self-soothing abilities to be developed to combat the cause of our behavior. We didn’t put much of what we’d learned to use in elementary or middle school years, and in fact felt isolation creeping in as early as fourth grade from the simple fact that we knew what we knew. We were afraid to show the people around us what was, and still is, a more vulnerable side of us that, in that time, we knew would not be cared for in their hands, so we closed off knowledge meant to help with our exact problem. It was all we could do, given the situation, because this part of our life was still quite fragile and we knew on some level that stronger parts of the system should handle the pain that such fragile ones could not.
For us, at first there were two separate searches happening at once. In 2010, I watched a tv show called ‘That’s So Raven,’ in which the main character was a psychic who could see what was to come. We loved that show, not for the plot, but for the visions shown in it and the reactions the main character had to said visions. We were in elementary school at the time, and bumped into someone who was the same body age we were because of that show. As it turned out, she was more deeply involved in that kind of thing than we realized, and very quickly we were being pulled into her world, at a speed that outmatched our ability to handle what was happening. This is when the first births happened that were purely for the intention of handling the things that this friend and her mother dragged us through. There was joy in our time with them, but there was also a lot of pain there, mostly in the form of us, as a system, not knowing what we were doing and being involved in a lot of things that we didn’t quite understand, and after they and we were separated in middle school, I began searching again, but from the relaxation and calming aspect of the world wide web.
In seventh grade, after completely ignoring what we’d been through in elementary school, thinking we’d put it behind us, we tried once again to do yoga with the same teacher who’d done it with us in 2009, began looking into healing modalities, and learned what we could from all we could understand. The results of our 2009 restoration efforts were devastating. To our dismay, the teacher we’d known, who took her time and put effort into caring about her methods, the solid foundation, of sorts, that we’d built ourselves upon, had been replaced with someone who was a rushing, cold, and rude person, and who cared more about the physical than the mental in her practice. We broke away as quickly as we could after suffering for months over our past involvement with her, and were adrift again, finding comfort in the overly complex articles on the web that, eventually, Michele alone took on the task of reading, until in eighth grade, a chronic liar, despite being this way, led us to our empathy and through the door to our spirituality wide open. It was during our time with them when we were told, by someone who hardly knew us, that we were indigo children, and that statement, though partly wrong, was enough to confirm our differences from those who shared our body age and drive us headlong into loneliness and isolation. Despite the presence of convictions born from the books we’d looked into about other cultures, and the presence of someone who we thought cared about us, this piece of information had too strong of a foundation to be easily ignored, and emotional support in accepting our differences was lacking, so we split twice to handle the impact of it.
But no matter how strong the convictions we had at the time were, in 2015 when the person who’d led us to our empathy through lieing about their own had left us, those convictions left with him, or so I, maria, thought. In reality, while I myself drifted, lost and regained my sense of spirituality, we as a whole were discovering our various paths. Our times of discovery hadn’t been neglected with the book-based convictions that were now overturned in me, and after the untruthful person in our lives had left us, we continued to look deeper into a specific kind of breathwork, called Rebirthing. We’d studied mostly this, and other healing modalities, for 4 years of our search, somewhere along the line dropping the spiritual development aspect as an active topic of focus, that is, until we discovered the kind of breathwork mentioned above. After tangling with the charismatic and deceptive leader of the main rebirthing movement in late 2015, then pulling away after realizing how cult-like the whole thing was, we began looking deeply into other things we’d learned of along the way, before we’d discovered any kind of breathwork, as an effort to help ourselves escape the pain of this last loss. The darkness, during this time, was within as well as outside of us, because not only was it the darkest part of the winter then, but the loneliness that had built up over seven years was holding its own, and for the first time I, and others in the system, contemplated taking our own lives.
In December of 2015, my ability to tolerate loneliness shattered. I began creating what I thought were only characters in my mind, not aware of the fact that I was a multiple at the time and that I was actually talking to insiders. When they passed their names into my thoughts, I just assumed I was making them up for my own pleasure. From December of 2015 until August of 2016, we focused on building communication and getting to know one another, and I began to accept the reality that something happened to us in our childhood to cause us to be many, and that I didn’t, in fact, create them for my own enjoyment; after all, no self-made creation could give its own name, or come into the body with such consistent, unwavering ways of interacting with the world if I’d only made them out of my own head. I almost completely dropped everything else to focus on learning the skills we never learned in our ABA/behavioral intervention program, and in the process discovered more about the system who was always there but always silent. Things like rebirthing became highly suspect to some of us, particularly those who hadn’t been taught simple deep breathing or other ways to calm themselves. Our ability to fully surrender to emotions was, until this point, inhibited by the lack of a solid, foundational knowledge that emotions wouldn’t, and won’t, last forever, and in these nine months we focused on building in that knowledge, and filling in the gaps that forced a shattering of our one soul into many, and saw that rather than integration or fusion, we were developing more fully into our own selves.
In late 2016, after we’d mastered these skills, we began to move back into rebirthing breathwork again, confident in our stability in the currents of feeling. We were inspired to connect with others, this time not through the screaming silence of isolation, but from the reassurance of having a caring figure, even for a short time, so we reached out through the internet to see if there were others out there who knew of this practice. To our surprise, we found a small group of just such people, and over the last 4 months, we’ve made many friends and begun to build a spiritual community of sorts. We’ve rediscovered our empathy, and the truth behind our existence as a collective. The web, once our worst source of pain, has now become a platform for us to tell the world what we’ve learned. We’ve started a YouTube channel, and begun this blog, thanks to better and more accessible technology, a better understanding of how the technology is supposed to work, and over all maturity from all involved. We’ve learned the meaning of many things that, in our younger years, we refused to even consider as being true, things that many people don’t bother to present clearly, and we’ve told ourselves that, upon this platform, we will make them clear. We’ve picked up the pieces, experienced shifts, and learned to learn from our pain without invalidating it…In short, we’ve learned to live.