12/12 - When I Googled “What To Do When You Feel Completely Lost”
I too felt helpless and hopeless when I heard those words:
“I’ve hit a brick wall.”
I hit rock bottom.
I didn’t have any words to say. Through everything that I had tried - that I had earnestly tried - over the previous years, nothing had worked. And now here I am with my wife saying:
“I have hit a brick wall. I can’t continue like this.”
The collapse of my entire life as it was, was now staring me in the face.
Two days later, on the 2nd April 2019, all I could think to do was to write out all my thoughts and feelings of this helplessness, this hopelessness, and searching for something. This was a message of just pouring out where I was at in my life. It was a message to both myself - as though I was reflecting on my life - and also to my wife.
I believe it’s important that I share some of those words that I wrote out.
This was me.
This was my inner world on the second of April 2019.
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Paul, I know you are devoid of emotion. How you are coming across is that you’ve no heart, no love, no joy in your soul.
I have decided to go and find myself. I have realised that now truly is the time for me to experience my spiritual awakening. Now is the time for me to wake up and start living. Only by me doing this will the love of my life finally get her true whole Paul back in her life.
I am absolutely determined to go through my awakening as quickly as I can to ensure it isn’t too late for us to rekindle our love, our bond, our friendship, and our trust.
As you know, I have tried various things to try and allow me to move on from harbouring such negative feelings and emotions - from 1-1 therapy to hypnosis. It is clear both these techniques are valuable and have helped uncover and pinpoint where my adult feelings and emotions have stemmed from, although neither technique has led me to truly move on.
I have for many years felt like there is something in my life that needs to happen for me to truly wake up and live. Something huge - a wake-up call like I’ve never had before.
I’m sat here in our family caravan, writing this with hardly any emotions going through my mind. I’m not crying. Writing this isn’t making me have the life-changing realisation that I have been searching for so that I, once and for all, can start truly living my life and making you as happy as you deserve.
I wonder if I need to go on tablets to settle my mind down. But hang on - from what one of our friends said about the tablets she was on, they remove any of your emotions.
I desperately want emotions.
I don’t have emotions.
It’s like I’ve got a cold heart.
I’m lost.
I’m more lost than I ever have been.
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That night, after writing this long personal message, I called my best friend of 30 years. He knew that I had been seeing a therapist, and he knew I’d had certain experiences in my younger years. But as he was listening to me read this whole message out, he was in absolute shock. He had no idea of how deep and dark things were and how much it had been affecting my marriage.
He was speechless.
He expressed how me and my wife were the last couple on earth that he would think would be going through something like this. He offered for me to stay at his home if I needed a few days away, and just to help in any way that he could.
He did everything that a best friend would do at that time. But he himself was helpless to do anything about my inner world.
The following evening, the 3rd April 2019, I got my phone. I went on to Google and I searched for:
“what to do when you feel completely lost”
I started reading stories of people having their spiritual awakening. People experiencing crises in their life.
Then whilst I was reading a particular blog post, there were words to the effect of:
“Many people, when they’re experiencing the most challenging period of their life, go through what is known as the dark night of the soul.”
I had never heard of that term before, and it was a link, so I pressed it and it took me to a new page - a very long page - speaking about the dark night of the soul.
There was a section quite a way down, as I was reading every word, and this section started by saying:
Here are seven omens that you might be going through a dark night of the soul.
You feel a deep sense of sadness, which often verges on despair. This sadness is often triggered by the state of your life, humanity, and/or the world as a whole.
You feel an acute sense of unworthiness.
You have the constant feeling of being lost or condemned to a life of suffering or emptiness.
You possess a painful feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness.
Your will and self-control is weakened, making it difficult for you to act.
You lack interest and find no joy in things that once excited you.
You crave the loss of something intangible - a longing for a distant place or to return home again.
As I was reading those seven omens, I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing.
This was explaining, in these 7 simple points, what I had written out on that long message only the day before.
It was like a mirror image of what I was experiencing and how I was living my life at that stage.
Knowing that, in whatever way, I was experiencing some form of spiritual awakening, I didn’t have anyone to turn to. I didn’t have any family members or friends who, from what I understood, had ever gone through anything like this before.
It was just me.
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A few days later, on the 7th April 2019, still in a place of helplessness and hopelessness, all I could think to do was walk across the village green and knock on the front door of Reverend Alison and her husband.
Her husband answered, and Alison was out at the time. He said he would ask her to call over to my home in a short while. A bit later, she came over, and I asked if I could go over to her home so I could just speak to her 1-1. She was absolutely fine with that.
Shortly after, I went over, and Reverend Alison said, “How are you?! How are your family?!”
She said this in a happy, joyful tone because we were living a picture-perfect life, and the Reverend knew nothing about what I was just about to reveal to her.
She very quickly realised something wasn’t right.
She said, “Come in and sit down. What’s wrong, Paul? How can I help you?”
As I began to explain what was unravelling - how my life and my marriage were unravelling in front of me - the tears started to come.
Reverend Alison was shocked.
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She said how happy we always seemed to be. She often sees our children playing out front and had no idea at all.
She was stunned.
Only a year earlier, she had christened myself and our three daughters in a beautiful service.
I was there, opening my heart with tears running down my face. Alison listened. She listened intently.
Then she said:
“Paul, I’ll just share with you a little bit about christening and baptism. So usually people are christened when they are babies, when they are very young, and their parents make that decision. But then when that child grows up, they may choose themselves to get baptised.
“You were only christened last year with your girls, but that’s absolutely fine. But next Sunday, at seven o’clock, I have a few people coming around to my home from the surrounding area. They’ve been christened already, and I’m going to be explaining to them about what baptism is.
“And Paul, you’d be more than welcome to come round and sit in.”
As I listened to the Reverend and received this invitation, I was appreciative.
I said, “Yeah, I’ll come.”
At that moment, I didn’t have any expectation. I just appreciated that she’d offered me this invitation.
So the date and time that had already been established before I went to the Reverend’s house was now a commitment I was going to be going along to in a week’s time.
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A few days later, I recalled seeing a book titled The Spiritual Awakening Process on that long article that explained those seven omens that could signal you are going through the dark night of the soul.
I was just desperate for support. I was desperate to learn and to understand what’s going on. What does it mean, this spiritual awakening?
So I purchased and downloaded this PDF.
When I opened it up, I was sat on a tram on my way to stay over at the home of my best friend. I started reading the beginning of the PDF.
Every word was resonating.
Tears started to roll down my cheeks.
In the first few pages, there were different quotes from people from years gone by. Each quote resonated within me.
These are the quotes that I took a screenshot of at the time, as I knew deep down how significant this was:
“Once the soul awakens, the search begins, and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfilment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfilment.”
“An awakening can happen in a flash. And in a flash, you are changed forever.”
“There is a candle in your heart ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?”
“Paradoxically, we achieve true wholeness only by embracing our fragility and sometimes our brokenness.”
“You have to love yourself, because no amount of love from others is sufficient to fill the yearning that your soul requires from you.”
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
That night, I sat in my friend’s home on my own and read every single page of that PDF.
Everything I was reading resonated. I cried through much of it.
It was like, for the first time in my life, I was starting to understand that there is so much more to life - and that I was going through something that I had never experienced before, and there was no going back.
I knew I was on a path of transformation.
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On the 14th April 2019, I walked across the village green to Reverend Alison’s home to attend this gathering that had been planned weeks earlier.
There were a few other people from the surrounding area that I didn’t know personally.
Following each of us providing a short introduction and sharing when we were christened - with me sharing that almost a year to the day ago I’d been christened with our three girls — Reverend Alison passed round a couple of pieces of paper to each of us.
On those pieces of paper were scriptures from the Gospels.
That night, in the Reverend’s home, at a place where I had reached the end of myself - in a place of utter helplessness and hopelessness -
I had the revelation.
The personal revelation.
That God is real.
That God loves me.
That Jesus is the Son of God.
That Jesus surrendered His life to save my life.
That Jesus Christ shed His blood on the cross so that I can be forgiven for my lifetime of sins - everything that I have ever done wrong, every time I’ve ever hurt anyone during my life.
Jesus paid the price.
With my outer world collapsing - marriage, business, professional identity -
…when I hit rock bottom, I was suddenly awakened to who is the Rock at the bottom.
