I’m sitting beside a brown, bald Santa Claus. Sort of. But instead of asking me what I want for Christmas, he’s asking me, “Who are you?”
It’s taken a long time, a plane ride from North America to India, and several psychotic/mystical/kundalini emergency episodes to finally get me sitting beside H. W. Poonja—this chubby, spiritual teacher dressed all in orange based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.
The relentless depression and the terrifying, threatening idea that I would always feel this suicidally desperate were what really drove me there. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I say it’s suffering.
I Don’t Care What You Call It
After several beatific spiritual experiences that catapulted me into psychotic episodes, I was eventually hospitalized, prescribed medications, and offered treatment plans and tongue twisters of diagnoses. Doctors told me I had mild temporal lobe epilepsy and rapid-cycling bipolar 1 disorder with generalized anxiety disorder.
The help offered could have been helpful, could have been soothing even, maybe even a relief had I been in a different mindset, given a different perspective, and offered curiosity by healthcare providers—or, more accurately, by the medical system—instead of directives. But I wasn’t.
So, I refused the diagnosis and I refused medication. Instead, I bought an open-ended plane ticket with my then-boyfriend (12 years my senior) and prepared to get enlightened. Prepared isn’t really accurate—yearned, burned, ached to get enlightened is more like it.
Poonjaji—as he was referred to, with ‘ji’ being a sign of respect—was born in 1910, was a teacher of Advaita Vedanta and a student of Ramana Maharshi. Poonja started attracting students first from his home country, India, and then from all over the world. I was one of those from all over the world.
He was kind, giggly, and at times impatient and cranky. He spoke in riddles that made your mind drop. But he also offered clear concepts that changed your perception. Simply sitting beside him, you would be painted with peace.
I wrote to him prior to my trip to India when I was an open-hearted, easily influenced young woman of 26. I saw him as my road to freedom from suffering. Part spiritual bypassing, part earnest search. 100% last resort.
A Personal Reckoning
Severe depression cloaks itself in many guises. I didn’t see my depression as a mental illness. It was an existential crisis. A personal reckoning manifesting physically and psychologically. The question “what does all this—life—mean?” had pin-balled in my head without pause for at least two years. What sparked it, I’m not sure. It’s the chicken-and-egg scenario.
Did life feel meaningless because I was depressed, or was I depressed because life felt meaningless? Either way, one fed the other.
I searched for answers in all forms: the higher power of AA and OA, self-help books, talk therapy, scream therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, Reiki, psychics, a sugar-free diet, ecstatic dance. But those mosquito-like questions still buzzed in my brain. “What’s the meaning of life? What’s the point of it all?”
B.I. (Before India), in my blue-walled bedroom, my dad and I were once again talking about my struggle to make sense of this world and why we were here (existing on the planet, not in my room). He warned: “People have been asking those questions for millennia and have never found an answer. If you keep asking yourself that, you’ll drive yourself crazy.” Uncannily accurate and unfortunately prophetic.
I’d been told by psychiatrists that what I was going through was clinical depression, that a chemical imbalance was at play—the running theory at the time; then it was bipolar disorder.
But I saw it as a spiritual quest to know my true self more consciously. And it was.
Both Can Be True
Over the years, I’ve learned it can be both. For me, it must be both. Because the relative and the transcendental are one. Not one and the same, but instead they make up the whole.
I can hold two truths at once—the medical and the spiritual. One doesn’t cancel out the other.
A spiritual crisis can be an aspect of a mental health issue and can be helped by medical treatments. A mental health issue can be part of a spiritual crisis and helped by spiritual practices and support. Both have required a recovery of my true self and identity. Mental illness and spirituality intersect. Not for everybody. But for me they certainly do.
Personal Perspectives Essential Reads
I continue to grow my awareness and expand my consciousness. Meditate. Learn. The difference, though, is that it’s not driven by pain and questions; now it comes from a place of curiosity and contentment.
© Victoria Maxwell.