My Story

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Chronic Fatigue, Insomnia, Awakening and Embodiment

Why I Share My Story and Why In Detail

A major purpose in telling my story is not “See how much I suffered,” but “I can see you because I suffered." It is hugely important to me that those who come across my work, certaily those who work with me privately, feel seen. I lived in "no one can see me" for very long as you're about to see. Healing really took off when I felt seen for the first time ever, listening to someone's detailed insomnia story. This is why I decided not to minimize the details of my own struggle.

My hesitation was that I'd come off off as special, but actually, what propelled my healing forwardwas learning that I was not special. Yes, we are all beautifully unique in our own way, but specialness is different -- it separates us.

Making out struggle special often keeps it in place, placing healing out of reach. All of us in the insomnia and chronic issues space, and all who've felt life's hardships as unrelenting, have tasted more despair, fear, frustration, and loneliness than we believed we could handle. We are not alone in this, rather we share something in common.

I thought there would never be anyone who could see me, I was wrong. Loneliness is a feature of being in hell. It comes with the territory. But I'm here to tell you someone, whether myself or another, knows the dark spaces you've visited, and perhaps right now you find it hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. Your struggle, however, isn't who you are. It doesn't have to be part of what makes you special, nor does it have to seem so mysterious that ther is no solution. It doesn't have to become an identity.

The human spirit has made it through hell and will always persevere. Others have been there, can see you, and most importantly have made it through - just like you will.

I do this work to provide the help I wish I had. I'd gone through what I did so that I can share my insights from the journey with you from a place that really sees you.

My Story is 30+ years long, so grab a cuppa and come on a journey.

The Struggle to be Free of the Struggling Identity

Excel!

In the early 90s, at the age of 11, I had a Computers class. We had a test coming up in Excel. Symbolically, it couldn’t be more perfect, because the pressure to excel caused me to have poor and little sleep the night before. I didn’t know to call it anxiety back then, but the pressure I’d placed on myself was so much that on the day of the exam I couldn’t focus, and I got a relatively bad grade.

After this day, I was afraid of not sleeping for the first time in my life. An extremely life-loving and joyful kid, my mind now could not look away from the possibility of things going wrong. I didn’t know how to get out. I didn’t know that this was something called anxiety. The whole situation was foggy, not simple and clean as I share it now, as an adult. Then, I had no language to convey my experience to those around me. Also, given the pressure I felt to perform well, I was ashamed and felt that I needed to get my act together so that I could avoid anger from adults and mockery from friends.

Context: The Events That Preceded That Night

MASCULINE IMBALANCE

Leading up to that night of poor sleep was a rather big shift in my life. I had moved back to my country of birth, Israel, after nearly 3 free and joyful years in the US (7-10 years old).

During that time I had completely forgotten my mother tongue (Hebrew) and didn’t feel much connection with my past in Israel. Returning was a culture shock. At first, I didn’t understand what people were saying when speaking to me and felt awkward for being unable to respond. Also, I needed time to adjust to their directness and the sense that people were stepping into my space.

When I left for the US, my family had split, and upon return, reunited. As other family members had quite a bit of adjusting to this transition to do themselves, absence of emotional support began to affect me. As a result of the family reunion, I all of the sudden had masculine presence around me that I did not have before. Whereas before I could fight for what I wanted, now I was afraid to. This had a path-altering, and frankly suppressive, effect on my life and spirit. My will wasn't going to be validated or listened to. Throughout the years it became almost non-existent. Spiritual approaches that vilified desire would replace the position of childhood authorities as suppressing (or denying) the self.

In addition, my life’s landscape now also included extremely competitive friends when it came to grades in school and overly serious teachers. The entire atmosphere was telling my sensitive spirit that my worth is defined by my performance. I felt that my actual self wasn’t taken seriously, and gradually substituted it for the self that would be tolerated and, possibly, approved of. At the time, I didn't know, of course, that I was parting ways with my life-loving self and heading into decades of spiritual, psychological and physical war as my struggling self.

ZERO LIFE FORCE: Astral Attakcs or Self-Sabotage Due to Feeling Inadeqate?

On a more mysterious note, leading up to that difficult night before the Excel exam, I started to have what I call “depletion episodes.” These would happen from time to time during 5th and 6th grade, each episode lasting several minutes during which I was completely frozen. This wasn’t mere fatigue, it was a complete inability to respond. It was as though my entire life-force had been sucked out all at once, leaving me with only enough energy to feel the horror of my situation. I’ll never forget the panic and fear I felt the first time it happened, as I wondered if this debilitating stranglehold would last forever.

Whether you think of these episodes as astral attacks, stress and self-sabotaging psychology, or the latter making me vulnerable to the former, they didn’t happen at random times. Loss of body-control would overtake me at crucial moments that sabotaged relationships I cared about. Situations I was found in were not what they seemed, but I could not explain myself as I was too paralyzed to respond. Also, these overpowering episodes would happen right when another kid and I had started a fight (I didn’t shy away from fights as a kid, and it earned me the nickname “Danny Van Damme”). They were sabotaging my life, and I could do nothing about it. As they kept happening, however, I learned that I could fight back, or resist the stranglehold, but it took a staggering amount of effort to manifest the slightest reaction to my environment.

By the time the episodes had stopped occurring I was living in a constant state of fatigue and fog. It didn’t matter how much I’d slept during the night, I was never refreshed. Who I was felt buried underneath rubble, my confidence along with it. My heart was in one place, my body, another. My focus was on making it through events, not advancing in life.

Except for one lucky day in high-school in which I felt perfect, I can’t remember any other day that felt “right” in my body for the next 30+ years. I lived in constant hope that “tomorrow will feel like it’s supposed to” — like I felt before all of this, like my life-loving self.

The Search for Energy: Conventional Healing and Spirituality

My fatigue had led me, from the age of 11 and onwards, on a search for energy. Really, I was seeking the end of feeling off and wrong. I began my search by reading the philosphy books that were present in my household at the time, at least those I could understand. In my teenage years and with the advent of internet, I moved on to psychology, which I also studied in university later on.

During high school I did try to convey my situation a few times, and even with a larger linguistic context I still couldn't, because I didn't truly understand why I was tired all of the time no matter what. The best I could do to explain a condition that was mysterious to myself, was suspect and convey that I had depression. In truth, I'd never really lost touched with the life-loving self under the rubble, I just couldn't get him out. My occasional complaints led to a few visist with professional, which actually eneded up developing in me an “anti” attitude toward psychologists and psychiatrists. I left those few sessions feeling more anxious, and frankly, I didn’t feel much human warmth or connection in them. At the time, a little validation would have gone a long way, but I was treated as a problem to fix, a behavior I'd very much internalized and became my way of relating to myself.

Later on I’d try doctors, and quickly resolve that it was too exhausting of a road for me (until, later, insomnia would “force me” to try again). Being young and looking healthy within a "man-up!" society meant I'd have to try several doctors to just find one that validates me, then go through a series of checks, maybe go back to therapy, etc. I needed to feel better now, not waste energy I don't have on a path that won't pay off. The only way I would be if someone held my hand through it. But everyone had their own life and commitments to show up for. For me, committing to long work shifts or any long duration of being away from home was something avoided. I couldn't be in places that expected normal functioning of me for very long -- pretending to be functional was itself exhausting, on top of the haze and fog that never left. Since all of this began, My nervous system had been growing more and more sensitive, and was becoming hypersensitive. Things felt overwhelming quickly.

At the age of 21, my state and what now appear to me as fateful life events, had pulled me into spirituality. Strange sensations and experiences had started happening immediately. I had no spiritual figures around me to help me make sense of them. By my introduction into spirituality I’d felt so different and so alone, and having these strange experiences and being spiritual and being judged for it only contributed to that. Yet travel to India had opened me up to connection with a spiritual group that I'd be a part of for the next several years. With them I didn't feel judged for being spiritual, but I also questioned the authenticity of their hippie ways. We gathered often, at first around a teacher, and during those years I'd experimented a little with LSD, and other "medicine."

Waiting to Live

Living within a hidden struggle that no one else seemed to relate to at all had led to feeling that I was the only one in the entire world experiencing what I was. I still have a recording of a song I wrote at around age 25 or so about not understanding what’s wrong with me and wishing one day I’d be able to function normally. I wrote it to give room to how abnormal I felt, as I was so used to hiding it that it seemed like I myself was beginning to deny it.

All of my songs were about struggle and liberation from it. There was nothing else on my mind. I had - and still have - an intense love for singing, and back then had a lot to pour out lyrically. Some fortune came my way and I began recording some of my songs. Finding a producer, who happened to be high out of his mind all the time, he helped me put a band together to record all the parts. Some of the musical choices were out of my control, however, for better or worse. An alcoholic drummer, who I love dearly and always will, sabotaged every opportunity at success. It remains a dream to pick up many of the songs I'd written in my 20s and record them professionally.

”Morning comes; Pray that it will be OK today; Found my smile, I’ll put it on my face.

Morning’s gone; Afternoon’s coming along; It’s getting harder to keep that smile here.

I ain’t sad; It’s not exactly that things are bad — there’s just one thing that’s getting me down.

I don’t understand it; What’s wrong with me; I wish it would be over; And I’d be… normal.”

As a sidenote — but a hugely important one for chronic issue — knowing that you’re actually NOT alone is often, if not always, where the healing really takes off.

While some with insomnia and chronic fatigue react to the experience with shutting down their lives, I felt like I never really got a chance to start life in the first place. Feeling like I could only do the bare minimum, I was never able to build a life for myself. I took jobs that allowed shifts, like waiter or server, mainly, and tried to do only as many as necessary for rent. I just barely made ends meet, and just barely made it through each shift.

In my 30s I began to be more isolated, and not as a deliberate choice. It seemed that I was just too exhausted to handle being a part of society. I could hardly work anymore, and I actually stopped at 32-33. Strangely, at that age (toward the end of 2015) I began to let go of my life in Israel. I felt that I could, for example, let go of my room in the apartment I rented, and yet I had no clue where I was going and was not particularly worried. I’d had enough, and was ready to jump into the arms of the universe. Quickly, my journey took me back to the US, where I became a wanderer for a few years, until Spirit began preparing me for my life’s work: Sun Ray was about to be born.

During this time, sleep was hard to come by. I didn’t consider myself an insomniac, but I was one. I was happy to be free of jobs and obligations, but I still felt so weak that wherever I was and whatever I did I wasn’t living — but waiting to live.

Waiting to Live

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Chronic Fatigue, Insomnia, Awakening and Embodiment

Why I Share My Story and Why In Detail

The Struggle to be Free of the Struggling Identity

Excel!

Context: The Events That Preceded That Night

The Search for Energy: Conventional Healing and Spirituality

Waiting to Live

Waiting to Live

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