From freeze and fear to finding a home

I haven’t sent off any articles for a very long time now. I was in such a deep functional freeze that writing just didn’t flow. But I am now sharing my personal story in the hope it offers strength to those who walk this path. Because in the end, I did make it to the other side— a happy ending of sorts, a new beginning. This spiritual journey after great loss brings my indigenous friend Hazel back into the picture toward the end of this article. 

I had sold my piece of paradise about four years after my husband's death, trusting that the universe would show me the next step in my grieving and letting go journey. But the next step was sixteen months away, and I often wondered if I would ever find my way back home again.

Every day for these long months, I would wake up with fear by my side. A sense that I was trapped with no way forward, sideways, or backwards. Doomed. The doom was dunked in a dense, suffocating weight of shame.

After waking, I would spend the rest of my day trying to get rid of the doom. Religiously riding to the beach could not be skipped. Movement was my biggest weapon while being in a freeze for such a long time, while feeling the terror so close to my skin.

I still managed to make new friends and go freediving, and I had days of laughter and carefree fun while visiting Germany—but for over a year, the headline was one of fear, freeze, and feeling “homeless”.

I have so much compassion for people who are actually homeless. I had a roof over my head and still found the simplest of things difficult. Taking a shower was sometimes an effort, and cooking meals without having my own kitchen was the biggest stressor. I would go to the farmer’s market and buy fresh produce only for it to sit in my fridge. Feeding myself was packed with stress; it felt like trudging up a steep hill carrying a boulder. Some days I would cook myself a meal with ease; that’s when I knew I was having a good day, and the freeze was lifted for a little while. But it never fully left; it stayed put for all these months where hope seemed gone. Only glimpses on the far horizon. 

Friends said, that they envied me for my freedom. I could live anywhere on the planet! But I was completely overwhelmed and felt I did not belong anywhere. I missed the wild bush. “I hate…” was in my head as I dodged cars, noise, traffic lights, and exhaust on my push bike. I had moved to Fremantle with the romanticised idea of what it was twenty-five years ago, but the reality was a felt density that hit me hard: Big blocks had vanished, replaced by three or four houses without yards. Trees and beaches were gone. My nervous system was in constant overload, and I didn’t get to do any of the fun things cities offer. Not once did I jump on a train and go to an art gallery. 

I did look at houses on the market while the prices went up and up and up, finding a home was more and more out of reach. I looked in Shoalwater, back in Denmark, Bali, Broom, Exmouth, over east—I considered putting everything into storage and living in a van or travelling the world. I had to follow my instincts, and not knowing where to go was part of my journey. I trusted this inner knowing of my body and knew this was not a decision my mind could make. This is what I teach my clients. But when I started this journey, I never knew it would last for so long. 

I aimed to escape every morning and just rode to the beach. Every day, sometimes twice. I am such a homebody, but I never pottered at home; I stopped singing and did a hell of a lot of scrolling on my phone to numb myself, and only occasionally did I do qigong and yoga. The beach called me every morning. I loved the wide horizons, but the sand and water underlined the lack of trees. I longed for wild nature, for green. The disconnect made me feel so utterly, utterly lonely.

And city people are busy; you can’t just pop in for a visit. Their nervous systems are overloaded too, but they don’t notice it anymore. 

How desperately I tried to reach out to friends on Digby’s birthday. A day when no human should be alone unless they choose it. One ‘friend ’ said they could ring me in six hours, but when that call finally came, I was shamed and told I should do more therapy. I just needed an actual human being on my side. In the evening, I finally shared my leftover birthday cake with friends, and I knew I was okay. Humans are herd animals. Grieving needs to be witnessed by others, and some days it just needs company, laughter, lightness, and a cup of tea. 

I had days where the constant mantra in my head was “I don’t want to live. I don’t want to live any more”. It went round and round like a ferris wheel, turning without care. It’s the biggest turn-off for any friendship, so some days I would say nothing. I’d go for a walk with a friend, pushing their pram, grateful to not be alone while the wheel in my head kept turning.

Gratefulness. Another chapter I could write about for ages. When a person is in a deep freeze, gratefulness is out of reach. It’s not accessible. Spiritual bypassers would urge me to enjoy the small things, to lift my frequency. But on the doom-laden days, this was just not possible. I felt broken, damaged, lost, and covered in shame.

I still worked and saw clients. I was able to hold people as I had learnt to hold my own doom. I was capable and, surprisingly, really good at my job, connected to a higher source when working. Maybe I was whole and okay, and just walking through a really long and dark night of the soul? A spiritual journey of deep inner suffering that maybe one day would end? Maybe.

In the two weeks leading up to finding my new home, I was in the deepest of freezes.  The fear and terror were bigger than ever before after the New Year. I did not know what to do anymore, so I just imagined being greeted out of my mother’s womb by my beloved aunty. I visualised that she became my mother as soon as I was born. In my mind’s eye, I saw her holding me tight and just gazing at me with utter delight. She really saw me, and I could just relax and be. I did that over and over again and rested a lot while visiting Margaret River. That was where I finally found my new home. Visualisation is a potent, powerful medicine when it hits the sweet spot and nourishes the nervous system in just the right way.

And this story is really a continuation of my spiritual journey with Aboriginal Elder Hazel from Ningaloo. Some might remember that a huge manta ray at my local beach near Denmark, WA, had sent me travelling to Exmouth a year after my husband’s passing. My new spiritual totem animal led me in mysterious ways to Hazel’s doorstep near Coral Bay, a farm directly on the manta ray dreaming beach. Hazel gave me a manta ray brooch she had bought prior to my unplanned turning up. “I had wondered why I bought this brooch. I am a turtle woman. But now I know that I bought this for you two weeks ago”.

We connected over the years, and I loved her stories of spirit; they always made me feel at home. My husband saw spirits, and I missed having a person like that in my life. After Hazel’s husband passed, I camped at her house as the only white person attending an Aboriginal festival. Hazel had asked me to organise a road trip to Margaret River and Denmark in the New Year. As campervans were all booked out, I rang around until a practitioner friend offered me her home while she was away. When it was time to head off, I rang Hazel, only to find out that she never left Ningaloo and was still up north, not feeling too well herself. It was a big blow, but in the end, I just jumped into my car and drove down alone to this empty house in Margaret River. This turned out to be a blessing. I was feeling unsociable, I slept and rested a lot, read a book, watered the gardens. I felt at home for the first time in a very long time. This feeling of being at home followed me to the beach, where I remembered that a dear friend had sent me a house for sale a few months earlier. I didn’t have the energy to check it out back then, but when I received her email, I said out loud, “If this house is meant to be for me, it will wait.”

And there I was in Margaret River. The house had, of course, sold in these crazy market times, but the three-month settlement had fallen through at the last minute. The house had waited for me. I no longer own any land, but I have a home again. 

I am singing again, I am playing my drum and making up songs. I am able to write again in my home, and I have made this place the most beautiful home ever. I hope to build a new community of friends around me. It is my new place for now.

with love

Barbara 

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short article on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email. If you no longer wish to receive emails from me, please unsubscribe.

Feel free to forward my article to others, but please add my name to it for copyright reasons.     

You can also find me on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt" 

 

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma & Nervous System Recovery Specialist

Mental Health Social Worker

Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, EMDR

m: 0458 234 410

e: barbara@counsellingsomatic.com.au

w: www.counsellingsomatic.com.au

Grieving to healing travel and sailing adventure

Having a routine, a job that can distract and guide you, are great elements in moving forward after a big loss. But not if your job is working as a grief and trauma counsellor. In this chaptered article I write about my sailing and travelling adventure, being taken in by a spiritual Indigenous elder and the experienced deep transformation gifted via Digby’s death anniversary while on a sailing boat. 

As time went by and less people regularly thought of me, it got harder and harder to hold the grief on my own and I knew that I had to stop offering my counselling work May of this year. I decided to head up north for the winter and follow an unexpected calling to go sailing. The sailing world was completely new to me. I had no idea how to make this happen, all I knew was that I had to leave indefinitely.

The process of deciding to give up my last anchor, my work, was unravelling me before heading off. My closest friends know what a seriously bad place I was in for a while. My mind was fighting me relentlessly. My fears often had me locked in a complete freeze where I could see no way forward or out and I was terrified to go travelling on my own. But I knew that I had to leave as I was dying inside. I had to learn to trust life again and travelling was the only way forward for me.

I simply had a small pop up tent and a tiny car – quite a challenge for someone who isn’t into camping. I lived on the smallest budget possible like a backpacker and often volunteered and improvised in exchange for camping or couch surfing spots. Without Digby's death I wouldn't have found out how much I love driving and cooking on a milk crate out of the back of my car. I learnt that I am much more capable than I ever thought possible. It was often very uncomfortable and more exhausting than working, but I knew I wasn’t done travelling and rediscovering myself yet. I was slowly beginning to listen to my intuition again, even if my mind thought that it made no sense. It was like a wild spiritual initiation ride.

For me it is not true that time heals grief or that it becomes less over time. In my experience it stays the same. But the containment around it changes. There are these heightened moments of joy and new experiences that made my container expand like never before in my life.

When travelling I had amazing experiences. Via unbelievable coincidences I became friends with an Indigenous Ningaloo Elder, who showed me powerful Indigenous Australian dreaming sites on the coast. I had magical encounters with animals, and I lived on a moored fishing charter on my own for a few days after delivering a ute for a company, I went swimming right next to a giant whale shark, I felt in heaven and overjoyed when I collected beautiful pebbles, I snorkeled and dived with turtles and swam above a barreling manta ray. I travelled 6000km alone when before Digby’s death I couldn’t even do the 350km trip up to Perth. In these new moments I didn’t feel my sadness, only utter joy and wonder. The grief was still the same, but the container then was so massive that it seemed non-existent.

But when things went wrong, the container would shrink to a small slither, then the grief would become overwhelming and huge again and being alive would feel unbearable. I have no idea where this journey is taking me, all the norms are thrown out of the window. Sometimes I give myself a hard time for not “having it together” yet and I feel ashamed. Then I remind myself that it is my job to be gentle and patient with myself, not just with my clients, and that telling the world about this shame is a way forward for all of us.

I had no idea how much Digby was holding me when he was still alive as we both lived such independent and strong lives together. He was an unusual and incredible soul. I know there have been many unfortunate circumstances that do make my loss more difficult, but that doesn’t explain my intense grief. Digby was my scaffolding, he was so stabilizing and healing for my childhood trauma. Now it is my job to learn somatically to build a new scaffolding inside myself and travelling started this process for me. My life can become bigger because of this loss. What a crazy contradiction. What a massive and sometimes cruel challenge. And I might not be able to “move on” as quickly as others may expect me to, including myself.

Initiation into a completely new world

My journey up north was a great grieving ritual. I revisited many of the places I had been to with Digby 22 years ago, while pregnant with our daughter. I was nervous heading out to places where Digby and I have had such an amazing time a lifetime ago. But I made new memories and they were adventurous and good. I visited Shelly beach in Shark Bay and sobbed, told it my story and went for a dip. In Monkey Mia where a dolphin sensing my pregnancy back then had rubbed its nose on my leg, I had the most amazing dolphin encounters; one when I had already packed up to leave and was spending some last ocean moments resting. Not one single dolphin nearby. Suddenly I heard a flying drone and just because its noise was annoying me, I sat up. In exactly that moment two dolphins swam directly in front of me, only one meter away. A mother and daughter. These are the moments when I felt that Digby was with me and sending me a sign for my daughter and I.

It's like travelling the land was healing me, even though at times it was a painful process. Sometimes I just knew what was going to happen ahead of time and I was slowly getting back into a flow. I finally started dreaming of and feeling Digby with me more. I had moments of sheer happiness for no reason at all. My heart was slowly healing.

When driving up the coast, the energy of the landscape in the beginning changed so much that it once scared me. I listened to Digby's funeral music by Gurrumul and cried like I hadn't for a while. I asked the ancestors to accept me into their land and relaxed once I received their silent permission. 

I was in awe of the gorges near Exmouth. I went hiking through dry river beds full of big round stones, along the ridges of gaping canyons and was mesmerized by the power of these red rocks. Having canyons right next to the ocean with the expanse of the stars above was incredible. I felt so grateful for nature holding me so tightly but gently, being surrounded and infused by so much beauty, kind people and warm sunny weather. When I was driving I could cry and scream as loud as I needed to, but at the same time I strongly felt spirits holding me which was a beautiful grieving.

My mind stopped thinking and planning and I was beginning to trust the flow of life a little bit more. I went for many walks along the beach, sometimes remembering Digby's last few weeks alive and digesting the intense suffering I witnessed. I was once sobbing along the beach with my grief tumbling me upside down while collecting tiny round sand dollars, the cousins to sea urchins. I ended up with a small collection of  these "stars" and felt so grateful for being able to do my grieving journey on a beautiful beach while collecting shells as Digby and I often used to do together.

I treated myself to swimming with whale sharks. It was one of the best days ever and the holiday I needed after travelling, living out of my car and feeling quite exhausted by it. Swimming right along a whale shark and snorkeling amongst the most beautiful corals recharged my batteries. I felt exhilarated and so alive swimming next to this gigantic spotty fish. It was so nice reconnecting with my joyous and loud enthusiasm for life. I was reminded how much I love being on a boat and that the time was coming up for me to leave the land and go sailing soon.

Sailing and anniversary

And I did make it onto a sailing boat. With really good people who didn't mind that I'm pretty clueless when it comes to sailing. I loved watching the ocean move like sand dunes with little waves in the big ocean swells. I enjoyed it when I could see no land, only the fastness of the horizon with occasional whales popping up. The insignificance and smallness of me in this big body of water was a great holding comfort. Probably the only remedy available against my relentless grief and bloody stubborn resisting mind. The first 15 hours sailing I was struggling with my own mind and grief, still unable to accept that Digby is dead. In the evening I came to more acceptance. 

I may never become a sailor, but my love for the ocean grew with every hour I stared into this great expanse. I could be in company while on my lonely and at times seemingly endless grieving journey. I was humming to myself to keep seasickness and cold at bay. It was too rugged to get to the front of the boat to get warmer clothing and I later learnt that the other sailors took seasickness meds to help them get through it. We sailed for another 37 rough hours through the next day and night with the wind and swell against us. It was definitely not a luxury cruise. But it was the absolute perfect sail honoring Digby's departure. I was reliving so many of our last moments together as I stared out into the ocean, the roughness of the ocean fitted with Digby's inner battle and his resisting to go into hospice. 

I noticed I no longer feared the depth of the ocean; death has so much greater depth. When swimming with whale sharks with Digby 22 years ago not being able to see the ocean floor had terrified me, while this time I only took in the magnificence of the big quiet fish and was I part of it all. We were often over 100 meters above the seabed when sailing. On the ocean I had moments where I arrived at loving Digby unconditionally without the need for him to ever hold me again, to listen or talk to me, without him helping me to make decisions or to share responsibilities. But I had to question how long that would last before I returned to not being able to accept him leaving this earth.

I spent Digby’s death anniversary moored on the boat and had asked my friends to tune in to help me step through this gateway with their love holding me. This support makes such a damn big difference. Anniversary retracing’s can be powerful. It is nature’s way helping us unpack from another vantage point with less dissociation: A year on and we have the chance to feel more of what was previously too overwhelming. 

Digby’s death anniversary was horrid, but with a happy ending. I was physically a mess after zero sleep and I had a migraine. I felt stuck on the boat moored too far away from land. For the first time since travelling I wanted to be back home. I didn't know how to get through this day and I needed help. In the evening a dear friend and somatic experiencing colleague gave me a session on the phone. I was able to cry deeply and could finally touch into a crucial incomplete moment around Digby's death that had spiritually disconnected me for the whole year and made me unable to comprehend that Digby was really dead. 

I was so busy fighting for Digby in the hospital and hospice as for both of us the souls journey is important. Worst of all I had to fight off Digby's family for months who worked against his wishes and blamed me. I never had my moment where I could attune to death itself in peace. The "death doula" in me missed out on walking Digby to the threshold of life. I got to grieve about this immense loss in my session and then renegotiated and re-lived everything in a new way. It's something I can't put into words, but I got to feel it on the anniversary day and it was a deeply sacred moment. I finally could breathe in this indescribable energy coming from above and witnessed the silver lining, Digby's soul departing gently.

While others only saw a skeleton of a man in front of them, I could see the spiritual warrior he truly was, right until the end. In my renegotiation session I got to stand as a proud warrior woman on a beach, seeing visualized the departure of my beloved man. I saw my inner circle of friends standing upright next to me with torches in our hands, painted in proud ochre colors. We were giving Digby the Viking burial he truly deserved; on a high wooden raft lay his body, my bare feet strong on the earth, the fire burning the float sent out to sea, with the stars all above. I felt so strongly connected with the earth while sending Digby off. This solid anchoring would have made such a difference for my grieving later on. 

Funerals don’t include using the earth elements to help reconnect us with the planet, hence I had to do a lot of that on my own while grieving throughout the year. My swimming, smearing clay on my body and singing/toning were attempts to repair that lost moment. On Digby's death anniversary I got to complete what needed doing back then. Time had just become a concept. I am grateful that I got to do this sacred and important repair work on the anniversary day and that being on a sailing boat truly served its purpose.

Spirit sign and taken in by aboriginal elder

A month before leaving to go travelling I was given a spirit sign when I was still full of doubts and fears about setting off into the unknown: walking to my local beach with a friend I saw this giant manta ray a meter from the shore. It stayed there the whole time I was swimming. My friend said she had never seen a manta ray in the 25 years she had lived in this area. I understood the sea creature as a sign from Digby and looked up its meaning. It was all about letting go without acting out of old emotional pain, about being emotionally free without bonds or ties; it basically meant a kind of rebirthing.

I had posted on a public Facebook page that I needed a lift from Carnarvon to Exmouth after sailing and strangely enough I mentioned in that post that I was looking forward to collecting stones on the beaches up there. An Indigenous lady called Antionette read my post and contacted me personally. She texted and warned me to be very careful, that some stones were forbidden to be taken, or it could make me very sick. She suggested to contacting Hazel. And via multiple crazy coincidences I came to Hazel's house near Coral Bay and confided about my manta ray sign. She told me that the beach right in front of her house is the only manta ray dreaming place according to her old ancestral people. Can you believe it?! This whole exhausting and exciting initiation journey brought me to her place. My travelling story came full circle and I felt like I had come home.

When I met up with Hazel a second time I showed her the stones I had already collected. As I mentioned my three separate stone collections to her, I already knew which collection had to go back. Hazel pointed at two and said: "These two are good, you can make a mandala for your husband with them." To the third one she said: "These want to go back to their place!" Luckily, I had no actual forbidden stones in my collection. I drove back into the National Park to the exact place where I had collected the stones. The whole trip I felt an incredible happiness (was it the stones joy of returning home?) and when snorkeling afterwards I almost bumped into a turtle. It felt like a thank you present and I swam for a very long time with that wise old animal. 

I always dreamed of being accepted by wise Indigenous elders. Hazel and I just deeply connected and felt like each other's sisters; we talked a lot about spirits, death and healing (she has lost her son and older siblings). I enjoyed talking about experiencing spirits so; Digby had the gift of seeing spirits and I so missed talking with someone about that. 

I was the only person camping next to Hazel's house. She is a very important elder in Ningaloo on a huge station. And in Coral Bay you can swim with manta rays! Hazel gave me a manta ray brooch she had bought a month ago. She said she had no idea why she was made to buy it at the time, but understands now it was for me as I was meant to come to her place. It gave us both goose bumps.  

Hazel and her husband showed me the coastal dreaming places. We visited turtle, squid, octopus and nursery dreaming in an old rusty ute doing the most adventurous 4WD. I could strongly feel the energy of some places. Hazel then told me that what I was feeling aligned with Indigenous understanding of the land. I even did some of my somatic work with Hazel sitting on the beach. And when that session finished I sang with my singing bowl and a whole family of manta rays came to the shore and we watched them for ages in the thumping sea. I still don't quite know why I had to meet Hazel, but everything along the way felt like it had prepared me for this. Including living with my working class man for 22 years. 

When finishing my travels, I wrote “I am scared of going back home again where everything will remind me that Digby is dead while up here everything around me reminds me that he is very much alive. I am scared of returning home where some of my old grief will remind me of my huge loss, while up north everything reminds me of my huge gain. I'm scared of people down south meeting me and not remembering that I am still grieving and that I still need their support, their visits, their calls, their food, their love.” 

And coming home was indeed hard. I was greeted by plumbing and mold issues in my home and had to camp outside in the freezing cold for almost two weeks, which made me question where I live completely. I felt frozen and completely lost, once again I didn’t want to be on this planet, stopped trusting life, and instead started overeating and numbing myself by watching endless YouTube videos. I felt a lot of shame over it all, but it settled after another anniversary had passed: mine and Digby’s birthdays, only two days apart. And I continue to have really scary dark and lonely days, but I know that my whole nervous system is unravelling and building a new structure from the inside out which will require a lot of time - more than on some days I want to give myself.

My work is changing and I feel and see a lot more energetically, some of the counselling sessions simply blow me away. I love my work in a totally new way. But I don’t book many clients as my inner processing still needs a lot of space.  The secret will be to give myself space without needing to know what to do next. Instead of “supposed to do” I will hopefully just notice myself without any pressure.  I am learning to trust that I will be able to sustain myself as I work less, trust that life will guide me as I was guided all along these last three months travelling up north, not knowing where I will end up or what my future will hold.

 

Barbara Schmidt

Counselling Somatic

Trauma and nervous system recovery

 

If you want to find out more about your nervous system and the incredible healing from trauma I am inviting you to read the short articles on www.counsellingsomatic.com.au in my blog section  - you can subscribe to my newsletters via my website and receive all future blogs conveniently via email/

Feel free to forward my article to others, but please add my name to it for copyright reasons.

You can also find me on my Facebook page “Counselling Somatic Barbara Schmidt"