The Only Choice
A visit to Burma immerses you in the pungent smells of fish sauce from the street markets and open restaurant windows merged with mango and teak scented tropical breezes. Throngs of gentle, chattering Burmese wind their way through the busy streets of Rangoon, smiles brightening faces as the sun brightens the golden pagodas surrounding you wherever you go.
Both of my grandparents moved from India to Burma, so my parents grew up as foreigners and grew up through the Japanese occupation of Burma during World War II and a civil war.
Dad overcame poverty and mum challenged stereotypical roles for women for them to meet in medical school. Marrying after graduation their life seems idyllic after all they lived through.
One year later I’m born, to joyful expectations.
This oasis of joy lasts less than a year.
Just before my first birthday the military takes over and forms a junta, essentially a terrorist regime.
A soldier can stop you on the street, make you kneel and play head games with you. Maybe they shoot you, maybe not.
University students protest and are massacred by the army. My father treats them at the university hospital and when he runs out of medicines, he watches them die because the soldiers don’t allow them to get any more supplies.
Soldiers come to random houses at 2 in the morning and people disappear. You never know if they were dead or not — you just never see them again.
How does this affect you as a child?
Perhaps, like me, you’re especially empathic, often feeling others’ emotional pain and taking it on as your own, and this is what you live:
Every night, just as in every household, everyone, you as a child included, huddles together until 3am praying you’re safe again for another day.
Not daring to move.
Trying to sense if someone was outside the door.
Listening to every truck going by in case it stopped.
Your stomach churns as you marinate in your mother’s fear.
One day your dad suddenly isn’t there.
You don’t know that he goes to England for a course and stays there as a refugee waiting for you to escape and join him, not daring to come back because he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get out again.
You don’t know why all those others disappear from your world, one by one, until all that’s left is you and your mother.
You don’t know why, day after day, you’re taken by your mother as she goes to the Secretariat or the British Consulate.
You don’t know that she’s trying to get a visa to leave the country.
All you know is that she leaves you with the driver at the car for hours, the heat of the sun beating down on you, and when you cry or get upset, he beats you to shut you up.
You don’t realize she sees this happening through the window and feels torn and helpless because your only hope of escape is her staying in line.
You just know she left you with this man.
Then you go home and she wraps you up in her arms and bathes you in her guilt for having left you out there.
As a child, what would you do?
You’d ask “what’s wrong, mum?”
And what would any mother who’s trying to protect their child from the troubles of the world say?
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”
And you, the child wants to — needs to — believe her.
But your intuition doesn’t.
So you fight! You fight to believe the one person who you trust in all the world and upon whom you count for everything in your life.
So if nothing is wrong, then all that fear, all that terror, is “normal.” It’s the way life is supposed to be.
Your inner voice, your inner knowing has to be wrong.
You train yourself to push away the fear and doubts and believe what your mother tells you, but in doing that you push away your intuition and empathic knowing.
It’s nothing your mother (or any parent) would ever consciously wish to teach you, but it’s a lesson passed on in virtually every home around the world, even if the challenges were not as great.
Nobody ever says ‘this is the way the world is and should be,’ but that’s what you learn from everyone around you.
As with me, that would’ve been your birthright brought from Burma. It travelled with me when we finally escaped to rejoin my father when I was 5.
Here’s the thing: You arrive in England with high hopes, thinking that life will be better, and it is because you’re not living in terror for your lives and future. Unfortunately, prejudice is intense in England during these days.
After a few troubled years in elementary school, perhaps your parents would relocate you. Mine relocate us to Canada where they hope we could live something of what others called a normal life.
Normal doesn’t come. After escaping the hell of Burma and the prejudice of England, you find the war doesn’t end. It continues to rage within.
Perhaps, like me, somewhere deep within you feel there’s more you can do to serve the world, but your heart pounds in rage at this yearning, at this calling, because you learned long ago that you had to abandon your inner knowing to be safe.
You feel like an outsider, like nobody really gets you — even you. You are an outsider. This is normal for you.
You sabotage yourself in virtually every aspect of your life because of your unconscious programming that maintains fear and suffering and aloning as normal for you.
Whenever someone gets close to you, you recoil because most of your first five years were about everyone you know leaving and never coming back, and you’ve become terrified of loss. This is normal for you.
You’re a nerdy, shy kid, so you go into sciences in university, probably because it lets you hide and stay in your head. You live from the neck up, and you don’t have to deal with the emotional battleground deep within.
One day you go home from university to visit your folks for the weekend and see a flyer in the mail for your dad for a weekend workshop in hypnosis and hypnotherapy.
Now, you’re studying quantum physics, about as far as you could get from hypnosis, but something in that flyer calls to you. You know you have to be there, so you sign up, even though you’re saying, “this is crazy!” all the way there.
You soak up everything at the hypnosis workshop and that introduces you to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, which is like a software for the brain.
You become a certified Master Practitioner and a trainer in NLP and go on to learn every psychological approach to healing you could find — Psycho-Cybernetics, Silva Mind Control, Focusing, the Relaxation Response. The list goes on.
Something within you pulls you through this journey, from one thing to the next, to heal the trauma and PTSD you carried from Burma and beyond.
The time comes when you need to go deeper and you move from psychological ways to heal to spiritual, and you inhale every book and retreat and training you can — Wayne Dyer, Marianne Willamson, Louise Hay, A Course in Miracles, Napoleon Hill, Abraham-Hicks, Psych-K, Shamanism, Reiki and so much more. The right teacher and modality are always there when you need them.
Then one day new ways of healing come to you, intuitively.
As you heal the million layers of disconnection within you over the decades since that first course, you learn how to allow people into your life and close to you, you follow your inner calling and you find your voice to help others. The shy, skinny, nerdy kid becomes a professional speaker, coach and consultant and you now use what you learned to heal yourself to help and coach others.
Perhaps like me, you had an experience when your whole journey came to make sense.
For me, it’s during a coffee with a close friend, Shari, that this kaleidoscope of learning starts to come together and, like the door to the Chamber of Secrets in Harry Potter, the locking mechanism magically withdraws and collapses, and the door opens to reveal the secret treasure within — the secret to making sense of this entire journey.
We’re chatting about the challenges our coaching clients have in releasing their pasts to move forward.
“It’s crazy how much energy we can put into blaming others” said Shari. “It’s like they need to feel helpless about what’s happening in their lives.”
“That’s a choice, isn’t? Think of a challenge in life as a tornado. You can say, ‘Oh, poor me, I’m being carried away by this terrible tornado. I’m so helpless.’ Or you can trust that, at some higher level, you, spirit, God, the universe, whatever you call it, created the tornado to help you get where you otherwise could never have arrived.”
“That’s a pretty observant viewpoint,” said Shari. “How’d you come by that?”
I looked at her, pondering that question. “I don’t know. The first choice just feels wrong. I’d hate to live in a world like that where you have no influence over the tornados, like you’re a victim to their whims.”
“But none of us live trusting that there’s a reason to everything that happens all the time. You and I have both been whomped by life at times,” she said, looking at me knowingly. We’d each sent each other 9–1–1 calls when we’d been in crisis over the years.
“Yeah, that’s called being human,” I admit. “But with time we learn how we grow from each tornado in our lives, and we start to see how it carried us where we couldn’t get any other way. And then we get to choose again how we see the tornados in our life.”
Now the dots were connecting for me and I get excited as I continue: “That’s it! That’s our freedom, our right — to choose to trust the tornados that brough us here. Choosing to trust that my tornados, like Burma, helped me get here and become who I am changes everything about my life.” I flashed back to my teens. “When I was a teenager, I’d go out in the canoe at our cottage all the time. I was competent — I was OK — in the canoe, and I’d take off for hours down one of the two rivers connected to the lake.
“It took 5 minutes to cross the lake, but one day I was caught on the other side when a storm came up, and I was stuck. No matter how hard I paddled, the wind whipped the canoe around so I was headed further from our cottage.
“I was drenched, shivering with the cold and terror, and my arms felt like they were made of lead.
“It took me 3 hours to get back to the cottage. When I got back, I wasn’t competent at canoeing any more. I was a master. Three hours taught me more than years of canoeing in calm waters.”
“We don’t develop our strength and abilities through ease. We develop them through challenges that allow us to rise.”
If I hadn’t lived through all that trauma of my youth and the resulting PTSD, and if I hadn’t worked it all through, I wouldn’t have the strength I have today and I couldn’t do the work I do today.
When I look back, would I sacrifice all that fear and turmoil? I could’ve been a good person, living a good “normal” life, but I wouldn’t be me. And I wouldn’t give up who I am now for anything.
Would you?
