#10 The Gravity of Loss: An Adoptee’s Descent Through the Chakras
A First-Person Experience
It happens without warning – one moment, there is ground beneath me, the next, it is gone. A sudden, sharp drop, not the slow drift of a dream but an immediate and total collapse of reality itself. My stomach lurches, my limbs tighten, a primal panic surges through my body before I jolt awake, heart pounding, breath shallow, gripping at sheets that feel too thin to anchor me.
This is not the gentle unravelling of sleep but something older, deeper – a memory my body refuses to forget. A sensation of being severed, untethered, as if the moment of separation has imprinted itself so thoroughly into my nervous system that even in unconsciousness, it repeats. Falling, always falling, as if some part of me still searches for the arms that were supposed to catch me.
The Fall Begins (Muladhara – Root)
There is a sensation I have carried with me all my life, a slow, measured falling. It is not the sudden plummet of a body dropped from a great height, nor the violent spiral of an object sucked into the void. No, my falling is steady, quiet, a descent without a point of impact.
I have no memory of the moment I was separated from her – only the aftershocks. The severance is recorded in ink, in legal documents where my name is changed, where my first mother becomes an empty field marked *unknown.* They say the body remembers what the mind cannot, and so I imagine my body remembering the way gravity shifted the moment I was taken, the way I must have reached for something that was no longer there.
I have never known what it means to feel rooted. There is an absence in my bones, a hollowness where certainty should be. My feet touch the ground, but they do not belong to it. I float above the earth, a ghost in my own life.
The pain in my root is a deep, pulling ache, as if something inside me is still searching for its origin, for the place where I was supposed to take hold.
The Hollow Hunger (Svadhisthana – Sacral)
In childhood, the hunger came in waves. It was not a hunger for food but something more primal, an ache that settled low in my stomach.
I learned to soothe it with sweetness, with stolen handfuls of sugar from the kitchen, with the orange glow of television screens at night. But the emptiness remained, bottomless.
I would dream of a woman I could not name, feel the warmth of hands I could not place. Upon waking, there was only the sharp sensation of their absence.
The pain in my sacral chakra is a dull, gnawing void, a space where connection should live but does not. My body carries an imprint of someone who should have stayed but didn’t.
The Fire of Erasure (Manipura – Solar Plexus)
At school, we were told to make family trees, tracing our history back generations. I watched the other children write down names without hesitation. Their branches extended outward, filled with familiar faces, with grandmothers who baked bread, with great-uncles who fought in wars.
When I looked at my own tree, I saw only gaps, missing limbs where names had been erased. I traced the absence with my fingers, feeling its edges, wondering if I was supposed to pretend it wasn’t there.
I learned to perform gratitude. I became the perfect adoptee – smiling, adjusting, never asking too many questions. But the fire inside me burned hotter each year, the rage growing in secret.
The pain in my solar plexus is a searing heat, a pressure that builds behind my ribs. It is the quiet violence of forced gratitude, the exhaustion of existing in a narrative I did not write.
The Phantom Heart (Anahata – Heart)
I have always known how to leave.
When friendships became too deep, when love required too much, I found ways to disappear. I would pull away before they could, become distant before the inevitable unraveling.
For love to be safe, it must be conditional – I learned that early. I was loved once, and then I was not. The people who love you can leave, and they do.
The pain in my heart chakra is the weight of something pressing against my chest, as if my body is bracing for another loss. My pulse is a steady drum of anticipation, waiting for the inevitable abandonment.
The Silence (Vishuddha – Throat)
I was told that adoption was a beautiful thing, that I was lucky, that everything had happened exactly as it should.
I learned to say the words back, to make them sound like my own.
When I tried to speak my truth, my voice caught in my throat, stuck between obligation and the unbearable need to be understood.
The pain in my throat chakra is constriction, the suffocation of unspoken grief. It is a lifetime of swallowing words, of choking on the things I was never supposed to say.
The Visions That Never Were (Ajna – Third Eye)
For years, I searched for faces that might mirror mine. In crowds, in old photographs, in strangers on the street. I chased the ghosts of possibilities, the mothers and fathers who might have been.
I imagined my life as it could have been, parallel timelines running alongside me like shadows. What if I had never been taken? What if she had fought to keep me? What if I was never meant to be here at all?
The pain in my third eye is dizziness, disorientation – the sensation of slipping between realities. My mind is a hall of mirrors, reflecting lives I will never live, parents I will never know, a self that never was.
The Falling Never Ends (Sahasrara – Crown)
Healing, they say, is about acceptance. About integration. About making peace with the past.
But what if the past refuses to be reconciled?
There is a weightlessness to being an adoptee, a floating above one’s own life. It is the sensation of falling, not toward anything, but away. Away from the truth, away from the history that was taken from me, away from the version of myself that was left behind.
The pain in my crown chakra is vertigo, the feeling of standing on unstable ground, of slipping between worlds that were never mine.
The falling never ends.
But I have learned, at least, to name the descent.
Hello, my name is Shane Bouel,
I’m a retired, qualified designer, lecturer & e-learning specialist seeking true connection.
I am an adoptee of forced adoption, living in Bali — a place that, like me, holds the weight of displacement and the echoes of histories rewritten. My journey is one of systematic erasure, existential severance, and, ultimately, reclamation.
Adoption is often seen as an act of love, a new beginning, a gift. But beneath that narrative lies a deeper, often unspoken truth — one of loss, identity fracture, and the struggle to exist in a world that does not recognise what has been taken.
I have spent years unravelling my own story, uncovering what was erased, and reclaiming the self that was meant to disappear. It has been a journey through grief, awakening, and profound transformation. And now, I invite you to walk that path with me.
From here, we embark on a journey together.
