The Peace I Was Taught to Call a Weakness

For most of my life, I believed there was something wrong with me.

Not because I thought I was incapable.

Quite the opposite.

I was the girl who was considered smart, creative, academically accomplished. The one who could put her mind to something and figure it out.

And yet, there was another part of my story that never seemed to fit that picture.

Since I was very young, I had experienced episodes that were described as passing out.

Whenever it happened, my body seemed to leave the world before I did.

I could hear.

I could know.

I could somehow sense what was happening around me.

But I could not feel my body.

And strangely, what I experienced in those moments was not fear.

It was peace.

A peace so complete that even now, I don’t know how to describe it without turning it into something it wasn’t.

It wasn’t happiness.

It wasn’t relief.

It wasn’t sleep.

It was simply peace.

And every time I returned to my body, I found myself trying to reconcile two very different experiences of being alive.

There was the world of the body and mind—where I could walk, talk, laugh, think, love, struggle, worry, and experience everything that comes with being human.

And then there was this other place I could not explain.

A place where there was no story I could hold on to.

No identity.

No sense of separation.

Just peace.

The story I was given

At the time, there was only the language we had for what was happening.

My body was thought to be weak.

I was told I couldn’t handle stress well.

My mother worried about my health and my well-being.

And because these episodes were often followed by her love, care and attention, I learned to associate them with something being wrong with me.

Perhaps I was weak.

Perhaps my body couldn’t handle what life brought.

Perhaps I needed to be protected.

And yet, when I was in my body and mind, I was also the girl who was told she had beauty with brains.

I could be academically excellent.

Creative.

Curious.

Capable.

I could talk, walk, laugh, learn, achieve and express myself.

The two versions of me never quite made sense together.

I didn’t have the words for the contradiction.

I only knew that my experience did not completely match the story I had been given about myself.

The day it happened again

Many years later, I reached a point where my work environment no longer felt aligned with what I considered safe, respectful or professional.

There were ongoing boundary violations that did not reflect my values.

And then my body responded.

The next thing I remember is hearing two of my colleagues calling my name.

They were trying to wake me.

I could hear the fear in their voices.

They were panicking.

And what confused me was that I wasn’t afraid.

I was in a deep sense of peace.

I knew they were there.

I could hear them.

But I couldn’t feel my body.

I had experienced something similar as a child, so there was a strange familiarity to it.

I knew, in some way, that I was still there.

But I wasn’t experiencing myself through my body in the way I normally did.

My colleagues were about to call 911.

I wanted them to know that I was okay.

I tried to move.

Nothing.

I tried again.

And eventually, I pulled myself back.

Back into my body.

Back into the room.

Back into the world they were experiencing.

My body felt incredibly heavy.

And what stays with me from that moment is not only what happened inside me, but what I witnessed in them.

Their fear.

Their concern.

And then, as they drove me home in my own car, their compassion.

I could sense how much they cared for me.

Something that felt so peaceful to me had been frightening for the people who were watching.

Two very different experiences were happening at the same time.

Coming back

When I arrived home, my husband was at work and my son was at school.

And somehow, coming back into my body was not the peaceful part.

It was the difficult part.

My body felt contracted and heavy.

My mind felt disoriented.

There was no clear sense of time or space.

Sometimes there was barely a sense of identity.

It felt almost like watching a movie while simultaneously being inside it.

My husband was a character.

My son was a character.

I was a character.

The house was the setting.

And slowly, over time, I would become more and more embodied again.

It could take days.

As I returned, I could feel myself moving back into the movie.

I could walk.

Talk.

Think.

Feel.

Interact.

Participate.

I could once again experience myself as Vandana, a woman with a body, a mind, a history, relationships and a life.

But returning also meant returning to everything that came with being human.

Fear.

Anger.

Grief.

Attachment.

Joy.

Conflict.

Pain.

The darker emotions were difficult for me.

Because I had known another experience—one that seemed completely free of them.

And this created a confusion I carried for years.

The peace I couldn’t explain

I don’t claim to know exactly what those experiences were.

I only know what they felt like to me.

There was a profound difference between being in my body and being in that space of peace.

When I was embodied, I could experience life through my senses.

I could touch.

Hear.

See.

Feel.

Love.

Laugh.

Cry.

I could participate in the movie.

But when I was in that other space, there was no movie.

No character.

No identity I could hold on to.

And yet I wasn’t gone.

I was there.

Somehow.

That is the part I have never been able to explain.

The peace felt as though it existed before my usual sense of body, mind and identity returned.

And the moment I try to describe that peace too precisely, I feel that I have already stepped away from it.

You have to experience it.

Perhaps that is why I spent so much of my life questioning what I had been told about these episodes.

The label and the experience simply did not match.

Learning to care for myself

As a child, after these episodes, my mother’s love and attention helped me feel cared for.

As an adult, she wasn’t there.

Neither were my colleagues once they had brought me home.

I had to find my way back into my ordinary life myself.

I had to slowly and gently resume my daily activities.

There was no one to tell me exactly how to do that.

And perhaps something began to shift in me then.

I had spent years believing that I needed to be protected from my own body.

Now I was beginning to learn how to be with it.

Not fix it.

Not fight it.

Not judge it.

Simply be with it.

Choosing to protect my peace

After that episode, I made what felt like an executive decision.

I chose to protect my peace.

I stepped away from the job.

It was a difficult choice.

But it opened a door.

A door into a space from which I live today.

I began questioning much more than my work.

I began questioning the stories I had been given about myself.

The labels.

The definitions.

The assumptions.

The parts of myself I had learned to call weak.

The parts I had learned to fear.

And eventually, I began asking a much bigger question:

What if I don’t have to choose between the peace I know within and the human life I am here to experience?

The movie I had been afraid to watch

For much of my life, I think I wanted to understand how to return to that peace.

But perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction.

Perhaps the journey wasn’t about learning how to leave the movie.

Perhaps it was about learning how to fully be in it.

Because when I am embodied, I don’t just experience the beautiful parts of life.

I experience all of it.

The joy and the grief.

The love and the fear.

The laughter and the tears.

The moments when I feel expansive and the moments when I feel contracted.

The parts of myself I am proud of and the parts I would rather not see.

And perhaps the challenge was never that these emotions existed.

Perhaps the challenge was that I had known a state of being where they did not exist in the same way.

So I found it difficult to accept the darker and more vulnerable parts of being human.

I wanted the peace without the movie.

But I had chosen to come back.

The butterfly and the caterpillar

For a long time, I felt like a butterfly that had chosen to soar so high into the sky, while somehow being disguised or cocooned as a caterpillar.

I could sense something much larger.

Something freer.

Something more expansive.

And yet I was living inside a body and mind that came with limitations, emotions, fears, relationships, responsibilities and stories.

I was ready to break open the constructs I had built around myself.

But I didn’t know what would follow.

There was no guidebook.

No roadmap.

Only a knowing.

A deep faith in something larger than myself.

And a willingness to surrender to whatever was holding me through this experience called life.

Coming home

Perhaps my journey was never about learning how to leave the body.

Perhaps it was learning how to come home to it.

To let the body be a body.

The mind be a mind.

The emotions be emotions.

And still remember the peace I had touched.

Maybe I don’t have to choose between the infinite and the human.

Between stillness and movement.

Between the peace and the discomfort.

Between the one who watches and the one who participates.

Maybe I can be both.

Maybe that is what it means to be here.

I don’t know that I have found an answer.

Perhaps I am still walking the question.

But I have stopped seeing that little girl as weak.

I see her differently now.

Perhaps she was simply experiencing something she had no language for.

And perhaps there are parts of us that we spend years trying to fix, when what they are really asking for is to be understood.

So today, I pause.

I place my hands together in reverence.

For this body.

For this mind.

For the peace I have known.

For the human life I have chosen to return to.

For everything I still do not understand.

And for the mystery that continues to hold all of us.

Jai Sita Ram.