The Power of Now

For decades, I lived in chronic, deep depression. I had no idea why I was there, or how to get out from under the black cloud. So I did what a lot of people in that situation do: I self-medicated with drugs to numb the pain. Then, one day when I was twenty-eight years old, a boyfriend took me out ice climbing. On that day I felt nothing but the sheer joy of being alive. This presented me with a question: how is it possible that the same person who felt suicidal one day could feel so radically alive the next?

The short answer to what happened on that first day of ice climbing is that I had inadvertently “stepped into the now.” I had never heard the term “mindfulness,” or “present moment awareness.” And I certainly hadn’t done any yoga or meditation to help me achieve such a state. Through nothing more nor less than an act of grace, I found myself in a state of oneness with life, where nothing existed but the pure joy of being alive. I now know it to be the state many athletes chase called “flow.”

But back in 1992, as I dangled on the side of that ice climb, all I knew is that the emotional burden that had always been with me, that I thought was an inextricable part of who I was and that I would never be free from, literally evanesced. I instinctively knew I would give up drugs for my newfound passion, but several questions remained: How had this seemingly random experience happened? Would it repeat each time I went out ice climbing? And perhaps most importantly, could I find a way to transpose this feeling of connectedness into other areas of my life, thus rekindling my will to live?

They say the shortest route into the present moment is via the body, which is why masters of enlightenment put so much focus on breath. This seemingly random experience was not so random after all: ice climbing was so physically demanding, and had enough inherent danger, it pulled my consciousness out of its everyday default setting and planted it firmly in the now. Each time I went back out into the mountains to climb ice, the feeling returned, although with time I needed harder and longer outings to get my “fix.” Ice climbing became my “hack” into the present moment, and I engaged in the activity as much and as often as I could, all the while decreasing my dependency on drugs.

Decades after I learned to climb, I stumbled upon a psychological term used by leading trauma experts called “pendulation.” As the name suggests, it is used to describe exactly what I was doing with my ice climbing, where I would get a much-needed reprieve from my psychological state while engaging in the activity, then I would return to “normal life” where I still had to deal with the underlying causes for my depression. At first, I spent very little time in the now and infinitely more in my default state, but as time passed, I found the balance shifting toward more time living in joy and less time in pain. At the two-year mark I was drug free, but the question remained: with enough hard work and patience, could I overcome depression completely?

Along with my newfound love of climbing, I made other changes in my life. As I let go of the substances, I adopted better eating habits. I was living in my truck, in the mountains, breathing fresh air and drinking pure water. I was sleeping outside on all but the coldest nights. There was never a day where I didn’t know the phase of the moon. In The Body Electric, Robert Becker describes the bioelectrical currents running through all living things. My body was being reset to the Earth’s electromagnetic frequency now that I was away from most man-made interference. It was during this time I came to place the highest value on wilderness, knowing that without it, humans would be lost.

It felt amazing to have drugs out of my life and a healthy lifestyle to replace them with, but I still had to contend with the chaos of my emotions. Far from solving the problem, quitting drugs had simply gotten rid of a symptom and brought the cause to the fore. Not only had I failed to foresee the causes underpinning my substance abuse rising to the surface with a fury, I found myself with no skills to navigate the ocean of pain from past trauma. Instead of lifting, the depression worsened, and for the next eight years I drifted in and out of a dangerously suicidal mindset.

During this time, I continued to climb. Climbing anchored me to the present moment as I navigated the dark chambers of my psyche. Some called it my new addiction; I didn’t care. The street drugs had kept me alive long enough to find climbing, and the climbing had kept me sane enough to face my daemons. I found three seminal works that helped me construct a framework around my invisible struggle. The first was William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiences, where for the first time I was introduced to the concept that what is termed mental illness in our culture is but a spiritual crisis that can only be solved in that realm. In Caroline Myss’ Anatomy of the Spirit, I was given an in-depth analysis of comparative religions as they related to the human energetic centres often referred to as chakras. And Dr Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts explained to me for the very first time the connection between addiction, mental illness, and childhood trauma.

These works, combined with Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now, gave me the tools I needed to begin working my way out of suicidal depression. In other words, it was the snake biting its tail: instead of unbalanced brain chemistry being the cause of mental illness, I understood that the effects of early childhood trauma had caused a disruption in the mood-stabilizing chemicals of my brain that manifested in a cluster of symptoms used as the basis for psychiatric diagnosis. It followed that if the brain’s chemistry can get out of balance due to emotional stresses we live through, it can also be recalibrated by removing those stresses and adopting emotional habits that support balance.

It was empowering to know that the state of my psyche was mine alone to address. It gave me a sense of agency over something that had heretofore seemed beyond my control. And the greatest tool I used in overcoming my challenges was the development of practices that brought me into the present moment, where I accessed the state of mind that is often referred to as “flow.”