An excerpt from my journal Monday, July 27.

I am caught in this depth of sadness and anguish at 4 am. My chest is tight and my stomach is upset. This is how I woke up from a night of flashbacks. Flashbacks have not happened to me in a while so they took me by surprise. However, this time I did not wake up terrified, I woke up with this deep sadness and sense of aloneness. The enormity of these feelings is intense. I struggle as I sit and breathe into the feelings. I realize that these feelings are ones that I have felt my whole life. They were just buried so deep inside me. Outwardly, I gave the appearance that I was a happy and successful student, child, adolescent, young adult, teacher, nun and professor, but inside I was suffering so much with all my secret pain and anguish. Now these feelings are just sitting on my chest waiting for me to compassionately embrace them.  This sadness, aloneness and anguish are part of my true self and part of my personality because they were the most common feelings I actually felt most of my life. These feelings live in every tissue in my body and in every neural pathway. I can feel their imprint in every cell. Continue reading →

As I am continuing with my online 21 day meditation experience with Deepak Chopra and Oprah, today’s reflection was on Success and Gratitude. The success I seek today is very different than the success I achieved before I could no longer keep up with the successful life of the “norm”. Today, I define my success as a continuous process of finding greater inner fulfillment. It is my birthright to have inner fulfillment. This is what I feel the universe is wanting me to do with my life. Today I have less material things in my life and I have really found great pleasure in living a simpler lifestyle. It has brought me fulfillment.

I seldom spend much time outside my home because it is too over-stimulating for my nervous system, so I have built a very contemplative and meditative life. Continue reading →

This morning during my stillness time I became quite aware of the wide range of feelings that I have been experiencing all week. I ran the gamut from intense grief and sadness for my suffering to intense gratitude, awe, wonder and rapture for what is, for how fully alive I am and how much in love I am with my husband and the cosmos. It is beautiful, freeing yet also distressing to hold all the emotions at the same time.

I try to feel and observe the life force energy of these emotions move throughout my body. I still go into a flight or fright response and experience hypervigilance because that is what my brain and body do due to my PTSD. However, I have learned to hold this suffering by placing my hands on my heart gently and warmly while telling myself that I am sorry I have to suffer. Continue reading →

In my blog a week ago I talked about my surrender to PTSD while making a lifelong commitment to optimizing the health of my mind, body, and spirit. This week, I took several steps towards this goal. One major step I took was to attend a workshop about how food (and food additives and pesticides) can affect both the mood and the body. There I learned that food allergies can cause high inflammation in the body and therefore can cause chronic pain especially in the joints. This realization goes along with the research which shows that PTSD is also associated with inflammation in the body.

So I have decided that the next step for me is to do a full set of tests for food allergies. This is a way that I can use my power and take control and full responsibility for the quality of my life while living with severe, chronic PTSD. Continue reading →

This has been a stupendous week and I have felt the strength of my power. I have really accepted that nothing is going to cure me from my PTSD. Furthermore, I took pride in the beautiful environment I had created in my life with the help of my husband and therapist; it is a place where I can be nurtured and evolve to my fullest potential. Also, we have created (over the last 11 years) the optimum environment for managing my PTSD. I feel that now I can be my truest self, my authentic self. I feel such intense gratitude for all the abundance in my life. However, I also feel this awesome responsibility to continue to learn new ways of optimizing my health, and I am committing myself to this evolutionary process.

The first area I am going to work on is to improve my optimum health through nutrition and the act of eating. Continue reading →