Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery

by Chett Vosloo

  The answer didn’t come in a flash of lightning from the heavens above, but very soon after, I started feeling a whole lot better. Now that I was enjoying the trip so much more than I was in the beginning, I lost all motivation to go home before reaching Istanbul. In the back of my mind, however, I knew what was in store for me when I got back to South Africa, but for now I just wanted to put it aside and enjoy the ride as much as I could. This was, after all, a dream come true for me, and who knew whether I’d ever have the chance to cycle through Europe again?

  Cycling in Europe, I discovered, is perfectly catered to bicycle touring. The roads are great, the scenery is awesome, and there are plenty of campsites along the way for you to stay at. Breakfast in the mornings for the four of us was usually a big bowl of muesli, for lunch we’d find a supermarket and buy all the ingredients to make a huge foot-long sandwich, packed with avocado, cheese, tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise, and as much else as we could fit onto it, and then in the evening we would sit around at our campsite and cook a big bowl pasta on our camping stove. Crossing Spain had been an unreal experience, but the highlight of the trip was probably our few days cycling along the French Rivera in the south of France. The beaches, the expensive cars and the decadent lifestyle, the beautiful women who seemed to be everywhere; I felt like I was right in the middle of a Hollywood movie set. From France we made our way into Monaco, and then into Italy. It was at this point that we said goodbye to Max and Dan, as Dan had to get to his sister’s wedding and Max had to get back to work.

  ***

  Johnny and I made a great cycling team. We were both fit and strong on the bike and so we could cover a vast distance without much strain at all. When it came to where we were going to sleep for the night, I typically made the decisions. Every now and then Johnny and I would sleep at campsites, but more often than not we would cycle until it was getting dark and then pitch our tents on the side of the road. However, when it came to plotting and planning which route we needed to take, it was Johnny who took charge. He would spend hours gazing at the map trying to work out which would be the best route. As much as we were in sync when it came to cycling, we were just the opposite when it came to how we liked to spend our free time in the evenings. Eight years older than Johnny, I preferred to chill out in the evening around our campfire, if we had made one, or sit quietly with my book and music, whereas Johnny would rather be in a pub. If only I had met Johnny eight years before, when I was the same age that he was now, we would have had so much more in common. Like partners in crime, we would have roamed the streets together at night and drank into the early hours each morning as we made our way from one pub to the next in search of ladies. However, that just wasn’t my world anymore. The things that Johnny enjoyed doing in the evenings were the exact same things that I was now trying to stay well clear of. Quite often during our cycle trip Johnny would tell me that he was going out to have a quick beer and would only get back home after sunrise the next day.

  “Just let me sleep for an hour or two and then wake me up, Jed,” he would say as he staggered into his tent. One of Johnny’s greatest qualities was that he was not only very driven, but he was incredibly easy going. He had such a great way of going with the flow and taking it one day at a time. Therefore, despite a hangover and hardly any sleep, he would be back on his bike as if there was no problem at all.

  ***

  Our ride through Slovenia and Hungary passed by just as smoothly. Things did, however, get a little interesting for us when we hit Romania and had packs of stray dogs chasing after us from time to time. Sometimes I felt like we were caught in the middle of a battle scene, as to fend off the wild savages that would often spring out of nowhere and come charging at us, like war mongrels making a surprise attack, we had to resort to cycling up hills each holding a thick wooden stick in hand. After making it through Romania alive and in one piece, from there it was an easy ride through Bulgaria on our way to Istanbul.

  Our trip from Portugal to Turkey took us two and a half months to complete, and in that time we had cycled around six thousand five hundred kilometres. All that was left now on my around-the-world cycle trip was for me to cycle across Asia, but when exactly I’d get around to doing that was anyone’s guess. Right now, I had things to get to the bottom of, which were far more important to me than my next adventure.

  CHAPTER 19

  One of the things that South Korea is well known for is its strong work ethic. For many Koreans, their summer vacation is as little as two or three days long, therefore you can imagine how Kim had to beg her boss to give her ten days off to come and see me in South Africa. I wasn’t at first sure about Kim coming out to South Africa, as I hadn’t been in the best of head spaces and my entire focus was now on getting to the bottom of my skin problems, but she was so excited and had been looking forward to the trip for so long that I couldn’t bring myself to say no.

  Within a few hours of arriving, it was as if Kim and I had never been apart. There was no awkwardness and we seemed to carry on from where we had left off. The funny thing was that when I was with her my skin didn’t worry me at all. For one thing, the pigmentation on my body didn’t bother her and so there was no reason for me to feel insecure, and secondly, when I was with her I didn’t give my mind a chance to ponder my skin condition and blow everything completely out of proportion, as it so often did.

  After spending a few days in my hometown to introduce Kim to my family, I then took her on a road trip up the coastline. The grand finale to our adventure was three nights in one of the most exclusive game lodges in South Africa. This was compliments of my sister, who worked for the company and was able to get us the nights for free. If it hadn’t been for her, it would have cost around $800 per person per night. Being her first time in South Africa, I think Kim thought this was just how things were when you went on a safari, not realising what a golden opportunity it was and how much it would have cost us otherwise. Anyhow, being the positive and enthusiastic person that she is, Kim absolutely loved it and was like a little child who had been taken off to a magical new land.

  Very often though, it is the smallest things that leave the greatest impressions, and this was just how it would be for Kim. I had thought the safari rides, the lavish food, sitting around the camp fire in the evenings looking up at the starlit sky, would have been the cherry on the top for her, but actually it was a group of poor local African women singing and dancing for us one night that touched her heart the most. These black ladies, despite having so little, sang with such palpable joy and love that you couldn’t help but get swept away by their energy. As Kim sat there listening to them with a big lump in her throat, she kept thinking, how can they be so happy even though they are so poor? Kim had barely left her country and her entire upbringing she had been led to believe that money and happiness go directly hand in hand. The more money you have, the happier you are. The less money you have, the less happy you are. Watching these African ladies singing and dancing with such obvious joy was Kim’s first big awakening to the fact that money can’t buy true happiness.

  As wonderful as our time together had been, maintaining a long-distance relationship proved to be too much in the end. We kept it going for a few more months after Kim left South Africa, before we eventually decided that it was time for us to go our separate ways.

  ***

  Now that Kim had left, it was time for me to get down to the business of sorting out my skin issues. Seeing as it had been years since I had last gone to see a dermatologist, I thought that this was where I would start. Who knows, maybe over the last few years they had found a cure for urticaria pigmentosa? I didn’t have my hopes very high, but it did seem like it was the right place to start. Just as I thought, the doctor shook his head and told me that there was little that he could do to help. The equipment used may have got more sophisticated over the years, but there was still no known remedy for urticaria pigmentosa. The only thing he could suggest was that I try using a UV lamp.

  �
�This is a long shot,” he quickly added, “and is by no means guaranteed to make things any better. It could stop further spreading of the pigmentation, but there is also the chance that the UV lamp will darken the spots on your body.” Something was holding me back. As much as I wanted to heal my skin condition, my gut was telling me that I shouldn’t go ahead with it. I told the doctor that I needed some time to think it through and that I would get back to him. Now that nothing had come from the conventional method of seeing a dermatologist, it was time for me to look into more alternate ways of healing my skin condition. The fight, in my eyes, was still far from over. I was by no means ready to give up just yet.

  ***

  It had recently occurred to me that maybe this skin disease of mine hadn’t just happened. Perhaps I had brought it upon myself. The thought had crossed my mind during our bike trip across Europe that maybe I should see a hypnotherapist when I got back home. I figured that going to see a normal therapist would only scratch the surface of the problem, and what I needed was to dig a lot deeper to get to the root of what had caused it. I imagined that in a state of hypnosis, it would be far easier to do this. Just the thought alone of seeing a hypnotherapist scared the hell out of me, but as I already told you, I had reached the stage where I would have done just about anything to get rid of what I could only think of as my biggest curse in life.

  Not sure of which hypnotherapist would be best for me to see, I went to see a well known therapist in the town I lived in, as I figured that she would be able to put me in contact with the right person. I left the appointment with two phone numbers. One was for a guy who was supposedly one of the top hypnotherapists in the country, and the other was the number of a woman who, although a practicing hypnotherapist, was supposedly far more alternate and lived a hippie-type lifestyle out in the forest. I knew for sure that I wanted to see this lady, but in the end I decided that I would go and see the other hypnotherapist first. Only once I’d explored that option would I go and see the lady living out in the forest.

  ***

  On my way to my first session, I already wanted it to be over and done with. Why did they have to call themselves hypnotherapists anyway? It sounded so harsh and spelt out the words: I’ve got issues! If only they called themselves ‘Journey within specialists’ or better still, ‘A guide to help you find out more about yourself’. If this was the case, I’m sure I would have been far more open and willing to the idea of going to see a hypnotherapist in the first place.

  The doctor was still busy with a patient when I got there, so I was told to take a seat in the waiting room. I was feeling insecure as hell and I couldn’t help but wonder what the receptionist thought when she gave me the form that I had to fill in. I bet she was thinking, shame, poor guy, so young and so many problems in life. God help me had someone I knew walked in. I probably would have covered my head with my jacket and run out in total shame. So, in a way, I was only too happy to step into the privacy of the doctor’s office and to get the session underway. The sooner we started, the sooner I could get out of there.

  I very quickly realised that my whole impression of hypnotherapists had been way off track. For so many years I had imagined that going to a hypnotherapist would be a bit like going to see a hypnotist. I assumed that the hypnotherapist would first whisper a few magic words into my ear, then they would twist my arm to make me sleep, but how wrong I had been. It wasn’t anything like this at all. To begin with, James, the hypnotherapist, asked me to sit back in the chair and to make myself comfortable. With my eyes closed and my arms resting on the armrests, he spent a few minutes leading me into a state of relaxation. This was like a guided meditation, and so I had a fair idea of what was going on. Once I’d given him the signal that I was feeling nice and relaxed – this done by me tapping my finger lightly on the side of the chair – he asked me to share with him what was bothering me. I told James all about my skin condition, the panic attacks I’d had at university, and how I thought that somehow I had brought this skin disease upon myself. James suggested that we go back to the night of my first panic attack and that I share with him what I had been feeling at the time. For all these years I’d been trying my very best to bury the memory of what had happened, and now I was about to relive it all over again. I guess the only way for me to get out of the fire, so to speak, was to first launch myself back into the fire itself. My stomach immediately twisted in knots and I could feel the same intense fear that I’d felt the night of my panic attack. I remembered how inadequate I felt and how the thought, I’m not going to make it in life, had played over and over in my mind. Once I’d shared everything I could remember with James from the night of my panic attack, he then did what he called, ‘building associations’.

  “Let me explain to you in simple terms how it works,” he said. “Let’s say that despite the fact that the rest of your life has developed perfectly well over the years, there could be a wounded part of you that’s been left behind. So when you’re dealing with the developed part of you, for example, you travelling the world, playing sports, or spending time with your friends, you would be perfectly fine and happy, but when a wounded part of you, let’s say the fear about what you going to do with your life, is brought to the surface, it’s very easy to forget all else and to be completely overwhelmed by this wounded part of yourself.”

  This made complete sense to me, as I’d experienced the same thing many times before with my skin. I was perfectly happy as long as I wasn’t thinking about my skin problem or having to look at the pigmentation on my body.

  “So what we have to do now,” he went on, “is to build up these wounded parts of yourself which have been left behind. We need to show these wounded parts of you that they have nothing to worry about, as everything in your life is going to work out just fine.”

  I left James’s office feeling energised and surprisingly optimistic about things. For the first time in a long time I thought that maybe, just maybe, there might be light at the end of the tunnel after all. Now that the first session was over and done with, I knew that the worst part was over and that from here on it would get a whole lot easier. After all these years of trying to run away and turn a blind eye to my skin problem, I had finally reached the stage in which I was ready to tackle it head on and to look within myself to find the answer.

  ***

  The next piece of the puzzle came the day after my session with James. I was lying on the veranda reading, The Power of Now, the well-known spiritual book written by Eckhart Tolle. I literally opened the book to where I’d read up to before, and bang! It was exactly what I needed to read. The section of the book was speaking about what the author referred to as pain-bodies. In the book it said that every emotional pain that we experience in life leaves behind a residue of pain. This pain merges with all the accumulated emotional pain from the past and is then lodged within your body and mind. The pain-body, Eckhart Tolle explained, could either be in a dormant or active state. Whenever the pain-body is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you could activate it. Once awakened the pain-body is then fuelled by negative thoughts. Anger, a heavy feeling of sadness, fear, and insecurity – these feelings, as well as all other negative thought, gives the pain-body power to carry on. Something struck a cord in me and I had this incredibly strong feeling that this, the pain-body, was very relevant to what I was going through. After all these years of suppressing my feelings and turning a blind eye to them, I could only imagine how big my pain-body had become.

  After explaining what the pain-body was, Eckhart Tolle said that what is needed whenever the pain-body becomes active is awareness. By becoming aware that the pain-body is active, it breaks your identification with it and it immediately loses its power. What gives the pain-body its power is when you play along and identify with all the negativity and the mental noise that comes hand in hand with it, so awareness is the key. I had never known this before and had for many years repeatedly ma
de the same mistake of getting swept up in a current of self-pity. Why me? Why do I have this disease? How much worse is it going to get? How am I going to get through this? These were the same recurring thoughts that had gone through my mind time and again, and little did I know that these thoughts were only fuelling the pain-body. Eckhart Tolle also said that whenever the pain-body becomes active, it is important not to judge or analyse the feeling. Just observe that the pain-body is active without labelling it as good or bad. The more you are able to do this, the less power it will have over you. So now I at least had something practical that I could use. I had tools. I had to be more watchful, more aware, of what I was thinking about my skin condition, especially when my pain-body became active, and so I could practice observing the emotions that I was feeling without labelling them as good or bad.

  When I had gone to see the therapist the week before to find out which hypnotherapist I could see, she had recommended that I read a book by Caroline Myss, called, Anatomy of the Spirit, as she felt that this book would help me a lot. I bought the book the same day and had, ever since then, been juggling between The Power of Now and Anatomy of the Spirit. The author of Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss, was what is known as a medical intuitive. This meant that she had a special ability to intuitively know what the cause of a person’s problem were, be it emotional, physical or psychological. After having just learnt about pain-bodies earlier on in the day, I read an incredible story in Caroline Myss’s book about a lady who had gone to her for help. Wanting to know what the reason for her disease was, it was soon revealed to her with painful clarity that all her deep-rooted fears had caused it. As I read this, it was like an explosion erupted within me. This was it. This was my answer. I was now absolutely convinced that I had created this skin disease myself. This meant that there wasn’t any point in blaming God or anyone else for what had happened to me, as I had done all this myself. I was the one responsible for it, and nobody else! Now, somehow, I had to undo the damage and to un-create what I had created, but how on earth was I going to do this? This was the challenge that lay ahead.