Beyond Trauma, Beyond Separation: The Long Return to Presence
Some wounds are carried silently for many years. I offer these words in the hope that no one walking this path feels entirely alone. For there are battles many people never see, and countless human beings who have had to survive them in silence.
Sanctuary Circle #2
As I moved through those years of overwhelming fear, nervous system storms, fragmentation, and the unbearable ache of separation, something else was happening quietly beneath the surface of the suffering. Something luminous.
Again and again, beneath the terror, beneath the exhaustion, beneath the feeling that life itself was breaking apart inside me, I encountered a love far greater than anything I had ever known or imagined possible. Not as belief. Not as theology. Not as comfort. But as a living presence. A presence that seemed to exist before thought, before identity, before the wounded self had learned its name.
And with it came a strange and sacred intimacy with the great mystery moving beneath all things — a hidden tenderness woven through existence itself. Something vast, ancient, immeasurably gentle, waiting silently beneath the noise of the mind and the violence of human forgetting.
There were moments when the suffering became so intense that the thread connecting me to the deeper ground of presence seemed impossibly thin. Moments where the illusion of separateness became almost absolute. A loneliness so profound it felt as though I had fallen out of life itself. And yet somehow, even there, presence remained. Closer than breath. Closer than thought. Closer than the one who was suffering.
I do not know whether suffering is necessary for awakening. I would never romanticize pain. Some passages of the human journey are unspeakably hard. But I have come to feel that part of this mysterious unfolding we call life involves forgetting. Forgetting what we are. Forgetting the presence that lives beneath all appearance. Forgetting the vast field of presence from which we arise and into which we are forever held.
And then, somehow, remembering.
Not all at once. Not permanently. But in glimpses. In openings. In moments where the heart breaks wide enough for eternity to enter.
There were times during those years when it no longer felt as though “I” was surviving through personal strength alone. Something deeper seemed to be carrying me. A hidden current beneath the chaos. A quiet hand beneath the waves. A mercy too immense for language.
Again and again, just when I believed I had reached the limit of what could be endured, something would open inside the darkness itself. Not escape. Not transcendence. Presence.
A love, a presence so pure and alive that it dissolved, little by little, the illusion that I had ever truly been abandoned.
And so the cycles continued.
After I stopped drinking alcohol, there was first a period of openness and relief — moments of almost unbearable clarity and lightness, what some call the “pink cloud.” But eventually the deeper layers began to rise. Buried grief. Fear. Shock. Ancient energies held within the body and nervous system for decades.
The waves would come. The contractions. The trembling. The fragmentation. And each time they came, if I remained open — even barely open — something deeper revealed itself beneath them.
Each descent opened into a deeper level of presence.
Again and again, what seemed at first like destruction became revelation.
Over time I came to understand something that now lives at the center of my being: love heals all wounds. Or perhaps more accurately, presence heals all wounds.
Because in moments of true presence, suffering dissolves. Pain may remain. Grief may remain. The body may still tremble. But suffering itself arises most deeply in the moment I believe myself separated from love.
And yet there are passages in human life where remembering love feels impossible. There are wounds so deep, states so overwhelming, nights so long, that faith itself becomes only the faintest flicker. But even then, something remained. A quiet knowing beneath the fear. A lantern in the depths. A pulse of eternity hidden inside the heart.
And over time — not according to my timing, but according to the mysterious rhythm of grace itself — the suffering began to loosen its hold.
Little by little. Breath by breath. Return by return.
Until one day I realized that what I had been seeking had never left me.
The love beneath all things had been there from the beginning.
Waiting patiently beneath every storm.
Love was there before every breath I took.
It has remained through every breath I have taken.
And it will surely remain when breath is taken no more.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Registered Charity Tax EIN 81-3411835
May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself.
And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not alone.
TEA AND ZEN
