The quiet work of finding myself again

Representational image by Zac Durant on Unsplash

Everything fell like a house of cards.

One night, my grandfather came into my dream and told me, “You are just like me.” He appeared in black and white, with a beautiful smile, just as he looked in the photograph that hung on the wall of my uncle’s house when I was a child.

I never had the opportunity to meet him. All I know is that he died by suicide when my father was 12, 22 years before I was born. In the dream, I felt as though he had come to remind me of my uncle, who had followed in his footsteps a few years earlier.

Shattered and sweating, I could not fall asleep again. Did I have the same fate? Or was the dream simply an expression of a fear buried in my subconscious?

It was during Nepal’s second wave of COVID-19 lockdowns. I was confined to my rented flat in Kathmandu. By then, I had several years of experience in journalism. I was living a comfortable life and was hopeful about the future. There seemed to be nothing to fear.

But after that dream, the horizon of my future suddenly seemed to disappear into darkness. Every assurance I had carried until then faded with a single thought. I felt I was following in my grandfather’s and uncle’s footsteps. Was this my inheritance?

I developed severe anxiety and insomnia.

I could not understand what was happening to me. I was so restless that I could not concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. To escape the restlessness, I started watching movies like a chain smoker lighting one cigarette after another. It was difficult to look away from the laptop screen. I watched around 200 movies in two months.

After a couple of months, I realised that if I continued living this way, I would develop depression. In reality, I was already there. I became afraid that I might end my life like my grandfather. I remembered the dream.

Then my jijivisha, my will to live, woke up and told me to get out of the situation.

Despite that inner alarm, the downward spiral continued. Sleep became a rare guest, sometimes visiting for only a few moments every few days, and sometimes arriving after exhaustion had forced me to sleep for an entire day and night. My jaw remained clenched almost all the time.

I would wake up at midnight, walk into the living room or bathroom and then wonder why I had gotten out of bed. I would get up from a chair for no apparent reason. During occasional meetings with friends, I would lose myself in thought while they were talking. Even a small unfavourable situation or careless remark could send my mind spinning. My head would feel hot, almost as if I had a fever.

I spent hours thinking about the smallest things. I began to feel that everyone hated me and that nobody cared about me. I felt like Kafka’s insect, being transformed bit by bit, day after day.

And yes, I thought about a solution—but it was a terrible one. The thought of ending my life came to me many times a day, sometimes almost every hour.

I tried to seek help from psychiatrists and counsellors, but I could not gather the courage to meet them more than once or twice. I ran away from the help I was seeking. I tried everything I could think of to escape—from alcohol and marijuana to trekking and sex. But these short-term escapes from reality only magnified the problem.

My physical health also began to decline. I kept falling sick. The downward spiral continued.

But the story is not linear. There is a twist.

Today, I am writing my own story. I did not lose the battle.

Much later, I used reliable online screening tools to assess how severe my depression may have been at that time. I scored 27 out of 27 on one test. The result suggested severe depression and high risk. It was not a clinical diagnosis, but it helped me understand just how serious my condition had become.

I had shared my condition with very few people, but I did not receive much direct support. Some people even played a role in worsening my situation, something I do not want to revisit. The best decision I made during that period was to attend a Vipassana meditation course.

I had first heard about Vipassana around 2018 but was not deeply interested. During those years of depression and isolation, I began exploring it again. In January 2024, I applied for a 10-day Vipassana course in Kathmandu. A few days later, I received my confirmation email.

I had heard from previous participants about the difficulty of maintaining complete silence and spending entire days without gadgets, books or pens. Surprisingly, I had little trouble with that. The schedule, from 4:30am to 9pm, left little time to do the things we normally do in everyday life—not even talk to one another.

Sitting cross-legged for hours was difficult and painful, but that was not my greatest challenge.

I slept well for the first three nights. From the fourth night onward, my sleep became increasingly shallow. Soon, I was spending entire nights without deep sleep.

Then came the nightmares.

I dreamed of falling from a mountain peak into an endless abyss, being hunted by snakes and attacked by tigers. On the sixth and seventh nights, such dreams came almost immediately after I closed my eyes. I would wake up sweating.

On the morning of the seventh day, just before the first wake-up bell at 4am, I had another frightening dream. I woke up drenched in sweat. My clothes, bedsheet, blanket and pillowcase were completely wet. My body felt hot. I knew I had a fever. You can’t continue, my mind told me.

I decided to ask the teacher for permission to leave the course. I even thought about running away.

At 4:30am, the bell rang, signalling that the meditators should enter the meditation hall. I stayed in bed. About 10 minutes later, a volunteer came to wake me.

His name was Peter. He was a bald, energetic man, probably from Poland.

“Peter, I couldn’t sleep all night. I had frightening dreams repeatedly. I have a fever. I can’t go to meditation,” I told him.

He showed little concern for my excuses and insisted that I go to the meditation hall.

“You need to be in the hall before 5, when the teachers enter for meditation,” he said almost like an order.

He gave me half an hour to rest. I still intended not to go.

“Do you have a watch?” he returned to ask.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, I will come to call you.”

He came back and took me to the meditation hall. I sat through the session. After breakfast, I felt somewhat better. I never told the teachers that I wanted to leave, although the thought continued to run through my mind.

I was also experiencing intense pain in my forehead, just above my nose. From the first day, when we were instructed to observe the breath as it was, my attention kept moving from the tip of my nose towards my forehead. I found it extremely difficult to bring my attention back.

I later learned from experienced Vipassana teachers that some people dealing with anxiety and depression experience similar sensations. For me, it became an awareness of how psychological distress could manifest physically.

During the first four days, I often focused more on the pain in my forehead than on my breath. I shared this with a teacher, who told me that the pain was impermanent and advised me to continue observing my breath with awareness of aniccha, or impermanence.

I followed his advice. Gradually, I was able to focus on my breath and then on sensations throughout my body.

Still, I wanted to leave the course until the evening of the seventh day.

That evening, in a recorded video discourse, S. N. Goenka said that it was normal for a Vipassana meditator to sleep very little or occasionally go without sleep. I do not know why, but hearing that brought me enormous relief.

My troubles suddenly seemed lighter.

During the brief 15-minute meditation after the discourse, before we went to bed, I felt smooth, subtle sensations throughout my body. For the first time, I genuinely enjoyed Vipassana.

Vipassana teaches us to observe our breath and bodily sensations as they are, without reacting to or trying to change them. The practice is Buddhist in origin, although the idea of observing without reacting also appears in Hindu philosophical traditions and Jainism. In Sanskrit traditions, this can be understood through ideas such as sakshi or drasta bhava—the state of being a witness.

If something is painful, you observe the pain. You do not immediately try to remove it. You observe how it arises, how long it remains and how it eventually dissolves.

This sounds simple. Practising it is anything but.

With continuous practice, however, the habit of reacting to everything that arises in the mind gradually begins to change. But accepting pain and difficulty requires courage. For me, that courage came from understanding dharma, the law of nature, and prajna, wisdom.

The first lesson Goenka taught me, and that I later explored further through Buddhism, was aniccha, impermanence.

Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. Whatever comes into existence will eventually cease to exist.

I began to understand that my suffering was also impermanent. My depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and self-harming thoughts could not remain exactly as they were forever.

I only needed to observe the change.

Whenever anxiety returned, reminding myself of this brought relief. Slowly, my condition began to improve.

The second, and perhaps more important, lesson was anatta, or selflessness.

The Buddha taught that what we call “I” or “me” is a combination of physical and psychological processes. Neither the body nor the mind is entirely under our control. The body grows and decays according to the laws of nature. The mind, too, is constantly arising and passing away, shaped by our past experiences, physical condition and environment.

Anatta taught me to see that the suffering I experienced was not my entire identity. It was something happening in my mind.

I began to observe my thoughts as a witness.

My mind seemed to divide into two parts—the thinker and sufferer, and the observer. As I developed the habit of observing my thoughts, I began recognising the thoughts that caused my anxiety. Once I recognised them, I could remind myself that they were impermanent.

Gradually, they began to lose their power.

I realised that understanding these ideas was not merely an intellectual exercise. It was the foundation of the practice. If everything is impermanent, then my pain and my thoughts are also impermanent. They will change and eventually fade.

Anatta helped me understand that my fear of the future was a product of my mind, not necessarily a reflection of reality.

The third lesson was samata, or equanimity—the ability to observe reality without immediately judging or reacting to it.

When you meditate, the mind constantly runs away into thought. You bring it back to the breath. Then it wanders again. You bring it back again.

The same principle applies to anger, irritation, pain and every other sensation or thought. You observe it without judging or evaluating it.

Gradually, this habit of equanimity moved beyond meditation and into everyday life. I began observing unfavourable situations without immediately reacting emotionally. I spent less time thinking obsessively about every small thing that did not go my way.

I began to understand that there are no dramatic solutions to every difficult situation. Improvement takes time.

I continued exploring Buddhism, attended more Vipassana courses and practised meditation regularly. I also began exploring ancient Sanskrit literature, particularly the Upanishads. These traditions changed not only my worldview but also the way I looked at ordinary life.

Slowly, I began to feel better, more confident and more hopeful.

I started finding the old me in the new me—not the same person, but an upgraded one.

How did it happen?

It did not happen overnight. It was not magic. It was a gradual process of changing my patterns of thought. It began with something as simple as observing the breath.

When you observe your breath, your mind stays in the present instead of wandering constantly into the past or future. For me, learning to stay in the present was transformative.

When my mind wandered into the past, I would replay conversations, mistakes and things that had gone wrong. Then it would jump into the future, imagining how I could fix them or what might happen next.

For someone already struggling with depress