Luke Benoit's Blog
August 27, 2012
Where did the Meditations Go? and Where Have I Been?
“Vertigo” or “Where I’ve Been in Case You Missed Me?”
I’ve never understood why those thrill seekers chase storms. They always seem to find me all on their own.
In the second or third week of January (so hard for me to believe that I actually had to trace it back on the calendar) my life literally fell into a spin like a hurricane or a tornado had blown in taking the house that was me up into for more than half a year. That’s where I have been.
It was a weekday, a workday evening and I was driving home around 7pm on the 55 freeway South going home. There was traffic. And then the world started to spin. And the car started to spin and rattle and shake like I was inside a child’s toy gyroscope or a time travel machine out of an old science fiction movie I couldn’t remember or in the middle of a washing machine violently thrusting like the inside of a giant crashing wave throwing you to the ground but not stopping.
And I thought: oh, God. Not again. This is it. This is the day I die. This is the moment. And I thought, oh, well, if this is my time, I’m ready. My affairs are in order and I’m as right as I can be with everyone who is important to me. And I said out loud
“God, please help me.”
And blindly, I tried to hold onto the wheel and I pushed the emergency button for the flashers on the dashboard and with no choices, I started to veer across the lanes and the next lanes beyond all logic and laws of gravity to a stop on the side of the road soaked with sweat and sick to my stomach in a way that it spread dusky green through my entire body like the flesh of a zombie. And I tried to close my eyes to try to just make it stop.
All of this had happened to me about a year and a half before. At that time, there had been three or four, maybe five attacks that in a cluster that lasted about three weeks before they stopped. Without explanation. And they always happened when I was driving.
And here I was again on the side of the road afraid that I was going to hit by the speeding traffic begging for it not to hit me and for the vertigo to subside until I couldn’t wait anymore. I inched the car down the next exit ramp, rolled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 put the seat back and fell into a sweaty sleep. I couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Vertigo is not just the name of a Hitchcock movie or always a little dizziness that’s more of an inconvenience than anything else or a self-indulgence that neurotics get over dramatic about. Vertigo is more than dizziness. Vertigo is a bodily state of terror, the physical illusion that the world is moving around you even though things are actually standing still although it isn’t really happening and a body full of panic and sickness.
Most cases of vertigo are caused by tiny bone fragments within the inner ear that have become dislodged and are causing an equilibrium imbalance (this is called Benign Positional Vertigo). But not here.
I went to the Doctor and I went to the Chiropractor and they moved my head around to shake the little bone shards lose but it didn’t help. And I took sea sickness medicines, Dramamine and Meclazine that made me sleepy but helped only a little. And I wore pressure point sea sickness bracelets and vertigo aromatherapy drops. But I wasn’t on the high seas.
I went to the eye doctor and went to physical therapy for eye exercises because your eyes and your stomach play huge roles in your equilibrium and balance. And that helped a lot but didn’t solve the problem. And I went to an inner ear dizziness specialist and they wondered if maybe I might have had a stroke. Or whether I had a brain tumor or if I had MS. They gave me a referral to a neurologist to examine my brain to rule these things out but I was too afraid to go. I didn’t even want to drive to the doctor’s office.
The group suggestion seemed to be that it was all likely caused by a virus in my ear and that there was no way to tell how long it might go on. It might be a few months or disappear tomorrow. Then again they told me, for some people, it just never goes away. They just have to learn to live with it for the rest of their lives. My mind reeled and now my mind was spinning. I felt broken and fell into a state of panic and depression and the anxiety and depression got worse as the days went by.
I was prescribed more medicine to get my body to relax because now why whole body would lock up and freeze which only made the symptoms come on more. It helped, especially when I had to drive which had become a regular experience like something out of a horror movie. You never know how much of your life depends on driving until you can’t do it anymore.
The medicines started to effect me but I didn’t get it that something was going wrong. I was so relieved for the times when the panic would break that I just bought that whatever the side effects were, I just had to put up with them. And I believed that I had no choices, that this was the only thing that I could do that this terrible doom fate had been visited upon me and more and more there was no way out.
I was sleeping in every free moment because I could hardly stay awake but my family thought I was more lazy than incapacitated. The irony was that I had written a book about fighting depression, finding your True Authentic Self and pulling yourself out of the darkness and now I had reached a point where I was so knocked down that I couldn’t do anything to support the book or make it known in the world. I had come to live in this ongoing state of despair just trying to keep walking, wishing desperately not wanting to be different but with people everywhere I’d go coming up to me and saying “Are you all right? You don’t look like yourself. Are you sure you are OK? I’m worried about you.”
It was when only when I realized that I had lost my capacity to write (that is handwrite) and that when I read the left side pages of books the words would float and move around and switch places. Then I saw that the left side of my body was jerking involuntarily and I was slurring my words. And I started to think that maybe I actually had had a stroke. Isn’t this what would happen to you? And I was terrified because that was what had caused my mother’s father’s death of years of endless suffering.
In my fear and desperate denial to believe I had not had a stroke, I did not see that I had become dependent on the medicines and once I finally go it, I immediately went to the doctors to get detoxed. I gave up and made the decision that if I had to live in a world where I would never be able to leave the house and just give up on trying to go out and interact with the rest of the world, that it would have to be better than this.
It took about two and a half months for my body to balance out again and then it was physically over. And it took three months after that to bounce back from how low I had become and the tolls it had taken in virtually every area of my life. To just to be able to get up and stand up and just be able to function and get back into the stream of life.
It is now August 26, 2012, and at the time of this writing, things have stabilized. Cross your fingers. Is it really over? And I actually feel hopeful again, like things are good and maybe a shoe won’t drop. It’s been almost like rebuilding a city after a flood or after a storm after some time has passed.
And I am back swimming in all my work again and swimming in my life. Like swimming in waters that have balanced out again after that storm, after the hurricane and the tornado have gone.
And I have to remember one more time that even when the sky seems darkest, it’s only a sign that light is coming. That the light is on the way.
And I guess it’s really true that they do…
(as someone once told me)
All storms pass.
-- Luke Benoit, CC CPH
Certified Professional Hypnotist
Certified Life Coach
Author, All Storms Pass: The Anti-Meditations
ALL STORMS PASS; The Anti-Meditations
I’ve never understood why those thrill seekers chase storms. They always seem to find me all on their own.
In the second or third week of January (so hard for me to believe that I actually had to trace it back on the calendar) my life literally fell into a spin like a hurricane or a tornado had blown in taking the house that was me up into for more than half a year. That’s where I have been.
It was a weekday, a workday evening and I was driving home around 7pm on the 55 freeway South going home. There was traffic. And then the world started to spin. And the car started to spin and rattle and shake like I was inside a child’s toy gyroscope or a time travel machine out of an old science fiction movie I couldn’t remember or in the middle of a washing machine violently thrusting like the inside of a giant crashing wave throwing you to the ground but not stopping.
And I thought: oh, God. Not again. This is it. This is the day I die. This is the moment. And I thought, oh, well, if this is my time, I’m ready. My affairs are in order and I’m as right as I can be with everyone who is important to me. And I said out loud
“God, please help me.”
And blindly, I tried to hold onto the wheel and I pushed the emergency button for the flashers on the dashboard and with no choices, I started to veer across the lanes and the next lanes beyond all logic and laws of gravity to a stop on the side of the road soaked with sweat and sick to my stomach in a way that it spread dusky green through my entire body like the flesh of a zombie. And I tried to close my eyes to try to just make it stop.
All of this had happened to me about a year and a half before. At that time, there had been three or four, maybe five attacks that in a cluster that lasted about three weeks before they stopped. Without explanation. And they always happened when I was driving.
And here I was again on the side of the road afraid that I was going to hit by the speeding traffic begging for it not to hit me and for the vertigo to subside until I couldn’t wait anymore. I inched the car down the next exit ramp, rolled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 put the seat back and fell into a sweaty sleep. I couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Vertigo is not just the name of a Hitchcock movie or always a little dizziness that’s more of an inconvenience than anything else or a self-indulgence that neurotics get over dramatic about. Vertigo is more than dizziness. Vertigo is a bodily state of terror, the physical illusion that the world is moving around you even though things are actually standing still although it isn’t really happening and a body full of panic and sickness.
Most cases of vertigo are caused by tiny bone fragments within the inner ear that have become dislodged and are causing an equilibrium imbalance (this is called Benign Positional Vertigo). But not here.
I went to the Doctor and I went to the Chiropractor and they moved my head around to shake the little bone shards lose but it didn’t help. And I took sea sickness medicines, Dramamine and Meclazine that made me sleepy but helped only a little. And I wore pressure point sea sickness bracelets and vertigo aromatherapy drops. But I wasn’t on the high seas.
I went to the eye doctor and went to physical therapy for eye exercises because your eyes and your stomach play huge roles in your equilibrium and balance. And that helped a lot but didn’t solve the problem. And I went to an inner ear dizziness specialist and they wondered if maybe I might have had a stroke. Or whether I had a brain tumor or if I had MS. They gave me a referral to a neurologist to examine my brain to rule these things out but I was too afraid to go. I didn’t even want to drive to the doctor’s office.
The group suggestion seemed to be that it was all likely caused by a virus in my ear and that there was no way to tell how long it might go on. It might be a few months or disappear tomorrow. Then again they told me, for some people, it just never goes away. They just have to learn to live with it for the rest of their lives. My mind reeled and now my mind was spinning. I felt broken and fell into a state of panic and depression and the anxiety and depression got worse as the days went by.
I was prescribed more medicine to get my body to relax because now why whole body would lock up and freeze which only made the symptoms come on more. It helped, especially when I had to drive which had become a regular experience like something out of a horror movie. You never know how much of your life depends on driving until you can’t do it anymore.
The medicines started to effect me but I didn’t get it that something was going wrong. I was so relieved for the times when the panic would break that I just bought that whatever the side effects were, I just had to put up with them. And I believed that I had no choices, that this was the only thing that I could do that this terrible doom fate had been visited upon me and more and more there was no way out.
I was sleeping in every free moment because I could hardly stay awake but my family thought I was more lazy than incapacitated. The irony was that I had written a book about fighting depression, finding your True Authentic Self and pulling yourself out of the darkness and now I had reached a point where I was so knocked down that I couldn’t do anything to support the book or make it known in the world. I had come to live in this ongoing state of despair just trying to keep walking, wishing desperately not wanting to be different but with people everywhere I’d go coming up to me and saying “Are you all right? You don’t look like yourself. Are you sure you are OK? I’m worried about you.”
It was when only when I realized that I had lost my capacity to write (that is handwrite) and that when I read the left side pages of books the words would float and move around and switch places. Then I saw that the left side of my body was jerking involuntarily and I was slurring my words. And I started to think that maybe I actually had had a stroke. Isn’t this what would happen to you? And I was terrified because that was what had caused my mother’s father’s death of years of endless suffering.
In my fear and desperate denial to believe I had not had a stroke, I did not see that I had become dependent on the medicines and once I finally go it, I immediately went to the doctors to get detoxed. I gave up and made the decision that if I had to live in a world where I would never be able to leave the house and just give up on trying to go out and interact with the rest of the world, that it would have to be better than this.
It took about two and a half months for my body to balance out again and then it was physically over. And it took three months after that to bounce back from how low I had become and the tolls it had taken in virtually every area of my life. To just to be able to get up and stand up and just be able to function and get back into the stream of life.
It is now August 26, 2012, and at the time of this writing, things have stabilized. Cross your fingers. Is it really over? And I actually feel hopeful again, like things are good and maybe a shoe won’t drop. It’s been almost like rebuilding a city after a flood or after a storm after some time has passed.
And I am back swimming in all my work again and swimming in my life. Like swimming in waters that have balanced out again after that storm, after the hurricane and the tornado have gone.
And I have to remember one more time that even when the sky seems darkest, it’s only a sign that light is coming. That the light is on the way.
And I guess it’s really true that they do…
(as someone once told me)
All storms pass.
-- Luke Benoit, CC CPH
Certified Professional Hypnotist
Certified Life Coach
Author, All Storms Pass: The Anti-Meditations
ALL STORMS PASS; The Anti-Meditations
April 5, 2012
HOW DARE YOU LET ME DOWN -or- Today, I will realize that sometimes PEOPLE WILL LET YOU DOWN and I can let it be OK
__________________________
and maybe it's unrealistic to think
that they won't or that it's the end of
the world when they do
and just like with the rest of life,
life isn't about what happens to you
it's what you do with it...
and to realize that
there is no tragedy here
and I can almost always do
for myself what I thought I
needed you to do
for me.
And it doesn't mean
I'll always be let down
or I can't trust anyone to be there
for me or that the world is an
UNTRUSTWORTHY PLACE.
Just that I need
to pay closer attention to
what I ask of you and whether or not
it's realistic
and SEE
the obvious things
about people that are
right in front of my face
even when I
don't want to
SEE THEM.
and maybe it's unrealistic to think
that they won't or that it's the end of
the world when they do
and just like with the rest of life,
life isn't about what happens to you
it's what you do with it...
and to realize that
there is no tragedy here
and I can almost always do
for myself what I thought I
needed you to do
for me.
And it doesn't mean
I'll always be let down
or I can't trust anyone to be there
for me or that the world is an
UNTRUSTWORTHY PLACE.
Just that I need
to pay closer attention to
what I ask of you and whether or not
it's realistic
and SEE
the obvious things
about people that are
right in front of my face
even when I
don't want to
SEE THEM.
April 4, 2012
meditation: no one is a MIND READER and we can't CHANGE THE PAST
__________________________
but sometimes,
we still
don't know how
to
LET GO.
but sometimes,
we still
don't know how
to
LET GO.
April 3, 2012
meditation: Today, I will finally see that THE CONTENT IS IRRELEVANT
__________________________
and I will stop trying to
INJECT MY AGENDA
and realize that the content
of what we are talking about
is irrelevant and that the
STRUCTURE and the
FORM and the
HOW of how we are talking
to each other is the only thing
that's important.
That by really listening to you,
I will transmit the message
that "I think you matter"
so that I can know that I matter
and wasn't that all each one of us
ever really wanted
in the first place?
__________________
Luke Benoit CC, CPH
Author, ALL STORMS PASS
the Anti-Meditations
Certified Life Coach
Certified Professional Hypnotist
NLP Practitioner
562/618-3099
www.lukebenoit.com
www.lukethecoach.com
Twitter: @LukeBenoit12
and I will stop trying to
INJECT MY AGENDA
and realize that the content
of what we are talking about
is irrelevant and that the
STRUCTURE and the
FORM and the
HOW of how we are talking
to each other is the only thing
that's important.
That by really listening to you,
I will transmit the message
that "I think you matter"
so that I can know that I matter
and wasn't that all each one of us
ever really wanted
in the first place?
__________________
Luke Benoit CC, CPH
Author, ALL STORMS PASS
the Anti-Meditations
Certified Life Coach
Certified Professional Hypnotist
NLP Practitioner
562/618-3099
www.lukebenoit.com
www.lukethecoach.com
Twitter: @LukeBenoit12
meditation: Today, I will admit that sometimes BEING STUCK IS A CHOICE...
__________________________
and I will think about
all the many times in life
I have been stuck
and I will think about all of the
possibilities
I didn't see...
And the things I told myself
that kept me
frozen
paralyzed
and without options
and the excuses I made
for you and for me
and others I blamed.
Maybe because it was really
necessary or I can't handle
facing or CHANGING
or maybe that Choosing
was just
OK?
and I will think about
all the many times in life
I have been stuck
and I will think about all of the
possibilities
I didn't see...
And the things I told myself
that kept me
frozen
paralyzed
and without options
and the excuses I made
for you and for me
and others I blamed.
Maybe because it was really
necessary or I can't handle
facing or CHANGING
or maybe that Choosing
was just
OK?
meditation: Sometimes I don't want to hear you say that Forgiveness will set me free
__________________________
Sometimes the last thing you want to hear
is how
forgiveness
will set you free.
But there is no understanding this
because It is beyond understanding.
And some things will never be right.
It can never make sense.
But you can become free
in time no matter how impossible
it seems right now
and you will be
a more compassionate
different, richer
person.
And it will give you something
that will let you help
someone else
Sometimes the last thing you want to hear
is how
forgiveness
will set you free.
But there is no understanding this
because It is beyond understanding.
And some things will never be right.
It can never make sense.
But you can become free
in time no matter how impossible
it seems right now
and you will be
a more compassionate
different, richer
person.
And it will give you something
that will let you help
someone else
March 30, 2012
NEW MEDITATION: What more were you waiting for?
SOMETIMES THE MESSAGES ARE ALL AROUND ME
BUT I STILL CAN'T SEE THEM
_______________________
Because they're not what I want to hear
and I don't want to see them
Because I'm clinging to something I
don't want to let go of
Because I'm clinging to something I
love
that I don't know how to be
WITHOUT.
And I can spin my wheels like
the man in the old story
who was given warning
the a flood was coming and
decided to stay in his house
because "God will provide"
and when they sent the boat
when the water was rising
and he refused to get in and
then turned away the helicopter
when he'd stranded himself
on the roof and continued to
say
GOD WILL PROVIDE
until finally he drowned
And God said, I sent you
a warning
and I sent you a boat
and I sent you a helicopter...
WHAT MORE WERE
YOU WAITING FOR?
BUT I STILL CAN'T SEE THEM
_______________________
Because they're not what I want to hear
and I don't want to see them
Because I'm clinging to something I
don't want to let go of
Because I'm clinging to something I
love
that I don't know how to be
WITHOUT.
And I can spin my wheels like
the man in the old story
who was given warning
the a flood was coming and
decided to stay in his house
because "God will provide"
and when they sent the boat
when the water was rising
and he refused to get in and
then turned away the helicopter
when he'd stranded himself
on the roof and continued to
say
GOD WILL PROVIDE
until finally he drowned
And God said, I sent you
a warning
and I sent you a boat
and I sent you a helicopter...
WHAT MORE WERE
YOU WAITING FOR?
March 26, 2012
MY INTERVIEW! / ALL STORMS PASS
http://blip.tv/letitshineshow/let-it-...
Here is me being interviewed by Spanish born Isabel Rojo who does her "LET IT SHINE SHOW" in both English and Spanish...
The beginning is about my work as a Life Coach and Hypnotherapist and the last part is about my book ALL STORMS PASS.
I think I scared her a little bit at the end because she wasn't expecting I could get so loud.
Thanks Isabel!
Here is me being interviewed by Spanish born Isabel Rojo who does her "LET IT SHINE SHOW" in both English and Spanish...
The beginning is about my work as a Life Coach and Hypnotherapist and the last part is about my book ALL STORMS PASS.
I think I scared her a little bit at the end because she wasn't expecting I could get so loud.
Thanks Isabel!
March 25, 2012
(workshop version) I will not be afraid when good things happen
TODAY, I will not be AFRAID
when GOOD THINGS HAPPEN...
and I will trust that they
will work out
and I won't lose
and I won't end up in
PAIN
and I will realize that
the doubt and pain I am
generating now
are coming from
INSIDE ME.
when GOOD THINGS HAPPEN...
and I will trust that they
will work out
and I won't lose
and I won't end up in
PAIN
and I will realize that
the doubt and pain I am
generating now
are coming from
INSIDE ME.
March 22, 2012
LIGHTS, CAMERA...!
Today is the taping of my interview on the cable TV talk show LET IT SHINE! with host, Isabel Rolo about me and ALL STORMS PASSED. The cameras roll at 1:30p so cross your fingers or say a little prayer around that time. And hope for good lighting!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Let-It-...
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Let-It-...
