The power of our mind

I want to bring you in to my life and story, to share with you some insight into your own strength. How can I know you are strong? How can I know you have it in you? Allow me a little of your time here and let me share my own story with you.

I have had cause to change my own life when I was only 17 years of age. I was a wayward teenager who would not conform for anyone. My parents, my friends nor the law of society. I wanted to be bold and great and wonderful and an all round fun guy. My teenage years flew by and by the time I was 16/17 I was a regular visitor to our local district Court for all kinds of drunken altercations. I was using drugs and the more I did them the more I wanted, even more. This I can tell you is not a nice way to be when the system decides there is only one place for you and that is prison. It is from my prison cell that opportunity came knocking, not just to score some extra drugs inside prison, no, the opportunity was to get out. The opportunity was an open type group home for teenagers who were abusing drugs and alcohol. It is here where I learned that my feelings are just feelings and they can pass by just as easily as they arrived. I gained the benefit of group therapy and while all the time my stay there was under a court order and the threat of  a “suspended sentence” hanging over my head. I forgot all about the courts and the cops and all the sentencing stuff I was facing. I began to grow. I was learning tools for life and I was still only a teenager with my whole life to live ahead of me.

Sober living life afforded me some wonderful travels around the world and all the while the foundations I had learned about how to say no to drugs and alcohol were only growing stronger with each day and year of my life. To appreciate the simple beauties of life and the world are things I never took for granted. I was very clear and understood I was on a second chance at the whole game of life and I really told myself to enjoy every ounce of it.

I became a father when I was 20 and probably the happiest day of my life and still only 20. My beautiful son was born and we named him Darra. You might be wondering why I would share these tidbits with you and what could be the whole story to my transformation as a teenager, well I can tell you that they are just the important pieces to know.

When I turned 35 in 2011, life was still wonderful and I was to continue on travelling around the world and had settled in the beautiful paradise of Costa Rica. This really is a paradise like you cannot believe. A simple country where you can taste life in the air. Being from Ireland anywhere with sun every day and an average temperature of low 20’s every single day of the year, well you can understand why it is paradise to an Irish man. The rain is warm and everything gets dry very quickly after any rains. I was returning home from work one morning at 8 am, the night shift was over and all the accounting for the week prior totted up to perfection. Sleep and the day off by the pool later were my plans. I received a phone call from the office that my brother who lived in Sweeden was trying to reach me and so they patched the call through to my mobile phone. This was the phone call that changed my life. Have you ever had a situation change your life?

What my brother John told me that my morning changed even the taste in my mouth. My mind ran wild and I had something come over me that I had never experienced before. I was a fun loving guy who had learned about life and his feelings as a teenager. I had good solid footings inside of myself as a man, nothing could ever have prepared me. John pleaded with me to call home and speak to my mother. We went back and forth and I was for sure certain that something had happened to my grandmother and my brother needed me to hear it from my mother. I demanded he tell me and as he sobbed on the other end of the phone, I made my tone very precise and clear to him. “John I am in in a third world country where I could lose my phone signal. We are on an Internet phone connection, tell me what is wrong?”

Aidan, he said. I could hear him shaking almost down the phone, “Aidan it’s your son Darra, he is dead. He didn’t wake up for school, I am sorry”, oh god even writing this here right now has brought a lump to the back of my throat. My life changed.

I ran for a plane and as quick as I could I was travelling to Ireland, some 14 and a half hours on planes and then 4 hours driving through Ireland. I made it to his wake, there was my baby 15 years of age in a coffin in the front room of his family home. Nothing prepares us for this, no classes in school and not even the extreme of a treatment center where I was, at 17. Nowhere and nobody could have ever prepared any of us who lost Darra. I cannot speak for his mom and or step dad who also were in the worst nightmare just as I was. This day was the worst of my life for sure. In hindsight what had happened to me was I went into shock, the trauma was real and I had to travel across the world unknowing really how I did it or at the time how I coped with any of it.

If we fast forward two years, I find myself back in Costa Rica and with my beautiful new born baby Patrick. A father once again and all the nerves of having a new little boy and all the grief of having lost Darra. The mind is very powerful indeed. The days I wanted to bury my head in the sand and just wanted to cry, I had Patrick to come home from work to and hold and hug and play with. How did I ever cope with the loss of Darra? When I wanted to give up on everything because basically it is what grief does to you when you lose your child. It plays with your mind, causes havoc with your emotions and just leaves you steam rolled. Flat like a pancake. Patrick was born in February 2013 and so it really all happened fast as I was trying to come to terms with the loss of Darra. I had been given a new gift of life while I was struggling so deep inside with loss of life. I felt guilty sometimes to smile and have fun, I didn’t want anyone else to love my new baby only me because I was so sad with all my love now turned inside out for Darra.

In the morning of July 6th 2014 Patrick found his way out to a swimming pool and drowned. He was 1 year old and 4 months only. I was pool side with him performing mouth to mouth resuscitation, it just wasn’t working. The taste is still on my lips some 5 years later. I stood in an ambulance and then again in an emergency room trying to will him to live. I am not sure if you can imagine what it might be like for a father who has lost his first born son to be standing in an emergency room watching a rescue effort take place in front of my very own eyes for my second son who was laying there all angelic like. Yes I was going through what now seemed the toughest day of my life. I already knew what being graveside to my son was like. The things flashing through my head just abnormal, let’s call them crazy even. It happened again. Another coffin and another grave. Who on earth could imagine this. It all happened in my life and I find it hard some days to even understand how or why or what.

It is these questions that can drive us very deep into places of bitterness, bitterness towards ourselves or towards the entire world. Not just the immediate society around us but the entire world. I had walked the right side since making a correction in life at the young age of 17. What exactly was going on? You do not have to have suffered loss and grief like I did to understand what the effects of negative thinking can do. Any trauma or head racing with questions can bring us down and really when I say down I am referring to way down deep inside ourselves. Life can seem just not worth it, if you have ever found yourself asking yourself “what’s it all for?” or “what’s the point” then it might be for you that I began writing. I understand what is it like to have our mind race into a frenzy of thoughts, I am aware what it is like to be so emotionally congested that I have felt like tearing my own heart out. These things are real and not only because of grief. It can happen to any of us for anything.

I began writing my story to help me get it out of myself and put into a thing, a project to take the feelings out of my inner self and allow myself a chance to look at it, read it and see could I convince myself it has all been true and it is all real. It is through writing my books that I have found a great way to allow myself be somewhere else. Be back in my thoughts and recall the happy times even though it has been the devastating blows in life that have inspired me to look back, I began to find some happy thoughts and some of the fonder memories too. This brought a smile to my face. If I can have a smile and remember some of the nice stuff so can anyone, that is my honest belief.

I have learned that we always have a choice. We can allow ourselves to be down and extremely sad. We have the ability to allow or mind drag us so far down that we convince ourselves that we can never get back up. This is where through taking my time and writing about how I have felt and what my thoughts were like that I learned how to break things down to even a simpler format. Simplicity is a marvelous thing. If you would like to think about it for a moment…..

I gave a talk in Dublin earlier this year to a very attentive crowd and I was approached afterwards by one of the audience. The lady asked me “when you mentioned having been in places of great darkness, how did you find your way out? What did you do?” I had no prepared answer for her. I answered though, “if we can break things back down to basics, we have a chance to understand them. What is the most simplest basic thing we can do as humans? We begin our life as a baby and as soon as we are born the midwife is smacking our bottom to get us to cry. Why do they want us to cry? They want us to breathe. Just breathe is what I found is the most simplistic I can make my life. To just breathe and then focus on my breathing and allow my body to just do what it has done from the very first moment I was brought into this world. Breathe, allow my mind to clear and allow my emotions to flow, these are the things that may bring even more tears to my eyes but that is totally okay. It is with this unlocking of my emotions that I can allow my mind to relax, to slow down. When our minds slow down now we have a chance to begin to understand and some of our frenzied type questioning also has slowed. This is where I can begin again. At any given moment on any given day I can begin again. It is like a reset button. Allowing myself to breathe has helped me claw my way right back out of dark places inside of myself and begin a new taste for life (lust for life).”

I hope she enjoyed my answer and although long I felt she and I were on a complete understanding of what we both meant at that exact moment.

I write my blog on random thoughts and sometimes a little here and there of what it is like to be a grieving father. I also continue writing books to hopefully provoke some thought in my readers. It is not for me to influence any person. I wish to help them begin to work on themselves by beginning to understand how, our head and our emotions can imprison us in our life. The questions can be so fast and so many, should we try and practice some breathing (some call it meditation) we can allow ourselves a chance to understand that the same emotions that we feel and the same thoughts and the same POWERFUL MIND can bring us right back to where we need to be. Content can happen and we can live on, finding little projects like writing for example or painting or gardening even. The difference is we are in control of our mind and emotions now and should they wish to run away with us, all that we have to do is pause for a moment and focus on our own breathing. Just like how the nurses did the day we were born. The nurses put their career and life into making sure we breathe. Now it is time for us to just keep on doing it when we need it.

I am a father who has buried his children and cried my eyes out sometimes for just seeing another father playing in the park with his child. Us men are not “supposed” to be so emotional. It is my emotions that have carried me through ever since learning all about them back when I was 17. Take my word for it. Life is beautiful and well worth living. So much to see and appreciate. So many friends to meet and laugh with. Perhaps it is because of my personal horrors that I have gained an ability to see the beauty in the world. I wish for you to not have to suffer like I have to gain the tools to see the beauty too. The very same mind that can drag us down is the same mind that can bring us right back up too. The Power of Our Mind is an amazing thing.