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• Personal Growth

August 2016

By Suzy Singh

It took a head-on collision for Suzy Singh to understand that she was on Planet Earth to grow and evolve, and exiting was not an option Swinging playfully on the iron gates that guarded our Jaipur home, I was blissfully unaware that a forthcoming event was going to change my life forever. I will never know what prompted that monk to walk up to me, other than the idea conceived years later, that perhaps he had some kind of soul contract to awaken my superconscious memory. Smiling compassionately, he had removed the rosary made of Tulsi beads from his neck and handing them over to me, he had disappeared without saying a single word. Thirty-six years later, I still cannot fathom if he had really vanished before my eyes that day, or if I had imagined the whole thing. But strange things had started to happen after I wore that rosary.

Peculiar happiness would overcome me that compelled me to hide each day in my mother’s dark storeroom where I would close my eyes and practice placing my attention between my eyebrows. At 15, when all my friends were reading romantic novels, I was romancing a formless entity called God. It was shortly after this event that my father’s friend gifted him the first-ever spiritual text I was to read, which was quite aptly titled, The Call of the Master. Reading it further accelerated my spiritual ardor and put me firmly onto a lifelong quest for truth. Romancing God From then on, the universe connected me to many spiritual paths and masters in the most magical ways. People I had never met or known would invite me to attend discourses, satsangs, and talks by enlightened masters. I had the opportunity to train under several renowned spiritual teachers, read rare texts, and receive the gift of many healing methods. The Divine seemed to be showering His immense grace on me, and slowly but surely it was awakening my memory and purpose of incarnating on earth which was to know God and return to Him. My life at that time was traveling along the parallel tracks of material and spiritual endeavors. The twain, they say, never meets, and so, after 16 years of chasing corporate net worth, I gave up my advertising career suddenly. The reason was simple. My soul’s calling was beginning to overwhelm my worldly pastime as an advertising professional. I would go into trance at important meetings, began seeing people’s auras indiscriminately, and was frequently making the error of speaking and supporting what I believed to be true, rather than being strategically or politically wise at work. Clearly, it was time to choose what I really wanted to do with my life, and I decided to walk away from that make-believe world of glamour.

Call of the soul

Having forsaken a thrilling career in advertising for the calling of my soul, I moved to Delhi and set up my first healing center in 1998. With each passing day, my meditations became deeper and my soul ached for Divine union. When I wasn’t busy with healing sessions, I would be lost in meditation, sometimes for hours at a stretch. But something about my spiritual efforts was still not quite right, as I was to discover after the spring of 1999. We had gone to the hills for a short vacation with my parents when it happened. Having retired to our beds after a peaceful family meditation, we woke up to find the whole house rocking to an earthquake, 6.7 points on the Richter scale. The windows rattled like they were about to shatter and the roof trembled nervously. That night was the longest in my life. I prayed and chanted in the dark with my husband crouching over the entwined form of my six-year-old daughter and me, hoping to protect us both if the roof came down. To our relief, the heaving and moving of the earth finally stopped and we lived to see the morning sunrise. Devastated, we cut short our family vacation and decided fearfully to return home to safety. We had barely reached the foothills when our car broke down giving me the opportunity to meditate at the recently built Sai temple that I had secretly yearned to visit. The development of faith must bear many trials and tribulations, but I was yet to experience that. Recommencing our journey, we discovered to our dismay that we had somehow ended up taking the wrong route, one that we were going to regret eventually. It was getting dark and my head had started throbbing with terrible pain. For some reason, I clung desperately onto the prasad and holy cloth from Baba’s temple that was resting in my lap. Chanting his name, I closed my eyes, and then suddenly, there was a loud bang. Colliding with reality My headache vanished magically as I found myself floating effortlessly towards the light. Weightless and free, I rose gently into a timeless sphere until I heard a terrible shriek coming from someplace very far away but it sounded extremely familiar. In an instant, something that is impossible to describe in words, shifted in my energy, making me aware that it was my husband’s voice beseeching to know where our child was. Like a vacuum sucks in the dirt, I was suddenly brought back into my body and into a very different world, one where pain and misery felt very real. On the earth sphere, our car had met with a terrible head-on collision with a tractor-trolley. The windshield had crashed into my face tearing open my forehead in a near-fatal injury. The villagers had dragged my wailing child out of the crumpled car and my father lay unconscious on the back seat, while my mother moaned in great pain with a damaged ribcage. Thankfully, my husband didn’t have a single scratch on him and could thus arrange the much-needed rescue operations in time. In the days that followed, I battled with God, with the unfeeling and often callous medical fraternity, with the painful prison of my human form, and the deep emotional turmoil in my heart when my daughter failed to recognize me. (My whole face had been patched up with stitches, a pretty scary and probably ugly sight, particularly for a little child.) As I tended to my wounds and my family’s scars, I asked God a question every single day for several years to come, “I was already on the path, why then did I have to undergo this? What is it I am not seeing? What do I need to learn from this accident?” It was the longest and hardest conversation I ever had with Him because the answers took so long to come. But somewhere deep within, God was chipping away at my impatience. He was teaching me quietly that I was not here to escape this earth reality and return to Him, I was here to grow and evolve. Unconditional acceptance I learned painfully and slowly that being here on earth required an unconditional acceptance not only of the universal human condition of suffering and rampant unkindness but also of our personal experiences of misery and pain. Regardless of how much we ached to return to a state of peace, tranquillity, and stillness, we had to develop the fortitude to endure this suffering and rise above this unpleasant state while we were still in our human bodies so that we could create peace on earth, not just for ourselves but for others too. Suzy Singh was led to understand that life was for learning. I guess I had not fully embraced my earth reality and wished perhaps for a premature return to God through my spirituality, but that was an escape, not the evolution of my soul. I had to stay right here and stand face to face with my fears, learning to overcome them, and feeling safe while I was here. I had to belong to these people of the earth, sharing with them and teaching them what I had learned. “If I had wanted you to remain here with me, I wouldn’t have sent you down there to complete your work,” I heard God say. “Accomplish your purpose, finish what you have been assigned, be brave, learn, conquer your infirmities, and find me there itself on earth,” He said. That’s when my true spiritual journey began. Without wasting any further time I started deconstructing my fears, expunging the darkness in my soul, searching for humility and truth, and learning to find God, in everything that I did and every person I met. The car crash was working its miracle on my soul; it was helping me seek the difference between truth and false beliefs. But most importantly, it was making me realize that God did not dwell in some imagined heaven that I had to escape to; he lived in every heart that loved selflessly, regardless of which plane of existence that experience was occurring in. My suffering had cracked open the shell of my soul and it had finally let the light of truth in.

About the author: Suzy Singh is a transpersonal therapist, karma coach, and energy healer with extensive clinical experience in multidisciplinary approaches to vibrational and spiritual healing. Her practice is based out of Delhi.