My path to wellbeing and mindfullness

Speaking to the people I know, they often describe me as a person who reflects a lot, is balanced, at peace, and always seeks opportunities to grow.

This sounds flattering, and I let them believe it as this is ultimately their perception and their view.

I rarely speak about my motivation and my background, about what makes me search for peace and balance. However recently I realized that this is important too. I've never ever met a person who is actively and passionately trying different tools, techniques, and approaches to improve their life without a serious trauma in their past.

From what I've seen, it could have been death, war, separation from a partner, a career crisis - life circumstances when they don't know how to live on. I've never met a person who lives a happy, fulfilled life and just does all this self-investigation and self-improvement for fun. Maybe those people exist, but I'm yet to meet them.

My state of balance, inner peace, and constant self-reflection are my daily choices and my daily hard work. Those don't come to me naturally. And yes, I have met people who are natural sunshines; I am not one of them.

My childhood ended abruptly when I was about 5 years old.

At that time my family lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, and in the 90s the Soviet Union fell apart and the civil war started. People shot each other on the streets; energy, water, and gas were shut down. My parents were suddenly considered "foreigners" because of their Russian-Ukrainian roots, got robbed and threatened. At the same time, my mother's parents, who lived in a small town called Orsk in Russia, died one after another. My mother fell into a deep depression, my father put his parents first, separated from my mother, and was trying to help his parents build a new home in Sochi, Russia. My older sister was a teenager who was trying to bring my parents together. I suddenly had to become an adult and look after myself.

I have lots of vivid memories from that time - neighbours dying of hunger and we couldn't help them, us fleeing from the war in Tbilisi and spending 3 nights on the cold marble floor at the airport hoping to get a flight out of the country. My mother, managing to sell my grandparents' apartment in Orsk, sat in a tram with an old brown leather suitcase full of paper money. Just a day later, another inflation wave hit the country, and we could barely buy a pair of shoes with all that money. People using drugs on the streets in Orsk, as the town became a drug trafficking route from Kazakhstan to Russia and no one cared in the wild 90s.

My parents came together again and decided to settle down in Sochi, at the Russian Black Sea coast. Why there? My father insisted on it- the climate is mild and similar to Tbilisi. He missed his hometown a lot.

As for me, I was often cold, hungry, overwhelmed and very silent. Expressing my own feelings was not on the agenda. It was considered a weakness and a luxury; we were trying to survive, shutting down our feelings and emotions.

My mother developed a vision for me to leave Russia for good sometime in the future, go to Western Europe where I could live freely and have opportunities to grow. Considering our status quo at that point, this vision was truly shooting for the moon. We were homeless, didn't have enough to eat, my mother was depressed, and my father took every job at every construction site he could find to earn some money.

Following her vision, my mother focused intensely on my education. I was expected to be the best at school, enter the best university, and go somewhere in Western Europe to build my best life there. There were many unknowns and variables in the plan, but it was clear that education was a priority. All I did was learn, receiving the best grades, and knowing even that wouldn't be good enough for my mum.

When I brought home the best grade possible, she asked me why it was just the best, and not the best with a star after it. I was trying to earn my mother's love by striving as hard as I could but didn't receive it. Sometimes I even wished I died so that she might finally show her love for me - I hadn't seen much of it when I was alive.

The obsession with my education was so bad that I wasn't allowed to have any spare time. My day was scheduled to the last minute - wake up at 6 am, school bus at 7, school starts at 8, school ends at 2-3 pm, come home for a quick lunch break and learn till 8 pm, bed at 9 pm.

No discussions, no exceptions. The focus was on foreign languages: English and German. I remember once she managed to book an expensive additional English course with an American tutor in a fancy place in the city center - all our savings went towards this one. The problem was that I didn't have much to wear for such a fancy course and I was always hungry.

So we quickly reviewed my old clothes, sewed them into slightly different ones, covering the holes, and coming back home after the fancy course, I knew what to expect for dinner. All three of us were shared the only chicken leg we had. First my father - he needed nutrients for his physically challenging job, then myself - I was growing and needed energy, my mother last. It still was the best chicken leg of my life.

Almost everyone I knew was living at that time in circumstances similar to ours and even worse; we were by no means an exception. There were parents who abandoned their children, mistreated them, and many were drinking heavily to escape reality.

What I found exceptional about my family later, is the fact how hard they - especially my mother - were trying to hide how poor we were. She was deeply ashamed of it and the thought of "what other people will think" threatened her to her core and caused her physical pain. Maintaining the good-looking facade, not losing face in front of others, making a good impression was so important and essential.

She was telling others stories how much they invested in my education, bragging about my successes at school, and was not telling them that we lived in an old sea container without water and energy supply so that I was doing my homework by candle light.

Despite all this, I had my happy moments and enjoyed them, developing my own coping mechanisms to deal with my reality. I found a deep connection with both nature—working in the garden, swimming in the sea, gathering wild fruits and berries in the forest—and animals. We had hens, a couple of cows, ducks, cats, dogs, and rabbits, which I fed and cared for.

I escaped my reality by reading books, which became my favourite pastime. I read all the books I could find at home and at the local library, including Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" at the age of 14.

I also shut down my emotions and feelings not to appear weak and leveraged my oversensitivity, using it to understand others' feelings and protect myself.

I was very far away from the mindfulness and wellbeing path, trying to survive and to get my core needs covered. But I was gathering lots of life experiences and baggage to let go of for the rest of my life. I didn't live the life I've freely chosen but lived the expectations of my mother, was trying to earn love with my performance, was ashamed of our poverty, and was trying to build a nice facade without having a proper foundation for it.

My intention in sharing this is not to blame anyone, claim exceptional hardship, or dwell on difficult times. Every person carries their own baggage and traumatic experiences, and these are all very different. Also, different experiences resonate differently - I met a person deeply traumatized by losing their mother out of sight in a supermarket, while other people endured heavy childhood abuse and seemed less traumatized by it. Everybody responds differently to life events, and it doesn't make sense to compare oneself with others. The only valid comparison is with yourself at different points in time. As for me, I gathered many experiences as a child that I needed to let go of later in life.

This is the source of my urge to search for balance and peace, making it part of my daily routine.