If there is something I fear more than death; it is my church’s weekend deliverance from demonic spirits program. I tell my friends that there is no way on earth a demon finds you fit to live in when you finish the program. Since I was seven, I have always avoided it by being a good child until when I was about sixteen; I woke up from a daydream sweating and breathless. It turned out a snake was chasing me. Unfortunately for me, my dad caught a whiff of this episode through my little brother (whose only talent is causing trouble and had undergone about 4 failed deliverance sessions) and decided without listening to my account of the dream that; the snake was, without doubt, a spirit. Without thinking about my emotional state of mind, he called our pastor and scheduled a deliverance.
I had wished that this deliverance thing was one of his billion 5-minute-ideas that he never followed through with, only for me to realize a day before the weekend that he meant business. Fast forward to the deliverance session, and I had to go without food and water for three days. For someone who eats as early as 7am under the guise that I may visit the gym when I am thirty, I knew I would not cope.
I had a taste of hell. The pain I felt was unbearable. I could feel my stomach decomposing or whatever happens to the stomach when there is no food in it. Weak and depressed, I kept wishing for an earthquake or a tornado (I eventually settled with a tsunami) so the program would end. For most of the deliverance program, I felt miserable until I stopped comparing what I wanted to feel like (filled with food and free from pain), to what I felt (hungry and dying), did things become better. I still felt hungry, but if you are not trying to avoid pain, if you just accept your fate, your whole experience is totally transformed.
That week, my wish that I should always feel comfortable, was ruthlessly tested. Yet for different reasons, this frustrating situation became one of my most rewarding learning experience. It all began when I viewed my situation as an opportunity—particularly my path to freedom from “always wanting to feel comfortable”. This awareness did not come during the deliverance program. In fact, I only realized this while writing now. But at one point during the program something became very clear: I may not like my problems and I can try to avoid them, but the fact remains that whatever is happening now, irrespective of how unpleasant it is, is my life. Whether I liked it is not the point; I have no choice than to embrace it.
A Buddhist friend once told me that being able to see our toughest experiences as an opportunity means that we realize how our difficult situations forces us to work with the things we fear the most and I can’t but think he is right. All my life, this has been one of my major flaw — not wanting to feel a particular way in losing someone, heartbreak and unpleasant things. That day, I had to stay present with whatever I was going through.
It was one of those situations that even though I was hungry, I was happy I was alive enough to feel pain. This lesson is just one of those things I have had to learn repeatedly—that to be happy, one must have known pain. And that every day, there is always a new lesson to be learnt, a new mystery to be revealed if we just embrace life.
I think it was a day or two after the deliverance session, that I saw a snake again — this time, real life. The piece-of-shit animal was at the gate while I was about to go out and fornicate. I can’t remember if it chased me or not, but I know I ran back inside the house only to find my dad about to use my laptop logged to a porn site.
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