Why I Had to Lose Everything to Find Myself
And why you don’t have to suffer to awaken
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Words: 2240 | Normal Reading: 11 minutes | Slow Reading: 22 minutes
I AM a failure.
I just turned 47, and I’m everything society says you shouldn’t be.
I had to lose everything to discover what cannot be lost. As you'll see, nothing teaches a lesson faster than serious illnesses, accidents, and great losses.
Rumi said: What hurts you, blesses you! Darkness is your candle.
Like a fierce grace, the spiritual awakening came to me. It stripped me of personhood completely, sending me inward to surrender at God’s feet.
There, in the quiet between grief and grace, I discovered the kingdom of heaven inside my own heart. It didn’t come from striving. It came when I stopped.
And now, even with nothing to show, I feel blessed like never before.
How Suffering Stripped Me of Everything I Was
You think you’re on a path to peace. But peace doesn’t come dressed in white robes and warm light. It comes like a storm. It comes to tear apart everything you think you are. And if you're lucky—if you're ready—it doesn’t leave until only the truth remains.
Spiritual awakening didn’t bring me peace. It took everything from me until only the Peace of God remained. Fierce Grace feels like hell while it burns away your false self and familiar world.
Every time I tried to rebuild my old life, life broke something else, as if it were telling me that you can’t go back to your old version. And that was the blessing.
Born Into Fire
I was born in India into poverty that tears at your bones. My father drove an auto-rickshaw, and later he sold things on the streets as a street hawker in the terrible heat of Indian summers. Our family survived on $2 a day in the 1980s. Some days, meeting our day-to-day necessities seemed like miracles. But we managed to survive. Barely.
My childhood neighbourhood, where I grew up, didn’t nurture dreams. It swallowed them. Addiction, violence, brokenness—every corner whispered, “This is all you’ll ever be.”
And yet, I worshipped my father. He worked through unbearable heat with kindness in his eyes. His suffering became the soil in which I planted my ambition.
The First Scar & The God I Couldn’t Find
One day, as a child, I uncovered something about my mother that I was never meant to know. I carried it in silence until the weight of it cracked me open. With trembling hands, I finally told my father in a letter. Eventually, my parents' love blossomed, and they loved us immensely. However, this event left a deep scar on my psyche.
During those times, my parents and society led me to religion. I followed the rituals, but I never felt the peace of God. The religious rituals of a culture that saw God as outside of us only left me feeling guilty, as if something was inherently wrong with me. The God I was taught to worship always seemed far away, distant, and judging. I couldn’t find peace there.
Building Success and Losing Everything
I left India for Dubai with fire in my belly. I couldn’t afford the education I wanted, so I took a job abroad. I worked hard, married young, and launched a real estate business. In just a few years, I became a millionaire.
Mansions. Luxury cars. Money. Success.
I had everything I once believed would make me whole.
But I wasn’t whole.
Behind the success was a growing greed for more. Behind the ambition was fear and emptiness. And then it all came crashing down in the 2008 financial recession. The global downturn wiped everything away—the business, the money, the future I had built.
I remember sitting alone after losing everything, holding a book, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I read a passage on page 53.
“Focus your attention on the Now and tell me what problem you have at this moment. I am not getting any answer because it is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now.”
My mind stopped. Time stopped.
And something vast opened up inside me.
I experienced a spiritual awakening that freed me from the illusion of thoughts. But it was only the beginning.
The Suffering That Followed
I moved back to India, broken and confused. Depression swallowed my days. My father—my quiet hero—was dying. Ten years of illness finally took him.
I buried the man who had carried me through life with blistered hands.
I left India for Singapore again, trying to regain my old identity that was taken from me during the 2008 financial recession.
Singapore. Malaysia. New businesses. A second chance.
But no matter what I tried… life said “NO”.
Every time I tried to return to my old self, rebuilding my old business, a new door slammed shut. Whenever I tried to revive my past, life shattered it again, piece by piece. Not out of cruelty, but to remind me. “You’ve outgrown that identity. Return to the truth.”
I thought I was being punished. But now I see… I was being saved.
The Body Became the Battlefield. The Illnesses Began.
In 2012, I went in for an MRI after sudden back pain.
The doctor looked me in the eyes with a stillness I’ll never forget.
They had detected a brain tumor.
The back pain began as a whisper. I had spine surgery in college, so I assumed the pain was back. But during the scan, they found something else—a shadow in the brain.
But instead of fear, I felt peace. Not on the surface but deep below the noise. Beneath the fear. Beneath the grief.
I had brain tumor surgery. I survived, but I didn’t come out the same.
After surgery, I tried to move on. Tried to rebuild the old identity—success, ambition, the familiar hustle. But my body wouldn’t cooperate.
Four years of chronic back pain followed after the brain tumor healed.
This back pain gave me sleepless nights, silent tears. I couldn’t walk properly. I felt as if I was trapped in my body.
One night, broken and desperate from back pain, I looked up at the sky and screamed. I spoke to my dead father, begging him to tell God: Heal me… or Take me.
My daughters held on to me. My wife held me as I sobbed.
I had nothing left—no strength, no hope. Only surrender.
The next morning, during meditation, a quiet whisper came:
“Try reading a book.”
That book was Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno.
Within 45 days, the pain was gone. But the real healing had just begun.
Fierce Grace Keeps Striking
The mind wasn’t finished. It resumed planning—new ventures, new ambitions. And life, in its fierce compassion, stepped in again.
My knee was shattered. A torn ACL. I couldn’t walk for two years.
Then my shoulder's rotator cuff tore, one of the most painful injuries imaginable. Doctors told me I might never regain full movement.
For another two years, pain was my only companion. But this time, I didn’t fight it. This time, I surrendered. Fully.
I made a vow to myself: No surgery. Not for my ACL. Not for my rotator cuff tear. The world said it was impossible. Doctors told me I’d never fully heal without going under the knife.
But something deeper in me refused. I chose a different path—one of listening to the body instead of silencing it. And against all odds, I healed. Naturally. Completely.
Not because it was easy. But because I believed that true healing doesn’t come from being cut open…
It comes from being fully present with what’s broken—until it remembers how to become whole again.
I stayed inward. I abided in Being—even when my body screamed. It was sacred suffering because it dissolved what was left of “me—Ego”
In the agony, I touched something more profound than joy.
A silence more vast than pleasure. A stillness no success had ever given me.
The mind that once ruled… finally surrendered.
Why Awakening Destroys You
During these challenging times, Ramana Maharshi's teachings transformed my life; I lost the fear of death and felt a profound sense of oneness with the world. My mind dissolved completely into my inner Being. I never felt depressed or anxious again, though the physical suffering continued.
However, now I no longer identify with the body or mind.
Now I understand why it all happened. My mind was never going to surrender by itself. It was built on fear. On trauma. On the desperate need to prove.
So Life stepped in. Each collapse wasn’t a punishment.
It was mercy. Fierce Grace.
Awakening doesn’t hand you bliss. It strips away illusion. You lose passion. Your career. Even the joy of simple pleasures disappears. Because your center of living shifts—from mind to Being.
And in that in-between, you ask:
→ Who am I without my old life?
→ Why doesn’t this feel like the “peace” I was promised?
→ Why work?
→ Why feed the body?
→ Why support a family… when everything feels meaningless?
The Sacred Phase of Being Nothing & Nobody
There’s a phase after awakening that almost no one talks about. It’s not glamorous and doesn’t get you recognition and thousands of likes. It doesn’t look like meditating in Bali or writing profound Instagram quotes.
It looks like this: sitting in silence, unable to explain and express yourself, while the world keeps rushing by.
Carl Jung would say you’re not lost. You’re in between. You’ve disidentified from the ego, but haven’t yet found a new way to live from the Self (Being).
This space is not a failure. It marks a significant transitional period in a person’s life. But in our hyperproductive world, stillness gets misdiagnosed as laziness. Pause gets mistaken for paralysis. So you judge yourself by thinking that there is something wrong with you, and that judgment blocks the energy of your Being that is trying to speak to you.
Jung had a term for this psychological pause: enantiodromia, the process where things flip into their opposite.
Carl Jung’s enantiodromia is the idea that everything, when taken to its extreme, eventually turns into its opposite.
In simple words:
If you push too far in one direction, life will pull you back the other way.
For example:
If you are overly disciplined and controlling, you might suddenly break down and become impulsive or chaotic.
If you chase success obsessively, you might one day feel completely worthless and unmotivated. (As your mind identity will break due to awakening)
Jung believed this “flip” isn’t a failure — it’s nature’s way of restoring balance to your psyche.
When you awaken, your inner pendulum swings from ego-driven striving to stillness of Being. You go from “I must do everything” to “Why do anything?” And this swing is sacred. It’s how balance is restored.
In myth and ancient teachings, this is the hermit phase—the death before rebirth. It’s the moment the caterpillar turns into a soup inside the cocoon. Not a butterfly yet. Not a bug anymore. Just… formlessness
And yeah, formlessness doesn’t hustle.
This is where the ego panics. It wants action, identity, and direction. But inner Being is whispering, Let go. I’m building something deeper.
Why You Don’t Have to Suffer to Awaken
You can remove suffering from your life by exercising your greatest free will—the only “true” free will granted to you by God.
Your greatest free will is to surrender your mind inward, become conscious, and transform everything as if by a miracle.
When you surrender inside and stop reacting to what occurs, something powerful shifts: The karma loses its hold on you. Then, change happens outside without unnecessary effort. And you don’t hustle, so you don’t suffer.
There’s a sign that Life is done letting you play with mind’s rules.
It’s when every door shuts.
When every plan fails.
When illness comes, not to punish, but to pull you inward.
That’s not failure. That’s God. That’s Fierce Grace.
My new identity emerged, and Fierce Grace led me to become a spiritual teacher.
After all these years—loss of everything, brain tumor, back pain, knee injury, shoulder tear, Covid—I have finally stopped trying to go back to who I was.
Because I saw clearly: that person was never real.
Now, my life is silent. Still. Peaceful. There’s no more inner push or pull. No more chasing. My mind has surrendered within.
I live from Being now. Not perfectly. But peacefully. Life flows through me.
I don’t try to make things happen. I don’t chase. I don’t strive. I don’t pretend.
I simply rest… and allow.
I am still a family man with a loving wife and two daughters, along with my mother, siblings, and their families.
I no longer ask, “What should I do?”
I rest in the knowing that “Life is living me.”
Everything I once sought… is unnecessary. And yet, everything I need arrives.
How to Rediscover Motivation After Ego Death
So you’ve just experienced what many refer to as an ego death. It may have happened during a spiritual awakening, a crisis, or a loss. Your old self, the identity you clung to for so long, collapsed. It’s gone. But now? Now you’re stuck in the silence. No goals. No drive. No clear vision to strive for. Now what?
→ Have you experienced a loss so profound it almost shattered you, yet somehow revealed your true self?
I'd be honored to read your story in the comments.
✨ If This Resonated With You…
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Aby,
Thank you for sharing your personal story. The pain you endured brought tears in my eyes. May you lead a blissful life!
I have been a successful business owner and over the last 7 years, went through a heart attack and a lengthy divorce. 2 years ago, I abruptly - to the world only - I resigned from my prestigious Corp. honorary position, sold off one business, handed the other business to my ex to run and I became almost nobody by worldly standards. No job, no responsibilities. I surrendered many - not all - my worldly ambitions. I have been meditating for about 10 years, spend significant portion of my time in solitude to discover who I am. Hoping to be on a path to lead a peaceful, soulful life.
Lovely. Thank you very much for sharing,…just in time