It's been 3 years since I was abducted.  I've struggled with it, slid easily through it, stumbled over it, and laughed at it.  There has been pain for sure, but more than that there has been peace and happiness.  Early on I learned how to be present, and how to sit with the discomfort, even during the abduction itself.  A switched flipped the moment they took me, and I knew there was no point in thinking of the past or wishing for the future, only the present mattered, especially because my life was on the line.
    When it was all said and done with, a sadness bubbled up within me where there had been extreme calm and focus.  Everything changed from extended clarity to a sticky black molasses ocean of discomfort that I couldn't swim out from.  Where was the shore?  Where was the feeling of the present?  Where was I, and why did it hurt so much?  I had felt so whole, so present, that even though it was during a moment of terror, I missed the clarity that I felt and the intensity that I had felt it.  It was a long road to healing and cultivating clarity on my own.
    Now, 3 years out, I don't miss it anymore.  I know how to find that feeling with ease and grace rather than forcing it into my life through tragedy and drama.  Did you know that things don't have to be hard?  That life can be easy and soft, and you can be soft in life even when life is showing it's fangs?  I learned this on the day that I was I was taken, and I've been practicing ever since then. I have recently come to yoga as one of my preferred ways of practice.  So here I am sitting and breathing, paying attention to my own inner world again.  It's a way for me to  check in with myself, find my sticky spots, angry, and sad spots and just sit with them.  I'm sure this sounds like it could drive a person crazy to just sit with something uncomfortable, but I find that when you do, you actually breathe life into that feeling and let it dance it's last steps.  It's like they are emotions and moments, frozen in mid tango just waiting for the music to start again, and the music is breath and stillness.
    I often find myself aware of a sticky spot that needs to speak.  I know that the more I relax, the more permission I am giving to that discomfort to just shake out and walk away.  Usually that's exactly what it does.  I'll feel an electric current rising up inside of me, reaching it's arms out like a lightning bolt to collect all of the stored emotion inside my bones and muscles, and then BAM!  Just like that it will all come pouring out, I'll shake, or scream, or cry, or laugh and it's gone.  It's a very similar experience to what would happen involuntarily during the first few months of recovery.  Over time I've learned to trust this feeling as an awesome healing gift of unstuckifying the emotional goo that gets deposited from trauma and life. 
    Back track five years, not really the total beginning of the lesson of calmness, but close enough to it.  I was feeling disjointed and unsure of myself in a way that drove me crazy.  I couldn't escape my discomfort, and I was only just beginning to learn to sit with it.  In a moment of clarity, I meditated on the matter and came to the realization that there are 3 distinct parts each person needs to nurture in order to be whole; the physical, mental, and spiritual.  It made such an impact on me that I tattooed 3 dots on my thumb to remind me to be kind to my three selves.
    After the abduction, I found myself coming back to those dots constantly.  I made sure to nurture each one carefully.  In the very beginning stages of recovery I recognized that I needed to reinvent myself to be the person I always dreamed of, because I had been stripped of so many of my ideas of who I was.  What do you do when your world crashes?  I figured I'd rebuild mine to be totally awesome.
    It's been 3 years since I was abducted.  Here I am, whole and healthy!  I'm still self reflecting, adventuring, and figuring out what of the old me gets to make a comeback, and what gets to take the back seat.  Fear is subsiding, adventurousness is on the rise, but I have a new found caution.  It's something that wasn't there before, but is becoming my friend rather than a perceived oppressor of fun.   I don't feel disjointed and unsure like I used to, and I don't feel terror and sadness like I did either.  It's not that those feelings will never reappear, because once they are yours they stay with you, but they won't have the same hold on me because I have found wholeness.  It's a state that loves and respects everything around it, and it's also a state that comes and goes like everything else.  The ebb and flow of life.  But for now I am here, and I will forever have this feeling to draw upon, even when I lose sight of the whole and return to nurturing my three selves.  Once it's yours, it's yours.  To  honor this insight, and the completion of my journey from 3 to 1, I have tattooed a single circle on my other thumb.