Sands of Life

“A Journey Through Collapse and Awakening”
By Vincent

After the divorce, I was a total auto wreck complete with broken glass and colors on the steering wheel. Everything that had once defined my life…my home, my marriage, my sense of belonging just gone.

Leading up to the big D, I found myself sleeping on the back porch in a sleeping bag, late October winds biting through the night air, a tropical storm threatening to rip through what was left of my dignity. The next night brought near thirty-degree weather, and I remember thinking I could endure anything as long as it meant not sharing the same space as the unmentionable…

Around midnight, my daughter came to the door.

“Dad, come inside. Use the couch in the basement. You’re not a dog.”

“Thanks, honey,” I told her. “Dad’s okay. You know Dad’s a survivor. Besides, that basement’s your brother’s hangout now, just like it was yours. I’m not going to intrude on that. Dad’s okay.”

Eventually, a close friend and his wife found out what I was going through…that I was sleeping on the back porch. They took me in and offered me a small apartment-like space…just one room, later known as the Situation Room. Apparently, others had used it during their own car crashes.

There was a small bathroom, a separate entrance, and a north-facing window that somehow felt like heaven. In exchange for free rent, I cooked meals, cleaned, and fixed things around their home. It was a quiet barter of survival and sanity…a fragile refuge while the frigid nuclear fallout of the divorce and legal battles ebbed and flowed beyond those walls.

9 months became a strange kind of sanctuary. A cocoon where I could breathe again before stepping back into life. Things were finally final, at least as far as lawyers (whether they are on your side or not, they suck) and phone calls and insurmountable bills…

When I finally did, I landed in a big house in New Fairfield, Connecticut… three bedrooms, two baths, a den with a fireplace, an acre of land, and a garage for my tools and vehicle. All for $1,150 a month!

It should have felt like victory, like the return to a man’s life rebuilt. But instead, monotony set in. Work, eat, drink beer, sleep, repeat.

The beers went from two or three to five or six. Then came a joint or two. Then Oxy’s…obtained from lying to my doctor about shoulder pain. He was quick with the scripts.

The empty hours after work became a storm of fear, doubt, anger, and despair, burring feelings like a squirrel burying nuts, or at least trying hard…each emotion howling its own tune, ripping through my head. I was surviving, but I wasn’t living.

One night, opened my eyes and saw the floor up close…mostly naked, disoriented, heart pounding out from my chest, head spinning. I really felt like I was going to box. Crawling toward the den, where my phone lay, I reached for it…a 9, then a 1, and then a pause.

Moonlight spilled through the sliding glass door of the den, glinting off the hardwood floor and catching a picture of my two kids. For reasons I couldn’t explain, that sight told me I was going to be okay. I collapsed…not from panic, but from surrender.

When I woke the next morning, something in me had changed. The silent friend inside me decided to speak…actually, to scream:

“Dude, what the fuck man, this ain’t going well at all. You need help. This will not end well if you keep on this collision course. You are a pile of twisted steel rebar.”

On instinct, I called the marriage counselor (she was the only person I could think of) and left a message. I was sitting in her office AGAIN…this time, not as a husband trying to save a marriage, but as a man trying to save himself.

After many sessions, I reached a breaking point. I was tired…tired of her, of therapy, of my business (which I somehow still managed to run efficiently), tired of pretending to be fine.

I finally asked her about what my children’s mother had said in her own one-on-one sessions. (I had stopped calling her my “ex.” That word felt like it still held a connection I was trying to release. My children’s mother gave me distance, peace, and closure.) I just needed to know…couldn’t hear it from the ball and chain…she never had one tiny contribution to why I left…

My therapist paused, carefully thinking how to respond…then said something that cracked the illusion wide open.

“I don’t normally do this…client-patient confidentiality and all that. But since you both came to me, and you both had individual sessions with me about the same issue, and now that the marriage is over… I don’t see any harm in giving you a little surface information as I came to know.”

“After your son was born, your wife had no use for you. The only time she seemed happy was when you were doing things for her. That’s when she would initiate intimacy. When you stopped working for her, she stopped needing you, stopped intimacy.”

She looked at me and added,

“You said it yourself, from day one in my office”…”After my son was born, I felt a huge distance between us.”

That truth hit like a head-on crash. Twenty-five years spent trying to make the wrong person happy. Twenty-five years trying to earn love that was never truly there.

It was devastating and liberating. For the first time, I saw the full picture.

Then my therapist said something that would change my trajectory forever.

“I’d like you to try yoga. Not the kind they do at the gym, but a philosophy-based yoga studio. I think your Krav Maga training isn’t nourishing you anymore. It’s fueling your anger, angst, and anxiety.”

I laughed and shot back, very sarcastically:

“Yoga’s for women.”

She smiled.

“Yoga was created by men. And you’re a deep person with deep emotions. You need something that reaches those depths, and there is NO competition”

Then she mimed dropping a stone down a well and waited for the splash.

“That’s you,” she said softly. “I think yoga might help you hear your own echo again.”

I went home skeptical, but something about what she said stuck. I searched online and found three studios. I sent a few tentative emails with questions.

Two replied with class times and prices. The third responded differently…thoughtful answers, no mention of cost or schedule, just conversation. Eventually after two or maybe three email exchanges, came an invitation:

“If anything I’ve said resonates with you, come by. Come on by, I’d be happy to talk.”

No mention of money. No mention of times or packages. Just human interaction.

It pierced my third eye…and my silent friend again, this time whispering,

“Pay attention to this jackass.”

So, I went.

The moment I walked into that philosophy-based yoga studio in Mahopac, New York, greeted by a beautiful being radiating warmth and light, I knew. Somehow, I just knew…I had just laid eyes on my new Sensei.

That day marked the beginning of a new chapter…not one of quick fixes or miracles, but of quiet healing. Yoga didn’t erase the pain or rewrite the past. It gave me a way to sit with myself without judgment. It helped me find balance between strength and surrender, between control and acceptance.

Looking back now, I see that collapse wasn’t my end but in fact it was my initiation. Everything that broke me forced me to confront the truth of who I was beneath the roles, the labels, the hats and the noise.

I had to lose everything that wasn’t real to find what was.

And in that moonlit moment on the floor and later, on the yoga mat…I began the slow, steady work of becoming whole again.

To be continued…