Written by: Safar
I am standing in front of the mirror, shaving.
It’s Monday morning. Or Tuesday. I honestly don’t know. All mornings look the same – same light, same face. A pleasant face. Neat. The face of a man who has everything under control.
But I know that face is lying.
Inside there is an empty silence that neither hurts nor rejoices. It just is. Two long relationships behind me, a corporate job, an apartment, a car. I function. I am pleasant. I keep the tension so low that I can barely feel myself anymore. I live. Or rather, I survive. Back then I called it normal.
How did I get to this mirror?
I am twenty-two years old and the world is spinning around me. I stopped eating. I barely sleep. My body runs on a chemical cocktail of euphoria, excitement and fear that keeps me awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling with the feeling that I am, for the very first time, truly alive. The world looks different. Sharper. Clearer. As if I had been watching a film through foggy glass my whole life and someone just wiped it clean.
Today I would call it an altered state of consciousness. Back then I simply call it love.
Something is working between us that I don’t understand – a mental, emotional and very physical connection. We know what the other is thinking before they even speak. Synchronicities appear everywhere. And the sex? Deeper and more complete than anything I have ever experienced. We call each other soulmates. We believe it. Or at least we both tell ourselves we do – because without this belief, what is happening between us would be impossible to explain.
But underneath it all, something dark is beating.
We fight with a skill that is only possible between people who truly know each other – who know exactly where to put the knife to make it hurt the most. I am incredibly jealous. I want to control the relationship.
I want to be sure that my soulmate will never leave. And because I don’t have that certainty, I do things I am ashamed of.
I want my other half to suffer the way I am suffering.
The cycle is relentless: a painful fight – incredible sex – another wound – a fragile reconciliation. Up and down. A rollercoaster with no stop. In the lowest moments I shut down completely. I can’t say what is happening inside me – the words don’t come, or they come like explosions. So I reach for a bottle and a cigarette. And then another. It’s relief for twenty minutes. Then it gets worse.
And in those lowest moments, thoughts of suicide arrive as the only possible way out. In the darkest nights I build detailed scenarios in my mind. How to do it. How to end this suffering for good. I am twenty-two years old and in my exhaustion I simply cannot imagine any other way out.
And then comes that grey, damp autumn morning.
The night started with an emotional storm and ended in tenderness. I get into the car. I can still feel the warmth of that night on my face.
I press the accelerator.
I don’t make the turn.
The car hits a rock. It flips onto its side. And starts sliding across the wet surface toward the edge of the road.
The asphalt is ten centimetres from my face.
I hear the wipers. Still faithfully moving across the windshield, which is now lying horizontal. I feel the glass from the side window entering my forearm. The seatbelt presses me into the seat like a vice. Beyond the edge of the road there is a drop. Deep. And the wreck of the car is sliding toward it, unstoppably.
The whole thing lasts maybe two seconds.
But time inside stops.
I am absolutely, terrifyingly, completely present. And my mind starts to pray. Automatically. Without faith – I never considered myself a believer. But now I am asking God to let me live.
And then another voice appears. Calmer. Colder. More honest than anything I have ever heard:
So you have been playing with thoughts of suicide for a whole year. And now, when you might actually die, you are begging to be saved?
The car stops against a plastic road marker.
I sit there. Rain drums on the glass. The wipers keep going.
And something inside me changes. Permanently.
Within two months I will end the relationship. And from that day – not even in the darkest corner of the darkest night – will I ever return to thoughts of suicide.
I was at the very edge of a physical abyss.
And I did not jump.
Not this time.
And so those years in front of the mirror arrive.
A pleasant face. A functioning life. A silence that neither hurts nor brings joy.
Then come my Jesus years – thirty-three. The first meditation retreats arrive, group workshops, therapy. I notice something surprising: the states I experience in deep meditation – especially in active meditation – remind me of that altered state from my first intense love. Time stops. I dissolve a little. Something larger moves through.
And then comes a workshop with an esoteric-sounding name: Inner Man and Inner Woman. Led by American therapist Sagarpriya DeLong. I expect exercises from a textbook.
I get something completely different.
There, for the first time in my life, I meet Osho – not as a name on a book cover, but as a living presence, transmitted through Sagarpriya’s complete openness and sharp honesty. She sees exactly where I am hiding. Her words are sometimes surgical. Some of them take me days to digest. When I finally open to them, I feel lighter. More real. Almost reborn.
But more than her words, what heals is the foundation she works from: meditation. Active, guided, silent – woven into every exercise, every confrontation. Therapy can move the stone that blocks the river.
Meditation is the river itself.
And in that workshop I come face to face, for the first time, with something I have been projecting onto others my whole life.
The toxic patterns I blamed on all my Exes – they don’t come from outside. They live inside me.
In what Sagarpriya calls the Inner Woman, I recognise a person: manipulative, controlled by the fear of abandonment, capable of going very far just to keep the attention of the Inner Man. So far that in one of her past incarnations she reached for black magic – to bind him to her forever.
What she didn’t anticipate: this act permanently damaged her ability to love in a healthy way. Every relationship then mirrored this unhealthy attachment – through jealousy, fear, control.
And in what Sagarpriya calls the Inner Man: unable to stand up for himself, to say out loud what he feels. His only way out was to comply. And to disappear. Into the bottle. Into the cigarette. Into a silence that hurts more than any fight.
What I saw outside my whole life was always just a reflection of what was happening inside me.
But Sagarpriya also shows me the other side of both energies. An Inner Woman deeply empathic, gifted at healing, able to see the invisible. An Inner Man who can keep a cool head, throw himself into new things with curiosity and discipline.
The same energies.
From fear – war.
From love – wholeness and creativity.
The war was not between me and my partners.
The war was inside me all along.
When Sagarpriya invites me to join her facilitator training, I don’t hesitate for a second. A month later I leave for a fourteen-day intensive retreat in Italy. For the first time I experience the Evening Meeting with Osho.
And then comes one morning after a guided meditation.
Silence.
And into that silence I hear Osho’s words:
“Suicide is a false sannyas, sannyas is a real suicide — because in suicide only the body dies and you will be born again.”
I sit. I think of the abyss. Of the asphalt ten centimetres from my face. Of the voice that asked why I was begging to be saved.
Back then I stood at the edge of a physical abyss.
And I didn’t jump.
Now I feel a different abyss. Deeper than any road. And I hear:
“I will teach you the real suicide: Become a sannyasin. Jump!“
This time I jump.
With all the fears. With all the uncertainty. The fear is there – but it stops being an obstacle.
And the name that comes is Sw Nityam Safar.
The Eternal Traveler.
Accurate.
The years since then.
Each year I understand my inner energies a little more and hold them a little more lightly. I learn to ask for forgiveness from those I have hurt – and to forgive those who have hurt me. Relationships heal. First the closest ones, then the more distant ones.
In the morning I get up, make coffee and sit in silence – alone or next to the person I love. No drama. No fear of what comes in an hour. Just this moment, this cup, this person. No need to control. Beneath the tenderness, no fear is running. The need for extreme highs and lows is gone.
It took thirty years.
But the edge of that abyss taught me something that morning which I know to be true today: when I truly face the possibility of losing everything, I find out what I truly want.
I want to live.
Really live – without the armor of fear, control and attachment.
It is a practice.
A practice that always begins with one thing.
The willingness to jump.
Sw Nityam Safar is a facilitator of the Star Sapphire Energywork method with over 15 years of experience, trained by the creator of the method, Sagarpriya DeLong, author of the book Two Shores of Love. He lives in Prague and in 2026 is bringing this work to the USA for the first time. More information about workshops: hollowbambooai.org/us-retreats