G.aia Rayneri today is a young woman with a smile that raises light up to her eyes. During the interview, around her you can see a blue sky full of wind, wide horizons and a “I don’t know what” that one could venture to call happiness on the screen. But it wasn’t always like this: about ten years ago, shortly after his first novel There is no flea – which has also become a film – he was 24 and a borderline personality disorder verdict to regiment the pain and wounds with which she had grown up in the health sector. In her new book, eloquently titled A healing book (Harper Collins), tells how he found in himself, more than in official therapies, the spark that transforms suffering into opportunities for growth. Accomplices meditation and love. A testimony that is good, in which the power of truth gives power to words and becomes style, touching universal nerves with clarity and poetry.
A healing book by Gaia Rayneri, HarperCollins, pp. 350, € 18.50.
His book is intense. Let’s go over the facts.
The first novel was going very well, but suddenly I was struggling to cope with commitments, I could not be alone and felt a deep sadness. So I decided to get help, it wasn’t the first time I was in therapy. In this case I was advised to combine psychiatry and psychotherapy. I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (it is a disorder characterized by hypersensitivity, instability in self-image and impulsiveness. is told in part in his first book ed). On the one hand this was a relief, as recognition was given to my pain, but on the other hand it gave me little hope of recovery, at least a tolerable coexistence with the symptoms.
How did his state change with the treatment?
At first I identified with the disease, my mind couldn’t think of anything else. In addition, the drugs created what I describe in the book as a “paradoxical effect”: they exacerbated the symptoms of the disease. I had more and more desperate perceptions as I reviewed my wounds. For many years I have been really sick.
It does not testify to great confidence in traditional therapies.
I specify that, if one has never worked on oneself, it is better to become aware and heal oneself with psychotherapy and drugs rather than nothing. But, for what I experienced on my skin, it was not the way to recovery. The attention was intensified on the wounds, which could only be resolved in therapy, thus creating a sort of addiction.
The “healing” of the title instead found it within himself. How did it happen?
I was in a state where I tried everything that could help me. Thus, through friends, I am approached to meditation, and it was the beginning of a very important path of knowledge. It was still about becoming aware of what had hurt me, but, unlike in therapy, this was from the heart not from the mind.
One of the turning points in the book is gratitude. How did it work in her?
As long as I gave exclusive attention to pain, I was lacking and that was my gaze on things. But the moment I began to recognize what was there and not what was missing in my life, was it also the sky, a house, the air I breathed and took for granted while I was suffering, I shifted to a sense fullness, even if the situation was the same. And it’s incredible: no longer feeling like a victim, bringing me to the level of a sense of happiness, happiness really came too. Of course this does not prevent the wounds from going through.
The writer Gaia Rayneri was born in Turin and lives in Sardinia. Her debut novel, Pulce non c’e, tragicomic and real story of coexistence with autism and of an error
judicial, has become a film with Piera degli Esposti. Photo: Simone Li Gregni
So what was the function of pain in this happiness today?
Pains can be our best friends (dragons that contain gifts, as I call them in the book). They serve to show us that a certain way of life is no longer good, it is an invitation to change. In my case from the stability that therapists required to a freer life: from Turin where I was to Sardinia where I live now and where I do what I was born to do: write. Only in our Western society is pain considered an interruption of life. In a more oriental view, and from a soul perspective, it is a necessary step for our evolution. Then, if you welcome it, if you take responsibility for it, it becomes a guide, it softens.
Did you then follow his “spark”, as you call it in these pages?
Our soul shines if we find the courage to follow us, that is, to do, beyond social models, what we came here for. And this gives immediate meaning to all the steps that have taken place.
And then there is the love cure.
Yes, which for me is also linked to the return to nature. A sense of expansion, of belonging to creation, not just romantic love; but it is surprising how, once you reconnect to love, life responds to you by bringing you love in turn. I believe this would be what we should cultivate in these sad times. Each doing their part, raising the vibration in the piece of the world around us.
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