A memoir by Maya Campbell
In This Is My Heart, the reader walks beside Maya Campbell as she experiences despair, pain, life threatening illnesses, traumas and isolation until finally she comes into a place of awakening and hope.
Maya shares how, in 2009 at the age of 42, she had a cardiac arrest in the middle of the night at home. She is resuscitated and spends nearly two months in a coma from which she awakes with no memory of the previous decade. In the years that follow she embarks on a journey, not only of healing, but also exploration into the events and causes that led to her heart ceasing to beat.
She recounts the childhood curiosity that leads her to become a scientist. She studies at Cambridge, only to drop out when a chance meeting triggers her childhood traumas. She later returns to academia to complete her degree and doctorate, ending up at Oxford university as a postdoctoral researcher at the physics laboratory. Once again, depression and trauma resurface. After finishing the research, with a paper published on the front cover of Nature, she falls into a state of burnout and depression which lasts until the cardiac arrest.
Post-coma, Maya is haunted by flashbacks and dreams based on both the cardiac arrest and horrendous nightmares she has while in the coma. She remembers and describes these in vivid detail, including a journey into space where she leaves the blue-green globe of the Earth behind, a near-death experience that has been described by many others over the course of history. The nightmares are a visceral response to what had been happening to her body in the coma – intubation lines, drip feeds, medics moving the body all of which Maya has no agency. Past memories join the mix, waking Maya and leaving her drenched in iced sweat.
Depression and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder plague Maya. She undergoes therapy and – against her scientific skepticism – tries mindfulness meditation and compassion techniques. The result is profound and over time they enable Maya to experience and cope with the distressing flashbacks and the despair of being diagnosed with heart failure and an inoperable aneurysm in the heart meaning she has a life expectancy of a few years.
In one particular session of her therapy, Maya suddenly flashes back to teenage years and the vivid memory of being sexually assaulted by a group of teenagers at age 12. The remembrance of this long blocked out event, although initially overwhelming and hard to be with, helps her understand some of the causes for the heart condition since trauma, depression and stress are linked to heart disease. She retrains as a Psychologist and works for two years in the UK NHS, but steadily her heart heart failure worsens. But instead of giving up and despairing, she embarks on a journey into profound healing, researching both traditional western approaches to health and alternative approaches to healing. She utilizes her expertises as a scientific researcher, her professional training in psychology, mindfulness and compassion and her lived experience in both trauma and heart conditions to conceive of different approaches and to try different ways.
Using all of this knowledge and expertise, Maya decides to choose a different path, not rejecting the western scientific medicines, but rather expanding and complementing the approach with acupuncture, tai chi, energy healing, shamanic healing, body based somatic approaches, meditation, compassion and more. Building inner resources that generate self-care, self-love, and self-healing, she activates the innate natural healing capabilities that all of us process. And nearly a decade after she had been told she had just a few years to live she is alive and thriving, teaching, writing, running courses and workshops and sharing her experiences and learnings with others, so that they too may heal.
Out now on Amazon
Dr Maya Campbell 