On a summers day in Yokohama, Japan, 2003, I got up and walked towards the harbour. "Nothing is real. I could just drown in the harbour and nothing would be different," I thought to myself as I got ready to follow through. On the way, a random man caught my attention and started talking to me, breaking me out of the spell and bringing me back to reality.

A month earlier, I'd been shaken by my first suicidal thought. After 3 days of sleep-deprived psychosis delusion reached a traumatic crescendo, the thought "I have to end my life to stop this" snapped me out of the trance. It shocked me so much that I began to reach out to friends. "What was wrong with me?" I wondered.

The shame stayed for many years. But things began to change thanks to 2 key changes. The first is the amazing work of empathy and emotions expert Karla McLaren. In her book "The Language of Emotions", she has a whole chapter on suicidal urges. She herself suffered with strong suicidal urges for many years. Her depth of experience and research felt true and real.

But it's one thing to read a book and know the information in your head. It's another thing to embody it and live its wisdom in your own life. Inspired by what I'd read, I realised that since 2003, I'd been asking myself the wrong question. I'd been asking:

Behind that question is the assumption that there is something wrong with me. It assumes that suicidal thoughts have no purpose and that I'm just a defective human.

Once I learned more about how the mind and emotions work. I started asking myself the question:

We tend to take our thoughts literally. But often what we're thinking in words is symbollic and not literal. We've been trained to think logically, linearly and analytically through left-brain focused education.

Beneath our wordy, thinking state, there's a deeper language beyond words. It works in symbols, emotions, archetypes and stories. Our wordy thinking minds can't process emotions because they have a whole language of their own.

Trying to solve an emotional problem with the wordy thinking mind is like trying to answer an English language question with Maths. They're completely different systems. To solve an emotional problem, you have to open up and feel your way through it. Once you've felt your way through, your logical mind can assist to make higher meaning from it.

Asking the question "what did those thoughts mean?" began an enquiry into what had happened. According to "The Language of Emotions", suicidal urges come up when something has become so unworkable in your life that it has to die.

The first suicidal thought I had was immediately after 3 days of a chaotic breakdown and spiritual awakening. In an altered state, I experienced trauma and a part of me was frozen in time and space. Who I'd been up until that weekend couldn't cope with intense life experiences. That version of me had to die. It was a version of me that was so academically trained that I was living in my head and cut off from my body, my emotions and that deeper level of wordless wisdom.

It hasn't been a quick change. It's a been a gradual relearning and reconnection. My main tool has been journalling sprinkled with understanding I've gained from training as an energy healer and hypnotherapist and working with clients.

Now I can talk about suicidal thoughts without the "charge" and feeling of shame about them.

There's nothing wrong with having suicidal thoughts. There's everything wrong in the society that causes us to disconnect from our innate wisdom beyond words.

- What became unworkable in your life before you had suicidal thoughts?

- What change has you experienced?

- Who do you need to become / what new identity do you need to integrate the change?