My name is Ahmed Showyd Ahmadi
Everybody calls me ‘Sher’,
ever since I was a child.
I was born in Afghanistan.
Fled from Afghanistan.
Arrived in the Netherlands.
My mother took me and my sister.
It was the end of 1997 when we came here.
We were not really accepted at the time.
We were discriminated against a lot.
And then I ended up in the Netherlands as a 13 year old boy,
in an asylum seeker camp.
And then life began for me.
Before that I had never been to school.
Never really had a childhood.
So that's where it all started.
I just became a teenager, but also missed a lot of things.
That’s when my mother said to me and my sister
“This is our new chance, so make something of your lives.”
At a certain moment, 5 years ago
I had reached the goals that I had received from home:
Succesful job, married and two beautiful kids.
Everything was how it should be.
But then it struck me.
I didn't feel happy.
Looking back on it now, I probably had a burnout,
But I didn't want to admit it because my work was my escape.
I really wanted to work a lot so that I…
I dreaded the moments of stilness
Because then all the thoughts came.
One day I said to my sister,
“Listen I have this problem,”
“I have trouble sleeping.”
She said “You might have a trauma.”
“Traumas?”
“What do you mean? What trauma?”
She says “Yes because of what we’ve been through.”
I said “It doesn't bother me. That's not it."
But it kept getting worse.
My mother and grandmother were born in the war,
and I was born in the war.
So when I asked my mother
“Could I have been traumatized by the war?”
She said, “But what traumas? You were very young"
That’s when it occured to me that I probably have trauma
and I realized that they probably didn’t want to accept that they also have trauma.
So if they don't see and accept that in themselves,
then it will not be accepted and seen in me.
I received a lot of lifelines but I didn't accept them,
I had to go through it myself.
Then I started doing a workshop by Wim Hof.
Especially the breathing exercises made me realize that I still needed to process a lot from the past.
Every time I did the breathing exercise I got very emotional.
I went deeper to the root of the pain.
Child abuse,
Which is common in our country,
We have stored that in our body
And what a lot of people don't do out of shame...
Shamed to say you have a problem.
Shamed to show that you are weak.
But we are not weak.
You are very strong if you can say what happened to you.
And the breathing exercise is so powerful because it helps you get it out of your system.
We can very easily get a pill to numb it, but we don't go to the core.
It will always haunt you if you don’t do the work.
Every day I went in the water I was just amazed,
It gave me so much energy and love,
especially for myself.
I would pass that on to my wife and children.
How loving I was...
The joy... I saw pleasure in life.
It totally changed me.
I really became a different person and could look at myself in the mirror.
Anyone who has experienced something really bad…
whatever trauma,
we can get that out of our system.
I firmly believe in that.
And that has brought me to where I am now.
But you really have to fight for it.
Go through that pain.
Breathing through that pain.
Then you’ll get there.
Every time you have to go deeper and then the release comes.
That is beautiful.
It has become a healthy addiction for me.
It's a positive routine that I just don't want to miss.
Every day…
That feeling when I get out of the water…
I have to take the bike for a bit
Two or three minutes to where I enter the cold water,
and sometimes I'm still quite sleepy when I go there.
And on the way back I go barechested,
And some neighbours who pass by me by car or bike
they have their scarf on and are on their bicycles…
They probably think I’m crazy.
I look at them and say “You're the crazy one.”
No way back.
This is the path I chose.
Enlightment.
I have...
...seen the light.
So that's where I'm heading.