Yesterday was a day when everything became too much.
There are those days and as a sensitive one has them more often than others.
I remember when I was living in Melbourne at the beginning of my sound career. I used to work as local crew and AC/DC had come in: 42 trucks, parked in the lot underneath the stadium. Two ramps to push gear up on stage, over 40 degrees heat with not much ozone layer. The guys who worked with me in sound looked like they were huge, muscles up to the brim and I thought: “My goodness, who am I against these guys?” Luckily there was a veteran sound guy who used to tour with Megadeath as a monitor engineer on team sound. We had worked a few times together, so he said to me: “Just don’t worry about these guys. They’re gonna be out in half an hour or an hour tops. Just stick with me. We’re gonna keep calm and do our thing.”
He was right. An hour later we were reduced to half the people we had started with and we were both still in the game. Each time we had pushed up a speaker and went down the ramps, we drank some water, walked slowly back and forth, didn’t talk much. We just did our thing. The first few times pushing the speakers up the ramps I nearly threw up, but after a while it was actually okay and I got into the groove. He told me a story back then, because I asked and wanted to know what he was doing with all the young folks. He said that he was on a tour doing monitors, all was going seemingly fine… until it wasn’t. One night doing sound check, he said that he was standing behind the desk and out of a sudden had this huge ringing int he ears. It was deafening, he couldn’t hear anything anymore. His whole system shut down and there was nothing he could do. They flew him back home and he shut himself off in complete darkness and silence in his apartment for 10 days. The ringing went away and he recovered his hearing.
I was stunned when I heard this and I looked at him. He continued to tell me that he decided then that he would not continue with such a stressful lifestyle. He said in Melbourne summer he would do some loading gigs and he was doing local bands to mix, sometimes some tours, but only in Australia. He said he realized that his system was just way too stressed before and that he was happier with a simple life more than ever.
This day has remained deeply impressed into my consciousness. This was also the gig that landed me a job with a major sound company back in Europe that got me onto large tours. How ironic to think about this in hindsight, because nearly the same thing befell me many years later. It sometimes still stays with me: My system was overwhelmed not only by fatigue, but also by all this noise, late nights, high levels of stress and pressure, lots of traveling. Tibetans call this lung (pronounced “long”) or even meditator’s disease. It is when you strain the nervous system. Tibetan Lamas reckon that most Westerners have chronic lung and I have to agree. We are goal oriented and often cannot let go of our attachment.
The same thing befell me while working in Dubai and has come back now due to too much Shakti or even light running through the system. It is having a hard time catching up on it. We take ourselves into our spiritual practice, no matter what. Awakening teaches us our patterns and habits. Mine is to exaggerate which obviously stems from a deep dissatisfaction. So over the past months I stopped meditating, staying away from spiritual practice, no reading of spiritual material. It’s cold turkey and rough, I have to say.
Yesterday I dared to read a bit about the divine Mother and the whole thing started again, so instead of continuing, I stopped and will leave it aside right now. I got a life to live.
Apparently this is the message behind all of this for me: Live your life. Be happy.
Yesterday I needed to stay in. Even walking around the corners was too much and I shuffled along the pavement and then went back home straight away. In the evening I talked to a friend, but in hindsight even this was too much.
Like my old buddy from Melbourne said: “Keep calm and do your thing.”
Are you doing your thing and keeping calm amidst the chaos?
Vanessa
A Beautiful World 