Ascent and Descent

On this day, in 2005, I stood on top of Àrd-thir Suidhe (Arthur's Seat), in Edinburgh, and left my body.

In the context of the previous two weeks, this was not unusual. Looking back now, I think that I hadn't really been, embodied, properly, since I disembarked from the Tube at King's Cross Station in London. I can tell you that I fell into a swoon, of sorts, in London, a lifetimes' worth of dreaming in books and feeling as though, at a biological level, my body, which seemed so reluctant to embrace the eucalyptus-y humidity of the big Sydney sky with it's allergies and its eczema, was telling me that Australia, really, wasn't my home. Home was closer to the cruddy, ice-crusted streets of Regent's Park, and I had fallen through several layers of reality by the time I was standing up there above Edinburgh.

In the context of my life, this sense of departure from my self perhaps wasn't so unusual, although usually some rational explanation sat comfortingly within reach of my transcendental experiences (whoops, few too many drugs, whoops, really good sex, whoops, forgot to eat. For six months) . A big imagination, and a capacity to join other people in places a rational mind probably never would have embraced on a cold dark morning meant my grasp on reality got (still occasionally gets) somewhat tentative, on a frequent basis.

What was different about Edinburgh was depth and duration. Depth, in that, that night back in the hotel I was wracked with body pains that in my most Crohn's ridden state I had never met. Something was leaving my body. Duration, because I was equivalently 'high' for the rest of my UK jaunt - thank the heavens for Mike who sorta slung me on his back along with his guitar and trekked around York & Northern Ireland, and because this 'high' lasted the rest of summer back home.

And it was serious, and pervasive. The change in the colours of the world, of my oceanic-sense-of-oneness, in the complete inability to be thrown into a pouting state, the engagement with anything that was presenced in my presence. I came home 15kg lighter - there had been no need to eat while I was overseas, I was not in my body. My dear flatmate tried to drag me to the doctor fearing cancer when I got home, my work girlfriends wanted to know what the Posh Spice diet secrets were, my Jungian therapist took me to task about my Messiah complex. I had come home preaching the need to love one another, to help one another, to care for one another. I don't think I was delusional, I wasn't actually raving but, I was not in my body.

I see life in terms of ascent and descent. I can tell you in a nice safe, dualistic fashion that the extent to which I can fly with this kind of experience, is directly offset by the somewhat traumatic experience of the crash back to earth. I can tell you that I don't think this is bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or even akin to hysteria, I think it's simply an experience that some people are a tad more predisposed towards than are other people.

There's a psychic life that our culture inspires, but barely supports. There's a child within me that feels as though she speaks with discarnates more fluently than with humans and has done so since she was tiny. There's an echo of a scream of being trapped in a world I never made, in a body that gives itself over so easily to rape, and that stares, in shock, at the sheer violence that humans will impose on other humans, physically, emotionally, politically.

Since Edinburgh, I've been graced with standing further and further back, and being blessed with being able to watch, a little more, my own ascents and descents. What I'd love, is that there was a place for kids to go, where a nurturance existed for a spirit-self, not a bland diagnosis of a complex that does not really fit the pathology. A place where talking about experiences such as the one I've just described doesn't leave the hapless 'tourist' with a fist-full of prescriptions for anti-depressants and a sense that they're (we're) wrong, somehow.

These guys seem to have the germ of the idea:
http://www.spiritualemergence.org.au/

A place where a possible growth, in spirit, is allowed to be, spirited.

God bless the voice within, that, while I was playing with Laurence on the balcony the day after I came home, caused me to look up over the trees behind this block and said 'She's gone'.

God bless the life, ever since, that I step through, moment to moment.