During the school summer holidays of 1996 I went on my last family holiday to Malta. It was my third time there since my maternal Gran is Maltese. I returned to school to enter what would be 6th Year (to get into university in Scotland you really have to stay on past 4th Year). I lasted a couple of weeks because they were trying to force me to take subjects I didn't want to just to fill up the schedule. I felt something rise inside me and announce I'd had enough with education. I told them I wanted to leave and was sent to the Careers Office for school-leavers. This was in August 1996. By October, just after I turned 17, they got me a job in a private banking firm, at the bottom of the ladder in the mailroom. I had disappointed some people in my family because they had rested their hopes on me as being the first to go to university. This was the beginning of my journey of disappointing people!
In the run-up to Christmas 1996, I was becoming more and more agitated. I remember sometimes trying to get my tie right in the mornings and losing my temper throwing it on the floor. My mum observed the change in me more than I did. As the office Christmas party loomed I really didn't want to go but with persuasion from people eventually gave in.
The night after the Christmas party I was at a friends house. We had a couple of beers. I was feeling really weird and spaced out but put it down to a hangover from the night before, although I knew this felt different. The following day I went out to do some Christmas shopping. I was still feeling strange. It was like a sense of being disorientated, feeling foggy headed, sounds were muffled and everything just felt very weird inside my head. On Christmas Eve I went shopping again, with my mum and brother this time. I was
really feeling spaced out by this point. My body felt heavy but my head very light and with a kind of pulsing feeling going through it. I remember I almost got knocked over crossing Princes St, the main shopping street in Edinburgh, as we went to the bus stop.
Since I had never experienced anything like this before I didn't say much to anyone. I just told my mum I was feeling strange. On Christmas Day I received an electric guitar. About a year earlier I'd spotted a classical acoustic guitar in my Gran's flat. She had taken some lessons but then stopped. Seeing that guitar stirred something in me. So although I was delighted to get the guitar I found it difficult to be enthusiastic about it on Christmas Day since I felt so out of it. I tried my best to go along with proceedings but inside felt terrible - really sluggish, heavy and completely spaced out. Yet nobody really seemed to notice too much difference in me externally.
After a week or so, all of this disappeared and I felt normal again. I returned to work and then about a month later the same thing struck me down and I was off sick for a week. It was like a strange kind of flu but with no cold-like symptoms, just the heavy, lethargic feeling you get with the flu.
Throughout 1997 this pattern continued, being off work for a week or so and then back to work for a month, eventually the off-periods increasing in frequency. I began to notice other things like I just couldn't read the paper or watch the tv. My body felt so heavy I would just stay in bed, either sleeping or sitting up but any attempt to read or watch the tv just seemed to be too much for my head to deal with. Everything felt jumbled. Even listening to music wasn't enjoyable. Sometimes I'd read clocks the wrong way round. Everybody who saw me during these episodes said I looked perfectly normal and healthy on the outside. This made it more frustrating because I felt so terrible internally that I couldn't believe it wasn't showing up on the outside.
The doctor was called out to see me and all he could say was it was a "mystery virus". When I told him of the pulsing feeling in my head he explained that would be the virus "rushing through my system". All he kept telling me was it would go away eventually. Blood tests showed my white blood cells were slightly low but everything else was normal. It was getting harder to go back to work each time and shrug my shoulders and tell them it was a mystery virus. My boss was called Grace (interesting now in hindsight), and she was very understanding and sympathetic but most of the other staff thought I was just pulling sickies and were getting fed up having to cover for me. The company sent me to BUPA, private medical healthcare, and I had scans done on my brain, etc... but nothing showed up. One of the odd things I noticed was these episodes almost always came upon me at the weekend after I'd been out drinking the night before. I mentioned this to the doctor, and asked could it be something to do with alcohol, but he laughed that suggestion off. Eventually I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (or M.E.).
I resigned from my job in August 1997 because I didn't want the hassle of constantly being off and my local doctor signed me on for Incapacity Benefit. I'd disappointed people again who saw the prospect of a high-flying career as a banker. Thank God I got out!
It was during this period - from August 1997 through until March 1999 - that Music began to come more and more into my life. The episodes continued every month or so for most of that time. I remember going into town to buy the new Oasis album Be Here Now with my friend in August 97, shortly after leaving my work, and I felt so spaced out but looked totally normal to him. I kept asking him if I was walking funny or looking strange. My eyes felt so heavy, sound was muffled, my body felt so heavy and I couldn't concentrate on anything.
One of the first things I did after leaving my work was redecorate my bedroom. For some reason I painted all the walls black, got a red carpet and black desks in. I wasn't a goth or anything! I began getting into the guitar more, and especially writing songs. I didn't know where these songs were coming from but it was quite an easy thing for me to do. It felt like slipping into a private universe.
By April 1998, I was getting pressured from the job centre to do something and had been signed off Incapacity Benefit. I enrolled for a free music course for jobseekers. There was only 3 of us on the course. It lasted a few months and then the tutor died from cancer and it was cancelled. I was back on the dole. I just kept going deeper and deeper into Music. I couldn't afford to go out much with my friends, I'd see them maybe twice a month at the pub and the rest of the time I was on my own. It seemed to all be part of this "mystery condition". I had always had friends and been quite social during school years but was now finding myself wanting to be alone yet at the same time felt lonely. All I could do was keep writing songs.
By this time the episodes seemed to be cooling off but I still didn't feel myself. In fact, I never quite felt the same ever again. Its almost as if I just got used to feeling slightly off, as if it had dropped into the background, and I could function pretty much as normal. One thing I remember about this period was that my mum and some others in the family noticed I had changed in some way. It was as if subconsciously those close to me recognised something had happened to me but nobody could put their finger on it. Plus, I was in my late teens so it was easy to put it down to the transition of a teenager into an adult.
After being on the dole for some time, by early 1999 they were pushing me back into work. I still wasn't feeling 100% but went with it. I landed a job at the Scottish Executive through the New Deal in March/April of that year but lasted only a week. The open plan office with bright fluorescent lights and the noise... I just couldn't handle it. I walked out on the Friday evening and knew I couldn't go back. This meant I couldn't sign on for benefits for 6 months. It was probably the lowest period I'd been through. I didn't realise it at the time but all of this was slowly crushing who I thought I was - I was continually disappointing people. I'd been a promising footballer at school but gave it up, I'd got good school grades, and now I kept walking out of jobs. You have to understand, I didn't know myself what was happening and I was fighting it because my self-image was being destroyed.
It was only a few weeks after this - at probably my lowest point - that I met
Kate online through the chat program ICQ. We instantly clicked and shared the same abstract, silly humour. That was the beginning of our journey together that led to SoulJahm.
During the next few years my system seemed to be flooded by nervous energy. I would get incredibly nervous for job interviews or when I had to meet anyone in a formal situation. My hand used to shake with nervous energy when I picked up a drink in these settings. Of course, the more I tried to hide it the worse I was probably making it. At the time I just thought this was a self-confidence problem - that's what people would say to me "you just have to have more confidence David!". I heard that line so many times from people. I also seemed to always feel lethargic.
When Kate came over for her first visit, I was trying to juggle going out during the day with her, showing her around Edinburgh, and then going into work at nights part-time for UPS, and sometimes hanging out with her after work. It should have been no problem for a 21yr old but I was going into my work feeling totally drained. Even the guy I was working with commented that I looked shattered.
By the time Kate came over to live with me permanently in 2002 I had simply got used to and accepted this general tiredness and foggy-headedness. There were also waves of what you might call depression. No matter how low I felt I always instinctively stayed away from seeing a doctor about it.
It took 5 more years before I finally understood what it was all about when I was introduced to
kundalini and ascension symptoms. I first come across this information in January 2007, a month or so before my mum died. One of the things listed under symptoms of Spiritual Awakening was someone close to you dying but I'd also noticed so many of the symptoms I'd been experiencing for years were there. Then I started coming across lots of stories of people who'd also been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (M.E.) when they were in fact going through a spiritual awakening. On coming across this kind of spiritual information and individuals like David Icke and Eckhart Tolle for the 3 months prior to this, something profound shifted inside me and this included a change in the symptoms I'd been experiencing for years. It was like how before an earthquake you have tremors. Well, the years between 1997 and 2007 were like the tremors. Now it was an earthquake.
Just after my mum had died, in between her death and her funeral, I went to bed one night and felt energy building up at the base of my spine and shooting up my whole body from there. I started shaking in the bed. Kate was lying next to me, asking if I was ok and should she call a doctor, and I was telling her I was fine, not to worry. My brother Mark was staying with us that night and in the living room. It was a force surging through me and sort of scary in an exhilirating way but at the same time I knew deep inside this was something natural. I didn't intellectually know what was happening but I intuitively understood.
Over the course of the year 2007, as new symptoms took place, I began to understand it had been a spiritual thing all along and that was why the doctors could never find anything. The spaced out feeling was my system being flooded with spiritual energy and basically I was going through a major reboot or rewiring. Now I am used to it and live with these things on a daily basis because there are two parts to awakening. It is true to say there can be one moment when things change overnight as if you were one person before that point and something else after it. On top of this is an ongoing process and the body being a thing of time is affected by this process. There are periods where symptoms get quite intense and uncomfortable and periods when they drop more into the background. I would never be able to function in structured society again - i.e work in a job, but that is no longer a problem because as part of this process you start to see life moving and rearranging things to accomodate you. It is Life itself which has instigated all of this and so once you stop seeing it as wrong and give up trying to fit into the society gradually a new path is carved out for you. It may be unconventional, it may put you at odds with the society you live in but it cannot be wrong because it is a move of the Universe. In my case I recognise my life is in Music and it has been all along. Everything has come into focus but its an ongoing process of bringing more and more of myself into alignment with Music.
In truth nobody can truly know what it is but nobody knows what anything is and yet it can be consciously understood on an intuitive level. The body's own intelligence comes to the fore and seems to know that it is recalibrating itself. Concepts like
kundalini and ascension just give you a verbal framework to place it all in but a simpler way I'd put it is like this... our bodies have accumulated all sorts of tensions and ideas and concepts over eons. As long as you are in that stream of the system - go to school, go to work, get married, have kids, drinks at the weekend, holidays each year - you are effectively programmed and running as a kind of automaton. If that programming somehow breaks down through an 'earthquake' of some kind - and who knows how that happens - then your body is for the first time given a chance to come into its own and begin to function as a natural being. As the conditioning, the ideas, concepts and tensions you were burdened with break down, they are somehow flushed out of your system by the body's own innate intelligence and within the framework of society, you become useless because your natural rhythm and flow is no longer in alignment with the forced flow of the society. It is not an easy thing to go through yet it is freedom.
