I thought I was a prophet
After my schizophrenic break, I couldn't even trust my own mind -- and it would be a long road back from the abyss
Friday, Aug 2, 2013 | Michael Hedrick
A photo of the author.
On the day I realized I was a prophet, I left my home in Colorado and began to hitch-hike to the U.N. I needed to save the world from its various evils. And I needed to go — now.
I spent the next several days wandering around the northeast, trying to decipher messages. I found codes in places where codes didn’t exist. I finally found my way back home, thanks to a quiet and generous woman who lived somewhere in rural Massachusetts, and when I got back, I explained to my parents that I was on a mission and this was God’s will. I’m sure there was some stuff about aliens and conspiracies in there, too.
And so, a week after my adventure began, I woke up in the psych ward of Boulder Community Hospital, and I spent the next seven days condemned to a hospital bed with waterproof sheets in a ward with eight other people who either didn’t talk or rambled so incoherently that it was impossible to understand them.
My parents came every day at 2 o’clock, when visiting hours began, and they brought me pillows and a down comforter and my favorite hoodie. Anything to make me more comfortable. Still, their visits were marred by hour-long screaming and crying matches in which I accused them of throwing me in a mental hospital to rot. Why was it so hard for them to understand? I was a prophet, and this was my magnum opus.
My parents didn’t know what had happened to their son. For that matter, I didn’t know what had happened to me either. And all of us wondered: Would I ever make it back?
Four and a half percent of all adults in the United States suffer with a serious mental illness. That equates to 14,125,500 people who struggle, day in and day out, not sure if they can trust their own thoughts. Many find support and do recover, but many more don’t. They become homeless, they languish on the fringes of society where they aren’t given the slightest thought, let alone assistance. I could have been one of them.
When I got out of the hospital, nobody knew what to do with me. (And I certainly didn’t know what to do with myself.) I moved back into my parents’ house and was treated with nervous caution. Mental illness was a foreign concept to them. Before I broke, they had blamed my strange behavior on marijuana. Now, they regarded me with a silence reserved for things they feared. And they were probably right to fear me. I was still sick and dangerously delusional.
It’s hard to explain the logic of a cracked mind, but I found personal threat in every tiny action or event. Once, I was seated at the piano, and my mother reached over me to lower the register, her hand brushing my lower stomach, and I was convinced she was trying to molest me. Another time, my dad and I were in the garage, trying to put new brake pads on my car, when I decided he was going to sabotage me so that I would lose control of my car, crash into a tree and die.
My mistrust of people was intense. Sometimes it felt like they existed only to harm me.
For instance, I was certain my psychiatrist was a quack. This is the psychiatrist who, over the course of the next six years, would guide me into stability, but when I first walked into his office I knew it was a ruse designed by my parents to convince me I was crazy. He wasn’t a real doctor. This was a set with props and actors. I remember being in the waiting room, seeing those magazines that stretched back two years, listening to the calm music and the sound of ocean waves on the speakers, sitting in the couches that seemed so real, looking at the diagnostic surveys and medicine prescriptions, and thinking: “Wow, they really pulled out all the stops with this one.”
Slowly it dawned on me: My thoughts were not real.
My initial diagnosis was bipolar. (Later it would be changed to schizoaffective disorder, and then schizophrenia with periods of depression.) And we began the long and frustrating battle to pinpoint the right medication. The first medication I tried gave me akathisia, a side effect in which you have an intense and extremely uncomfortable urge to move at all times. For weeks, I stayed in this particular hell, and I would spend hours on the treadmill or walking around the neighborhood in an attempt to shake the feeling that I could rip off my skin at any point.
We switched that, and switched it again, a process that took years. Eventually, we found a medication that worked on my mind, though sadly, not with my body. I gained about 100 pounds, took up smoking and was too tired most days to get out of bed.
My parents became a source of strength during this time. They began attending support groups and integrating themselves into the local mental illness community. They fought bureaucracy and headaches to secure me government assistance.
I moved into my own place, and for years I kept my diagnosis a secret. I still longed to live a normal life, even as I struggled with my paranoia. So I spent my time alone. I was afraid to leave my house, afraid to go into stores, because I was so quick to interpret random comments as criticism and ostracism. I just knew everyone was saying nasty things about me. I couldn’t even order a pizza without worrying that the delivery guy would get back into his car, think about that one expression I made, and tell all his friends what a freak I was.
To be unsure of your own mind is a prison, one that can break some of us. It simply becomes easier to slip into homelessness or drug abuse, but I fought against that. I began studying normal behavior. I read books on psychology, body language, dating technique — anything that would help me build a repertoire of healthy social interactions and somehow guide me into acting like a functioning human being.
I got better. Sometimes, I’m so much better that I question if I really have any illness. I’ll have a good month — no paranoia, no depression, lots of joking around — and I think, have I nipped this in the bud? Am I the first person in the history of medicine to cure myself of schizophrenia? The seductive thought arises: Maybe I could skip my meds tonight and see how I feel in the morning. The meds make me so miserable. Maybe I could actually be free of this stuff.
Those are the nights when I feel empowered enough to go to some bar where hipsters are trying to have sex with one another, but in every conversation I start to worry that the other person has found something wrong with the way I look, or the way I move, or the way I talk. I get so overwhelmed that I have to go outside and smoke, and I think: God, I just want to go home. And then when I get home I take my meds and go to bed — the habit that will keep me sane — and when I wake up in the morning I feel fine, and that’s pretty much all I can ask. The truth is, the meds make me feel OK, and OK is always better than bat-shit insane.
I’m pretty stable these days. I have good health care and a good family who watch out for my red flags. I have the semblance of a career. I do wish my prospects for love were better. Every piece of romantic advice says you should just be yourself, but it’s hard to do that when your self is a 400-pound schizophrenic. I’ve been on dates before, but it’s hard to snuff out the fear that everyone in the café is laughing at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that hurdle, but I hurt for companionship. I want someone besides my mom to rub my shoulders when I’m tense, to talk me down from my scary thoughts, to give me a hug when I feel low.
My parents tell me, “It’ll happen if it’s meant to be.” So maybe it isn’t meant to be. I can live with that, I guess, though it still stings when I see my friends getting married on Facebook or when I catch a rom-com on TV. But I’ve had to adjust a lot of my expectations for having a normal life. I realize that my challenge, ultimately, is to simply be all right by myself.
The only cure for paranoia is self-assurance, which comes from an intense and radical self-acceptance. You have to learn to accept yourself and everything you fear. You should try it sometime. You don’t have to be schizophrenic to find it useful.
It isn’t easy to be crazy. But my seven years on this path have taught me that people with mental illness are some of the most resilient and courageous people there are. They don’t pretend to be someone else. They have a raw authenticity that can scare people, and I see why. They show you their warts — demonic voices and all.
The media hasn’t helped in portraying mental illness as something to fear. After any massacre or inexplicable tragedy, you can count on a slew of pieces that explain how the killer was a quiet man who kept to himself and exhibited some strange behavior in the past. But endless studies have shown that people with major mental illness are much more likely to be victims of senseless crimes than to be perpetrators. Still, we struggle with the idea that we are monsters.
Maybe it’s up to me, and articles like this, to change minds.
~ Michael Hedrick is a writer and photographer based in Boulder, CO. He is currently a regular contributor for Thought Catalog but dreams of being paid to write a regular column for some big publication. His book "Schizophrenic Connections" is available here.
More Michael Hedrick.
Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Friday, January 17, 2014
A First-Person Account of Schizophrenia and Recovery
From Salon, this is an interesting first-person account of one man's descent into and recovery from schizophrenia.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography - The Society for Neuroscience
From the Society for Neuroscience archives, these interviews are part of their autobiography series, "The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography," detailing the lives and discoveries of eminent senior neuroscientists. There are 30 in all, including luminaries such as Michael I. Posner, Eric Kandel, Francis Crick, and Gerald Edelman.
Monday, July 16, 2012
NPR - Joy Harjo's 'Crazy Brave' Path To Finding Her Voice
When I was in grad school (the first time), Joy Harjo came to Ashland (OR) and gave a poetry reading in an event co-sponsored by the SOU English department and The West Wind Review, the college's literary magazine. Her poetry was honest, imbued with the rhythms of song and chant, and both deeply personal and subtly mythic. She was beautiful - I was young . . . and I was entranced. The picture above is from 1990, a year or two before she visited Ashland.
I had not thought much about her in the 20+ years since I finished that master's degree - so it's nice to see she has an autobiography out, Crazy Brave: A Memoir, and is featured on NPR. There's a link to an excerpt at the bottom.
In her new memoir, Joy Harjo recounts how her early years — a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father and abusive stepfather, and the hardships of teen motherhood — caused her to suppress her artistic gifts and nearly brought her to her breaking point. "It was the spirit of poetry," she writes in Crazy Brave, "who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love."
NPR's Neal Conan talks with Harjo, now an acclaimed poet, performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, about the dreams, visions and heartache that led her to find her voice as a poet and musician.
Interview Highlights
On how trauma in her early years acted as roadblocks to creativity
"Sometimes, I think, in order to get to something that we really want or we really love or something that needs to be realized, that we're tested. I mean, I think if you look at any stories all over the world, they are usually set up as, OK, here's where I start, here is where I want to go, and here are the tests.
"And they were pretty intense tests ... I failed a lot of them, or you find a way around. And maybe there is no such thing as failure ... that's kind of what I've had to come to. Yes, I mean, there's times ... when we fail. But it's a useful thing.
"At least I've had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure, this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know, stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you."
On the importance of music in her life
"I think music is what attracted me to this world. I could hear my mother singing, and I thought OK, that's a pathway I can follow. And it was that moment — there was kind of a trans-cosmic consciousness, transcendental moment came when I was standing in — this is before seat belts — in my parents' car. And I think it was Miles Davis, his horn came on.
Enlarge Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
Joy Harjo has won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year for her album Winding Through the Milky Way.
"Of course I didn't know Miles Davis or horn, and ... that music opened an incredible door, and I was out there, and I could almost see the shape of my whole life. And I have a great love of jazz, and actually it's close to my Muscogee tribal people.
"I'm working on a story now that proves that — that includes us in the story of American music. Most people don't know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground ... in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz."
On how to get your artistic voice back, if you've lost it
"I [had] felt like I had lost my voice, too. And sometimes, to find it ... what I've learned is it needs to be lost for a while. And when it wants to be found, you'll find it.
"But I would say is that you just put yourself in the place of poetry. You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.
"And, you know, it's like looking for love. You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you."
Friday, June 01, 2012
An Evening with Jeanette Winterson
At the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Writers' Festival, Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and talks about books, life, love, death, madness and creativity.
Jeanette Winterson is the author of 10 novels including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing The Cherry; a book of short stories, The World And Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects, as well as many other works including children’s books, screenplays and journalism.
I was especially fond of her collection of meditations on art, literature, and identity, Art and Lies. The novel that launched her from a relatively unknown postmodern academic author to critical and public acclaim was Written on the Body, a fascinating novel with a nameless, genderless narrator.
Presented by Sydney Writers' Festival, May 2012. Duration: 01:00:42
Thursday, November 11, 2010
AGIT PROP - Move the New George Bush Book to the True Crime Section
As proposed by Waging Nonviolence. As a former bookstore employee (who still occasionally moves incorrectly shelved books to where they belong) I can see how this will be very annoying for employees - on the other hand, I definitely see the justice of it as well.
The book has already been released as on today, the 11th, but I can still see a lot of people doing this.
The book has already been released as on today, the 11th, but I can still see a lot of people doing this.
Group Plans to Move George W. Bush’s Memoir to Crime Section of Bookstore
The protest blog Waging Nonviolence is urging readers to move copies of George W. Bush‘s forthcoming memoir to the crime section of bookstores.
The blog hopes readers will move Decision Points inside the bookstore and “put Dubya where he belongs.” Waging Nonviolence scheduled the protest to coincide with the book’s release tomorrow.
Here’s more from the post: “If you do decide to participate in this nonviolent act of subversion, please respond to our invitation, take a picture of your “mission accomplished,” and post a photo of your handiwork to our Facebook page.”
A similar U.K. movement targeted Tony Blair‘s memoir, A Journey as Facebook participants moved copies of Blair’s book to the crime section of their nearby bookstores. The UK group’s slogan: “Be part of a literary movement. Literally.”
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Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Mark Vonnegut - Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So
I could have sworn I heard an interview with Mark Vonnegut this morning on NPR, but I can't find it. Still, I did find this review and excerpt from the book he wrote that they were discussing in the interview. Very interesting - I really knew nothing about Kurt's son.
There is an excerpt at the bottom.
Here is a taste of the book, also courtesy of NPR.
There is an excerpt at the bottom.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So: A Memoir
By Mark Vonnegut
Hardcover, 224 pages
Delacorte Press
List price: $24October 19, 2010Recovering from a psychotic break is far from a guarantee. The famed novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, metaphorically, of the challenges of mental illness: "Some people survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Others didn't. The turbulence is really something." But it's his son, Mark Vonnegut, who has written most vividly and personally about surviving bipolar disorder, about returning to a reality that's been snapped. In a phrase, life takes on a new imperative: to be "normal with a vengeance."
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So — Mark Vonnegut's exactingly titled second memoir — is an honest, witty and vivid depiction of "normal" life in between interruptions of mental illness. It's about how much one can accomplish, while a history of insanity follows close behind. "Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible," he writes. Instead, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was just trying to pass for normal, as if forgetting to tiptoe around the mental eggshells would let the voices return.
More than anything, Mark's bipolar illness gave him the desire to be useful, to make up for the time he spent feeling so utterly useless while hospitalized in his 20s. And useful he became — after 19 rejections, young Vonnegut earned admission to Harvard Medical School and pursued a long and dedicated Boston-based pediatrics career. To the benefit of his readers, this endows him with a rare prerogative to lament the American medical system, or more accurately, the insurance regulations and cost-efficiency guidelines that make trying to practice medicine today like "long jumping with weights on your ankles."
Enlarge Barb VonnegutMark Vonnegut, pictured above with his son Mark Oliver, is a pediatrician and writer living in Massachusetts. He is also the author of The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity. He is the son of novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
Whereas Vonnegut's first memoir, The Eden Express, is a young man's artistic account of spiraling into psychosis amid the social tumult of the 1960s, Just like Someone Without Mental Illness is a vastly more readable, down-to-earth narrative. Wisdom tempers a zeal for political rebellion, and a sense of humor allows brazen self-reflection. He subsumes within these chapters a remarkable amount of his midlife experience, ranging from his around-the clock pediatric residency, alcohol dependence, returning bipolar illness that nearly launched him out a window, remarriage, and a life in the shadow of his father.
The late Kurt Vonnegut is an eccentric background character, and Mark's childhood memories of his not-yet-famous father are worth chasing through the pages for. Far from remembering him as the author of Cat's Cradle, Mark knows Kurt as the man throwing the chessboard across the room upon losing, dancing with his wife and a mop to the tango music in the aisles of Walmart, and adopting four children. It's always amusing to learn that one of the 20th century's most influential writers was once a terrible car salesman who couldn't get hired to teach English at Cape Cod Community College.
Coming from a man who was named Boston Magazine's "No. 1 Pediatrician" just as he was experiencing a fourth psychotic episode, Vonnegut's memoir is ultimately about how bipolar disorder can shape, but not define, a life. Just don't expect it to be normal.
Here is a taste of the book, also courtesy of NPR.
Excerpt: 'Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So'
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So: A Memoir
By Mark Vonnegut
Hardcover, 224 pages
Delacorte Press
List price: $24Chapter One
Excerpted from Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So: A Memoir by Mark Vonnegut. Copyright 2010 by Mark Vonnegut. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press.
A Brief Family History
It's good to have a sixth gear, but watch out for
the seventh one. If you think too well outside the box,
you might find yourself in a little room without much in it.
The arts are not extracurricular.
One hundred thirty-nine years ago, my great-grandfather Bernard Vonnegut, fifteen years old, described as less physically robust than his two older brothers, probably asthmatic, started crying while doing inventory at the family hardware store. When his parents asked what was wrong, he said he didn't know but he thought he wanted to be an artist.
"I don't want to sell nails," he sobbed.
Maybe his parents should have beaten him for being ungrateful, but they wanted their son to be happy and the business was successful enough that they could hire someone else to do inventory. He became an apprentice stonecutter and then went to Europe to study art and architecture. He designed many buildings in Indianapolis that still stand today. He drew beautifully, made sculptures and furniture. He was also happily married and had three children, one of whom was Kurt senior, my grandfather, who was known as "Doc" and who also became an architect. Doc could also draw and paint and make furniture. He made wonderful chessboards, one of which he gave to me when I was nine.
When he was sixty, Doc was pulled over for not stopping at a stop sign. The cop was astonished to notice that his driver's license had expired twenty years earlier.
"So shoot me," said Doc.
At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.
When I worked on the Harvard Medical School admissions committee, artistic achievements were referred to as "extras." The arts are not extra.
If my great-grandfather Bernard Vonnegut hadn't started crying while doing inventory at Vonnegut Hardware and hadn't told his parents that he wanted to be an artist instead of selling nails and if his parents hadn't figured out how to help him make that happen, there are many buildings in and around Indianapolis that wouldn't have gotten built. Kurt senior wouldn't have created paintings or furniture or carvings or stained glass. And Kurt junior, if he existed at all, would have been just another guy with PTSD-no stories, no novels, no paintings. And I, if I existed at all, would have been just another broken young man without a clue how to get up off the floor.
Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.
Craziness also runs in the family. I can trace manic depression back several generations. We have episodes of hearing voices, delusions, hyper-religiosity, and periods of not being able to eat or sleep. These episodes are remarkably similar across generations and between individuals. It's like an apocalyptic disintegration sequence that might be useful if the world really is ending, but if the world is not ending, you just end up in a nuthouse. If we're lucky enough to get better, we have to deal with people who seem unaware of our heroism and who treat us as if we are just mentally ill.
My great-grandfather on my mother's side drank to keep the voices away and ended up the town drunk in the middle of Indiana. My maternal grandmother wrote textbooks on teaching Greek and Latin and had several bouts of illness that resulted in long hospitalizations. When my mother, Jane, was in college the family resources were exhausted after my grandmother spent over two years in a private hospital. With great shame and embarrassment her husband transferred her to a state hospital, where she became well enough to go home a few weeks later. She remained mostly well and never had to be hospitalized again, but she had spent roughly seven years of my mother's childhood institutionalized.
There was no acknowledgment of or conversation about my grandmother's illness either between my mother and her father or my mother and her brother, who would also be in and out of hospitals most of his life. He emerged normal enough to marry three times in his fifties and sixties, hold a job as a librarian, and be the Indiana State senior Ping-Pong champion.
This same maternal grandmother warned my mother not to marry my father because she was convinced there was mental instability in the Vonnegut family. My father's mother, a barbiturate addict who didn't come out of her room let alone the house for weeks at a time, told my father to stay away from my mother because there was mental illness in the Cox family. My father's mother famously (some say it was an accident, but does it really make a difference?) overdosed and killed herself on Mother's Day. Barbiturates had been prescribed to my grandmother as a wonderful new nonaddictive medicine for headaches and insomnia.
If you want to pick out the people who go crazy from time to time in my family, find the ones in the photos who look ten or more years younger than they actually are. Maybe it's because we laugh and cry a lot and have a hard time figuring out what to do next. It keeps the facial muscles toned up.
It's the agitation and the need to do something about the voices that get you into trouble. If you could just lie there and watch it all go by like a movie, there would be no problem. My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.
If you don't have flights of ideas, why bother to think at all? I don't see how people without loose associations and flights of ideas get much done.
The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one- on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?
The psychotic state is a destructive process. A fire can't burn that brightly without melting circuits. Making allowances for individual tolerances and intensity and duration of the breaks, complete functional recovery becomes increasingly unlikely much beyond about eight or nine breaks. Fixed delusions, fears, loss of flexibility, loss of concrete thinking, and low stress tolerance make relationships, jobs, and family next to impossible and then impossible. The biggest risk factor in determining whether or not you have a nineteenth psychotic episode is having had the eighteenth.
Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.
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Monday, March 15, 2010
Book Review: Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold, by Krishna Das
My girlfriend, Jami, accidentally agreed to review this new book from Krishna Das (Hay House, 2010), then ended up really enjoying the book.* * * *
Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold
by Krishna Das
Hay House, Inc.
Released February 2010
Reviewed by Jami Parrish
Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I need to be honest here, right? Then this is my confession: when I first heard of the book, Chants of a Lifetime, I thought it was about Ram Das. Don’t ask me why. It seems that the two teachers blended in my mind. I had heard of both, but knew next to nothing about each. In fact, I think I thought they were the same person. I had heard of Krishna Das and his music only in passing. When someone mentioned him to me, I only heard Das, and the only Das I knew was Ram Das, so I thought it was Ram Das chanting. Now the name Ram Das was only a bit more familiar to me. Other than he went to India, wrote some books and said some cool things, I knew nothing about him. I wanted to learn more about Ram Das and so decided to review this book. Since I was also interested in chanting, I figured this would be perfect. Big time confusion, right?
So some, or many, okay maybe even all of you may think I am a complete idiot, so be it. I have my flaws and this is clearly one of them. Needless to say, when the book arrived with a picture of Krishna Das on the cover, (I knew enough to know what Ram Das looked like and to realize I had made a big mistake) I was a bit disappointed. The great surprise was that reading this book was a complete delight.
Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold, is the story of his life (Krishna Das that is, just in case anyone else is confused). It starts with his traveling to India and then his return to America, his practice and his faith. While it is an interesting story, words of wisdom abound in the pages. Sometimes subtly, other times directly. Not only is this an autobiography, but also a sutra (of sorts). Through his story we learn of attachment and grace, enlightenment and falsehood. While I don’t have a guru or teacher, I can get a taste through Krishna Das’ experience with his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba.
This book seems to have been written with honesty. Krishna Das shares his foibles and attachments, making our own journey toward truth bearable and less lonely. He shares his humanness and makes it sacred. And humorous. The journey through and beyond our humanness is the essence of the journey, isn’t it? We all need laughter on this trip.
I don’t chant. I love listening to others chant, but it isn’t something I do. This book made me want to chant. His passion for chanting as a path seeps through the pages and into the reader’s psyche. I didn’t get the CD with the proof copy, and what a bummer that is because I think the CD would greatly add to the experience. (In fact, I think I am going to buy the book so I can get the disc.) For those of you who do chant, this book will speak to your practice.
…by the repetition of the Name, we are tuning in to that essence within us. … [T]he repetition of the Name can free us from our thoughts and allow us to be here in a deeper way. …Let me start where I am. I’m here, I know I’m here. Now, what’s in here? Who is here? That’s what I want to know. My belief is that what lives within me is that divine reality. All I have to do is uncover it. The path is a personal, individual quest for each of us. It is a journey of spirit, not necessarily having anything to do with organized religion. When we can live in spirit, meaning that which lives inside of us already, we will see it everywhere. (p. 61)For those who have a deeper understanding of this path, I think Chants of a Lifetime would still be useful. The simple things really aren’t so simple. If the CD is anything like the book, I imagine that it will also be of value to those who practice regularly, adding a new dimension of singing with the master. But that is only a guess.
I could say more about Chants of a Lifetime, but I think it would be best if you read it yourself. A summary just doesn’t do it justice. And if you don’t know who Krishna Das is, you will quickly learn and may become very interested, as I did.
* * * *
Krishna Das is currently on tour supporting the new book and CD. His schedule can be found at his site. He will be in Tucson on March 31, but both Jami and I will be in classes that night, so we will miss him.
Sacred Song & Kirtan: Krishna Das and Deva Premal & Miten:
Seattle, March 24 Portland, March 25 Los Angeles, March 27 San Francisco, March 28 Mesa, March 30 Tucson, March 31 Santa Fe, April 1 Denver, April 3 Dallas, April 5 For other dates, see his site.
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