Beauty Grows from Darkness

When I was in the right place at the right time this week to be gifted tickets to BLISS N ESO’s sold out Wollongong gig, I said hellllllll YES!!!

I mobalised @calmlykaotic and after a delish dinner at @kneadingruby (next time you’re in the gong check them out, it’s pretty awesome) we joined the overwhelmingly face tattooed male 20 year old crowd for a night of jumping around covered in other people’s drinks. If you follow me on Insta, you would have seen that the night was well documented on my stories. And you might have wondered why? Why is this meditation teacher sharing footage of being at a gig. What’s that got to do with meditation? Stay on topic. Get a personal account for that shit.

Well if you saw me there (and if you’re reading this, I feel it pretty unlikely that you fit the key demographic of the night), you would have seen that I bounced around all night with a smile from ear to ear. We were pushed. We were shoved. We needed to ring our clothes out a few times there was that much loose beverage action going on – one of the 20s even offered @calmlykaotic his jacket to help mop up what had landed on her by another 20  – that was impressive. (Halfway through writing this I get a text, “I even have redbull INSIDE my bag”. Insert cry laugh here. Then choke laugh when she suggests I include the hashtag, BLISS N #messso).

I loooooved every sober (both driving) second of it.

I LOVE a good gig and BLISS N ESO and there wasn’t a moment of that experience that was lost on me. Or a moment that I wasn’t grateful that that was now my reality.

Physically and mentally it’s taken A LOT to get there.

When you’re a 26 year old spending months on your back in a neck brace, then endless amounts of time in physical rehabilitation, and you’ve got the pshyc team telling you that the old you NO LONGER EXISTS – the things you loved in life are no longer reachable for you and you need to stop thinking that that will ever be your life again – having that experience again can feel pretty impossible.

Especially when you get to a point where physically you’re now able to leave the confines of a bed, but mentally your whole physiology is telling you IT’S NOT SAFE!

When you’re hit by a car, on a pedestrian crossing, and you’re obeying all the rules and doing all the right things, your world view becomes very warped. Or not. Really. As a protective mechanism my brain started to tell me essentially that therefore logically anytime I left the house, even when doing all the right things, something could happen that might kill me. My mind would SCREAM at me not to leave the house. That it wasn’t safe. That I might die. Doing anything. Any time. The logic actually makes a lot of sense. And I was an evidence-based, analytical lawyer let’s not forget. A biochemical shift occurs in the brain and we physically start to feel pain. Pain being the body’s safety mechanism. DANGER. DANGER. DANGER. It was a seemingly never ending cycle.

And at that point the other self-talk shows up, as in, well what’s the point of being alive, if I wasn’t going to be able to physically or mentally do any of the things I loved doing? What is life without joy? Without fun? 

BLISS N ESO was not my first gig since my accident. I’ve been back gigging for a while now. But it was a reflective night. I am constantly amazed by what my body and I have been able to achieve together. And this is what meditation is about. It has given me life. It’s provided the conditions under which physically my body has been able to rest, repair and recover, and mentally been able to filter out and process the trauma. It’s an ongoing process. But the life I live and the experiences I have now are well beyond anything I could have dreamed up for myself.

I share because I know for me these experiences have had purpose, and I can have lived through all of that if it means that I found a way to help someone else through that too.

This is also the thinking behind BLISS N ESO’s latest album Off the Grid. The boys took 4 years off after their last album, and have been dealing with some pretty big f*ck ups and challenging life experiences.

In a recent interview they said “This album is the first time we really decided to open up. Once you start, the floodgates open and it gets easier…We used the time to write therapeutically for ourselves, with issues that we’re dealing with…That raw honesty is that human connection. If fans can get something from your story and it’ll help them, man that’s the bee’s knees of music….Beauty grows from darkness”.

Thank-you BLISS N ESO, that kind of thinking and reflection brings us songs and lyrics like Friend Like You:

Yo this is a leap of faith

I got heart you can count on that

When you hit rock bottom you gon’ bounce right back

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off

And you start from ground zero

And if you need any help

Just believe in yourself, you are your own hero

~

My mind is scaring me right now

Somebody shine a little light down

Tell me is there anybody out there

Feeling like I do?

Well here I am, about to move again

I’m on my knees and I could use a friend

Tell me is there anybody out there

Feeling like I do?

~

You will discover some things about yourself that you don’t know right now

Speak your mind

What you will realise is

Tell it like it is

What you will realise is that you’re more powerful

Than you can ever imagine

Don’t hold back

Sing it brother

Your, your dream, your, your dream

Your, your dream, your, your dream

Sing your song

You, your dream is possible

 Pic by Dean Hammer