Dancing with Vertigo

Last Sunday disappeared as I was struck by my nemesis, vertigo. It’s my fourth or fifth attack. Each time it gets more violent and debilitating. This time for about two hours I could do nothing but sit upright on my bed, follow my breath and try not to throw up or fall off the edge of the earth. I just stared into nothingness waiting for the symptoms to ebb. If I even moved my eyeballs too quickly I felt the world spinning out of control.

It is my most frightening body symptom. For some reason I hadn’t noticed till this episode how similar it is to a bad hangover - the heaving stomach, the constantly moving ground, the jelly like muscles, the slurry thoughts - multiplied about a hundred times over. I felt gripped in the unbreakable metal claws of some large being that was turning me round and round, shaking me up and down, wanting me to listen to some message that I couldn’t hear. Yeats line, ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’ echoed through my head.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that my scariest body symptom resembles my most lethal substance (a potent mix of alcohol and tranquilizers) addiction. This addiction almost killed me when it put me in a coma for five hours sometime in 1999. Dates and the linearity of events are unclear around that time in my life. Under the addictions crushing grip life had plunged into anarchy and Yeats poem 'The Second Coming' had begun to make sense on a very intimate level.

How I acquired that addiction and how I rid myself of it is one of the stories I want to write about in the BF-memoir. But today I want to continue to dwell on the message vertigo has for me. It is a spiritual message I know but my meaning of the term spirituality itself is something I have to re-discover.

I close my eyes and slowly feel the sensations of the vertigo. Sufi dervishes whirling in repetitive circles appear out of nowhere. I find my way into their ecstatic trance, their direct experience of the sacred truth of life. Something I long for even when I have forgotten I do. Something I seek in the sudden feeling of being in flow when immersing myself in karate or the surprising heart opening I experience when I fall madly in love. Multiplied a hundred times over of course.

When I had my first attack of vertigo I thought it was directing me to align myself with my ‘true north’. I thought then that being a good person was the way. But today I know it’s more than that. As I experience a loss of external hearing I hear other sounds. The life affirming roar of a powerful waterfall, the thundering silence of the beginning of the universe, the ringing of a million stars on a moonless night.

My addiction did have a spiritual message for me too. I only discovered it in 2001 after I had wrestled back precarious control from its physiological and psychological pull. I walked back to the edge of the dark abyss and risked losing it all to get a glimpse of its meaning. I used to drink to forget the million conflicts surrounding me. When I approached the drinking with awareness I discovered that the cocktail of alcohol and tranquilizers would take me outside my body and for a brief moment, before i passed out, I would have a 360-degree perspective and a forgiving heart. To find that state without using any substances was my task then. Today I don’t have any serious addictions - though I stay up late to finish a book or beat my own score in a game or to simply procrastinate - and I have travelled far along the spiritual path the addiction led me to.

I feel on the edge of another unknown path. But some part of me has a memory of it. 'This was where i was before I was here,' it says. The task now I think is to once again push the boundary, feel beyond the senses, give up the illusion of control and allow the spirit to leave the body in search of deeper truths. I don’t know how to do this today but others have done it and so it’s possible.