My Journey

I am laying in bed. I feel burning sensations in my neck and if someone is drilling from the back of my head into the skull. There is darkness, heaviness and confusion, I have no idea what this is or how to make it better. I have been in this condition for almost a week, every time I get up or do something my nervousness system got overstimulated and I have to lay down again, in a pitch dark room. The doctors tell me I`m not sick, it's just headaches I keep telling myself...

The topic of death crosses my mind more often and somehow I get a sense of gratitude for all the other things that I have in life. I listen to Metallica's ``One``, it is almost frightening to me how much this song touches me.. a deep sense of awe and beauty for this song portraying a war veteran with no more arms or legs, only being kept alive by being hooked to a machine.

I am 22 and having headaches and neck-pain for years, only this time it is so bad I can not neglect it anymore. I swear to myself that I will have to do anything about it, no matter what it takes, I do not want to live with this anymore. 

Fast forward 7 years, I made big changes to my life and the neck-pain is (almost) gone. What I perceived first as a trivial headache with a simple cause which I just didn't understand and the doctor could not tell me, I see now as the manifestation of a deeper pattern that contradicts how I work and how many patterns of (mainstream) society work.

I found out that I have a genetic trait called HSP (about 20% of people have this in varying degrees), which enables the nervous system to pick up on more detail and process information with more depth. 

Growing up in an environment of engineers and mechanics, where life choices are primarily based on rationality and pragmatism, and where the realm of spirit and consciousness are outside of the the conceptual reality, I started to feel a profound emptiness and meaninglessness, that made me withdraw from the outside world and look inwards.

It brought me on a journey to first explore academically different subjects such as psychology, religious studies and philosophy and then afterwards diving into different subcultures and ways of living, seeing the bright- and not so bright sides of these different ways of living and what I can learn from all of them to find my own place in this world. 

However the real ``healing`` started as what I perceived as a full surrender to life, where I gave up all my plans and intentions, moved with 23 back to my parents and started from literally zero.

As the world was in the grip of Corona, a process started to unfold in me where I felt daily waves of intense emotion and energy surging though my body, taking up all my energy and space. What I first expected to last a couple of days, or maybe a week or two, ended up taking around 5 years, kicking me out of all my plans and patterns and forcing me to let go of everything I thought was important for me, slowly working though all the emotion and energy that was suppressed and clogging up my body/spirit. It was often intense and exhausting, yet I could feel a constant sense of being uplifted, feeling lighter and more energetic. After the initial years I started to see the overall patterns and how there is much more to be gained than the absence of headaches and decided to keep going on that path, making it a priority and structuring my life in such a way that would give me space to fully embrace what was unfolding.

I used music to express the change that was happening in me and in that sense the music also worked as a mirror to me, showing me where I was in the process. 

My debut album ``positive disintegration`` is a collection of songs that I created during this time, which reflect the overall process I was going through. 

Now after having been on that journey for the last 10 years, I see it as my mission to share the lessons that I have learned through means such as music and writing, and to build bridges between different peoples and disciplines so that we can tackle our global challenges from a integrated way of seeing the world.