In the beginning and the whales

Yesterday I took my 15 year old son to the airport. While I was waiting for his plane to take off, I went to the toilets, and after washing my hands, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I felt disorientated, because the person I saw wasn't me. The first thought I had was that my brain wasn't quite right , because 2 nights ago I was admitted to the hospital having a Meniere's attack. At hospital, I had been very disorientated. I had vertigo and everything was spinning. I couldn't remember my CPR number, or get it round the right way (in Denmark, your CPR is your identity number and everything is centred around it, from the library to the hospital, or language school or whatever - you learn it pretty fast!) My second thought then, was that I was disassociated, that the shock of everything had ungrounded me, and I wasn't 'in my body'. But then today, a whole new train of thought started to come to me, one that made me question many years of dismissing my own inner experiences.

But Friday night had been the worst attack so far. (You can find out more about Meniere's here http://www.menieres.org.uk/information-and-support/symptoms-and-conditions/menieres-disease)  I  was lying on the floor doing some yoga exercises and suddenly I was too dizzy and nauseous to move.  'Oh no, it's happening again', I thought. I called out, 'Thomas, Thomas, come and help me, I'm sick again'. My danish husband was in the next room, and as he came in to help me, I brought him up to speed that it was happening again. In the middle of the night, 3 hours later, he called the out of hours doctor, who panicked upon seeing how distressed I was, and called an ambulance. I couldn't stop being sick. I couldn't keep still because everything kept spinning, I was continually falling asleep, I was so tired and exhausted, but every time I started to fall down into sleep, the vertigo would rise up to meet me and become stronger, and wake me up again. I was in a terrible state. I had tried to take my anti-sickness pills twice, but each time, I threw them up again.

Three days after the hospital - I took the picture above whilst walking through the park next to our apartment. It was a 'bright but breezy' day, although I had managed to spend an hour, soaking up the sun & sitting on one of the benches, tucked away from the winds cooling effects. The red berries really stood out against the blue sky, and also against the green grass, where they were all lying scattered about. I had been re-reading 'a Bowl of Light' by Hank Wesselman, a book about his experience with a Hawaiian elder shaman. Re-reading because the first time I read it through as fast as I could, because I was sucking up all the info in there. The second time now, I am reading it much more slowly, so as to understand as fully as I can everything that is there. I have been to Hawaii twice now, once in 2005 and once in 2008, and they really were life changing experiences for me.

But so many times in my life, I have thought that I am being silly, or imagining things, Like when I looked in the mirror, and assumed I was having an altered perception because I had just been unwell again. I dismissed it. But then sitting in the park, I thought again. what if I wasn't to dismiss the things that I saw, felt or heard? What then? Was it 'ME' I saw in the mirror, or was it that I was suddenly aware that that physical person's body is not ME, or all that I am. That I could suddenly see that with total clarity. Maybe all that throwing up cleared something that was blocking my vision?! And maybe that thing was how I don't believe my own experiences.

Because probably like you, I grew up in a world where people are 'normal'. Except that really I'm not. When 'normal' people get to know me, and find out that I'm not normal, because I tell them about myself, they say 'but you're so normal'. Except I'm not. I've tried really hard to be. I've ignored myself, belittled myself, ridiculed myself and taken absolutely no notice of myself, and now. Well now, I think I've really had enough. Sometimes I see things that aren't there. Sometimes I hear things that aren't there. Mostly I know things for not any particularly good reason, except that now I know it. I feel things all the time. I have to have a lot of 'alone' time, because otherwise I suffer from information sensory overload, because I pick up a lot of information unconsciously from my environment and other people. I have to consciously 'tune in' in order to have that information come into my conscious awareness, but it's coming in nevertheless. 

But back to the Meniere's. I woke up last week in the night because I could feel energy crawling around the crown of my hair. It was very strong, as if something was physically there. I am used to getting strong physical sensations that are actually caused by energy, rather than something being physically present, otherwise I would have thought something was crawling around my head! And when when I started having the Meniere's attack, I was seeing bright colours and a strong pressure around my 3rd eye. So there was definitely some more, metaphysical things happening here, shall we say.

So when I was sitting in the sun this morning, (and this is Scandanavia at the end of October, so we're talking not the strongest rays here, but being grateful for every little appearance the sun makes, because we know we're not going to see it too much between now and next April) I was actually not feeling too well still - so I was sitting still for much longer than I normally do. There is always a pressure on me for doing too many things. But as I was not fit enough to be doing my normal 'getting things done', and I was sitting around pondering much more than normal. Suddenly I noticed two trees across the park (which is full of trees, but these two were standing out) and they were 'radiating' to me, as in sending me energy, and it was really noticeable. Really very clear. That was when I think I had the thought that the Meniere's episode had 'done' something to me, and then it occurred to me that the mirror episode was not in fact me being delusional, or unwell in my brain, or whatever,  but was actually me seeing more clearly! Because I spent many hours being sick on Friday night, and spinning with vertigo, and that has to have an effect on your energy bodies, right? And perhaps my body is trying to align me better than I am now.

Somewhere in my pondering, I looked at a webpage that I hadn't had time to read from last week, it's 6 months old now, but it was a really big shock to me. It's about the pod of British killer whales (orcas) that live up and around Scotland https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/02/uk-killer-whale-died-extreme-levels-toxic-pollutants
When I was a kid, I was crazy about dolphins and especially killer whales. I seriously wanted to be one. When I was at school, I wrote a story about a boy in Canada who made friends with a killer whale, and the teacher thought it was too good for me to have written it, he asked me where I had copied it from. And the school book it was written in, mysteriously went missing one time after I had handed in my homework, and I never saw it again. I'm not sure I knew there were orcas actually in the British isles back then, otherwise I probably would have been trying to drag my mum off for us to go visit them! But if you read the article, it makes for very sad reading.
This is where being 'normal' has gotten us. The sea so full of pollutants that the orcas are unable to breed and are dying out. This particular pod of orcas only swim round a particular area, and geographical pods of orcas are a little like a race of people. They develop their own dialect and behaviours. So when they die out, on a small scale it is like say, the Irish people dying, or the English etc., and this pod could become extinct when this generation dies out. Here's some more info on the pod http://www.discoverwildlife.com/british-wildlife/orcas-british-isles?page=2

And I started dreaming about dolphins and whales one summer when we were living in England, so I think that was 2012, and I've been dreaming about them ever since. Several times a week I dream that I'm looking for them, sometimes I find them, but most of the time I don't.
But the thought I had today was that 'being normal' in the human race is what has led us to this place. We have forgotten how to use our intuitive abilities. We laugh and mock anything psychic or spiritual. I know we're not the only culture in the world, and there are others, such as India, where they don't do this. But I can only really talk about the western world, because that is where I come from and it's the world I'm living in.
So this summer I have reconnected to shamanic journeying. And that's what I need to do now. Stop trying to be normal, and instead be myself. I need to start taking myself seriously. I can't tell you how many spiritual experiences I have had, that I have taken absolutely no notice of, and I've only just realised that this week. It's very painful to realise this. I really thought that I was silly, imagining things and so on. But I have been dreaming about orcas and dolphins incessantly and I haven't managed to work out why yet, and when I have gotten myself a bit better, and have some energy again, I'm going to do a journey to find out why. I have a lot of catching up to do.