When I started loving myself

I’ve understood that I’m always and at any given opportunity

in the right place at the right time.

And I’ve understood that all that happens is right –

from then on I could be calm.

Today I know: It’s called TRUST.

When I started to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody

When I try to force my desires on this person,

even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it,

and even though this person was me.

Today I know: It’s called “RESPECT”.

When I started loving myself

I could recognize that emotional pain and grief

are just warnings for me to not live against my own truth.

Today I know: It’s called AUTHENTICALLY BEING.

When I started loving myself

I have stopped longing for another life

and could see that everything around me was a request to grow.

Today I know: It’s called MATURITY.

When I started loving myself

I’ve stopped depriving myself of my free time

and I’ve stopped sketching further magnificent projects for the future.

Today I only do what’s fun and joy for me,

what I love and what makes my heart laugh,

in my own way and in my tempo.

Today I know: it’s called HONESTY.

When I started loving myself

I’ve escaped from all what wasn’t healthy for me,

from dishes, people, things, situations

and from everyhting pulling me down and away from myself.

In the beginning I called it the “healthy egoism”,

but today I know: it’s called SELF-LOVE.

When I started loving myself

I’ve stopped wanting to be always right

thus I’ve been less wrong.

Today I’ve recognized: it’s called HUMBLENESS.

When I started loving myself

I’ve refused to live further in the past

and to worry about my future.

Now I live only at this moment where EVERYTHING takes place,

like this I live every day and I call it CONSCIOUSNESS.

When I started loving myself

I recognized, that my thinking

can make me miserable and sick.

When I though requested for my heart forces,

my mind got an important partner.

I call this connection today HEART WISDOM.

We do not need to fear further discussions,

conflicts and problems with ourselves and others

since even stars sometimes bang on each other

and create new worlds.

Today I know: THIS IS THIS LIFE!

I originally saw this at Mountain Who am I? but with some inconsistent formatting, then a further search revelaed a copy at Esteem News in 3 separate posts. The two are very very different, enough so to make me wonder if it is from Chaplin. I’ve compiled it and pulled it together here. Anyone know the definitive version, anyone know if this is really by Chaplin?

In the process of spiritual awakening often an energetic shift  happens where our gears get somehow stripped – that is that portion of us, the cog which seemed to fit into the world and make things turn is no longer there.  We can no longer operate from the same ego and survival drives we had before and indeed do not want to.  But it leaves us strangely disconnected from the rest of humanity all scurrying around doing. When your self-worth or sense of purpose no longer depends on money or impressing the opposite sex or fame, recognition or security or impressing ones parents or not ending up like them – what is left?    After my awakening I spent a week living in the park before crashing with some of my friends in a squat & then close to a year after that wandering around barefoot doing what little it took to keep my body alive but hardly participating.

Sound familiar? 

It was my blessing to get stabbed twice and thus be brought back from this blissed yet also somehow unreal realm fully into this world with all its delight and tears. Intense prolonged pain was a fast shortcut back in but is not appropriate for most. There are gentler ways to get back in but first you need the motivation as why to engage again.

How about playing the game for its own sake? For the sheer joy of being in a body and being surrounded by the 10 000 fascinating things?  How about delighting in the fact that material existence gives us sex and chocloate brownies? How about figuring out something to do with our time here that is loving, creative, fun and juicy? GUYS jacking back in is important, spirit without matter is expressionless – the maya is also the leela. 

My friends who are sensing a dissatisfaction with being cut off, who do want to again play the game often end up engaging with me around the re-entry.  Seldom do they come right out and actually ask though, because as in the pre-awakened state we never know there is another level until we reach the false summit and see more clearly the next stage of the journey.

I swear to god maybe I am clumsy and new at it – but this work is like breaking in horses.  My friends ask for my help in the world beacuse they can sense I am operational again yet from true Will rather than from ego (mostly – I do keep finding the odd shard here or there) but then when I try and help they buck and bite, kick and scream.  Like having got out of the matirx there is no way they are even contemplating jacking back in.

Jack kornfield wrote a great book called “After the Ecstacy the Laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path”. 

For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contraction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the heart reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.The only surprising thing is how unexpected this truth can be. It is as if deep down we all hope that some experience, some great realization, enough years of dedicated practice, might finally lift us beyond the touch of life, beyond the mundane struggles of the world. We cling to some hope that in spiritual life we can rise above the wounds of our human pain, never to have to suffer them again. We expect some experience to last. But permanence is not true freedom, not the sure heart’s release.

Every wise voyager learns that we cannot hold on to the last port of call, no matter how beautiful. To do so would be like holding our breath, creating a prison from our past. As one Zen master puts it:

“Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can’t cling to that as a new identity or you’re in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust.”

So come on down and get back in its lovely here.

“My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual, physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together.” Osho

There are two primary modes of energetic expansion – for simplicity and becasue that’s how I experience them I’ll call them ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’.

Vertical

This is the development of awareness.  Recognising your own and other’s patterns.  Process work, knowledge of self and others. There is a sense of sharpness and clarity about it. Although it is not seeing, this kind of energy opening is closest to the sense of sight.

As you start to develop this faculty one gets on top of the emotions and recognises them for arisings in the bodymind.  A non-attachment begins to develop and often changes in language take place – “I am sad” becomes “There is some sadness today”.

For me it feels centered in the Ajna or brow Chakra.

A flowering of vertical mode is what is commonly thought of when we call someone “spiritual”

Horizontal

This is the development of the capacity to move energy through the body, to sense into things and respond intuitively.  There is a warmth and feeling of aliveness about it. This kind of opening is closest to the sense of touch and movement.

As this faculty gets more developed there is a sense of flow and of being able to strongly affect the energy of others, heightened senses, increased pleasure. When this further develops it becomes an ability to go with the flow and there is a deep acceptance of what is.

For me it feels centered in the Svadhistana or belly chakra.

When there is an opening and expansion of the horizontal we often view people as artistic.

Practices

Practices which emphasise the vertical are meditation, enquiry such as Maharshi’s “Who am I?”, and deep process work through tools such as the enneagram.

Practices which emphasise the horizontal are creative and expressive ritual, dance, ecstatic prayer, sacred sex 

Practices which use both modes – Yoga, Magick, Singing, Active Meditations, Tantra, Dzogchen

Overemphasis

Risks of an overemphasis of the vertical are dryness, a lack of juice, excessive analysis. Spiritual practitioners with a strong vertical and an underdeveloped horizontal mode get stuck with insufficient energy to power through conditioning and other internal blocks.

Risks of an overemphasis on the horizontal mode are an excess of undirected energy and this leading to all the dangers we associate with artistic temperament, mental instability, addiction, excesses of emotion.  Artists with an underdeveloped vertical often do not acheive much the undirected energy spills into drama and indulgence instead of being channeled into creativity.

Masters

Masters who emphasise the vertical mode – The Buddha, Zen Masters, Ramana Maharshi, Al-Maas

Masters who emphasise the horizontal mode – Rumi, Ramakrishna, Amma

Masters who have emphasised both modes – Osho, Gurdjieff, Adi Da, David Deida

Unity

I don’t think the initial journey toward unity can be attained through timid steps in both directions and an attempt to stay in balance.  That way lies a static underdevelopment in both spheres.  Each should be explored wholeheartedly and yet there needs to be a recognition that when diminishing returns are being obtained in one sphere, it is time to push the pendulum back the other way and start shifting modes.

Me

In my own growth I have found a definite sense of swinging between these practices and at times in my life I have primarily explored one or the other.  I think of my time in business and then my time living in a park and a squat.

A few years back when I was strongly rooted (stuck.) in the horizontal I had the good fortune to meet an amazing woman who was very dedicated to vertical expression (primarily in the form of process work rather than meditation so I did not recognise it).  We proceeded to push each other very hard – it was mostly agony because of sharp shards of remaining ego we still both had (despite prior shatterings) and which we were configured to recognise and demand abandonment of in the other.

This kind of intimate partner work though intense proved to be a fast, high energy track. 

Right now the expressions have both reached a certain level where there is enough momentum that development is proceeding similtaneously 

Narcissus and Goldmund

In the book of this name Herman Hesse examines something similar to the two modes I speak of here through the  characters Narcissus and Goldmund.

“The thinker tries to determine and to represent the nature of the world through logic. He knows that reason and its tool, logic, are incomplete–the way an intelligent artist knows full well that his brushes or chisels will never be able to express perfectly the radiant nature of an angel or a saint. Still they both try, the thinker as well as the artist, each in his own way.” Narcissus

“Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.” Goldmund

“Dear friend, how little you know me still!  Perhaps I did ruin a future monk in you, but in exchange I cleared the path inside you for a destiny that will not be ordinary.  Even if you burned down our rather handsome cloister tomorrow, or preached a mad doctrine of error to the world, I would not for an instant regret that I helped you on the road toward it.” Narcissus

Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell, researchers at the Brooking’s Institution created a  computer simulation to study social structures and group behaviors. Their program, named Sugarscape, simulates the behavior of artificial people (agents) located on a landscape of a generalized resource (sugar). Agents are born onto the Sugarscape with a vision, a metabolism, a speed, and other genetic attributes. Their movement is governed by a simple local rule: “look around as far as you can; find the spot with the most sugar; go there and eat the sugar.” Every time an agent moves, it burns sugar at an amount equal to its metabolic rate. Agents die if and when they burn up all their sugar. A remarkable range of social phenomena emerge.

It is amazing to see the actions of the agents as new mountains of sugar are created and they rush to colonise and farm them. Twitter is like seeing an Everest of sugar arise in Sugarscape. Initially many did not sense quite how big this particular sugar hill was going to be (I didn’t  despite signing up to Twitter in ’07 I only really started to use it in January ’09. And I am generally fairly early with the net –  usenet from ’92, running Linux in ’01,  blogging in ’04).  But now its becoming clear – its a mountain of googlesque proportions…and so the rush begins.

I love watching the ripples in the collective noosphere as these new sources arise. With the Internet these upwellings of energy have become global phenomena, and they are arriving with increasing rapidity.  We really are undergoing a massive shift in consciousness and surprisingly (at least to me) it is manifesting quite physically via the Internet.

It makes me wonder about certain spiritually very switched on friends who are not online, or not to any large extent – I can’t help feeling that despite their cultivated awareness, intuition and general expandedness they are missing out…are somehow stuck in an evolutionary Galapagos and being cut off from the net and what is happening here are in no way keeping pace and expanding to their full potential. 

This is why we spend so much time online and with tools like Twitter.  We are attaching ourselves to this heavy teat of psychic mana greedily sucking the juice down expanding our own awareness and simultaneously co-creating this vast global intelligence. Damn but I wish McLuhan was still around – I would love to see his take on it. We have some very able & insightful commentators namely Clay Shirkey, Tim O’Reilly and Kevin Kelley (aside: what is it with these Celtic thinkers – there’s Joyce, Leary & McKenna too! Note-to-self, write essay examining Celtic magical/mythic consciousness and the Internet) but they a bit too technical and not quite esoteric(expanded) enough for my taste – and thus I must write.  

Mostly to scratch my own itch as it seems I have an audience of about 3 who are actually interested in the same bizarre mixture of art, esoterica and technology as I am.

6 Paul Graham from incubator Y-Combinator on why humans are not meant to have bosses

Paul Graham looks at what large organizations do to people an makes and analogy with the animals he saw in the wild in Kenya.

Favourite bit:

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. [4] Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

5 Not an Employee

A website dedicated to not being an employee

Favourite Bit: 

The Sticker they made “Expeditus A Dominus”

4 Steve Pavlina Outlines 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

A fabulous riff on why jobs are not actually more secure than self-employment/having a business & why the joys of slavery quickly pale.

Favourite Bit:

“When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money?  Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?”

3 Your Life as Pornography by Ran Prieur

A totally totally brilliant spoof/story by Ran Prieur of the Joys(!) of employment and what motivates us to do it.

Favourite Bit

He thought of the woman, her hot irresistible waiting body. “Uh, please Master, I beg you to let me be your slave…”
“Slave? We have no slaves! These are enlightened times.”
He sighed with relief. Perhaps the ordeal would not be so bad.
“Then what shall I be, Master?”
“You shall be my team member!”
“Do what to your member?”
“Beg! Beg me for it!”
“Please, great Master, let me team your member.”
“Abase yourself! Convince me you are qualified!”
“Sir, I feel I am uniquely qualified to apply this position on your member. I am experienced in several very similar member positions, with other teams…”

Favourite bits:

To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated….

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business….

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom.

1 Tyler Durden: Fight Club

Need I say any more?

Favourite bit:

You are not your fuckin Khakis.

The above are why my (equal!) partners and I at Fizzy do not hire people and we make an effort to work with partners who do not hire people either. Personal sovereignty baby… second only to love on the priority list.

I think many of us have kept these parts of our lives discreet – not wanting people we work with to know about our personal lives, not wanting the people we pray with to know what we do for a living. The gaps I bridge can seem wide and the circles I travel in are diverse, yet nowadays people seem remarkably non-judgemental, the harshest judgements and fears often come from ourselves.

And so I find myself letting go of these fears and giving myself permission to be whole, to be truly who I am in every scenario.  Of course it is not necessarily appropriate to launch into sharing tantric practises when teaching a class on Internet Marketing (I hear my business  partners breathing sighs of relief) but neither will I shirk should a moment come when I reveal a bit more of my other facets.

Its a time of integration folks.  Osho tells a story:

A king went into his garden and found wilted and dying trees, shrubs and flowers. The oak said it was dying because it could not be tall like the pine. Turning to the pine, he found it drooping because it was unable to bear grapes like the vine. And the vine was dying because it could not blossom like the rose. He found Heart’s-ease blooming and as fresh as ever. Upon inquiry, he received this reply: 

“I took it for granted that when you planted me you wanted Heart’s-ease. If you had desired an oak, a vine or a rose, you would have planted them. So I thought that since you put me here, I should do the best I can to be what you want. I can be nothing but what I am, and I am trying to be that to the best of my ability.” 

You are here because this existence needs you as you are. Otherwise somebody else would have been here!–existence would not have helped you to be here, would not have created you. You are fulfilling something very essential, something very fundamental, as you are. If God wanted a Buddha he could have produced as many Buddhas as he wanted. He produced only one Buddha–that was enough, and he was satisfied to his heart’s desire, utterly satisfied. Since then he has not produced another Buddha or another Christ.  

He has created you instead. Just think of the respect that the universe has given to you! You have been chosen, not Buddha, not Christ, not Krishna. You will be needed more, that’s why. You fit more now. Their work is done, they contributed their fragrance to existence. Now you have to contribute your fragrance. 

This story is not just about being satisfied with being ourselves but also about being fully ourselves. Glorying in our height, our grapes, our flowers, our simplicity.  As we stop worrying how we are perceived so can we shed these layers and stand in our gifts and so realise the magnificence that is our birthright.  The more permission we give ourselves the more permission we give others to do the same.

If you ask me I would say I have little desire for wealth itself.  Yet I desire a beautiful home, world travel, fine foods and clothes, to stage lavish theatrical productions, to make weird experimental films, to throw sumptuous parties, to attend numerous courses, to have leisure time to live.  All of which require money…So repulsion and compulsion. 

As a vajrayana practitioner I know that the quickest way to transcend is to go through and so for the past 2 years I have been struggling to get back into the matrix, to save, to start businesses and to try and earn wealth.  Now on the verge of another business venture there is again a fluttering in my chest a scream, a roar, an almighty “FFFFUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!”. What is it about this energy that is so difficult to hold with love, ease and awareness?  I know I am not the only one who struggles with this.

I know all is in full polarity and so that which appears so dark and tangled must be equally light and free. To a not inconsiderable degree I have found this with sex and desire but not yet with money.  There are still knots. When I look at the body/mind complex called “Donald Trump” I see that as much if not more energy flowing than in the body mind complex called “His Holiness the Dalai Lama”. Yet the struggle to find the transcendance in it remains with the body mind complex sometimes called “Simon Tzu”.

Where is the transcendant book about money?  I’ve read perhaps 100 books about business and money and the closest I have come is John De Martini’s “How to make one hell of a profit and still go to heaven” yet John while a lovely well intentioned being is still as cheesy as hell and pretty high on the cringe scale.  Maybe that’s it – its not so much that money is not unspiritual but rather that is is somehow seriously uncool….or rather legally earned money is uncool. Money earned from stripping, prostitution or drug dealing is kinda cool.  What the fuck?!  

There is something there, something around the freedom that illegal activities imply.  Chaotic money?! Anarchic money?  Can there be such a thing?

I imagine a strange multilayered organic city ancient beyond measure filled with beasts and warlocks, druids and poet-sorcerers…where the money is  a strange species of tiny iridescent plane-shifting butterfly which descends on those filled with mana and appears at need, disappears if abused and  flits from one person to another depending on the true exchange of energy between them. It has its own whims and cannot be hoarded but only used in the moment…

Hmmm…got distracted.  Facing the sheer density of money and earning a living is challenging.  Actually the best book about money I have read is Bernard Lietaer’s “The Future of Money” which deals with alternate forms of currency not based upon debt and usury – so it is not really a book about money in its present form at all but where it might move to.

But still we have money and I am seeking its transcendence.  The polarity of the sticky controlling flows.  If I open the eye between the brows I see a blazing white sword. Is this it?  One thing which money

 does better than anything else is settle obligations.  If we consider the network of favours and obligations which build up between family members and friends over time these karmic cord prove almost impossible to unknot and yet it seems like money can settle so much.  When somebody does something for you and you pay them the correct amount – no knots, no cords. 

Perhaps this is it – money seems such a clean pure form of energy it is like a concentrated drug.  Our bodies handle opium poppy tea and chewing coca leaves quite easily yet if we use cocaine or heroin the essence of the plant is too distilled and throws our system out and unearths vast quantities of karmas which we are unready to deal with.  Money is the distillation of an exchange mechanism. 5 chickens for a goat becomes more abstract with metal coins, then more so with paper notes, then more so as money becomes purely digital, and now most of our money is represented by light pulsing down fibre optic cables.

Is money simply an incredibly powerful distilled energy which like crack cocaine has simply been concentrated too much for human consumption? Is our challenge in a varjrayana type approach to become clear enough to use it without becoming addicted, and without frying ourselves in the process?

I have been told that the nerve damage may take up to 6 months to get better as nerve tissue recovers very slowly. The other theory is taht the pain may not be from the knife damaging the nerve but from internal scar tissue.  Here is what I am doing to get better,  been on this routine for about three weeks…

ACTIVE

- Yoga and pranayama twice per day.  When I wake up and before I go to bed. I do a set of asanas then 12 ujay breaths, 6 rounds of kaplabhati, 6 rounds alternate nostril breathing and 6 rounds sitali. Finish in yoga nidra and then recite the healing mantra.

- Chi Kung once per day.  I do gathering and arousing chi exercises and stand in Wu Chi.

- Physiotherapy once per day.  To strengthen the leg I have a series of lifts to do front and back.  The physio says that strengthening the entire body will help so I am doing upper body exercise also.  Sit-ups, push-ups and pull-ups.

- Other things I do ocasionally but not every day.  Toning, Singing bowl, holding crystals over the wound, alternate cold and hot water, heat on the leg from a ehater or hot water bottle.

MEDICINE

- Am taking herbs for nerve strenthening.  St John’s Wort and Ginko Biloba with Lobelia which potentiates them.

- Am taking Spirulina, Ginseng and Lecithin for general aminos and strength.

- Homeopathic remedies I use are Hypericum Perforatum 30c, Ledum 30c (now discontinued) and Calc Phos tissue salts (General tonic for  Capricorn)

- Was taking Tramadol for pain but have run out.  Currently not doing any pain killers as I don’t like the opiates, thay make me fuzzy. 

- Am taking 400mg ibruprofen with every meal to help with the swelling in my calf and right foot (the nerve damage makes the foot and leg respond by swelling, its an automatic response and we have not figured out an alternative yet)

- Ocasionally when the pain in the foot gets too tirining I put on a capsicum patch.  The path seems to create a pain very similar to the neural firing and when I take the patch off there is a few hours relief.  This seems to be a homeopathic type effect. like cures like.

MIND

- There is an Osho BodyMind CD which is excellent.  You externalise your illness as a guardian which has created a symptom as a means to communicate with you and protect you from something else.  You then thank your body for being a servant and ask what it needs from you.  Then you and the guardian try and come up with another mechanism for giving you this protection or information and letting the body heal.

- I also use a couple of hypnosis CDs for pain control.  The relief is onlt temporary but they work well at night to help me sleep.  The hemi-sync pain control & Constant Comfort by Richard Bandler.  I prefer the Bandler CD.

THERAPY

- Am painting almost daily and find it soothing.

- Have started smoking 2-3 roll-ups per day.  There is a lot of evidence that nicotine is good for nerves and the tobacco certainly has a soothign effect (it has lithium in it).  I have smoked small amounts on and off ofr years so am not worried about becoming addicited.

- I dance pretty much every day.  Music has been mainly chill-out, soul and trance with some pop thrown in.  Favourite song: Christina Aguilera – Fighter.  "After all you put me through you’d think I’d depise you but in the end I want to thank you, cos you made me that much stonger…thanks for making me a fighter."

- Have started a gratitude journal. Listing the things one is grateful for at least once per week really helps keep one’s spirits up – research has show that this is a powerful way to increase one’s level of happiness.

- Screaming sessions.  Every now and then the rage and frustration get pretty strong and so I go outside and screm long and loud.  The neighbours must love me…

TREATMENTS

- I consult with my GP quite often on the phone,  just to check what might be happening and what may work.  We are going to try a course of voltaren injections when I get back to Cape Town to see if we can soften the scar tissue in the wound site.

- When I can I get acupunture and dry needling for the pain.  Have had 2 sessions so far and they give me about 3 hours pain free and drop the pain from about a 6 to a 4 for a day.

- Cranio Sacral Therapy ocassionally.  I love this modality is goes really deep and I feel a big release every time I have it (have only gone twice so far). It also lasts the longest giving me relaxation and relief for up to 4 hours after the session with slighter effects up to the next day.  I wish I could afford to go more often.

HUGE thanks to all my healers who havd been helping me so far -  David, Daryl, Dean, Grant, Robyne, Rasada, Subodhi.  As you can see I am not shy about trying everything possible all at once.

Special thanks to my girlfriend and my Mom.  Crystal has been amazing, words cannot do justice to the amount of support,  strength and love she has given over this time.  My mom  has been so generous helping out with time, money and concern.

A month ago I was stabbed twice while walking in Cape Town. I had just run my first ever workshop ("The Art of Attraction") and was due to meet the participants at a party and help them with their flirtations.  The workshop went great. 

My lift didn’t arrive and I don’t have a car so decided to walk in to the center of town.   En route I met some kids being pushed in a makeshift go-kart, down the main road at 9pm!  This amused me and we talked and connected as I pushed them a little bit.  The older kid at the back pointed around a corner into a side street.  As I pushed them into the side street I did not like the vibe and so returned to the main road quite quickly.  The older boy ran off – possibly to call others.  About 30 seconds after getting back on the main road 4 youths in their late teens appeared on the street behind me – I noticed knives glinting in the streetlights.  My mind thought was to stop and just hand over my wallet and phone, my feet did not think they simply ran – fast.  I was in tai chi slippers so kicked them off and ran in my socks.

The guys chased me  and  we all ran down the center of the main road.   

If you know Cape Town this happened in Sir Lowry main road Woodstock about 1km before The Castle…I was running into an even more deserted area.  Then a car coming the other way slowed down to see what was going on and I ran for the car.   Over here there is a blank spot, am missing about 30 seconds of memory. The next think I knew I was on the front bonnet of the car (over the passenger side window) hanging on to the roof rack banging on the roof for them to drive.  I knew I had been stabbed in the leg (I only later discovered I had also been satbbed in the shoulder).  He proceeded to accellerate really fast, it was quite exhilarating to be hanging onto the front of a fast moving car..

The driver of the car stopped outside Woodstock police station got out and snarled
"Get the fuck off my car"

"I’ve been stabbed can you take me to the hospital?"

"What the fuck were you doing? Buying drugs?"
"No I was walking to town. Can you take me to the hospital?"

"No – go to the police station."
"I can’t walk can you help me?"
"No."

The crawl to te police station was about 30 meters, I slid in leaving a thick trail of blood behind me like some huge red slug. At this stage my jeans were soaked from top to bottom, the wound was still pumping, I was trying to hold it closed but could feel warmth on my hand as I continued to leak.   The Police simply ignored me, I could feel their eyes slide off me.

"Please help"

"We’ve called an ambulance."

I desperately wanted someone to sit with me band maybe put a hand on me but they did not.  HIV infection is really common here and South Africans are terrified of it – so someone covered in blood was obviously pretty scary. At this stage I remember thinking "Oh Fuck.  I could be in real trouble".  I had lost a lot of blood and ambulances in South Africa are notoriously scarce and slow.

Then the guy who’s car I grabbed onto came into the police station and asked me if I wanted to phone someone. Oh yes! Of course I had my phone.  I called my flatmate Mark who was just around the corner. Then a senior policeman arrived and decided having someone die on the floor of the police station might not look great and perhaps they could take me to the hospital.

I was loaded into the back of the police van and driven at high speed to Groote Schuur a local public hospital. Thing is they neglected to close the door.   So there I was curled up on the metal floor holding desperately onto a bench so I didn’t slide out of the van.  The door was banging crazily and I briefly held it closed but then decided that putting pressure on the wound was actually much more important.

Arriving at the hospital I was met by my friend, housemate and landlord Mark. An ally at last!  It was good to see a friendly face.  Mark could not stay with me long though as we had to fill in admittance forms and give them medical insurance details before treatment.  Treatment…well my blood pressure wqas dangerously low so they hooked me up to a plasma drip but then I was not seen for ages. This being a public hospital and a Saturday night in South Africa I was waay down the triage list.

"Is a doctor coming soon?"
"No – they are dealing with 2 recusictations and a gunshot victim."

Anyway I have medical insurance (thanks mom!) and so Mark wisely decided to call an ambulance and get me the fuck out of there and into a private hospital.  This took a couple of hours. Once at the hospital a face pulled a tongue at me through the ambulance window and I burst out lauging in relief.   Arriving at City Park was the first time I really felt safe.   The face was Robyne’s – my friends Robyne and Adam who I was supposed to meet that night had come to meet me at the hospital.  Robyne is a also my yoga teacher and head of Brave a foundation helping people recover using yoga. Convienent huh?

The wounds have mostly healed but there is some nerve damage in the leg (which causes me constant pain) and I cannot walk properly yet.  There are also many emotional issues which have come up.  One of the realisations has been how insistent I have been on doing things alone and not asking for support.  Ridiculous!  I have so many wonderful friends.

So  friends please think of me, send some healing energy or say a little prayer – a note about where you are at would be wonderful.

Much love to you wherever you find yourself,

Simon

Yep,  thats all blood on those jeans…