My Heart and I Agree – A Manifesto

It’s been a pretty rough couple of months for me personally and I want to talk about here on these pages. Hopefully this story will inspire you to focus on living out your dreams starting right now.

This story has three strands that run with each other like a braid. The first seems innocuous: there’s a pose in my Bikram Yoga practice called the Camel that always makes me want to pass out. Up till two days ago, I could only do it for a second before I’d have to turn around and lie down. It is supposed to really work the heart. For reasons to be discussed below, as soon as I’d even prepare to do it my breathing would become very labored, I would feel dizzy or nauseous and every fiber of my body would scream, “Stop this at once.”

The second strand begins by me admitting that I lied, or at least partly lied to an ABC news reporter who was doing a story on us. It was a big lie to a big question. She had asked me,

What is your goal with all this music that you are doing.

I responded as follows: “I think I have achieved my goal. Every day we are in a position where we are taking our carear one step further. I feel like I am a pioneer on the forefront of my life. Every day reveals more unexplored territory, opportunity and possibility. As long as this continues I feel I will be satisfied.” Yeah, it’s all true but it’s also a big lie. I want a lot more than just that.

The third strand goes back to my genetics. I was born with a strange heart. As an infant, I had an experimental surgery which basically set things straight. Had I been born only a few years earlier I would have died after a few short weeks. During the procedure, I coded. I was dead on the table. I really shouldn’t even be here. But, thanks to modern medicine, since the age of three I have been perfectly healthy. Last November, I had a kind of medical crisis related to my heart condition. Atrial Flutter: the top part of the heart beats way too fast while the bottom part attempts to hold steady. After a few days in the hospital they actually put some paddles on either side of my chest and shocked my heart back into a regular rhythm! Turns out, and doctors are only figuring this out in the last few years, about 80% of people who have had the surgery I had get atrial fluter when the get to my age. I felt cursed. I felt resigned. Oh well, at least I had a good run at it…

Now back to life and the winter as a musician. It was a pretty stressful time for me especially as I didn’t have health insurance. Writing letters to doctors and hospital administrators became a part time job for many months. Eventually I was able to talk them down to something affordable. Meanwhile, there were a few episodes where I thought I was having a recurrence. I’ll tell you quite frankly that I was freaking out a little bit. I even went to my local doctor and got an EKG only to find that the results were normal. In a way, this was worse. Now I felt that I didn’t even have an accurate gauge of my own state of health. Perhaps I had started experiencing anxiety attacks that stemmed purely from my own fears.

I am writing this story today because all of this has come to a head in the last week. On sunday I started experiencing another bout of this fake atrial flutter. And even though it isn’t “real” it is still a terrible, terrible feeling. It lasted for days at a time. It was making me consider drinking myself to death. It was making me count my moments of life. It was making me feel like I needed to start saying good bye to the world. At the same time, I would take my pulse, recognize that what I was feeling was illusionary, and recognize that I was in the middle of some psychological storm that would hopefully show me something.

During the ABC interview, I was reflecting on all these things and it is this kind of gallows wisdom that lead me to such a Buddhist statement of my life’s purpose. Again, in a way, it is true and quite wise I feel. Needing nothing more than the present and feeling of some kind of purposeful growth is a guarantee of feeling satisfied. It is adjustable. No matter what the external condition of life, the internal feeling of growth and improvement can continue. It seems completely sensible. And even more sensible when one is face to face with one’s own mortality. It is also only half of my reality. The other half was being ignored or hidden.

If I look at my goals and dreams from when I was a kid onwards through my twenties, I see that my real life’s purpose is to be HUGE. HUGE in the sense of RADIATING ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY. If I had a picture of it, it would be a picture of me standing in front of a band of musicians at some venue like Giant’s Stadium with light reflecting off of me into a truly endless sea of a crowd. And, honestly, and without holding back, this energy did not stop at just the people at the show. It continued to radiate OUTWARDS to spread this energy to all of human kind. And not just human kind, animals and plants and all other being as well. And it didn’t just stop with the earth. It was like a beacon of energy radiating outwards to other planets, star systems, galaxies to the very boundaries of the universe and beyond if that were possible. There is a very deep part of me that is accessing this dream every time I perform. With every breath I take. Frankly, I think it is a natural state to assume one is the center of one’s universe as a beacon of one’s essence. Wow. Still with me? And what is this energy? It is all the joy, pain, suffering, love, passion of life.

The other day I was back at the Bikram studio and it was time again for the Camel. I got up on my knees and started to bend backwards. I began to feel the familiar need to abort the pose but for whatever reason, desperation?, annoyance with being afraid?, curiosity? I decided to stick it out and push past. I tried a few different ways of breathing and eventually made it through the allotted time and returned to lying flat on my back with all the others in the class. My heart was ON FIRE!! It was beating so fast and so hard and so rapidly. I could actually hear the valves of the heart clicking open and closed. Believe me, after all the research I’ve done on my own heart, I was pulling up all kinds of detailed anatomical diagrams into my mind’s eye. The thoughts that were coming through my brain were like a revelation, questioning my fear. “Why have you been short selling your ambition? What have you done with your dreams? Are you really satisfied with the moment you are in? What if you died right now? Would you have accomplished what you feel you are here to do?” The answers were charged with passion. “No! I would not be satisfied. I have achieved a good base but that is all. Now is the time remember who I am. Now is the time to move forward towards my real goal: performing for huge audiences all over the world and sharing my radiant vibration with the entirety of the universe – all at once – right now.” No need to run from what I’ve been hoping for my whole life.

The second set of camel was a piece of cake. My heart was still on fire afterwards but there was no resistance, no shortness of breath, no dizziness and no fear.

I work really hard. I push really hard. When I sing, I dive off the boundary of what I know I can do and fly into maximum effort with out any reservation. Even when I’m not performing I am working very hard at making the business side of what we are doing a fruitful, lucrative endeavor. I will not stop till I am where I need to be. It is a good thing to be reminded what I am working so hard for. It is a wonderful mirror to see my passion in. So, ABC, sorry to mislead you. I was tripping. I was circling around fear and stress. I was only giving you half of the story. Yes, I am wise enough to accept and appreciate every moment as a sign of growth. But growth towards what? Growth towards a radiant, joyous energy that is felt to the ends of the universe.
Yours,
Jesse