You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud or Youtube, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
For the next re-released song from the old catalog, we’re going to stick with the Stars Turn Me On album Goldrush for “ShangriLa Blues” from 2012. The audio shared in the video appears on the compilation album The Collection from 2014 .
Stars Turn Me On is the project with Justin Caucutt, and this song arose from this badass riff Justin came up with. That’s Justin’s forte, coming up with killer riffs. I love how this one just immediately announces itself and is relentless. I love the bassline, created by Robert Preston, who records everything I do. I love the way the vocal fits into the riff.
This song was written about a kind of amalgamation of people in my life at the time who were in painful cycles of addiction or behavior that seemed to perpetuate their suffering. And as in most of the songs I write about other people, I’m usually speaking to parts of myself I’m trying to free.
In my shamanic practice, it’s understood that we are born here to figure out the cycles and traps our lives seem to repeat over and over. Sometimes, we see these cycles as originating before we were born, the lessons of other incarnations that we haven’t mastered yet. These patterns are energetic and can show up in situations that keep appearing, or mind loops that seem to keep us trapped in misery with no clear way out.
I used to call my own cycles the Clemdulum. I saw myself knocking back and forth like a pendulum in a big clock, rapping my head on the sides again and again as I swung back and forth. Now I’m up, now I’m down. Now I’m productive, now depressed. Now healthy, now indulgent. Now clear, now muddled. Over and over, up and down, side to side, back and forth. I have said, “the extremes are where I’m the most comfortable. It’s the middle-balanced place I seem to forever run away from.”
All of my frustrating patterns were fought in this cycle. The funny thing is, this kind of instability became incredibly comfortable for me. “It’s just who I am,” I’d say, and rush toward the agony lying at the edges.
I’ve come to see this as such a pervasive human tendency: to cling to our suffering because it is familiar. These energetic patterns of unhappiness or unbalance start to be comfortable. “It’s just who I am.” Familiar, comfortable, miserable.
I had an experience several years back on a psychedelic substance that was a 6-hour agony in which I experienced real darkness and terror. There was a moment during the experience when I seemed to lift my head up into a different realm. It was like going from complete terror to absolute stillness, no sound at all, no mind turmoil. I saw an infinite sunset across a vast plain. It was like all the air got sucked out with the quieting of the deafening noise of the journey. Such silence is like a bomb going off, very disorienting, and as if all feeling was gone. The experience was so extremely still that I had the idea “I must be dying or dead,” and I felt myself doing everything I could to scramble back from this peaceful place into the extreme suffering. What a metaphor for the desire for the familiar over the possibility of peace.
To make the changes necessary to break these cycles requires us to be vulnerable and brave, to own up to the ways we identify with our suffering and the ways we inflict pain on ourselves because we think we’re unworthy of peace.
When I wrote “ShangriLa Blues” I was in the middle of frustration with friends who kept going back to their suffering, who seemed to be stubbornly clinging to behavior that was keeping them miserable. It’s so hard to see other people in their patterns, and it seems so obvious how they can fix things when looking in from the outside. I guess we get so frustrated with them because we’re frustrated with our own battles. Ours seem intractable, and everyone else’s issues seem so simple, right?
The movies “Lost Horizon” from 1937 and 1973, both versions, just slayed me as a child. Plane crash survivors are led to a cave in a Himalayan mountain and come upon a beautiful valley in which no one ever ages and people live idyllically. The hubris of the main character who needs to get back to his life, who is unhappy in the blissful valley, causes destruction for the one he most loves.
He heads into the cave to exit and you think, you dummy. It’s Eden there! What else do you need? But nope, back he goes. Back he goes to the warring society he left. Back to the familiar. Back to the suffering.
Locked out of the valley he goes. Just like humanity as a whole seems so bent on doing, over and over. I get so frustrated looking into the world and thinking how simple the solutions to problems seem to be. How about we treat everyone as if they matter? How about we allow the abundance present to be here for everyone? How about we just spend our time on care and love?
Then I remember, we’re all the same I guess. Caught in these irritating cycles of misery that we create, that we identify with. “It’s just the way people are” people say to me endlessly. I call baloney on that. There is freedom here. There is peace to be lived. The entrance to the valley is right here. We just need to realize we are worthy enough to step in.
Click image for video.