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INSANELY GIFTED
Jamie Catto runs personal development workshops worldwide. His teaching builds on his own experience of overcoming creative hurdles, and provides techniques that invite everyone to fulfil their potential. He was also a founding member of dance mega-group Faithless and acclaimed global music and philosophy project 1 Giant Leap.
INSANELY GIFTED
TURN YOUR DEMONS INTO
CREATIVE ROCKET FUEL
JAMIE CATTO
Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Jamie Catto, 2016
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Cynthia Occelli quotation on p. 57 used by permission of the author.
‘The Invitation’ by Oriah “Mountain Dreamer” House from her book, The Invitation © 1999. Published by HarperONE, San Francisco. All rights reserved. Presented with permission of the author www.oriah.org
Byron Katie quotation on p. 135 © Byron Kathleen Mitchell, www.thework.com
‘hieroglyphic stairway’ by Drew Dellinger quoted by permission of the author www.drewdellinger.org
‘The Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch appears courtesy of The Monty Python Begging Bowl Partnership
Excerpt from Piano Player: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut, copyright © 1952, 1980 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 803 9
eISBN 978 1 78211 804 6
Contents
1 How We All Became Approval Addicts
5 Who Am I and What Am I Doing Here?
Introduction
There was a time during my late teenage years when, night after night, with no discernible trigger, my body would descend into a state of primal terror. I found myself more and more terrified as the day drew on, knowing that as the light began to fade I would be back there in hell again, isolated, dying inside.
As soon as it got dark, I would feel a tingling around my perineum and then extreme nausea would take over, coupled with a rising, galloping thudding of the heart as adrenaline flooded my system. Over the next hours I would be back and forth to the toilet, first vomiting whatever was in my stomach and later retching bile and air when my stomach had nothing left to offer. I had no way to make this stop and it would only cease when I finally fell into exhausted unconsciousness, drenched in the stinking, clammy sweat of fear.
Back in the 1980s they didn’t really have the term ‘panic attacks’, and so no one knew what was going on when out of the blue I would start shaking and vomiting and disappear into a foetus-like state. It was so intense that after a few months of experiencing this every single night I felt the only option open to me was to kill myself. At the time, my mum had got involved in a self-development course called Turning Point, run by a genius Australian facilitator called Graham Browne. She had been trying to get me to attend the course with evangelic verve yet I found the whole thing completely creepy. The more she tried to get me to do it, the more I resisted and judged her for her cliquey, new-age language, but when I came to her and said, ‘Mum, I’m not being dramatic, but I think I might need to kill myself. I can’t handle much more of this, and if it is this or nothing, night after night, I think I choose nothing,’ she looked at me coolly, didn’t try to talk me out of it and said, ‘Look, just try going on this weekend, and if it hasn’t shifted it by Monday, then kill yourself. Deal?’ Who could argue with that?
The course was powerful, and even though it wasn’t a one-stop healing for my condition it definitely changed something about my responsibility and willingness to feel all my feelings and reframe what might be happening in me. It taught me to stop and look at what was going on, to notice and observe myself rather than be totally taken over by the experience.
It was the beginning of a great treasure hunt, the first step on a journey that has brought me years of making films and music and running workshops, and now even coaching people with panic attacks.
