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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. This road of exploration led me to many different practices, ideas and breathing techniques through the many cultures I visited and studied, all thanks to trying to survive being so sensitive in this world.

In 1999 this journey took me around the world with a project called 1 Giant Leap. The first trip was a journey of collaboration with singers and musicians from fifty countries, and along the way we also interviewed writers, chiefs, gurus, criminals and street kids. It was fascinating to me that the more diversity we encountered, the more unity was expressed. And the thing I realised so many of us human beings shared was this collective insanity, an unspoken pact where we all waste a huge amount of our daily energy maintaining an appearance of confidence and ‘being fine’-ness in public – especially at work, where being a ‘winner’ and ‘on top of things’ is paramount. I witnessed the way we will go to such extreme lengths to avoid our pain and our shadows, which for me resulted in those teenage panic attacks. I realised how many of us hide our true faces behind masks of appropriateness and how much shame and embarrassment we feel for the uniquely beautiful, eccentric and wounded individuals we are.

And here is the big clue about our suffering. If it weren’t for the heinous panic attacks I suffered in my late teens and the suicidal state I got myself into, I would never have sought out information and techniques to pull myself out of the misery. The survival tools I have learned have taught me to be a skilful and empathic helper for those who are experiencing similar things. I notice that the hardest times of my life have acted as a kind of superhero training, sculpting me and giving me gifts which are useful for others in need. It is almost as if, in our suffering, we are sent down into the darkest mines alone, but when we return to the surface we notice that we have in our hand a jewel that is of use to the next person down the line struggling as we have been.

In order to survive, I discovered that I had to be willing to feel my pain if I was ever going to release it, I had to be willing to stop hiding so much of myself that I judged as unattractive or inappropriate. If I was ever going to feel connected to the world around me I had to be willing to feel vulnerable, to go to the edge, come what may, and stop worrying so much about what might happen when I got there.

When they asked Michelangelo about his epic David sculpture, he said that as soon as they brought him the huge slab of rock he could already see the figure of David standing there within it. His job was just to chip away the excess marble, and that’s what we’re doing here with our innate genius. I want to invite you to slowly come out of hiding in all your raw glory and begin to dissolve that massive knot of emotional, painful gunk inside. I want you to tear up the complicit agreement that tells us all to say we’re fine when anyone asks. We so rarely feel safe enough to say what is really going on. So I have entered the rock-dissolving business, and the many exercises throughout this book are designed to help you dissolve your own rocks and make a Masterpiece of yourself.

It has dawned on me that we are all functioning, relating and creating from such an insanely limited version of our true potential that our brief seventy or so years of human experience are as good as wasted while we scurry around worrying and controlling and battling our way through our limited, self-cherishing lives. I want every aspect of my life and yours to be a Masterpiece, I want my work to be a Masterpiece, I want my parenting to be a Masterpiece, I want my sex life and all my relationships to be Masterpieces. I want us to explore the edges, gently, to laugh at our foolishness, gently, and see ourselves for everything that we are.

I want to live in a world where we stop settling for operating at this drastically reduced capacity and un-edit ourselves back to the juicy, unapologetic, uniquely gifted humans we really are. This is what I feel passionate about, what I am an activist for, because if you’re going to rebel against anything, best to start with our own considerable bondage. We are enslaved by our approval addictions, our fear of what people might think, our competitiveness, our shame of who we really are, and all this is death to intimacy and death to our Masterpieces. If you want to engage fully with your passion and innate genius, this is where to start . . .

Bob Geldof maintains that he never felt saintly about his work to end poverty in Africa; it just really annoyed him that such a solvable situation was going on unsorted. This is how I feel about the way we’re all going through our lives as these violently edited-down potential versions of ourselves. It irritates me in the worst way to see most of us humans living so dishonestly with ourselves and others and, in our quest for safety and comfort, missing out. It isn’t complicated, but just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is easy. When we dare to be visible, when we stop hiding, when we commit to staying present with our feelings instead of numbing them and escaping them, suddenly our lives turn from black and white into colour.

I’m on a mission, through my films and music, through my workshops, and now this book, to create an army of ‘walking permission slips’, a legion of like-minded souls who, just by being themselves, present, authentic, often vulnerable, become catalysts for everyone who comes into contact with them. When we meet people like this, who are comfortable to be seen and heard just as they are without hiding behind roles or being an ‘appropriate’ version of themselves, we ourselves become more relaxed and more authentic. Our freedom to be seen in our mess, in our eccentricity, in our fallibility, creates a permission in everyone we meet to lighten up around all the sides of ourselves that we believe aren’t welcome, and when that happens, intimacy and creativity levels shoot through the roof.

THE MANIFESTO

• We want to put our own full, unedited, unabbreviated selves into the work.

• We want to create a movement of introspection and self-enquiry where the viewer becomes the subject of the piece. It’s about you.

• We want to dare to show ourselves in all our raw glory, really express what’s going on in the chaos and the shadows, then give ourselves the chance to connect to something real in our audience. Because when I talk about me, you’ll hear about you.

• We need to collectively admit that we’re not fine, we’re not confident and balanced and good.

• We turn up to work every day pretending we’re not neurotic and obsessed and insatiable and full of doubt, and we waste so much energy keeping up this mutual pretence for each other because we think if people saw the truth, if people really knew what was going on in our heads, all the crazy truth of our dark appetites and self-loathing, then we’d be rejected. But in fact, the opposite is true. It is when we dare to reveal the truth that we unwittingly give everyone else permission to do the same.

• We need to stop holding our breath for a moment and actually come into the room. Be here, present, vulnerable and authentic.

• If we can all collectively acknowledge our insanity, the amount of energy we’ll inherit that has been wasted on the mask will be enough to creatively solve any global crisis. We are on a mission to make self-reflection hip for just a moment, just long enough to save us.