Insanely Gifted. Jamie Catto

      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