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By David Williams
ISBN: 978-1-78382-003-0
Published: 2013
Pages: 89
Key Themes: Mental Health, Mental Illness, Shamanism, Spirituality, True Story, Bipolar
Description
On 7/7/2005 the Celtic Shaman was sitting outside a Coffee shop in Amsterdam, self medicating his intrusive thoughts and depression with cannabis when the images from London came through. He stood in a trance looking at the TV screen. The bombs that went off in London that day triggered an explosion in David’s mind. For the next month he was to undergo a Spiritual Emergency, a Shamanic Trance Journey, which saw him being assaulted by the Dutch police, being arrested for hanging off the seventh floor of a Central Hotel, flying home to the UK to file an official complaint against the Dutch Police Force, fly back to the Netherlands to be arrested a further two times before landing up in Jail.A Spiritual Power was trying to tell David something. This is his story.
About the Author
David Williams aka the Celtic Shaman was born on St David’s Day 1966.
He was a bin man and council gardener, went to University as a Mature Student and became a Youth worker and then a Secondary School Teacher.
In January 2006 he was diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder. He is now Artistic Director of the Red Button Theatre and Film Co-operative. His mission statement is to help the dispossessed and the disenfranchised tell their stories through Community Theatre. His Monologues ‘The Lost Souls’ Launderette’ were performed at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff in 2010 five years exactly after ‘a visit from a Shamanic force ‘ in his prison cell in Amsterdam. This is his story.
Book Extract
Back in the UK!
I needed some time to filter information, or so I thought. The Celtic Shaman endured a painful physical ordeal designed to separate the mind from the body in terms which invite comparison with the mystical experience. I booked a very expensive flight back from a travel agent and thought I would hire a car into the bargain. Aren’t these credit cards just wonderful when you’re manic?
The reason I chose this Travel Agent over any other was because they had taken time over their window display. It featured green hats, many of them. Hats that are normally to be found on Germans or Austrians wearing Leiderhosen and drinking Steins. I thought, these guys have gone to some trouble here, ok so it was a bit kitsch but it pulled me into the store and I parted with about 500 euros more for a return ticket than I usually would have done. Yes, you read that right! A return ticket!
I was destined to return to right this wrong that had been perpetrated on my soul.
I flew back into Birmingham Airport, back into soulless depressing Britain and went to look for this car. I had purposefully asked for a small car even though I was grandiose. What greeted me was the biggest, top of the range, Kia car! After having been inspected by Lee and Lance at Eurocar I drove West into the Celtic Sunset.
After visiting family in West Wales who greeted me and waved me goodbye as if they had seen a ghost, I then drove to visit friends in North Wales, London and Cardiff, all the while planning my return to Amsterdam. When I got to Cardiff I decided to take professional advice about the assault on my person at the Manixstrasse and I was advised by a solicitor to lodge a report with a British Police Station. This I duly did.
The following letter was delivered to Butetown Police Station. It was also posted to the British Consulate-General in Amsterdam.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
GM Reynolds (verified owner) –
This is a must-read for all who want to begin to understand – and even empathise with – those struggling with Bi-Polar Disorder. It chronicles – and imparts not only the horrors of, but also the utter loneliness of – a very public and severe mental meltdown, peppered occasionally with random acts of small human kindnesses. Prison brings with it – and David Williams documents in his unique style of writing – a degree of external calmness whilst still falling apart within; and the painful, painful struggle to survive, regain balance and grow. He implicitly asks that question so many of us are asking in this postmodern, mad world: what is insanity? Is it really anything other than a rational response to an irrational culture? My only sadness is that it isn’t yet a paperback that I can lend to friends (in which case it would have got 5 stars!)
Martine Yates (verified owner) –
Amsterdamned pulls no punches. The emotions leap out from the pages as we follow the graphic journey of the Celtic shaman as he descends into his own personal Hades. All his pain, confusion and distorted view of the world is described with no holds barred, allowing the reader a glimpse of the inner workings of a disturbed mind. A good read.
Kyriakos Sorokkou (verified owner) –
I found the reasons that landed the Celtic Shaman in prison a bit exaggerated (from the authorities’s side not the author’s). Why? Because I’m Cypriot. In Cyprus you are never going to land in prison for speaking inside a Moneylender Temple in a threatening manner, or for shoplifting, or hanging off the 7th wall of a building (not many 7th wall buildings here in the Isle of Saints). No, you are going to get fined a large amount of money and/or a week in a cell but nothing more, and of course not 90-1 days in prison, unless you steal someone else’s castrated goat, you end up with 5 years in prison. Didn’t happen in this century or the previous. (Penal Code chapter 154, article 265)
Summer of 2005; My last few days of freedom before enrolling for the army.
August 2005, same year, same season; the Celtic Shaman’s last days of freedom in Holland.
A prison guard from Surinam […] shouted at me to get back into Noord Block. It was just like being back at school! Can’t agree more!
Having not been in a physical prison before, apart from school many years previously. Another attack on the schooling system. I can’t agree more (again) because I experienced the school type of prison, and the army type of prison, not the actual one, but combining army and school I get the gist (a part of it).
So now I know that I have been in prison three times,
1)School 2)Work 3) Prison one more attack on the prison we all live, school, work, retirement, death, and of course for some the actual prison which is a combination of school, work, retirement home, and death, all blended in one infernal paste.
Wow! This review has no beginning or end, it’s chaotic, it’s mental; oh ; here I used a word people use when they want to describe something crazy, something insane, many times they use these terms for people. They put different types of labels on them because they have mental health problems, well, if they had “physical” health problems they are just ill ‘normal’ people, but unfortunately they suffer from bipolar disorder, manic depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, are not ‘normal’ people we have to lock them up, they’re dangerous. How about the politicians, the bankers, the lawyers and the authorities that govern us, are they normal people because they’re out of prison or mental institutions? Apparently not but they don’t have the labels so they’re fine.
God was trying to tell Dafydd something, Dafydd is telling us something, his story. Read it. Now! 4 stars