First-person account by Alex King describing a life-changing high-speed car accident at age 19 that caused severe internal injury and long-term anxiety. The experience prompted a shift toward alternative healing—music, yoga, pranayama, meditative breathing and sound—which he credits with restoring his wellbeing and later benefiting others.
Chapters
Foreign, As with many people, quite, quite a lot to, to grasp and understand. And there's, you know, when I look back over my whole life, there's of course the sort of foundational early childhood experiences where you feel overwhelmed and scared and that informs, you know, how you react and respond. But it wasn't until I was involved in a very high speed car accident when I was 19 where on impact my intestines ruptured due to had a lap belt across my seatbelt. But we hit the car so hard that everything burst on the inside and so my pain went through the roof. I've never experienced anything so painful. I hit my face really hard. It was quite a scene. And of course all of my fear turns on. You know, I'm like trying to just survive in that moment. And that experience defines the rest of my life and taught me so much about how to relax because I, you know, even though at the time I was maybe curious about healing, I hadn't really, I was quite young, I hadn't really begun any particular journey. But the experience in the aftermath of trying to cope and manage with these incredible wounds inside of my belly and the uncertainty of whether I was going to die because I was, I was in the process of, my body was giving up when they rushed me to the hospital and put me in surgery and opened me up and did all the reconstructive surgeries to heal me. But after that I still didn't know. I was so disoriented and, and so my anxiety was through the roof. I'm just like, when is this going to take me? And so as I found my way and started to ask the right questions because my life had radically changed, I couldn't do what my friends were doing. I'd fundamentally come out different as a result. And maybe perhaps through the, the grace of how our destiny unfolds in life, this sort of core pain moment made me have to seek alternative methods of healing because while the, the doctors were very good at putting me back together in a critical situation, our medical system doesn't necessarily come in and support long term wellness. That's not what it's built for. What it's very good at is acute recovery. And so thankfully, my mother, in her infinite wisdom put me into music school after that because I was a bit lost. And there I met a wonderful man who showed me yoga and pranayama. And my mom gave me a great book called the Mozart Effect where they started talking about toning. And because I was studying singing and I was really deeply in music. And I was meditating, and I was trying to figure out what to do with all of this injury. The experience of breathing and making sound was like, oh, this is good. There's something. There's something here. And so I'm very, very thankful that the. The way that the situation unfolded created this core wounding that I could have never would have asked for, but were blessed by. And then the keys to healing, that wounding came very. In very short order after that and set me on a path. And little did I know that what made me feel good and at ease would end up touching so many people.
