The Absence Of Alice Coltrane – Reflections On Spiritual Eternal

"Getting over yourself is a lifelong job; you really have to keep at it, and most of us never manage. You might struggle, too, to work out what the difference is – practically speaking – between getting over yourself and just sitting down and being quiet. (You’d be in good company, and would perhaps make an excellent nun.) The fear, perhaps, is how do you get over yourself without making yourself disappear? There's no doubt that Alice Coltrane got over herself. She had help (though that might not be the right way to put it) when she was widowed aged 29 with four children to look after, her beloved husband killed by cancer. Grief can do amazing, terrible and bottomlessly strange things to you. In the period following John Coltrane's death, the harp that he'd ordered a few months previously arrived and Alice began to play it. She also entered into what she described as her tapas – a period of spiritual cleansing – where she fasted, deprived herself of sleep, meditated, hallucinated, and was admitted to hospital after purposefully burning herself during 'examinations' to see her body's further reactions to extremity. ..."
The Quietus