Rock bottom is a solid foundation
Heartbreak, a bad investment, a six-hour panic attack — and the collapse that became the foundation for everything I now teach about healing.
I am guilty, guilty of sharing only the good moments of my life. But aren’t we all somehow guilty of doing so?
I never learned to work with my emotions and breaking up with the then thought (unless she is that until you die) love of my life left me devastated and heartbroken for years. I didn’t cry when I was sad, I didn’t scream when I was mad, I didn’t even feel happiness anymore. I was completely disconnected from my soul and my intuition and fled into excessive work, sex, and partying. I started to use drugs like MDMA to be able to finally feel something again. It worked for the moment but the comedowns were getting worse and worse. My dopamine chasing and attention-seeking lifestyle led me to a very dark and lonely place that would soon come crashing down on me. I didn’t feel at home in my apartment, I didn’t have the family that I wanted in my mid-30s, I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with my parents and my sister anymore, even my job felt meaningless and even though I had a lot of friends I felt lonely.
I thought that doing something I’ve always wanted to do would get me out of the black hole and so I decided to spend a couple of months in Croatia and build a tiny home from a shipping container with a friend who’s a carpenter. The problem is, he is much more than a carpenter. He’s also a crook. He’s the kind of guy that fascinates you, even though you know he’d be treating you like everyone else when push comes to shove.
To cut a story short, he convinced me to invest (all of my savings) in his business and until today I haven’t seen a single cent in return. I was being more than just naive, but I didn’t want to accept the fact that this so-called friend was maybe not my friend. After 3 years of worrying and burying my anger deep inside of me, I decided that it would be a good idea to invest even more trust, time, and money and build a tiny home with him.
As if that wasn’t stupid enough I also thought it would be fun to take magic mushrooms together. Of course, I heard that you should be careful with set and setting of your drug experiences, but for some reason, I didn’t feel uncomfortable doing it in a place that was connected to so many bad feelings. I ended up having a 6-hour panic attack. It felt like all of the fear, sadness, anger, and worries I didn’t wanna feel over a long time were now boiling up all at once. The fear and panic were so strong that I thought I was going mad.
Finally, when the panic was gone the next day I decided to fly straight home and rethink my plans. At this stage, I put the experience aside as horrific but nonetheless over.
But after two weeks the panic I experienced on the drug hit me again. This time for two days straight. After another week again and then again and again… I was living through hell and I tried to find the solution externally again. I thought that I was reacting to food and researched the shit out of how our guts and brain are connected. I was so afraid of accepting the fact that I might have some unresolved issues that I desperately tried to come up with a problem that would be easy to fix. When I told my parents what had happened I felt ashamed. I felt like the image of the successful poster child was blown away in an instant and the vulnerable inner child came to the surface.
The Y
We grow up in a world that wants us to be strong and have an answer to all the challenges that life throws at us. We grow up with all the options and privileges one could dream of and we still feel lost. Society wants us to be better than our opponent and compete with anyone out there for money, love, and success. We are not supposed to cry — only girls cry. In an environment that thrives on measurable effects, emotional behavior is deemed unprofessional or even psychotic and mentally unstable and so we end up disconnected from our emotions — angry, sad, and lost in despair.
We are all dopamine junkies, chasing one high after another, just to keep our minds busy and satisfied for the moment because we are too afraid to take a peek behind the veil. In these times of transition, we are using old belief systems and role models to satiate our souls, but the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves is no longer serving us. I am sick and tired of these old tales. Sick and tired of the narratives that cloak us in an existential blanket, reassuring us against the vast universe of infinite choices.
Instead of exploring our inner space, we are chasing the illusion of a life full of external happiness and joy. We are barely ever connected to something greater than ourselves. We believe that traveling the world, having tons of friends and great experiences will lead the way to happiness, but life doesn’t work like that. External happiness and joy are only there for the moment. It’s an illusion. It will fade like everything else in your life. Rejecting the illusion will lead you to freedom.
“To be nobody-but-yourself, in a world which is doing its best — night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
This all might sound bitter, but it is supposed to be the opposite. It is supposed to be an ode to life and love, but maybe not in a way you would expect it to be. I could tell you now to be content with what you have and find joy in the moment, Eckart Tolle style, but you know all that already.
Societal pressure and expectations
Your personality is a product of your environment and in constant exchange with everything surrounding you. But that’s not it. The world inside you doesn’t want to be neglected either. Meaning, your personality is, in part, an adaptation of your suppressed emotions.
“I didn’t say it would be easy. I said it would be the truth.” — Morpheus
Everything that you call reality is something you have developed a subjective emotional response to. Interpersonal neurobiology means that your brain is not only being shaped by your experiences, but also by the experiences of people you are close to and your image of what you believe they think of you (tricky, I know). The human brain is able to model your personality according to what the situation and environment are demanding. The “you” you are showing your grandma is different from the “you” you are showing your pub-buddies.
In essence, it means that I was chasing my own Instagram feed just to keep up with the public image I thought I had built. I was living the life I thought others would want to live, not realizing that at the same time, I was making other people feel bad about their own situation and create more suffering. The mental model of my self (not myself!) had lost the connection to my true self and it was diverging like a 100-mile detour. The truth can be a tough cookie to swallow, but at that point, there was no going back to dreamland. I had already (accidentally) popped the red pill. Nothing ever is absolute and thus nothing ever is good or bad. It is your perspective that makes it good or bad and time will change the label depending on what your perspective is — a Zen master would say: “We shall see!”.
Ode to life
As tough as anxiety can get, I still see it as a gift that life gave me. Destructive forces always have a cleansing effect. I know how hard it can be to accept severe anxiety as a part of your life, but accepting and integrating it helped me to understand that anxiety is not an external threat, but the most beautiful part of you: your soul. It is pure life force that wants you to upgrade your standards and become the person you are destined to be. This part of you will go to extreme measures to wake you up. What else can it do? That is its purpose.
“You get what you tolerate” — Tony Robbins
Anxiety forced me to retreat, reflect, and reevaluate. It forced me to open my eyes to a neglected part of my reality. I realized how I had closed my heart against love in my life and how I had betrayed love in my personal relationships with my exes, but also with my family and my closest friends. The feeling of love is profound in so many ways, but something I have been cut off from for a very long time. Anxiety can’t exist in the face of love and so I started to give back the love that I had received.
I started taking care of my grandma again. I am visiting her several times a week, buying groceries, taking care of her garden, and feeding her with chocolate cookies (and she will let me know when I forget to preheat her coffee pot…). I started to check in with friends who are going through tough times, helping them with my experiences, and also with being a good listener (had to learn that as well). I am spending much more time with my family now and even went on a three-week road trip with my parents in their RV. A year ago I would have been annoyed after the first two hours, but now I see them as the beautiful humans they are. It is a gift to be able to laugh about stupid dad jokes again. You always tell yourself that you would love to spend quality time with your parents again, but you never do. You never know if you will ever have the chance to do it.
Today it feels like I am much more connected to my emotions, much more aware of the emotions of people around me (sometimes a bit too much), much more aware of my core values, and more aware of what I actually want to experience in this life. I am finally able to find joy in the little moments again. Things like the sun on my skin, spending time in nature, having a good conversation, or reading a book. Gone are the times when the supposedly happy moments would just fly by with me barely noticing them.
I can’t say that I got rid of anxiety, but I am much better today than I was a year ago and I surely don’t want to go back to the pre-crisis me. Pre-crisis me was a quitter. Somebody who would always opt for the path of least resistance. Anxiety forced me out of my comfort zone and into a mental war zone. For the first time in my life, I am experiencing what it means to really have to fight for something and it feels so damn good to see that it is absolutely worth it. In the end, people won’t remember you for your material successes but for your ability to overcome adversity.
Be your own hero
Remember your favorite hero and his or her story? It almost always follows the storyline of an adventure with a decisive crisis the hero has to go through only to come out of it as a better version in the end. It’s not about who you are, but who you can become. Figure it out, one day at a time. From me1, to #metoo, to me125. Upgrade your values and start living the life that is true to your soul.
Pain is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice. I know this is the one thing you don’t wanna hear when you are walking through the tempest, but it is the only thing that will get you out of there. You are not a slave to your thoughts or your emotions. You are the master of them, but you rarely take agency over them. Don’t let life happen to you. YOU happen to life. Don’t identify yourself with your thoughts. YOU can create them and YOU can change them. The day you start to take responsibility, accept your situation, and move your focus from pain to gain, is the day you win. Nobody else will do it for you. Reality is being bent by your perspective and amplified by your attention. Your experience is a unique lens of perception and you are the engineer, who can retrofit that lens at any point in time. It’s your choice. You either let the inner cynic taint your lenses of perception or you start seeing life as the infinite game of unbounded potential that it is.
“No one saves us but ourselves / No one can and no one may.” — Buddha
I have met so many of you on my path. People who were willing to take different roads and now flourish and survive in the reality they created for themselves. Choosing yourself is not about breaking up with everything else. It’s about choosing your life. The reality you create for yourself.
Most people drown in self-pity when faced with adversity, but not you. You will accept your fate and turn this thing into an opportunity. An opportunity to transform yourself into something bigger, better, and stronger.
And so I am calling all of you my friends. Wake up, it’s time for a change. It’s time to see ourselves the way we really are. Kind and unconditionally loving souls, equipped with infinite wisdom and creativity. Transforming ourselves will ultimately transform the world.
