i'm 24 i recently graduated from uc santa barbara psychological brain sciences and for
most of my life i suffered with treatment-resistant depression
treatment-related anxiety and treatment-resistant insomnia i exhausted every single option
almost every single option for there's a few special treatments i didn't go through but
i went through every class of medication for each condition different combinations and nothing was
effective uh the only reason why i really kept taking it is because at least the ssris and snris
were keeping my brain from dying even if they weren't providing relief i could you know for
just to quantify the the amount of what i was dealing with you know just insomnia in general
i was on five times the recommended dose for ambien uh and i'd still stare at a ceiling for
four hours and eventually get up and would just start studying for school again you know whether
it was homework you know the final that morning or whatever so it's been a battle and not only
did i go through every institutional treatment and medication or medication class i went through
every almost every eastern and energy related you know thing different you know
30-something modalities on the other side of institutional meditation
or medication including other meditations too and nothing really provided relief at all
and i don't talk about my experiences in orlando for the orlando retreat when i when i showed up
i had reached a point where the guilt of what it would cause my mom and my brother for me to end my
life was no longer keeping me here you know when you're in that much pain and misery and you don't
want to go but everything is seems to be forcing you to go you you come up with strategies to keep
you here even if they're not healthy and one of them was the guilt of what it would do to them and
knowing really what it would do to my mom because my brother would have followed suit very quickly
and so yeah and basically you know i built a prison in my own mind i was the warden and
the guard and the prisoner and i was torture and torturey my heart was completely closed
you know doing we were doing the meditations um it was just numb there was nothing there's
just an abyss you know you're trying to create a feeling that you haven't you haven't experienced
joy in over 14 years or something you know it's hard to create that and what what started it
is i could get it to flicker when thinking about the service dog that was in front of me i could i
couldn't find love for myself but i could get it to flicker for that dog eventually those flickers
the distance between them decreased and became more frequent eventually they became bleeps
and they would stay a little longer and then once we got to the first healey meditation
then it really started opening up and i could i still couldn't feel left for myself but
i could burst wide open for another person in their life
so that's kind of where it started started feeling the heart there but really the major experience
i'm going to talk about was in the pineal gland meditation um for two hours of it i'm not
time but you know total time i spent full body convulsions
and i so much that i could not focus on the meditation you know at all i was very much in
my body and i couldn't even hear really what dr joe was saying it was just so intense and it was
i knew that was a good thing so i just kind of i let it happen and was kind of just trying to
study it you know see what if i could increase it you know if i play with it a little bit
so i spent that time convulsing and letting my autonomic system reset itself and realign
and then after you know it wasn't a big moment or anything like that where i was like it's all
everything's gone you know it's i'm healed it was more or less kind of like a a slow build up after
that you know i was no longer in in pain and mental pain is quite hard to quantify but it
as someone who's experienced mental and physical pain and non-pain as a traditional
pain scale um just as a physical pain where you can't move or barely even string more than three
words together for a sentence mental painting is very similar you can you can think of it as like
a mental kidney stone you know imagine trying to go around with that and it was just gone and
i fell asleep the next night within 10 minutes i stopped taking my medication that that day before
it because this this this event was the last thing it was there was nothing else i'd given myself
i gave myself enough grace that i had done enough and that this this wasn't this wasn't gonna fix
it nothing would and then and that was it so i i gave it everything it was this or death i
was not gonna spend the next uh 24 years of my life how i spent the first 24. without you one
way or another that was not going to happen and i'm a very much data and linear person
so i don't really use the word miracles but there's there's no better description of that
um and it's been six months and i haven't taken any medication for anything
um joy and love real self love i haven't really i don't think i really felt that ever in my life
self-love felt joy earlier as child but i don't think i've ever felt true self-love
and the the concreteness of that change was
ultimately tested in the worst way possible and if there was anything there was one of two
things that could i believe that could throw me off back in my old self and one of those things
happened three weeks ago and it was my little brother suffered with very similar struggles and
his pain and misery hit a tipping point three weeks ago and he he left this world
now i've i've had you know you know obviously the massive grief from it it didn't throw me
back into my old self so besides him or my mom dying i don't really know
there was no other event that would throw me back it's that's how concrete is and it's i would trade
my relief to have him here but i can't do that so it's just a testament to how concrete this
this changes you know and so my recommendation for people is to keep going keep going um even
if you can't even as much as you can do a show up that's enough you know build from that even
yeah even if all you can do is sit in a chair and even if you can't sit the entire meditation sit
for as long as you can and try to go past it like keep going don't lose faith even when you can't
bring up the feeling or picture what you're trying to picture or even just focus on the meditation
just do what you can and just keep going build off small increments you if you can't feel your heart
for yourself feel it for a loved one or a service dog or your pet you know
find a way and get it to flicker get a glimpse and then reduce the time between the glimpses and just
with practice and then eventually you can sustain it for longer than eventually it's fully open
and the breath the breath is is so major too because i you know from my undergrad you know i
know about all the downstream effector systems and what happens when the pineal gland stimulates and
how everything cascades and epigenetic chain changes up up regulating down regulating
um so it all made sense and it's like yes i'm i'm glad finally someone else was trying to put
it together and put it together before i did so i no longer had to keep trying to synthesize it
all from just so many different disciplines you know biology endocrinology psychology
philosophy neuroanatomy you know someone hour if someone finished the product that was that was
a relief too because zigzag and i appreciate his work for that because that is exhausting
to synthesize so many different things from so many different areas into one cohesive package
so i'm very grateful for his efforts into that we're evolutionary designed to resist change
you know the genes are designed to resist change you know if everything was mutating all the
time systems wouldn't function properly we would have a lot more malfunctions and we are designed
to resist change and so when you meet that resistance that's the physical and psychological
mechanism that is resisting change because your brain believes that that's what it needs to do
for survival and especially if you're already living in a survival state you know it's that's
that that program's on overdrive it doesn't it doesn't want to change anything
it just wants to it just wants to be and survive it you cannot change when you're surviving because
you're trying to survive there's always more to do there's always more to grow you know
even if the growth is small you know what matters is consistency you know and
continual growth and growth isn't constant you can't expect growth to become you know
the rate of change of growth to be constant it's a better way to say it you know there's going to be
times where the rate of change is fast and times where the rate of change is really slow but what's
important is change is still happening even if you're not aware of it you know just sitting
there and overcoming your body or just focusing on nothing or just focusing on your pineal gland that
that's causing changes even if you can't feel them you know we don't have a receptor
to pick up genetic changes in our body we can't tell when things are being changed
so even even if change is not apparent it's consciously apparent it is happening it just
might not be happening as fast as you you want it to happen which you know that's that's the human
universal we are impatient beings we want it now we want everything now we want what we want now
that's not that's not how life works or the universe you have to be patient even when that's
nearly impossible to do so with whatever you're dealing with
what matters is the effort and the intention this work allowed me to
save my life it allowed me to save my life and if it wasn't for i wouldn't be speaking here i
wouldn't be able to speak at all i just wouldn't be here and now i'm free i'm free and i wish
i wish we could have gotten my brother free beforehand but it just
he had a tipping point you know he had a tipping point do your best to love yourself you know
and that's what that's what i would recommend