I began meditating at a young age but found myself embarrassed about the practice. I tried to keep it hidden from my family, particularly my brothers. I worried about explaining what I was doing and why. I share this not to be seen as advanced for starting young, as I truly don't feel advanced in a particular way. I share this because this was the first distraction, the first noticing. The first object of my awareness that started my journey in guiding awareness. My first experience of breaking apart the mind into different functions, and viewing them. Too young to know what they mean, too ignorant to be used as a tool, but my ability to notice started with noticing my embarrassment and fear. I knew nothing of my OCD thought patterns and behaviors, nor had any idea that these skills would be desperately needed in the future. So despite that early curiosity about wellness enough to get me to sit still and notice. Reading my journey, you will come to find meditation alone wasn't enough to prevent me from encountering challenges or disregarding my physical and mental health as I grew older. But allowing me to sit with them and find compassion and a different source of energy to keep moving.
My early meditations were a combination of feeling ecstatic, feeling calm, and it didn't take too long to become overwhelmed and scared. I stopped meditating when I didn't understand where an overwhelming amount of sadness came from. I'd ask myself, and try to grasp for any reason on why I'd be feeling sad, and I couldn't figure it out. Out of that confusion, the only logical reasoning I could find was to stop meditating.
So I did.
Panic.
That was an outcome not of ceasing meditation, it's an emotion and experience that came naturally to my young mind as the response to bullying and a feeling of not belonging. I was told to 'man-up', and so I'd bottle the emotions, until I couldn't anymore.
Panic.
My hands would tremble, my breath would be rapid and shallow, my thoughts would be smothered with an overpowering echoing chaos of darkness and fear. It was on and off into my junior and senior years of high school.
Then I remembered about meditation, and was exposed to the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and thought it was worth exploring again. In doing so, I reconnected to what it was like to feel my awareness separate from experience. I contemplated if I could make the panic the object where I consciously choose to focus on. Instead of my consciousness being pulled by the panic, but to willingly sit and observe the entire experience.
The sensation of observing panic in this way is difficult to describe. Awareness enters into a state of passivity. I felt my heart rushing, and my breath rising and falling. I didn't try to change anything, but I witnessed it change on its own. By passive observation alone, my panic released its grip, and although I can still feel panic or have echoes of its experience, it's something I lean on every day.
And then I let go of meditation again. My most extreme panic resolved and found a way to make use of awareness skillfully with intention. I felt like I had control over my mind and life.
Until I no longer had control.
In my late teens I developed an addiction to amphetamines and engaged in binge drinking despite the physical toll these behaviors took on my body.
I loved electronic music and would go to every rave I could. The feeling of being in a state of ecstasy was beyond anything I could imagine. And I was obsessed.
I reached a new level of low, it didn't have the disruption of panic. Instead it was a scar, a fissure, a depletion of vitality and the colors of life became gray and empty.
At this point in my life, I had smoked, drank, and snorted various substances. And my parents would shout and share their disappointment and fear. On another night of raving and partying, after taking multiple pills of an unknown class of amphetamines, I entered into a state where I lost so much weight, my face started to become frail, I lost the ability to sleep for 3 nights, and on the next morning as I was fighting the tremors in my hands to eat breakfast made by my mother, she walked up to look into my eyes. And I saw fear inside of her. I saw my own actions as the root cause of this fear, she didn't shout. She didn't hit me. She simply walked away, and I knew I had to do something different.
With the support of my grandma's presence and friends who were sympathetic to my sobriety, and a personal commitment to change, I achieved sobriety. It has been nearly 15 years, and I'm proud to say I have not used amphetamines since.
My wellness journey was far from complete. Learning about my addiction once more rekindled my curiosity about meditation. I decided to immerse myself deeply in the practice and relatively quickly found it to be transformative. I began to view my addiction as something both separate and a part of me. Separate in the sense that the position of impulsiveness is real. Addiction is real. And it is the unconscious relinquishing of control to one's senses. I gave up my autonomy to be guided by the sense of touch and pleasure that came from the drug. This understanding and reality of introspection and spiritual development led me to a profound appreciation for life, especially the natural world.
So then I explored psychedelics. I won't share my exact experiences, as in my later years I was taught the importance of letting things stay within you, unspoken, yet forever true. However, I can share what impact they add and the struggles they brought up as well.
I quickly became increasingly curious about consciousness thanks to psychedelics, it opened doors to connect to something I was not entirely familiar with but a deep knowing that it was connected to the subtleties I would experience in meditation. I pushed the boundaries and at times would go too far. As I continued doing them, I kept having an intuition that this isn't the final destination. I kept being challenged and asked why is a substance outside of me necessary to understand the 'me' underneath? And so I learned to let psychedelics go as I recalled how my senses can be tricky in convincing my awareness to relinquish control to the senses.
So I defaulted to a more passive and open practice of meditation giving a sense of trust to life and belief in myself that I can achieve a more impactful and deeper connection to life and reality beyond psychedelics.
During this time some of my experiences led me to become captivated by the beauty of our planet, which then felt like my dharma, my purpose. And it inspired me to study environmental science.
After several years of study, I quickly came to a realization that many people had been advocating for environmental change long before me, and some had passed away without achieving their goals of transforming our relationship with the environment. This realization plunged me into a deep depression once again. After all these experiences, after all this profound calling and nature, I felt I had failed in my mission, I felt I had failed my dharma.
Thankfully I knew time would bring opportunities I wasn't yet aware of, and I'm grateful my love for nature persisted, which then prompted me to pursue the study of plant medicine. During this time of my life, I discovered a beauty beyond anything I could have imagined. I learned about how plants produce their secondary constituents, how these constituents interact with our bodies, and the intimate connection between humans and plants. No words do this connection justice. It's not enough to know plants can heal. It's about feeling the 'aliveness' from the plants, watching them grow, and then absorbing them into your being. This is where I realized:
We are not separate from nature. We never were.
The Earth provides medicine for us, and this selfless act showed me that I had been approaching environmental stewardship all wrong. Success was never about my individual actions but about recognizing the fundamental connection we have with our home.
This insight led me to study holistic health, something I never thought I would do, but this was where I was lucky to be introduced to Ayurveda. And this connection was immediate. One of the most profound teachings at its core is that Ayurveda teaches living in harmony with the natural world, including nurturing our own health. It brought everything together: the meditation, the love of nature, the study of plants, into a single, coherent practice.
To heal our environment is to first heal ourselves.
This is my story of my journey and passion for wellness. In my studies of Ayurveda I also learned of the 6 major systems of philosophy, my spiritual practice grew beyond any psychedelic, and yoga as a form of integration is something that fuels me to no end to this day. This is the reason behind my work. I aspire to share the knowledge I continuously acquire. My dream is that together, as a community, we can care for our shared home.