I looked at my bearded friend Rob and inhaled from my Cuban cigar.
We were at the Chedi, a luxury boutique hotel tucked away on the shores of the Ping River in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Candlelight danced across the marble table between us and created interesting shadows and colours as it passed through our glasses of top-shelf Whiskey.
It was 2015, maybe 10:47pm and so hot and humid that we were in shorts and singlets despite the late hour. We were halfway through our cigars and 2 or maybe 3 glasses of Whiskey into the evening… and it was beginning to get philosophical.
“What do you mean something’s always missing?”, Rob asked.
I took a breath before replying.
“I don’t know man. It’s just that no matter what I do, no matter how successful my business is, how many adventures I have, how many cool experiences, I always feel like something’s missing.”
Like I said, it was getting philosophical 🤣
And honest.
I probably wouldn’t have posted that conversation on Facebook at the time (back when I still used Facebook)…
…but I was happy to tell a close friend of my struggles.
It was a strange situation to be in.
Life was great in many ways.
I made 6 figures online while living in Thailand. Rode motorbikes through the mountains on the weekends. Traveled around the world when I felt the urge. Had plenty of friends. As many dates as I could be bothered to go on. Great coffee. Nature at my doorstep.
But no matter how much I tried to fill the hole inside me with money, friends, dates, travel or adrenaline… I still felt like something was missing 😢
That made me search.
Zen meditation. Life and business coaching. Gratitude journals and apps. Breathwork and ice baths. Talk therapy. LSD, mushrooms and other psychedelics. Motorbikes. More success and achievement.
It all helped but like I’ve mentioned in other emails, it never gave me what I was searching for.
It’s like I was lost at sea… the sea of “something’s always missing”.
All these different tools helped me tread water in that sea a little better… but none of them helped me get to the shore and get out of the bloody sea.
Then I discovered the world of fight-or-flight disarming and that’s when everything changed.
Once I learned how to regulate my nervous system and disarm my overactive fight-or-flight response, that sense of “something’s always missing” gradually dissolved.
Now?
I can’t remember the last time I actually felt like that.
Looking back, the problem was multi-faceted.
First, I didn’t feel safe. In the world. In my body. In my life. I didn’t know it at the time… but once I discovered what safety actually felt like, it was like “ohhhhhh this is what I’ve been searching for all this time”.
That was part of it.
The other piece was some amount of shutdown or “functional freeze”. In essence, my nervous system was stuck in a certain amount of freeze or dissociation.
In other words, I’d unconsciously shut down or disconnected from my uncomfortable emotions and feelings, which had the unintended side effect of disconnecting me from all my beautiful emotions and feelings. I didn’t feel the bad stuff… but I also didn’t feel the good stuff. I didn’t feel much of anything. As a result, I didn’t feel alive. I lived my life in grey… no matter how much I tried to inject colour.
I thought it was normal. I thought everyone felt like that.
But as I began to work with my nervous system and heal, I gradually realised that this sense of disconnection or shutdown was actually a sign that my nervous system was stuck in various amounts of fight, flight and freeze.
That’s where Rageheart comes in.
It’s a step-by-step process for pulling yourself out of fight, flight and functional freeze (aka. shutdown) so you can get back in touch with your feelings (ALL of them), banish the sense that “something’s missing” from your life, remember who you are and unleash the beast inside you.
Get started for free here:
https://www.rageheart.co/go/
Already a member and feeling the impulse (Rage 9) to wake your nervous system up and purge more of that “something’s missing” feeling from your system?
Hit the “Sign In” link on that page above and get purging.
Cheers,
John Wood