From Fear To Freedom – My Story

I’m 34 years old and until my late 20s I was convinced I was shy, weird, inferior, unable to talk, unable to be liked… I was fearful. I had fear of being judge, fear of being rejected, fear of being vulnerable, fear of being seen as weak… Living like this created a constant state of anxiety, which many times manifested as fight or flight reactions, which in my case was only flight. So I ran away from conversations, I ran away from initiative, I ran away from responsibility, I ran away from adulthood, I ran away from becoming a man.

I was in survival mode and I thought that was how life is, I thought that was how I was, I thought that was my identity and I didn’t even question it. Self improvement, spirituality, self development, were all things I rejected or made fun of. At the same time, I had this duality within me: one side felt insignificant, the other tried to belittle others to feel meaningful. This created a pendulum effect, sometimes I thought I was smaller than everyone else, so I felt down. Other times, I thought I was better, so I felt up. Both sides of the pendulum, I understand now are toxic and are a product of the ego. So how did this stopped? Pressure stopped, pressure changed everything.

When I was 28 I started doing a PhD and that required me to leave my home country. I found myself in England, unable to talk English properly, with no family, no friends… I felt isolated, alone, depressed. I felt so much pressure that my anxiety went through the roof, so my behaviour became even more weird, my body temperature was affected, my ability to talk was even more compromised. I couldn’t bare the thought of asking someone “how are you?”, it was that bad.

So what did I do? I blamed the country, I blamed the food, I blamed the people, I blamed the weather, until the pressure forced me to look in the mirror and recognise: it’s me. It’s me that I need “fixing”. So I started looking for tips on how to meet people, how to make friends, how to start conversations. Eventually a video appeared as suggestion on YouTube with the name “How to be a man” by James Marshall. I saw the video but for more than a week I couldn’t click on it because I didn’t feel like a man. Although I was alone in my room, I couldn’t cope with the shame.

A week passed and I finally clicked on it and watched it. This video changed my life. The video showed me how wrong I was, it showed me that I could change, it showed me that are unlimited ways of living this life, showed me the immense amount of potential there was in me. Don’t take me wrong, at the time, it was just conceptual, I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t even believe it but a seed was planted in my head.

Slowly I started learning how to talk to people. I started small with “Hi, how are you?” and I practice that for a while. Then I introduce more questions, more interesting questions, and eventually I noticed I needed to share things about myself, so I did. I started going to dance classes to have an opportunity to talk to quite a few people in one night and more importantly, to learn how to feel comfortable with human touch. Therefore, with the dance classes I was learning body language as well as differences between different types of touches. Where you touch, how you touch, what is the intention, what is calibrated and what is not. I also learned how to be comfortable in an environment with loud music and people dancing around, which was scary to me before that. All that I took from dancing lessons.

None of my friends and family could believe I was learning how to dance because they couldn’t imagine me doing such thing. Some even made fun of me but it didn’t matter, I was changing, growing and accomplishing things. No one could take that away from me. Other obstacles arose though. During social dancing, men are supposed to ask women to dance. That meant for me to take initiative, to take the risk and that was a problem. It took me almost 2 years to invite the 1st girl to dance. Usually guys start right away asking girls to dance but I didn’t managed to do so. The consequence was that I learned slower than most other guys. However, I was persistent and eventually I started dancing with everyone. I became better slowly but I did get to the top level. This was a great lesson for me. I was not naturally gifted, I learned very slowly, I had a lot of fears but still with persistence I got good at it, much better than other guys that skipped lessons or just did social dancing. I realised that I could apply that same process to all aspects of life.

With that same approach, I started asking people to go out for a coffee or a drink, I started asking girls on dates, making friends, getting into new social groups, getting into spirituality, opening up my mind to things bigger than I ever imagined. With time, I felt I was disentangling my mind, my emotions, my inner being. In this process, one of the most important things was to be introduced to meditation.

When I came to England, I was having troubles sleeping because my mind was having these cycles of thoughts that would repeat themselves over and over again, and I couldn’t stop them. My running mind didn’t let me sleep. I told a friend of mine and he suggested meditation to me, he told me to give it a try, so I did.

The first time I meditated, I fell asleep faster and the second time, I fell asleep right away. From that moment on, I knew there was something to it, so I kept meditating. Yes, I could sleep now and that meant that I was fresher in the morning, I had more energy and I had all the good side effects from that (better focus, better memory, mental sharpness, etc.). However, for quite a while, it felt like it wouldn’t go beyond that. I remember thinking “and now what?”. I had this thought because I could calm myself down alone in my room but I was still anxious in real world scenarios. All the benefits of meditation were only felt in my room. Nevertheless, I kept going until one day something happened.

I was pouring milk into a cup and I spilled milk on the table top and had the immediate thought in my head: “Oh sh…” but this time, I didn’t even finish the word. The thought was interrupted by: “Why is this a big deal? I just need to clean it and that’s it. Why am I becoming angry and upset? I don’t need to bring extra negativity to my life and carry it around through the day”. That was the first time meditation had a clear impact in my life outside the safety of my room. Without noticing, I had become more and more aware of my body and my thoughts, so I started noticing reactive thought patterns and all the baggage from the past that I was carrying around.

From that experience, I started asking myself: what is my truth? I started noticing and analysing what was truly me and what I had copied from someone else in the past. I started asking myself “Is this way of thinking serving me?”. So I followed the advice from Bruce Lee: “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”. That way of thinking together with my increasing awareness made my progress accelerate greatly and I remember going on this long phase that almost on a daily basis I would notice something that I had to let go off.

There is an idea that I want to pass very clearly. The process of growth/maturation is an interactive one. It is a mixture of inner and outer work. It is a combination of working on awareness and taking action, and you really need both components. Excluding either of the components has a very high price and leads to unnecessary pain. So be complete, do not ignore or avoid the any aspect.

The process I described occurred through all the time I was doing my PhD. At the end of my PhD, I wanted to go travelling but I did something else instead. I invested a big chunk of my savings in a month long life coaching program. This allowed me to work on some issues that I did not manage to overcome on my own and after doing that, things became really clear: I did not want to work on science anymore. So I abandoned my career plan, all those years of studying, all that time invested in that… I had to let go.

On the following months, my life changed fast, I felt more me than ever before. I felt free! Many of my darkest fears had faded away and I could see something new. The whole process of self improvement I had been working on during the PhD was the most important and fascinating thing for me. All my free time during the PhD, had been spent on it: researching, learning, experimenting. So, a question arose in my mind: what if I teach it to other people? Once this possibility was in my mind, I knew I had to do it. It felt right, it felt like my path. I am very consciously using the word “felt” because this was not a decision based on a thought process. I did not base it on a list of pros and cons, instead I genuinely felt something that I never felt before. I am talking about a sense of rightness, a sense of this is meant to be. Now, I still feel like that every single day.

For me, this is still a bit of a mystery how I ended up here, and how I found my way through all the confusion there was in my mind. I feel grateful for everything that happened in my life because everything made me get here.

This is my story, thanks for reading it!

What about you, what is your story? If you are going through similar challenges or you’d like to share your own challenges, get in contact with me. Contact me through email: [email protected]