"Oh god no... Please tell me this isn't happening."

Let's face a truth:

We humans experience a lot of pain in the span of our lives.

We would rather not think about it though.

Who wants to dig up and revisit their deepest childhood traumas? Doesn't sound so fun now does it. But there's a hidden cost to avoiding that, and most people don't realize how severe it is and how much it affects you.

It corrupts your happiness, your thinking, and your behavior towards other people.

Anyone can avoid it (it's the easy choice), but it takes real strength to face that head-on. As it turns out though, that is one of the most rewarding activities you can possibly do.

WARNING: This is not an easy read.

This is a story of facing my demons.

Let's start off with some background info.

I have been pursuing self-development for quite a while now (close to 9 months). One of my favorite self-development tools are psychedelics, particularly LSD (because it lasts for so long).

LSD has been shown to be immensely effective in psychotherapy. It raises your consciousness (awareness) to extreme heights, which can be used as a tool to gain insights on whatever problem in life you are experiencing. Business problems, creative challenges, relationship problems, addictions...

Whatever the case may be, you can be intentional about what you want the experience to do for you. Now, I originally went in with the intention of getting ahead in my business.

I struggled with developing a system that combines growth with monetization. But I did not expect it to go this way...

This time around, I took 4 tabs. That's a ridiculously high dose, but I have slowly worked my way up to it in the span of the last year. Last time I took 3 tabs, and 2 tabs before that. It's crucial to do this to get to the highest stages of awareness (the so-called "breakthrough dose").

It started off fairly normally. I studied a landing page and a handful of successful creators to extract the essence of what made them successful in the first place. I contemplated my own strategy and felt my brain working and rattling. Interesting stuff.

But as the trip progressed, I started getting this subtle, lingering, rotten feeling. At first, I played it off. But then it got worse and worse and worse. I had felt this feeling before. Subconsciously, I thought to myself: "Oh god, no. Please don't let this be happening." The feeling started turning into a creeping sense of doom. The one you get in your worst nightmares, and far beyond that.

I sensed what was about to happen. But I tried fighting against it at first. I was in denial of what was going on. But as it turns out... That's exactly what I needed.

This is where things get bad.

I couldn't fight it anymore. My demons were beginning to crawl and sprawl. My field of vision narrowed. The audio distorted and became dissonant, and the pretty visuals turned foul, dark, and ugly.

I started panicking, and I fled to the bathroom. My family couldn't see me like this. My breathing started getting heavy, and I was shaking with anxiety.

This is it. This is where my faith gets tested like it has never been tested before.

All the repressed trauma, pain, embarassment, and disgust (especially that one for some reason) from my entire life start coming at me. I start hearing my own inner voice, mangled and distorted in the most disgusting and creepy way imaginable. I hear it crying and weeping in horror and agony.

I fall to the floor of my bathroom. The pain is excruciating, almost unbareable. I feel like I'm literally going insane. I want it to stop so badly, but it won't. And then I realize...

This is what I needed all along. This is what healing actually looks like. Allowing yourself to feel all that pain that you have buried deeply, deeply in your past. Facing the harshly difficult truths that no one wants to face. I stop fighting against it and I try to lean into the pain regardless of how severe it is. This makes things a tiny bit more manageable.

At this point I start feeling physical pain all over my body, but especially in my hands. It feels like a thousand needles are penetrating them over and over and over again. And the noises in my head are only getting worse.

The pain (both physical and psychological) is so severe that it makes me gasp, groan, and whimper. It's literal torture. I can't possibly stay still. I try to subdue myself to the experience and I curl up into a ball on the floor. I literally feel my inner being getting broken down in the most brutal way imaginable, and until there's nothing left to break (the process is also called "spiritual purification").

I reach the core of all the hurt that has been lingering in my subconsiousness. I wish I could accurately describe how tormenting this experience was, but my words still pale in comparison to how intense it really was. At one point I put myself into a praying stance, but I know very well that even god can't help me now.

And mind you, this process goes on for hours. But alas... There is hope. Despite how maddeningly unbareable the pain is, things slowly seem to take an upwards turn. I can literally feel my most inner being shedding layer after layer after layer of deeply painful memories. With every heavy, shaky, pain-infused breath that I exert, another haunting demon of the past seems to leave my body.

I have the window open. The crisp, cold air and the sunlight give me a tiny bit of relief. I keel over the bathtub, and it literally feels like pain in its most concentrated form is pouring out of my body. It's like my soul is vomiting out my deepest-seated fears and traumas.

I hear my brother knocking on the door. "Are you good in there? I need to use the bathroom." I moan out an answer: "Just give me a sec."

Well fuck. Now I have to pull myself together. I stand up, still shaking, and I wipe the tears of exhaustion from my face. I take a couple deep breaths, still hearing these horrible noises looping in my ears over and over again. Still feeling the needles sting into my skin. Still in unimaginable psychological agony.

But it is what it is. I open the door and walk into our living room to lay down on a bed. The pain is slowly but surely beginning to subside. The noises are getting quieter and quieter. The process seems to be coming to an end, slowly but surely.

Here's what surpised me:

I started feeling a distinctive difference in how I approached life. Suddenly, I felt more love and appreciation for everything around me than ever before. I felt some very significant barriers drop. Some of my limiting beliefs were pulverized. I started feeling so much excitement for my business.

That day me and my brother went to our local park and schemed about our life and business for HOURS. We just stood there, in the cold, coming up with the next evolution stage of our brands & businesses.

Okay, but... Why am I telling you this? Because there is an immensely valuable lesson in here. If you feel stuck in life, think about the root causes. There's nothing in the present moment that's holding you back. Nothing at all. We all have the same amount of time in a day, and you can use that to build your dream life.

Everything that's keeping you from being the success you SHOULD be has been built up over years and years of conditioning. You are currently being held back by all of the nonsensical and toxic limiting beliefs in your subconsciousness.

And how will you break those without addressing them? Exactly, you won't.

The counterintuitive move you need to make here, is to lean into all of the suffering that is rooted deeply in your past. I know it's painful. But I lived through it! And let me tell you, this was one of the best things I've ever done in terms of increasing the quality of my life.

I feel so relieved, so free. So much more happy and careless (in a good sense) than I was before the experience. But I know that there's much more pain to dive into still, and that's for another time. I will keep increasing the dosage in the future.

But back to you: You need to show some courage. No one else can help you with this. It requires action and proactiveness on your part, paired with a good dash of balls.

If you do this... your clarity, productivity and happiness will shoot up like a rocket on New Year's Eve. And yes... It's incredibly difficult and painful to do. That's exactly why it's so effective! And that's also why most people will never do it.

Stop trying to dodge it, face it head-on. You are here to grow after all, not just to stay in one place (or even decline)! Growth involves difficult, nasty things that you don't want to do. But those things are exactly what will grow you the most as a person and as a business.

One of the most powerful tools available to you in that regard is questioning.

Have you ever asked yourself why you seem to be stuck in one (or more) area(s) of life? Well, it's because you are not taking responsibility. That's it. You're playing the victim and you're letting life happen to you instead of you happening to life.

You can have anything you aspire to have in this world, but only if you really put your mind to it.

What does this mean?

This means that you need to be willing to do everything it takes to get there, even when you're all alone on the journey. Even if everyone is telling you NOT to do it. Even when you feel lost and the weight of the responsibility is almost crushing you to bits. Even if you "don't want to do it".

Everything else just won't cut it.

Remember... you asked for this. It's in your hands to create the life of your dreams, and no one else but you has the responsibility to make it happen. And that includes facing things that you don't want to face.

Be brutally honest with yourself.

Here's what I want you to do...

I want you to stop hiding from your demons... invite them over for a battle instead. Look them straight into the eyes and tell them "fuck you". Fight them, and lean into the pain. Bleed as much as you need to. Because that is cleansing.

That painful, traumatic memory from your past? Let it hit you with full force.

And don't you tell me that "I don't understand". No, I do...

I have went through unimaginable suffering in my life, and I've seen the same thing happen to others. When I was 16, I got beat up by a group of 15 people for trying to stand up for a 13 year old that they were pressing.

Just a few months later, I stood up for my then-girlfriend and fist-fought her abusive dad (who is a Hells Angel). And these are merely scratching the surface, but I just want to make it clear that I know...

I feel your pain. But you can not allow it to make you weak. Don't use it as an excuse. I've seen people do that and get trapped in an endless cycle of hell. Hell, that was me for years and years before I decided to cut off my own bullshit!

You need to break out of it, and that's only going to happen through facing those unimaginably difficult truths head-on.

Don't you dare walk away from this and change nothing...