How an out-of-body experience gives me hope

🗣️ Quote of the Week:

"The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back." - Ram Dass

In this week’s dose, I share how my first out-of-body meditation experience has kept me going through hard times.

What happens when your motivation disappears?

When all of a sudden doing the simple things you’ve done forever feels like the heaviest lift you’ve ever done?

Making your bed, eating clean, working out, showing up for work…

When your whole life has been about discipline, hard work, effort, and results?

Yet they feel like distant memories.

What happens when you find yourself filled with judgment, shame, and guilt for not being the person you’re capable of being?

What happens when you feel like you let yourself down day in and day out?

And you can’t share with anyone because you feel like you’re the only one going through it.

You feel like you have to have your shit together 100% of the time.

I’ve felt so much pressure internally to appear like I never struggle anymore.

Not because of anything external, only because it’s a story part of me is hanging on to.

It asks how can I expect myself to help others if I’m feeling lost.

The past 5 months have been trying.

There have been brief moments of clarity & breakthrough lasting a day or two, but then right back into the vortex.

Half-assing workouts, not eating as clean as I do, sleeping in.

Part of me doesn’t want to share this with everyone.

Another part says I must.

I’m committed to sharing the whole story - the highs and the lows.

I’ve felt mentally clogged. Like someone turned off the faucet of ideas and creativity.

Reading old posts and thinking “How did I ever write that stuff before? Where did those ideas come from?”

What is most painful isn’t the lack of motivation, but the judgment I feel toward myself.

The shame a part of me feels for thinking I’m failing.

It’s heavy, sticky, and perpetuates feeling clogged.

What I’m exploring now is a deeper level of acceptance & stillness.

To a depth I’ve never gone before.

To be able to sit with and hold all of these “negative” feelings.

To go as deep as I can into pure awareness.

The only way I can describe it is it feels like I’ve been playing in the kids' pool and am being forced to go deep-sea diving.

A bigger part of me senses I’m at a stage that is fertilizing a big transformation.

(Reminds me of bamboo taking 4-5 years of growing roots before it shows signs of growth above the soil. Then it erupts at nearly 3 feet per day and 100 feet in a single season. Absolutely mind-blowing.)

I’m being called forward to double down on my commitment to growth.

But damn it’s kicking my ass.

I want to share one story that pops into my head when I think about giving up.

—

One morning in April of 2021, I had my first crazy experience while meditating.

I had only been meditating for 4 months for 5-15 minutes a day, so this experience shook me.

I couldn’t even tell anyone about all the details because I didn’t know anyone else who would understand, let alone anyone else who meditated.

But I had a message come to me in the form of, what I can only describe as, a download. Kinda like a vision, but it wasn’t visual.

It was like the information was dropped into my consciousness and I just knew it was truth.

The download was that I was to be a leader for men’s mental health and it had affirmed everything I had been working on up until that point.

Basically saying “You’ve found your path. Go!”

It was like future me popped in and gave me words of encouragement during the most uncertain time of my life.

I remember opening my eyes and an hour had gone by in a blink of an eye. 

At the time, I was still trying to launch a clothing business and had only posted a few pieces of content on LinkedIn… so receiving this was a wild experience.

It was my first time truly feeling that there was something much bigger than me working behind the scenes. I could sense that something else knew what I had in store for my life.

I didn’t grow up religious and have been fairly anti-God, but I felt myself have a sense of faith come over me.

Faith in what? I don’t know. But I didn’t choose it, it felt like it chose me.

I share this because it’s saved me a few times. When I feel like calling it quits, selling everything and moving to Costa Rica, questioning my very existence…

I come back to this experience.

So I think about this part of my journey and what is being asked of me. I’ve gone through enough of these hard times to know that there’s a lesson buried within. There’s a breakthrough waiting on the other side.

I wonder if I’m meant to be running a business, if maybe my path is to move to India to study under a guru, if ultimately I will coach coaches to have a bigger impact, or something else entirely…

But then I remember it’s not my job to know those details.

It’s only my job to focus on where my gut is guiding me and surrender the details to whatever it was that communicated with me in the first place (way harder in practice).

And what’s in front of me is simply life’s way of teaching me what I still need to learn.

So to those who feel like you’re the only one feeling lost, frustrated, foggy, worried, sad, angry, guilty, or shameful…

Know that I feel you - you’re not alone.

The way through it is to deepen your stillness, compassion, and patience for yourself.

My therapist told me, “We’re like plants... always growing toward the light. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.”

I found peace in that.

Tim 🖤

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