So you’ve probably been reading some of my blog posts or maybe watching me on YouTube and by now you are wondering “who is this guy and why is he so into primal modes of living?”
The reason that I love sharing what I have learned along the way on this blog is that it has made my life literally 100x better over the course of the last 3 years. I know that might sound like an exaggeration but let me tell you where I was a few years ago and where I am today.
About 3 years ago I was just wrapping up my first year of college, I had a great year socially and loved all the new freedom but academically I was disillusioned. I had been skipping class more days than not and my grades were still pretty good (A’s and B’s) Most people would consider this a beautiful thing but I. Was. Pissed. I was angry that courses that cost $1.000+ were so poorly put together that I could read a $40 text book and get just as much knowledge.
What a racket.
So I decided that I had had enough, I deferred for a year and decided to go out and “find myself.”
I moved back to Washington state and rented a little shoe-box apartment that was about 300 square feet. I picked up odd jobs and figured that I would learn what I wanted to do with my life over the course of that year.
Rather than grow as a person as I had expected I let myself get lazy, and weaker. Most of my friends were either back in California or off at colleges in different states. Starting from essentially 0 socially proved to be too hard for me at the time and so I ended up isolating myself in my apartment most of the day except for work which was usually evenings from 5-10PM.
Pair this isolation up with a few of my favorite hobbies at the time, guzzling coffee, lifting weights and eating 5.000 calories a day, and playing 20+ chess games a day, and you have a recipe for disaster. By the time that year ended I had put on 40 lbs of mostly fat, lost most of my confidence and become cripplingly socially anxious.
It was out of that dark night of the soul though that I ended up discovering exactly what it is that I love to do, and that is share the tools that let me lift myself out of that pit of social anxiety, and become charismatic and emotionally healthy again.
I experimented with just about every idea you can imagine to learn to feel good again but time after time the positive thinking and visualization practices just weren’t enough. It was time for something a little more extreme.
It was at that time that I discovered the ideas of embodiment practices, embodied cognition, and bioenergetics. All of these techniques center around the idea that emotions happen not just in the mind, but in the body. And bioenergetics in particular focuses on how we can use the body to help heal some of our emotional and mental issues.
Those techniques are covered elsewhere on this blog but lets just say that by embracing these techniques fully and practicing them daily I transformed from a guy who would stutter, bumble, and bungle his order at Starbucks to someone who feels comfortable on a stage in front of 100+ people.
Since that initial transformation I have kept growing and learning and found more and more ways that a return to the life of the body, to emotional intelligence (EQ) over IQ and to a more primal mode of being. With every step I take toward those styles of living I am feeling more and more grounded, calm, charismatic and powerful.
Hopefully these posts will help you to feel the same!