If you’ve ever felt like your world emotionally flipped upside down, like everyday there was another helpless panic attack and that no one could possibly understand you, then this post is especially dedicated to you. I know there are many people who have experienced and endured worse than me, and I feel for them, and I know what it feels like to hit emotional rock bottom.
This is just my story with the intention of acknowledging you and inspiring you to make adversity your calling to greatness.
I woke up in my uncle’s house feeling the buzzing of my cellphone at 6:36 a.m. It’s Tim – my friend from Hamburg. He invited me with his group to come down to Munich and enjoy the Oktoberfest celebrations. I begin to remember moments of last night, drinking great beer with my fellow Germans and I began laughing out loud (yes, by myself) at the funny memories we enjoyed.
I looked down and realize that I’m still wearing my Lederhosen and that there are a bunch of Tigers Milk protein bar wrappers all over the floor. Probably my forgotten late night snacks. I walked over to the bathroom to brush my teeth and that’s when shit hit the fan.
I looked in the mirror at my pale skin and weak body and I felt so confused. I tried hard to remember what happened yesterday, especially last night, and I kept remembering up until one point where my memory just blacked out.
When I checked my pockets, I realized my wallet was missing. Did I get mugged, drugged, beaten, assaulted, molested, injected with something? These were the thoughts that were going through my mind with a new, unfamiliar and terrified feeling sinking in my body. I closely examined my body for any bruises, cuts and damage. I didn’t find anything, however my body was shaking and I still felt terrified…and I couldn’t find out why.
My uncle called me to go eat breakfast and I hardly had the strength to lift the fork without jittering. I started to feel an uncomfortable sensation of heat rise in my stomach like I’ve never felt before, a lump of constriction in my throat, numbness and tingling across different areas of my body, nerve twitches in my right foot and my left eye, and a feeling like I wanted to puke and couldn’t (a different sensation than wanting to puke from drinking too much alcohol).
Ultimately, I felt like something was very, very wrong and like there was no way out and like I had no idea what it was. And in that, I felt completely helpless.
I told my uncle what was going on and he escorted me to a nearby hospital. The first wasn’t helpful and didn’t have a diagnosis for any of the symptoms I was experiencing. This started to freak me out even more. I went to another hospital and they wanted to charge me more than 1,000 Euros to run basic tests on me with a consultation.
I gave up on the hospitals and went home. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and that’s when it really hit me – I felt like I lost my sense of self, like what psychologists call an identity crisis, and that freaked me out.
I was hoping this uncanny feeling of fear would go away after that day, and that I could continue on with the Oktoberfest festivities joyfully and continue on with my round the world journey. Unfortunately, I found myself living the next 15 months of my life living in a state of constant anxiety.
For the first three months, I was in a state of anxiety almost 24/7. I’d feel anxious and afraid for no real reason and I felt stuck that way, like there was no way out and like there was danger always around. Danger to what? I didn’t even know.
I tried so many different tools, strategies, books, programs – you name it – to fix this problem that I seemingly could never get to the root of. I went to a psychologist for a few visits, which I literally had to be dragged into going to because I didn’t think their form of therapy was effective nor did I think anyone would be able to relate to me.
The psychologist ended up being a good man, but the visit still didn’t help fix my problems. I went onto searching the web for the symptoms I was experiencing and the results I came up with led to having an anxiety disorder, OCD, and an identity crisis.
Great, how do I fix this? That question kept me in a never-ending loop of pain and frustration. Focusing on trying to fix anxiety and OCD is like a dog trying to catch his tail: it’s pointless, and you’ll never fix it because focusing on trying to fix it is only feeding your emotional pattern to continue to exist, grow and have a stronger grip on your life.
I soon learned that avoiding and managing the pain only creates more pain in your life.
So my self-experimentation of trying to fix it didn’t work off the knowledge I got from the internet, ebooks and forums. I started to think that maybe I had inherited some gene that my mom and grandma had because they worry so often, and that because of that I had to look beyond the ordinary western health care culture to find some extraordinary treatment.
I then learned about eastern philosophy, practices, meditation and the chakras and thought it sounded so far off funky and kind of cool…it had to be my solution out of this emotional shithole. I even did a 10 day Vipassana silent meditation retreat, which was really a unique experience. Meditating helped me feel more calm, however it mainly only did so while I was in the state of meditation. Not when I was out actually living my life.
Chakras…well, I felt like I always had to balance my chakras, things which I never really knew what the Hell they were, and that this was a never ending game of balancing them. Although the concept of chakras seemed cool, practicing the chakra meditations were unsuccessful for me in really making transformative progress.
I then started watching intervention videos of Tony Robbins and grew extremely fascinated with his ability to effectively communicate and influence rapid and powerful transformation for people. I saw a
video where Tony helped a man discover the root cause of his stuttering pattern of over 30 years. He helped him turn it around to speak confidently, clearly and effectively in a shorter amount of time, and Rechaud ended up speaking to an audience of more than 5,000 people.
I thought this was the jackpot and that Tony was the man who could certainly help me, and that by watching and learning from his videos and programs I could help myself move beyond any obstacles in my life and thrive and I could also help everyone around me however they wanted and needed help. I learned swoosh patterns, neuro associative conditioning and his philosophy on the six human needs.
They are all great things, and I love the six human needs and regularly relate to them in my life, however these tools I used by myself only helped me feel a little less anxious regularly and little more comfortable with anxiety. Then I saw an ad for his coaching program. I thought the next best thing to having an intervention with Tony is to work with one of his top trainers.
And so I did. And although that helped me grasp more inner power and direction in my life, I still felt underlying anxiety pop up throughout my day. Not as much as before it seemed, but maybe that’s also because a year had gone by already and I had grown more comfortable experiencing the feeling.
A few months into working with my coach, I attended Tony’s most popular event: Date with Destiny. One day, Tony shared a story about how he was looking for a solution for his wife’s motion sickness. He mentioned how he went on a quest and tried about everything and that nothing worked really, and that he was willing to try anything at this point help his wife.
A friend told him about a man named
Donny Epstein, a healer who has trained thousands of chiropractors worldwide to help people heal from pain, tension and trauma, sometimes without any physical contact. Donny was introduced to us in the crowd and his
website was shown up on the projector screen, and I just happened to jot down the link.
Fast forward three days after Date With Destiny and I’m bedridden sick in a dark room with the most sever bronchitis I’d ever had in my life. I’m in pain physically and emotionally, feeling intense back pain, muscle spasms, and that feeling of fear and anxiety is creeping up. At the time I had been working with an upper cervical chiropractor who helped me experience greater range of motion in my neck, comfort in my body, and the only issue was I was in a different city at this point when I was sick.
I checked on my phone to see if there were any upper cervical chiropractors nearby and I couldn’t find anybody who was available. In my hopelessness and misery, I turned open my DWD notebook and I just happened to flip on the page with the website address to
find practitioners Donny has trained. I almost desperately started making calls to see who was available. Only one answered, and she invited me to her workshop that same night.
I drove there and arrived early, waiting eagerly to experience this phenomenal care that Tony Robbins spoke so highly about. As I entered the office and met the other and “practice members” as they are called, I experienced an energized educational presentation about how our spine and nervous system influence the quality of our lives and why we need to upgrade our nervous system to live an extraordinary, healthy life.
During the majority of this presentation, I was slouching in my seat feeling sick, drained on energy and feeling skeptical. Then the fun began, as two practice members came up to show us a demonstration of the NSA care session. I was blown away. The practitioner hardly touched one woman’s spine and it just started wiggling and oscillating. It was a movement that didn’t look like it could just be made up – it was like magic.
Then she made another contact and said, “Emotional intelligence,” and the other woman on the table let out a big yell. I alertly perked my head up with fascination and confusion.
“Soul,” she said, and a woman expanded her chest out with her arms wide as she started singing with an angelic high pitched tone. Another woman began crying with the next contact. At the end of it, both women got off the table looking more energized and happy.
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