The day that changed my life irreversibly

12 years ago today, something happened that changed my life irreversibly.

I woke up lying on the floor of a friend’s house in Sydney beneath a sheet fort that she’d constructed for me the night before.

Morning light was filtering through the creases of the sheet overhead, casting twinkling patterns on the white walls around me.

My heart soared with an unfamiliar sense of joy and contentment.

I stayed like that for a long time, watching the rippling sunlight in amazement.

I felt as though all was right in the world and that nothing could shake this deep sense of peace and wonder.

It was the first day of a month off from the superyacht in Europe where I was working for a Russian billionaire.

I had left the yacht in France and flown back to Sydney to start my holiday visiting old friends before heading home to New Zealand to see my family.

The next thing I remember from that day was walking with my friend, Mel, to her workplace.

I was elated as we walked along the newly laid white-grey footpath, chatting about our love lives (or lack thereof in my case). I couldn’t tell you what I was elated about exactly, only that the feeling was overwhelming.

After I’d dropped Mel at work, I walked down a suburban street lined with beautiful big oak trees spilling over the road.

I gazed up in wonder at the trees, struck by their beauty and aliveness.

I’d grumpily walked past those trees hundreds of times before,

and never once spared them more than a fleeting glance.

The next thing I remember is going into a cafe and feeling tears of joy well up in my eyes as I realised I could order anything I wanted.

Literally anything. I couldn’t believe it. Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate? Babyccino?

I was blown away by my good fortune and the endless array of joyful experiences that seemed available to me.

I knew something wasn’t normal in me, but for that first day, I didn’t analyse it too closely.

Years later, when I described my experience to a new friend,

he exclaimed that it sounded a lot like a magic mushroom trip he’d once had

where he felt at one with everything and in love with nature and life.

He described his experience to me and I nodded along with wonder at the similarities in our stories.

When I later met his brother, Bloody Good Bloke, a clinical psychedelic therapy researcher, I learnt just how similar my experience was to the experiences of many of the patients in his lab’s research.

In the weeks before that day in April 2012, while working on the superyacht, I had begun reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

In it, my mate Ecky describes a similar (though more extreme) experience where he goes from being suicidally depressed one night to waking up the next morning filled with joy at the wonder of life:

“The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. [...] Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room.

I recognised the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before.

Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence.

[...] That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth. [...] For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss.”

Even typing this quote from Eckhart Tolle now, 12 years after first reading it, I’m blown away by how similar my experience was to what he described.

Though mine lasted around 6 weeks, not 5 months, the lucky bastard.

At the time, I had an inkling that something like what Ecky had described seemed to be happening to me that day, but I couldn’t put my finger on what had set it off.

I hadn’t been feeling anything particularly strong the previous night, other than perhaps a little jet lagged. I hadn’t taken any psychedelic drugs (ever), nor drank any alcohol anytime recently.

The next thing I remember from that time is a couple of weeks later, standing in my parent’s kitchen in New Zealand, watching my breathing.

One of my family members — who I often used to butt heads with — had stormed off after a heated conversation. Instead of arcing up in anger, like I previously would have, I found myself observing the angry sensations arising in my body without reacting to them.

I was aware that I was responding to things entirely differently than I usually would, but it wasn’t until I turned around and saw my brother staring at me in surprise that I realised that others could see the change in me too.

He laughed and asked “Um… where did psycho Andrea go?!”

I laughed and shrugged. “I know, right?!”

I wasn’t at all sure where psycho Andrea had gone, but I was loving my new, peaceful life without her.

I later learnt that during psychedelic experience, the default mode network (DMN) is inhibited. The DMN is our “mind wandering” and “self referential thinking” network -

the part of the mind that I call “Neville”.

I believe that during those weeks in April 2012, my default mode network must have gone partially offline, which made me able to be fully present with ease.

The feelings of presence, joy and contentment extended throughout the whole month I was on holiday and into the weeks where I returned to work on the superyacht, which was now docked in Sardinia.

Looking back I can still piece together snippets of joyful moments that pervaded my everyday existence through those weeks:

→ Waking up to Sense and Cents by Trinity Roots, my alarm clock tune, feeling elated and excited (rather than the dread I’d previously felt), for the joy of another work day on the yacht, filled with interesting experiences. Like vacuuming walls and ironing beds.

→ Joyfully unboxing the sparkling dusty-pink packages of the billionaire girlfriend’s Shiseido makeup... Feeling the movement of my arms through the air as I peeled the barcodes off each of the many lotions and potions, and placing them carefully in perfect rows in the bathroom cabinet.

→ Diffusing a tense situation with one of the engineers, while aware of how easily I could have escalated the drama as I had in the past.

→ Enjoying the feeling of deep presence and curiosity while listening to the crew at the bar in Porto Cervo after work.

→ The feeling that gossip and politics were just washing over me without having any effect. I felt like I had a lot of access to wisdom and equanimity, and felt completely unruffled by even the most provocative of opinions.

→ Vacuuming walls with a sense of bliss as I felt the brush of the carpet under my bare feet, the sound of the vacuum whirring away, the feeling of the vac dusting head in my hand.

I can also remember how over the coming weeks, bit by bit, my ego, Neville,

(also known as psycho Andrea) crept back into the picture and set up camp. With his flamethrower nearby.

I started to notice the reactivity rising back up in me.

I noticed how gossip and yacht politics had started to stick to me like weeds, clouding my sense of clarity and calm layer by layer.

The more I struggled to get back to that feeling of peaceful ease and content,

the more rapidly it slipped through my fingers.

But the seed had been planted.

Over the past 12 years, I have gone in and out of that state, never quite reaching the peaks of ecstasy and contentment that I had back then, but never far away from the knowledge that peace and bliss are only ever as far away as my ability to be fully present is.

That experience, which I later learned was called an “awakening experience”, was the reason I spent the next few years seeking answers for what had happened to me, and experimenting with methods of training my mind so that I could get back to that state of presence and elation.

It was the reason I quit a career in architecture to start a business as a mindfulness coach and facilitator, which I’ve now been doing for 10 years full time.

I’ve become very lost at times along the journey,

but eventually I always remember to come back to presence by practising the tools that I teach in the Bloody Good Life program.

The Bloody Good Life program was born out of my desire to distil the practices I learnt into practical tools, as I discovered how to train my mind to come back to presence and joy.

I still use these tools daily, and consider the lessons in the program to be the greatest and most important lessons of my life.

If you’ve been thinking of doing the Bloody Good Life program with me, this is your last chance.

It’s time for a radical change in my life, which I’ll tell you more about another day, but it means that the Bloody Good Life program will be closing its doors from July this year.

If your curiosity is piqued, it’s now or never.

Put your name on the Bloody Good Life waitlist here. More info to follow.

x

Andrea