How I Got From Depression To Joy & Inner Peace (Audio version below)
Part 1: The Bald Soprano. 2006-2009
”Please, God... Universe?... Jesus?... Whoever's up there, please give me an answer. Please tell me what to do…"
I slowly mouthed these words to a stranger in the mirror who was staring back at me strangled for answers.
It was September, 2009. I sat in my basement suite with two exhausted hands holding up my forehead in a panicked distress.
I was just about to enter my second semester at one of the top professional acting conservatories in Vancouver, British Colombia. Until then, it had been my biggest dream all throughout high school to study with this particular acting academy. It was common knowledge they turned out more successful working actors than any other school in the country.
Like nearly every young artist in the industry, I had a burning desire ever since I was a kid to become an A-list actor in LA, working with the biggest names in Film & TV.
At that point I was right on the success path my 5 year old self would have killed for. My fire was burning bright and for a long time it didn't look like anything could stop me.
But that night as I sat staring at myself in the mirror, something felt seriously wrong. A titanic shift had been occurring within me for weeks and I couldn’t make any real sense of it. And so I sat there begging...something...for an answer.
Rewind to 3 years prior in 2006.
I found myself studying personal and spiritual development material in my spare time, a passion that unexpectedly came upon me while directing a play in my senior year of high school entitled The Bald Soprano.
This play was an avant guard piece derived from the philosophy of existentialism which is essentially the idea that mankind's existence is devoid of any real meaning or God except for that which he thinks for himself.
These theories, although often very bleak, were what caused the beliefs my family gave me about religion, science and spirituality to be directly challenged for the very first time in my life.
I remember when the realization first hit me. It was as if my mind had been suddenly let out of a cage it didn’t even know it was in, set free to fly wherever it wanted.
I don’t have to subscribe to any religion or faith that doesn’t resonate with me? Meaning… I can think whatever I want to think…and believe whatever I want to believe?
My brain would teem for hours at night, trying to comprehend the validity and falsity behind everything my mind had ever been introduced to throughout my life…
But what is the TRUE truth?
The months I spent interacting with this play changed the way I looked at life forever. It was my first real spiritual awakening from what most of our society expects us to think about the world, ourselves and the true nature of our existence.
After the play ended, my hunger for knowledge didn’t stop, it only became more aggressive.
I was obsessed with wanting to know the real answers to the questions mankind has been asking for thousands of years:
Who are we really as a human species?
What is our actual purpose in life?
What are the scientific and spiritual laws of creation that govern our existence and the universe?
For my 17th birthday I asked my parents for roughly 10 different philosophy books from authors like Jean Paul Sartre, Descartes, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and more. I was a total nerd for this stuff.
I soon found these teachings, however, to be dated and boring to read, so I sought after more modern approaches on the topic.
It was normal for people my age to be getting high off of drugs and alcohol.
I was getting my fix from teachers like Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill and Dr. Denis Waitley — just a few of the top leaders of the personal development movement in the 20th century.
The knowledge and wisdom I was injecting into myself from these great teachers got me high in other ways...and I couldn’t get enough.
The depth of self empowerment and fulfillment I experienced expanded over the next year and a half.
Not only was I beginning to learn the truth of mankinds purpose here on earth, I was also discovering that there was, indeed, a consistent, scientific process for creating success in ones life that was universally applicable.
This lead me to develop a strong desire to want to help others by sharing all the beauty I had learned with anyone who’d listen.
With young and innocent enthusiasm, I would bark sentences at my friends and family like, “You can be happy and successful in life! If you understand how your mind and the Universe works!”
Oh, I was high alright… On hindsight, I know I came off a bit nuts.
The truth is that I didn’t know how to fully communicate the totality of what had helped me so profoundly in a way that other people could really relate to as well.
Even though I began to use what I had learned to fulfill many of my goals over the years, including my biggest dream at the time which was to get into one of the top acting schools in the country, I found myself starting to fantasize about what it would actually be like to give back and teach this material to others on a professional level.
This started to produce a lot of conflict and confusion within me about what I was truly feeling called to do in life.
To everyone around me, I was always known as the guy who loved nothing more than acting and film.
I was learning so much at my new school from some of the best acting coaches in the country...yet I couldn’t help but recognize that there was a visceral shift occurring within me.
What’s going on with me? I asked in a puzzled stream of thinking to the universe. I’m literally living my dream right now! Why am I not happy? What am I missing?
It was then in June, 2009, that I stumbled upon a meditation program on the internet called Holosync.
This leading edge technology was said to contain binaural beats, which are essentially natural frequencies built into the audio track that were designed to stimulate the left and right hemispheres of your brain in a way that would scientifically synchronize them together to work at a more optimal level.
Put simply, it said that it makes your brain work better.
With consistent use it would result in measurable levels of reduced suffering and an increase of clarity, peace and joy.
“Meditate like a Zen monk at the push of a button,” the headline of their website so boldly claimed.
As skeptical as I was of something that sounded way too good to be true, I was extremely intrigued and so I did a lot of research over the next couple weeks.
The science behind the product made sense to me and the testimonials from hundreds of people all over the world made me convinced to give it a try.
I ordered the introductory version of Holosync and started using it immediately.
I remember the first time coming out of an hour long meditation with holosync feeling a sense of clarity and purity I had never experienced before in my entire life. It felt as though my brain was being cleansed of everything it didn’t need anymore.
As I knew from my research, however, this could possibly come with a price.
I learned that like when your muscles get really sore from an intense workout, your brain undergoes a similar breakdown-buildup process when meditating with holosync.
It said that because everyone’s brain is wired differently, everyone naturally reacts to this breakdown process differently.
I was pretty confident, thinking it wasn’t going to effect me much because I had already been doing so much personal development for the past three years.
How bad could it be? I thought.
I was wrong.
What followed was what seemed like random intense surges of fear, anger, sadness and sometimes rage…or “strong emotional upheaval” as the program called it.
These would last anywhere between 5 minutes and sometimes days on end.
When the surges subsided, however, I was met with an overwhelming feeling of serenity, peace and bliss I didn’t even know existed.
After every downward spiral I was having mini awakenings and realizations about life that were giving birth to an entirely new sense of self. To some degree it felt as though I was being reborn.
Suffice to say, it was an intense rollercoaster of emotion.
There came a tipping point after meditating with holosync every day for four months where my urge to leave school totally dominated me. I would have visions during my moments in silence of me speaking on stage in front of thousands of people talking about personal and spiritual development.
Even though on some level I felt better and more clear-minded than I ever had in my life, it was completely jarring to lose touch with who I always thought I was ever since I was a little boy.
I felt fear and couldn’t tell if what was happening to me was in reality good or bad.
And so, on that night in September, 2009 as I sat alone in my room, a shadow draped heavily across my exhausted mind, I tried to avoid the possibility I couldn’t help but loath.
But I’m so young; how could I possibly be a personal development teacher at this age? And what would my parents and friends think if I left acting school to become a spiritual teacher.
What if neither decision is right?
...What if holosync totally fucked up my brain and I’m going crazy?!
If I leave acting school and I’m not an actor anymore, then who the hell am I?
I became intensely rigid with anxiety as my ego and soul battled for my sense of truth.
Looking up in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the young man staring back at me anymore, tears rolling down his face.
My soul felt 10,000 miles away from his raw contorted expression, struggling to understand the meaning of the sound and fury banging loudly in his body. He looked just like a character in the play I directed back in high school.
Like a blind man trying to see…or a bald man trying to sing…
"Please, God... Universe?... Jesus?... Whoever's up there, please give me an answer. Please tell me what to do..."
Part 2: The Dark Night Of The Soul. 2010-2016
I felt like Neo when he was first being told by Morpheus that he and all other humans were living inside a computer simulation, only I didn’t really understand what that meant nor did I have a Morpheus character to lead me out of The Matrix.
“Red pill or blue pill, Bron?”
I was terrified to take either to be honest. I didn’t know what was right or wrong, real or not real anymore.
My whole concept of Self and life seemed to die with my actor identity.
It felt as though my mind was being forced down an evolutionary journey at warp speed through the use of Holosync, much faster than I was ready for.
With clenched hands and gritted teeth, I surrendered to the call of my soul and made the hardest decision I ever made in my life.
I abandoned my dream, the path that for years I had worked so hard to achieve.
I moved back to my mom and dad’s house in Vernon, British Colombia to figure out what was wrong with me and what I had to do next to get back on track.
I was vulnerable, dizzy and angry.
I soon fell victim to seeing myself as a failed actor with no tangible direction in life.
Without knowing how or why at the time, I sank into a depression that lasted for the better part of the following 3 years. I had no idea who I really was anymore.
For many days I didn’t want to get out of bed, and sometimes didn’t.
When I did go out in public, I put on a mask to hide my pain which only made it worse. I wouldn’t dare let anyone know that the new aspiring life coach was, in reality, going through a path of dark disillusionment himself.
I was more concerned with appearing enlightened rather than actually being enlightened because, in truth, thats the only way I knew how to deal with my suffering and situation at the time.
Most of my days over the next year were spent alone either meditating or reading books from teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Louis Hay, Esther Hicks, Neal Donald Walsh, Don Miguel Ruiz, Tony Robbins…and any other Morpheus-like characters I felt could help me find the happiness and joy I had once known so well.
I travelled to different spots throughout the world to attend workshops and lectures from some of these people to deepen my understanding of how the universe works on both a spiritual and scientific level.
I studied and trained alongside mentors in the field to learn how to create deep, meaningful relationships with people, and eventually how to offer real value as a life coach.
Even though I was starting to make progress on my new path, my heart was still riddled with self hatred for abandoning my inner child’s passion for acting. For years, the battle in my head continued, doubting the validity of my desire to become a personal and spiritual development teacher.
The same weekly rollercoaster of emotion became my dreaded “normal.”
Even when I made meagre attempts to get back into acting or distracted myself with unfulfilling career goals and shallow romantic relationships, I still couldn’t get away from the deep knowing I uncovered when I started using Holosync four years prior:
My purpose is to help people remember who they truly are and how to create what they actually want in their lives.
I wrestled with this truth for a lot longer than necessary and thus, the healing of my inner demons and alignment with my highest self did not come over night.
I didn’t have a quantum shift or some kind of magical spiritual realization that evolved my depression forever. Turns out those instances are far and few between in reality.
With a high willingness to learn and grow, I took all the tools I had learned over the years, distilled them down to the ones that work the best, and applied them diligently, one conscious shift at a time.
I know that sounds less glamorous than what you might have imagined the healing journey to be, but it’s the truth.
I eventually came to learn that the core reason I had become so depressed is because I, like so many people, got lost in the often unconscious trap of trying to find my sense of purpose and love in the world through motivations produced by my ego rather than fully understanding and believing in who I really was on a soul level and what I was being inspired towards on my life path.
Everyone has a different story, along with different reasons for their suffering. I don’t pretend to understand your current situation but I do know for a fact that positive change is a real possibility for everyone no matter what.
It is said that The Dark Night of The Soul is a process one may go through in their life that is often triggered by the loss or failure of a career path, relationship or some outer goal in which they feel strongly identified with.
When the person loses their concept of self like I did with acting, they are met with the stark realization that they really aren’t who they thought they were to begin with.
You see that your entire life was spent trying to be happy and fulfilled by chasing something outside of yourself without first being unconditionally happy and fulfilled with the person you really are first, which almost always results in a life of emptiness and quiet desperation.
With the lack of high quality spiritual and psychological support in our world due to the large amount of shame and guilt we have associated with talking about our mental health, it is easy for people to remain confused, alone and often depressed, not being able to comprehend how to unplug from “The Matrix” and move forward successfully on their path.
Part 3: Being The Light. 2017-2020
Like most days over the past two years, yesterday I woke up and went to bed at night feeling an abundance of love, joy and personal empowerment running throughout my mind and body.
As you know, I did not get here by mistake. I got here by understanding the three questions that inspired this path when I directed The Bald Soprano in high school:
Who am I really on a soul level and how does that relate to who I am now in this physical body?
What is my life purpose?
What are the scientific and spiritual laws that govern the creation process of our experience as human beings?
Obviously I don’t say this to brag. On the contrary, I say it because I want you to know without a doubt that it’s possible for anyone whose willing to learn the answers to these questions that they too can have what I have found within myself.
No matter who you are, where you are, what you’ve done or haven’t done, it is a fact that you can 100% create the life that is deeply meaningful to you from where you currently are.
Despite what we’ve been hypnotized to believe about what it takes to be consistently happy on a daily basis, it’s much less about what you’re doing and what you have, and much more about the way you’re thinking and feeling about what you’re doing and what you have.
It is the reason why there are those people with massive material wealth, yet commit suicide because they’re devoid of a sense of true purpose and meaning in their lives.
It is also the reason why there are those people who have virtually no material wealth, yet radiate positivity from a deep place within because they understand who they really are and what they truly want in life.
By looking at the millions of people who currently claim to experience some form of depression, it’s safe to say that the majority of our population are severely uneducated on how to naturally and holistically heal themselves.
At the very least, my story is meant to inspire and encourage you to not give up on your path towards healing.
There were many days I wanted to end my life but the teachers I looked up to played a significant role in my choosing to keep going.
At the very most, I want to provide you with the proper education, community and source of empowerment through the Live Your Best Life Movement that directly helps you become free from your mental and emotional suffering and step into the life you were truly meant to live.
Like my teachers did for me, I will not be your source of light, but I will teach you how to be your own.
When people ask me today how I healed my depression I talk about the fundamental concepts and practices that are really the essence of all emotional healing. when accepted and acted on fully, they provide a very real possibility for anyone to have a complete positive transformation.
Stay tuned to the next episode where I share some of the best practices and knowledge that have helped me and millions of other people get back into alignment with their highest selves and start living their best life.
▸The Live Your Best Life Movement