Can I Tell You A Story About How the Cruel Oppression of a Dictatorial Regime Changed My Life For the Better?

Look up enough and you'll see something inspiring.

In 1994 I was a young musician and a total mess.

Teetering on the brink of anxiety and depression, trying to make sense of the overwhelm and fatigue, I was mostly just a downer to my friends and that’s how I felt. All I saw was a dead end and I had no idea what to do about it.

Then, a woman in a country I wouldn’t have been able to identify on a map changed the way I thought about everything.

Life was stressful, being constantly short of cash and hustling for work had taken its toll to the point that I was being consumed by self-doubt and getting really anxious on gigs. One night, after a low-pressure gig that should have been easy money, I had a small panic attack after the last set. The next day I quit the band and was left with no income and no confidence to look for more gigs and absolutely no idea what to do next.

I felt terrible because it didn't seem reasonable - I had always been relaxed and managed to have fun, but now I just stayed home. I stopped doing things I really enjoyed and basically felt like an ungrateful drain on everyone. And it’s not like nobody tried to help.

Then it happened. An unremarkable night at home alone, half-watching the news a story came on that turned my life upside down and still influences me today. It covered a small makeshift shanti-town that the government of a country I wouldn’t have been able to find on a map had ordered its troops to bulldoze. It was awful, but what caught my attention was a woman filmed from a distance.

Her home had been destroyed, sons and husband were missing and she was inconsolable with sadness and anger. I didn’t have to know the language to know how she was feeling and it set off something very, very unsettling.

It’s a little embarrassing to think about now, but I understood her sense of anguished hopelessness because it’s exactly how I felt at some point of most days. The recognition of her emotional state was instant and very real, but more importantly it was obvious that what was happening to her was a lot, lot worse than anything that was ever even likely to happen to me.

I was in no danger of being arrested, executed or my house being bulldozed in the middle of the night (though the house was torn down soon after we moved out). As an Australian in the 90s I even had access to social security that I knew would keep me fed and housed and healthy.

The woman on my TV had none of these securities and was in the grip of a loss the likes of which I will never experience.

So how could I be as distraught as she was?

It didn’t make any sense - her anguish was justified. What reason did I have to feel the same way she did?

Up to that very moment, I’d always assumed that my emotions were about what was happening to me from out there. Bad things happen, I feel bad, worse things happen I feel worse, when things go well I’m happy and so on.

It was uncomplicated and logical, but I’d just stumbled across evidence that undermined everything about this view. And as I sat alone in my dark, empty house, the only conclusion I could come to was that It wasn’t all just happening to me.

Perhaps I was somehow participating.

I really took it to heart and made some big changes. I spent a lot more time at the piano practicing, swimming laps to get fit and even dabbled in meditation. It helped so much that soon I regained enough confidence to drop everything and move to the other side of the world, to a city where I knew nobody and do a jazz performance degree.

It was great, I’ve written elsewhere about some important lessons learned from uprooting myself at such a vulnerable time. But soon enough, even after a few years of my new and exciting inner-city Toronto lifestyle, some things didn’t go my way. At some point, I had a series of setbacks and again felt that pull into anxiety and depression. All the enthusiasm I had for things I loved started to leak out, like the air from a tyre on the mountain bike I’d stopped riding.

I could almost hear it.

But this time was different - I knew what was happening. Instead of being a helpless bystander as things got hard, I knew I was participating. It meant I had more control over how I reacted when things got hard. Not as much control as I’d have liked, to be honest, but I knew I had agency and that made all the difference. I wanted to know more and searched libraries and bookshops. I read weird new agey self-help books (no real help) and also some psychology and Buddhist philosophy both of which really struck home. So much so, confidence restored, I made another big decision.

I dropped what I was doing took off again – this time to India. I was there for about six years in total and learned Tibetan language, philosophy and meditation practice – it was a really special time I’ve written about elsewhere.

Now, (quite) a few years later and I’m back in Australia with a degree in psychology and Sanskrit and working on a PhD researching the effects of traditional meditation on stress and emotions. Bridging this gap between ancient contemplative and modern scientific approaches is a fascinating space to work in. I get as excited in a mountain retreat hermitage as I do a research lab, because it means I’m dealing with people who just want to know the answers. They’ve made observations and studied things that they want to confirm for themselves with the hope that it will also benefit others.

And if there’s one striking agreement between cognitive psychology, neuroscience and Buddhism, it’s an understanding that we’re all just interpreting reality as best we can, and getting it wrong more often than not.

That can mean overestimating threats or underestimating our ability to cope, and our own interpretations can lead us on a path to anxiety, depression and other distress.

I’ve heard it said that “adversity is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I think this oversimplifies things too much, but the core concept is spot on. When we meet with difficulties, we often have a tendency to make it worse, editing out silver-linings and wile focusing intently on the negative.

Emotions cause us stress that makes us more likely to do this, which causes more stress and we enter a feedback loop that is often a one-way ticket to burnout, anxiety and depression. And even though we’ve had tools to uproot these causes of stress for centuries, still we spend more time treating the symptoms than we do targeting the cause.

Of course you’re skeptical – I doubt any one of you reading this are as cynical as I was in my younger years! That’s why I’ve tried to make it easy and make simple tools available for anyone who has even just a sense that maybe they could take some control of their wellbeing and place in the world.

If that’s you – follow your instinct and try it out for yourself- nobody even needs to know! At the very least, you’ll find yourself more relaxed and making better decisions no matter how much pressure you’re under.

Which brings me back to the newly homeless woman on my TV more than twenty-five years ago. Everything I’ve learned since – even how to deal with tummy bugs, Indian post-offices, train stations and rickshaw drivers has come from her. Now, although I wish she’d never had that experience, I see her as incredibly kind, because it’s because of her that I now know I can choose how I interact with the world.

And I choose kindness.

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OR If you’ve had a life-changing epiphany moment, I’d love to hear about it.