Where This Began
I was diagnosed with Tourette's, ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, and ODD as a child, and later discovered I'm on the autism spectrum. My first symptoms surfaced around age five. By puberty things had escalated to daily police visits, dissociative rage attacks, and the start of a decade of antidepressants and antipsychotics.
I was on those medications for over a decade. Some worked for a while, then stopped. Some never worked at all. Cycling on and off them was its own kind of suffering. In my early twenties, I weaned off entirely.
Adolescence was the worst of it. Rage attacks, constant tics, depression underneath all of it. I started meditating because I wanted out.
At the bottom, I was meditating to die.
What happened instead was the opposite. The nothingness I was reaching for opened into something else, a stillness so complete that I could feel, for the first time, the physiological architecture underneath my symptoms. From there I could begin to change it. Daoist monks call this neidan, internal alchemy. It was the entry point.
What followed wasn't a clean arc. It took years of sitting, every day, often for hours, often when I couldn't see why. Most of what I did, I did wrong before I did it right. I had to learn to hold a gentle attention through every waking minute, and then unlearn that and learn it again as something quieter. I lost who I thought I was more times than I can count. The version of me in old photographs looks like a different person, not a younger one. By the time my symptoms were near zero, I had built a self from the inside out.
Diet was part of it too. Together, meditation and diet were enough to get me off medication completely. Once the medication was gone, the dissociation lifted and I could finally see clearly what I was working with. I became my own science experiment, drawing from every tradition I could find, keeping what worked, throwing out what didn't, just trying to stay alive.
I did it the hard way. There was no one to refine two decades of trial and error into a ten-week program. By twenty-seven, my symptoms were at near zero.
What I'd taught myself eventually brought me to real teachers. I got into Chinese medicine and befriended an internationally renowned doctor and gut-brain specialist, and what I'd stumbled onto with diet turned out to be almost exactly what Chinese medicine names as ideal. Soon after, I met one of only two living masters of a particular medical qigong system, an inheritor of ancient Shaolin medicine. I became a senior pupil and learned the entire system. It supercharged everything.
I've since deepened my practice under a Zen roshi who is also an anesthesiologist, and that has done for the meditation what Shaolin medicine did for the somatic work.
For the past several years my symptoms have sat somewhere between zero and five percent of what they're capable of being. With an hour of daily practice I'm at zero, in a place of peace and capacity I don't think most people ever know. If I drop the practice for a few weeks the symptoms creep back, depression first, then minor tics. They never come close to what they were. The foundation is laid. A day or two of practice settles it again.
My goal with every client is to give you everything I had to find for myself, so that after the program you can hold this on your own. That's also why clients keep access to my business number for months after our work ends. I'm still here.
I used to think Tourette syndrome and the disorders that came with it were my greatest enemy. I've come to understand they were never that. They were a friend. An ass of a friend, maybe, but a friend, stubbornly trying to show me the way.