The concept of bravery has come up in conversation a lot in recent weeks. I’ve been reconnecting with a friend and discussing life and our wins and losses over the years. We talked about what it feels like to fail and continue slogging on through the regret and fear that comes with failure. She told me that she thought my partner Euvie and I were brave for doing what we were doing over the last four years: traveling Southeast Asia, with no safety net, while building online startups. I’d never thought of it as brave (maybe a little stupid). But when I think back to who I was before I left Canada, the gigantic mess that I was in, and what I’ve been attempting to do lately, I can see her point. This is my story of how I hit rock bottom and used meditation to dig myself out the other side.

Into the muck

During my early twenties, in a short span of a couple of years, I was exposed to an absurd amount of tragedy. In one single month, I lost three friends to unrelated car accidents; one of them was my first girlfriend, another was an old soccer teammate, another was my long-time sparring partner in Karate. During that same month, I was laid off from my construction job, dumped from my relationship, evicted from my apartment, and as a result of the stress, was failing courses in college. Not to mention, a few years later another childhood friend whom I played in a band with jumped off a bridge. Yet another old friend died after he was tragically shot, and moments later killed in a car accident on the way to the hospital to treat the gunshot wound.

I’m actually leaving out a lot more of these types of stories for the sake of this article, but you get the idea. Every time I saw my hometown’s area code on my caller ID, I expected another one of those calls. I remember reading something in the newspaper one year about my cursed graduation class. For a while it seemed as though my old classmates and I had some crap superpower to find ourselves in emotionally traumatic situations.

On top of this, the 2008 economic crash had just happened, I was about 20k in debt from student loans, collecting welfare, and frantically looking for work. There were many times where I had to stretch a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter to last me a week.

For a long time I was depressed and contemplating life and death constantly. I would get sick every few weeks, I suffered from stress shakes and twitches, and I couldn’t sleep — sometimes for days. I felt guilty, because the most difficult part of everything I was going through was not the death of my friends, or the loneliness, the courses I was failing, or my relationships which were falling apart, it was my income situation. Growing debt provided a constant debilitating stress and anxiety. I had no idea how I was going to escape my situation, and every day seemed to be getting worse than the last one. Suicide was a sort of peripheral fantasy, one I would think about any time I drove a car. Just one little twitch of my hand on the steering wheel would send me plowing head-on into a concrete wall or oncoming traffic and simultaneously solve all my problems at once.

Digging up

One day something broke. I was laying in bed, eyes bugged, ladened with the usual stress, when I decided to stop avoiding my thoughts and dive straight into them. I looked at my life in context of the worst disasters I could think up: “At least I’m not in Auschwitz” I thought. “At least I’m not schizophrenic and addicted to heroin”. I laid there intensely focusing on the worst things that could still happen in my life. I could botch a suicide attempt and have to live in constant pain and eat through a feeding tube, my whole family could be murdered, a nuclear bomb could be dropped on my city, killing everyone I cared about. Just insane and improbable things that would feel worse than what I was going through at the time. I started visualizing my own death in vivid detail, imagining what it would feel like to die by torture, suffocation, burning, or being crushed.

This really doesn’t sound healthy, does it? But, after making a daily effort to saturate myself with fear and despair, my outlook on life began to change. Things weren’t yet getting better, but skipping a meal or two because I couldn’t afford it was easy when I’d spent an hour the previous day visualizing having to saw my own arm off. Sure, things weren’t great, but they could still get a lot worse. The absurdity of my morbid visualizations put my real life into context. I started to feel better and think more clearly about my situation. I realized that my pain wasn’t created from all of these external events, it was created by my thoughts and judgements about them. I’d been comparing myself to my own idealized, happy white-boy, shiny and successful avatar. The one who aspired to become a rockstar millionaire and wrote in his yearbook that he “looked forward to winning a grammy”. LOL. That kid did not know about the difficulty and fragility of life.

A degree from dishwashing

Eventually, as my outlook slowly improved, I found a job washing dishes and began to listen to audiobooks while I worked. A book called The Power of Now made its way into my headphones. This book, by Eckhart Tolle, is a story about the author’s journey from suicidal depression to enlightenment through meditation. In it, Eckhart talks about the importance of letting go of all past and future events, and focusing solely on the present moment; something I did so rarely I could barely conceive of it. “What do you mean there is life outside of worry, planning, and visualizing imminent destruction?”

I listened to this book more than a dozen times in the span of a year, and really began to integrate meditation into my life. Over time, that gigantic pit of nervousness in my chest began to lose its hold. I began to monitor my body and my thoughts and think of them as separate from me. I slowly came to recognize myself as this conscious entity existing in an outside-and-elevated perspective from my mind and my thoughts. I chanted the mantra in my head: “I am not my thoughts, I am not my emotions, I am not the events of my life”.

I pitied this paranoid, scheming, needy monkey known as Mike Gilliland. I started questioning who I was at the core. If I could separate myself from my identity and my thoughts, who the hell was left? Why the hell was I here? This line of questioning caused me to gradually cut away the layers of my identity and who I once thought I was. Every time I asked myself “who am I?” and the answer came back “not that”, I felt closer to the truth. I began to stop fearing my own death because I no longer identified as the monkey. True or not, this disassociation made being courageous a lot easier.

Training the pet monkey

Around this time I began treating the monkey (my former self) as a pet. I trained it. I worked on it. I viewed it as my vehicle, my tool, and I would be damned to see it behaving or performing badly. I started reading more books on self development and business, and one day I picked up this book called The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book gave me a roadmap for escaping the dishwashing job, and the crushing debt. It described this “location independent entrepreneur”, a person who works online, automates most areas of their business, and travels for pleasure. This was what I wanted. This was exactly it. Freedom. If I could just figure out this online business thing, I could escape the job I hated, the city I couldn’t afford, and the lifestyle that led to nowhere. Although I didn’t know what I would do yet, the idea had burned itself into my mind.

Things continued to change. My ideas and goals became this “fuck it, let’s do it” sort of thing instead of an exercise in listing ways I would fail. I had more focus and intention. I attended more to what I wanted because my mind wasn’t so preoccupied with what I didn’t want. I began visualizing the outcomes of my goals, and one by one they started happening — whether by focused planning, concentrated will and effort, or sheer luck and synchronicity.

Band aid

Later that year, I met a group of friends who became extremely close to me. They played in a metal band, which happened to be one of my favourites in Canada. They lived in a band house and at some point needed another roommate, so I moved in. I was starting to freelance as a recording engineer, and ended up recording one of their albums. This year ended up being one of the best years of my life. These people modelled what functional, happy, and intelligent people were supposed to look like. They liked me and knew I was going through some rough times, so they looked after me, loaned me cash when couldn’t afford rent, took me on tours with them, and even bought me a ticket to Sasquatch Music Festival one year when I couldn’t afford to buy one myself. They became closer to me than anyone I ever had in my life, and that gave me confidence that I actually could be likeable. Soon after I met my wife, Euvie, a Russian immigrant who was going through a similar situation to my own: struggling with a lot of personal demons, bailing herself out of debt, and attempting to reinvent herself.

We fell in love almost instantly, and began working together to build something that would give us the opportunity to think bigger and escape from our material difficulties. I showed her The Four Hour Workweek and soon after we started building a business together. We began designing websites with the intention to one day become location independent. About six months later, we got our first recurring client. Thats when we booked our one way ticket to Thailand and planned to travel indefinitely while working online.

After a year of traveling, working, and meeting so many other misfits and nomads, we began to gain a new perspective on work, life, and Western culture. We started to gain some of our freedom and time back. Although our income hadn’t really changed, our expenses had dramatically dropped by the fact that we were living in countries with a lower cost of living. This allowed us to start reading more books, contemplate our lives, and navel gaze about technology and the future. This is how we decided to start our podcast, Future Thinkers. We had been discussing consciousness and the future of humanity and reading so many books on the subject, that we wanted to start recording our discussions.

Into The Deep

During this time, Euvie and I were taking meditation a lot more seriously. Twice we visited a 7-day silent meditation retreat in the jungles of Thailand. My new focus was on turning the dial down on my mental chatter and being present as much as I was able to. I was spending more and more time intentionally deconstructing every one of my emotions and unconscious reactions in daily life. Whenever the monkey had a moment of anger, frustration, sadness, or worry, I was there watching and studying it.

It was at this time that I came across the concept of enlightenment. The definition was simple to understand but difficult to know: self knowledge, mental and emotional control and awareness, freedom from fear. I thought about and studied enlightenment for months, and began to get a grasp on the idea.

3rd Person Mode

During our travels to Portugal in 2015 I was meditating twice per day and experimenting with new meditation techniques. I began having frequent out of body experiences, like I was playing a game in 3rd person mode. I tried to ignore them, but the experiences would happen while I was walking outside. It was as if I was the camera, and the body below me was my fictional character — a wide-eyed ape, clumsily occupying its collection of meat particles, exploring a blue marble of a spaceship that was rocketing through the galaxy. Somehow after years of cutting away my identity, it was as if I was cutting away my own brain as the seat of my own consciousness. I don’t necessarily believe this is the case, but it was interesting to experience.

I started noticing a lot more synchronicities in my life too. I paid attention to them, even sometimes playing and experimenting with them. I picked up a book called Synchronicity by Kirby Surprise and was happy to learn that there were scientists out there who were exploring and experimenting with the reality of synchronicity, enlightenment, and non-local awareness. I also read The Field by Lynne Mctaggart which detailed the hundreds of experiments in psychic phenomena. A lot of people were playing with the idea that consciousness may be, if only partly, non-local and not not fully originating from our plane of existence.

I was now testing and experimenting with my reality and my own mind on a daily basis, visualizing events and then experiencing them within hours with little to no effort. I read several books on cognition, neuroscience, psychology, machine learning, quantum mechanics, and artificial intelligence. My isolation from Western culture and my partnership with Euvie helped to dissolve the cultural operating systems that had been bashed into my head for years from the media and my upbringing in The West. I didn’t need to believe anything one way or another. I could still be scientific, but I wasn’t attached to any results. Evidence was still the high priority in my investigations of the mind, but I was comfortable with balancing it with my own personal experiences.

Life wasn’t so binary anymore.