After graduating college, I went down the career path that was expected of me. I’m fortunate to have been given the opportunities I had. I was so financially motivated because that’s all I really knew. Most of my peers were the same way. I always had the creative child inside me, it just took a traumatic health experience to bring him back out. I was working 10-12 hour days at a consulting firm and traveling almost every week. Financially, things were good, but I was yearning for something so much bigger. I began to feel this identity crisis walking into the office, like “this just isn’t me”. The universe hit me with smaller signs to pursue the entrepreneurial and creative / artist path in my past. I listened sometimes, but never went for it 100%.
It wasn’t until I ended up hospitalized from internal bleeding and experiencing a loss of about 70% of the blood in my body (pretty much overnight), for me to question everything. I had never felt depression before this experience. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, and was pumped full of all kinds of medication that I didn’t know or understand. Doctors told me this was a lifelong thing and that I would always be on meds. I didn’t want to accept that. This experience led me down the path of seeking knowledge through books, videos and looking inward to my intuition (which had been suppressed for too long).
These extreme moments of suffering and being with myself were daunting and empowering at the same time. I had nothing to lose at this point. I experienced the lowest of the lows for countless months trying to sort out my body and mind. Once I stabilized physically, I became determined to get off medication and seek out my true purpose in this lifetime. This took me down the path of natural healing, and opened up my mind to spirituality. I didn’t realize how stressed I was before this experience. I was always in good shape physically and “healthy”, but discovered that I hadn’t been exercising and strengthening my mind the way I had my body. In 2018, I finally got off western pharmaceutical medications, and have been free of them since. I saved up money for a couple years, with plans to quit my job and pursue my own ventures. I had always been writing and making music, but never took it that seriously. Now I’m creating authentic music, true to myself, and taking it very seriously. I also launched a super high quality specialty olive oil and CBD brand. Everything is organic and sourced from the finest ingredients I could find in the states. These plant medicines helped me heal from the inside out, and it was only natural to start making them myself.
Now I embrace the bad / suffering experiences the same way I appreciate and love the good ones. This mindset has shifted everything for me. Every good experience feels good, and every “bad experience” is something you can learn from because it challenges you. I’m happy, healthy and more creatively fulfilled than I’ve ever been. It’s a beautiful thang.
It’s taken me over a decade to find my artistic integrity as a musician. Life experience, suffering, meditation and relationships have allowed me to reach these heights. I now understand who I am as a person. I feel like I’m me for the first time since childhood. It’s empowering and incredibly rewarding. When you listen to my debut album,
HORIZONS, I don’t think you’ll be able to compare it to any other living piece out there. To me, I feel like I’ve already succeeded. This is the album that I’ve visualized for the last decade, but didn’t have the life experiences or enough practice to create until now. Everything is starting to make sense. It’s funny looking back at all those little universal nudges, connections, deja vu, and “aha” moments. Everything you do, everyone you interact with, all the environments you engage with… they all shape and define who you are as an individual.
I’ve been spending a lot more time by myself (inspired by Covid), so I can tap into the source of who I really am. We’re constantly bombarded by the distractions of marketing, our phones and notifications and all of the media trying to grab our attention. You have to give them credit for building an annoyingly perfect and intricate system to keep us distracted from ourselves. It’s not going to last though. Covid has woken people up. People are starting to question all these systems that have been built, which is a really good thing. I’ve been writing about this for years, which is why I feel like the timing for the album is divine. I think it’s going to speak to people. That’s the goal at least, to plant seeds for people to open their minds and begin to question everything. We live in a world where we have to do very little work to find information. The issue though, is that we’re being shown information that other people tell us to read. That’s very different from wisdom. Wisdom is found over time, through experience and the free thinking and synthesis of information for yourself. Here are a few pieces of wisdom I’ve learned along the way.
