A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part I – Opening My Mind)

When I left the religious faith of my youth in my early 20s, everything collapsed – my faith, my certainty, and the sources of meaning I had clung to since childhood. 

I grew up with a clear sense of purpose: fight the good fight, spread the gospel, and fulfill God’s divine plan for my life. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I didn’t believe any of it.

What do you do when the foundations of your life crumble, and the reality you once believed in dissolves away and slips through your fingers?

I didn’t have the answer at first, but over the next two decades, I began an unexpected journey—one that transformed not just what I believed, but who I was. Far from being the end of my spiritual path, leaving my religion was actually the beginning of it.

This blog series tells the story of how I pursued that path over the last 20 years. In the early days, I thought it was an external search, for someone or something outside of me. I eventually realized it is in fact an inner quest for self-knowledge about who I truly am.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that this quest has unfolded in three distinct stages. 

The first chapter was all about my mind and intellect, as I spent my 20s questioning the narratives that I’d constructed to explain my past. My logical brain, the prefrontal cortex, stood like a sentinel at the gates of my mind, and I needed to befriend him and assuage his fears before he’d allow me to go any further.

The second leg of my journey was centered on my heart and emotions, as I learned how to let down my walls and connect with other people vulnerably. It was about deprogramming my default attitude toward emotions – repression and avoidance – and finding new ways to let my emotions flow through me.

And today, at the precipice of my 40s, I’m at the start of a third chapter: reawakening and getting in touch with my body and my gut. It seems to be about changing how my nervous system works and responds to fear, intuition, and desire at the most fundamental level of my bodily sensations.

Let me tell you the story of this first chapter, beginning with my mind – the world of ideas, facts, and logic.

Reading to understand myself and the world

I had always been a dedicated reader, but my consumption of books took on a desperate, existential drive when I abandoned my religious beliefs. I felt like a child being born again, ironically, forced to make sense of the most fundamental building blocks of my reality anew.

I relearned the origins of the Middle East and early church history from scholarly sources instead of theological ones through books like Church History in Plain Language and The Gnostic Gospels. I read about Eastern religions, finding many principles and points of view that resonated with me in Buddhism and Hinduism. I devoured the books of James Michener, diving deep into places like Poland, Spain, South Africa, Alaska, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Palestine through the medium of historical fiction.

As I dove deeper and deeper into the past, I realized I also wanted to understand the future, and picked up my first science-fiction books. My preference was for “hard” sci-fi, which stuck to known or plausible scientific principles as much as possible. I eventually read over 100 sci-fi novels that inflamed my imagination with the potent possibilities of the unknown future.

I dabbled in literary fiction, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and magical realism. I devoured biographies, travelogues, popular science, and speculative fiction. I had a habit of camping out at bookstores for many hours at a time, churning through a giant pile of books without purchasing any.

And then one day I discovered the category of self-help. 

It was 2005, and I was perusing the aisles at my local Borders bookstore in Mission Viejo, near where I grew up in South Orange County. That first book was called The Paradox of Choice, and it delivered a simple yet shocking message: having more options not only doesn’t lead to better choices in many cases; it leads to worse choices that we tend to be less satisfied with.

I was astounded by this insight. I just couldn’t believe such a practical, compelling idea was available for anyone to learn and apply to their own lives.

With the naivete only a wide-eyed 20-something is capable of, I thought it had radical implications for much of modern life, in which we are inundated with a constantly proliferating number of options for practically everything, and yet find ourselves with a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and FOMO as a result. 

After that, I began to voraciously read every book on personal development I could get my hands on. Napoleon Hill taught me how to think and grow rich. Daniel Goleman introduced me to the importance of Emotional Intelligence. Tony Robbins introduced me to the tenets of positive psychology. Daniel Pink revealed the secrets to having an unstoppable drive. Malcolm Gladwell blew my mind with his analysis of tipping points. 

I was hooked.

I found it remarkable, and still do, that you can buy a book for $10 or $15 dollars (or read it for free at the local library, bookstore, or online via resources like the Gutenberg Project) and get instant access to a lifetime’s worth of knowledge from the world’s top experts on virtually any subject imaginable.

This realization changed everything for me. 

It taught me that everything in life is a “skill issue” – a known problem that someone has had before, has probably already figured out, and more than likely, is willing to help me with. I realized that I could choose any aspect of my life and reliably improve it through education and experimentation.

Looking back, these were the first stirrings of a newfound agency I felt in my life. 

With each new tool or insight I gained, the hold that my upbringing, my parents’ worldview, societal expectations, and default life scripts had over me was weakened. I began to see that I could decide who I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel. I wasn’t stuck with the natural temperament, skills, personality, or talents I was born with. My destiny was mine to author.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had already embarked on a journey. It was a journey into outer space, to make sense of how the world worked and what my place in it might be. It was also a journey into inner space, to discover who I really was at my core.

The first cracks in an opening mind

My love of reading followed me through college, a few years living and studying abroad, two years of service in the Peace Corps, and my first couple of years working in San Francisco. My beaten and battered Kindle was always by my side, every digital highlight synced to the cloud for safekeeping.

But in 2013 things started to change. I decided to leave my consulting job and strike out on my own as a freelancer, plunging headfirst into a way of life with far more uncertainty and unpredictability than I had ever experienced. 

I can still recall waking up on that first Monday morning and realizing I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no one expecting me. I had the sudden thought that if I suddenly dropped dead, it would take days for anyone to find my corpse. I finally had the complete freedom I’d dreamt of for years, but instead of feeling liberated, I felt terrified. It was like waking up adrift on the open ocean, with no solid ground anywhere in sight.

As I cast about over the subsequent months trying every way I could think of to make money, I was faced repeatedly and harshly with the reality that I lacked most of the qualities I needed. I didn’t have the commitment and consistency I needed to accomplish my goals. I had no idea what valuable skills and knowledge I had to offer potential clients, much less how to effectively articulate them and close the sale. I didn’t have the social skills needed to find collaborators and make new friends without the shared context of a workplace.

Yet the absence of these external, professional skills paled in comparison with the inner qualities I was missing. I had the habits and self-care routines of a typical 28-year-old male; that is, I lacked them completely. I had little understanding of my own psychology – the ruminating and worrying and recurring anxieties racing through my mind. I avoided most of my problems, ignoring warning signs in my mental and physical health until they became unbearable. I didn’t have a way of getting to the root of my blindspots and baggage and thus recreated them time and again.

This was all the more frustrating because I had read all the self-help books. I knew all the terminology, could cite all the studies, and was following the “right” advice. In theory, all this knowledge should have prepared me for the challenges I was facing. In reality, it was all conceptual or theoretical knowledge, very little of it rooted in my personal experience.

The stark contrast between the sophisticated theories in my head and the poor results and struggles I was experiencing in my life eventually reached a breaking point. I decided that I needed something different, something deeper that would change who I was, not just what I knew. In my desperation, I decided it was time to go beyond reading books and find the environments, teachers, and training that would give me visceral, first-hand experiences of what it meant to change who I was at the deepest level.

Mastering my attention through Vipassana meditation

I decided to seek out what I now call “transformational programs” – structured, immersive, embodied experiences facilitated by skilled teachers who know how to facilitate lasting change.

I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, the global mecca for self-development and self-exploration of all kinds, and couldn’t help but notice how many such programs existed and the benefits they seemed to produce for others.

I had picked up an introductory book on meditation and mindfulness which I’d discovered on an obscure online forum late one night. Over the course of a few weeks, I was introduced to the first elementary practices for calming my mind and observing my thoughts. 

The book introduced me to the classic “raisin exercise,” in which I closely examined a single raisin with all my powers of observation and all my senses, which showed me in sensual terms how much detail and complexity was hiding within my everyday perception. I wanted to go deeper but had little money as I struggled to make ends meet.

Soon afterward, I heard about a free 10-day meditation retreat known as Vipassana, which was hosted at retreat centers around the world. Free sounded like the right price to me, and I signed up, not knowing that it would be the portal to a new world and a new path that I am still following to this day.

I returned from that retreat and wrote my first blog post, 10 Days of Vipassana, recounting what I had learned:

• Attention is a skill. Unless I intentionally cultivated it, the modern world’s constant barrage of distractions would inexorably undermine my ability to focus or even think clearly.
• Every distraction takes a toll. Distractions are not just momentary interruptions that leave no lasting trace. Each one I allow to yank my attention away conditions me with the subconscious habit of valuing the new at the expense of the important.
• How I pay attention is more important than what I pay attention to. Which means that I don’t have to perfectly control my environment or my inputs in order to feel the way I want to feel.
• Paying attention to something takes away its power. So much of my life was dominated by fear of pain of some kind. But pain is as insubstantial and impermanent as any other sensation, and by giving my full attention to any anger, doubt, shame, or envy I was feeling I could loosen its hold on me.

Most meaningfully of all, I discovered through prolonged meditation that happiness is my default state, like the bottom of the well of my mind. It wasn’t something I had to go out and find like a rare prize. It was always there waiting for me, which meant all I had to do was remove the things that were in the way and return to myself in order to find it again.

That first Vipassana retreat and the daily meditation habit I adopted afterward equipped me with the basic tools of introspection. It introduced me to the simple yet profound idea that there is a vast inner world inside of me and that I could explore that world freely using meditation, without permission from anyone.

Crucially, this experience also led me to begin writing in public. It was the first time that I felt I had experienced something unusual and interesting enough to be worth sharing. Writing itself would also become an essential practice, allowing me to structure, process, and integrate lessons for myself, with the added bonus of helping others and eventually, building a following.

Encountering psychological truths at the Landmark Forum

A couple of years later, my freelancing work had become more stable and for the first time, I had a little disposable income to spare. In the space of a few months, three separate friends told me about their experience at a weekend seminar called The Landmark Forum. I felt I was ready to begin investing money in my personal development, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I can still remember what an enormous commitment it seemed like at the time – spending 3 full days and about $750 on myself felt like an outrageous indulgence. It was also a completely life-changing experience, which I wrote about in A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum.

I went on to take the rest of the Landmark curriculum over the next two years, including about a half dozen courses on integrity, communication, and self-authorship. I eventually completed their intensive 5-month leadership program, known as the Introduction Leaders Program (ILP). 

Here are the main lessons I took away from that experience, which was a holistic education in many aspects of leadership:

• Everything I think or believe is just a “story,” a narrative I’ve created to interpret and understand what’s happened, which means I can choose to disbelieve or edit or reframe any event from my past.
• Any time I’m blaming others, it’s usually to avoid taking responsibility for something myself, while also receiving hidden payoffs (such as self-righteousness or dominating others) that keep that blame locked in place.
• Witnessing the power of honest conversations in Landmark’s programs, I adopted vulnerability, collaboration, and openness to feedback as central values in my life, a sharp departure from my typical self-reliance and perfectionism (which led directly to the live cohort-based courses that would completely transform my career).
• I realized that trying to be “right,” which had driven me for much of my life, is ultimately futile when it comes to living an authentic life of intimacy with others.

Most meaningfully, I used these insights to take responsibility for my relationship with my father. I had had a long-running story that I was irreparably damaged because of how he raised me. I’d told myself that I couldn’t have the life I wanted because he had been too harsh, too critical, and had failed to listen to and support me in the way I needed him to. Those attitudes were, of course, a set of stories that kept me a victim toward any source of power or authority that reminded me of him.

Letting go of my resentment toward my father, while forgiving his imperfections and accepting that he was always just trying his best, unlocked a floodgate of gratitude not only toward him but for the life he had given me.

The power of transformational programs

Landmark and Vipassana served as my introduction to the category of “transformational programs.” 

They showed me that personal growth could be efficient. There were direct paths to concrete outcomes that irrefutably improved my life within a reasonable amount of time. These paths weren’t exactly predictable, but they also weren’t completely mysterious. Personal growth was something I could invest time, money, and attention in and reliably see tangible change in my life as a result.

I realized I didn’t have to wait until the end of my life to learn what life had to teach me – I could accelerate that process and yield the benefits while I was still young enough to enjoy them.

I began to develop a set of criteria for the kinds of programs I would seek out in the years to come:

• A time limit – a clear beginning and end to the experience, allowing me to calibrate my commitment and see results without getting in over my head.
• A structure – whether that is a series of meditation prompts and guidelines over a certain number of days, or a formal curriculum with learning objectives, I sought a structure I could use to track my progress.
• Teachers and guides – whether a skilled facilitator imparting their tacit wisdom, a seminar leader following a workbook, or a volunteer silently serving food in the kitchen, I wanted guides on my journey who had already been where I wanted to go, and who could therefore help me see through my assumptions and blindspots more quickly.
• Social interaction – though there are periods when solo work is needed, the vulnerable sharing and vicarious learning that can only happen in groups makes social experiences far more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable and effective.
• Accessibility – I want experiences that others can learn about and sign up for themselves, allowing them to follow in my footsteps if they so choose so that my family and my community can grow alongside me.

Following these guidelines, each new book, teacher, program, and practice I’ve encountered has uncovered new layers of who I am, like a perfect diamond encrusted with dirt and mud slowly emerging as those layers are washed away.

At the same time, the world of the mind and the intellect was just the first leg of my journey, akin to stocking the ship and navigating the calm waters close to shore. In the next chapter, I learned that true transformation isn’t primarily about acquiring information, and doesn’t occur only on an intellectual level.

The deepest change happens on multiple levels, at multiple timescales, and changes every part of us, especially the parts we feel most ashamed and fearful of. For me, that meant my emotions, and thus it was my heart that I explored next.

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