The Journey That Built Internal Flow
From Chaos Into Order
Before you read this, I just want to say that this is just one angle of my life.
Yes, there have been lots of challenges to overcome, but there’s also been so much love, laughter, and growth along the way. I love my parents very much and I’m eternally grateful for all the sacrifices they made for us kids.
I grew up in 3 different pubs over the course of my entire childhood.
The air smelled of beer and cigarette smoke, the nights were filled with laughter, shouting, and the low hum of fruit machines spinning endlessly in the corner.
My dad and both of my godfathers were alcoholics. One of them used to sit me on his knee when I was just three years old, letting me press the flashing buttons on the fruit machines. This took place all through my childhood. In those moments, my brain was being conditioned, learning to chase lights, sounds, and instant rewards. I’m not sure what age I started playing them myself but by the age of eight or nine, I was addicted to fruit machines. That single habit would silently script the next few decades of my life. As a child, the brain creates over a million new neural connections every second, mine was wiring itself for dopamine highs.
At the age of fourteen, it was alcohol, cigarettes, and weed, and it wasn’t long before I moved on to harder drugs. My nervous system had learned to crave stimulation. The faster and louder life got, the more alive I felt. I didn’t know how to live without intensity.
I couldn’t hold down a full-time job until I became self-employed at 24. I was unreliable and irresponsible, weekends were wild, and Mondays were always payback.
Everything changed when I decided to become a personal trainer at 30.
It was the first time I’d ever truly committed to something. Passing my exams made me proud for the first time in my life. I realised I wasn’t stupid; I just needed something I cared about. For the first time, I found purpose. I found growth.
My personality split in two at this age.
On one side, I was studying health and fitness, looking after myself, eating well, and training harder than ever. My love for training went through the roof, and my addictive nature found another outlet: building a strong, muscular physique.
I’d already started taking steroids at 27, three years before becoming a personal trainer, and unfortunately, that habit continued. I built a great body and kept the party lifestyle alive. Naturally, I was drawn to people just like me, birds of the same feather flock together.
This was probably the happiest and most confident I’d ever been at this point in my life. For a while, it worked. But the combination of steroids, partying, and intense training, burning the candle from both ends, eventually caught up with me. My body started to break down, and my depression and anxiety worsened.
Each steroid cycle lasted longer, and the breaks between them got shorter. My confidence became tied to my body, and every time I came off, my self-esteem crashed. It was a destructive loop that kept tightening. Over time, I developed severe body dysmorphia, something that, as I’d later discover, came from a much deeper root.
The pain of my depression became worse than the pain of facing my insecurities, so I finally gave it all up. I had to move back in with my mum because I couldn’t look after myself, my depression was completely debilitating whilst I allowed my hormones to rebalance after six years of steroid use. I was also battling a gambling problem at the time. I ended up self-excluding from both of my local casinos to stop the cycle. I only ever went there after partying, in the middle of the night, so cutting that off helped stop the habit in its tracks.
I got myself in great shape after coming off steroids, and the irony is, I didn’t even need them. I found my happiness again, and the next two years were genuinely happy years, but then came the injuries.
At 35, I herniated my back and couldn’t train. I lost my body, and with it, my confidence, hundreds of hours of hard work in the gym gone. Painkillers became part of my routine. After a year of sciatica and sleep deprivation, I had surgery and recovered, only to be hit with another blow: nerve damage in my neck caused by bone splinters and disc compression. My body became unbalanced and weak. For a personal trainer, that was devastating, and I continued to shrink
My self-esteem collapsed. My drinking increased.
My brain fog became unbearable; alcohol and caffeine were the only things that cut through it. But that temporary relief turned into dependency. I was falling apart again.
It reached a point where I couldn’t see a way out, my drinking was getting out of control, I was exhausted, disconnected, and terrified that this was how my life would always be.
There were so many things inside me blocking my capacity to function, to feel normal, to simply be.
Suicidal thoughts had become a pattern I couldn’t control.
Each time I went to that dark place within myself, it felt like a brief release, a temporary escape from the pain I was living in. My brain fog had become so severe that I forgot I’d created this pattern myself. It felt as though my own mind was turning against me, like it was telling me to do it.
But every time, at the end of that vision, I saw my mum crying. And that image alone stopped the desire every single time. I’m very grateful for that.
I knew I needed to make some massive changes. I’d been living in fight-and-flight for so many years I was burning out, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going before I completely gave up.
My meditation practice had helped me a lot, but it was never consistent at this stage of my life. Trying to learn on my own wasn’t enough, my life was too complicated, too loud, with too many moving parts. I needed full immersion to take back control of my mind. I borrowed money from my parents to pay for a trip to Thailand and went to a Buddhist monastery to do two Vipassana retreats, 24 days at the beginning and 18 at the end of my journey.
The first retreat, 24 days of silence, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
No talking to other meditators, No technology, No reading. No writing. Just two meals a day eaten in silence, fasting for nearly 20 hours every day. When I first arrived, it felt like stepping into another world, a place where time slowed down, and everyone moved with deliberate calm. Each day was structured around meditation, roughly ten hours in total, divided into different sessions that lengthened the longer you stayed. The whole point was simplicity, to strip life back to its essence so you could finally see what was really going on inside. With no noise, no screens, no distractions, my mind slowly began to settle.
In this place of safety, free from responsibility, I was finally able to face the thoughts and emotional patterns I’d avoided for years. This was why I’d been struggling for so long, I’d never learned how to process my mind properly. It was overflowing with a lifetime of unresolved issues, insecurities, and fears. Years of partying had also taken their toll on my brain. My body needed structure, consistent sleep, real nutrition, no alcohol or cigarettes, and plenty of meditation. Meditation became my medicine. Slowly, my body began to heal.
I allowed my body to shrink intentionally, going through the emotions of my body dysmorphia. Because I was fasting and only eating two meals per day and no physical training. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to sit with these emotions. This wasn’t easy it was full of emotional highs and lows, but by the end of those 24 days, I felt reborn. Rejuvenated.
I left there feeling like I had healed myself and then went on and made all the same mistakes again afterwards, partying in Thailand for six more weeks before realising I needed a second retreat, another 18 days of silence to reset my mind before returning home to the UK. The biggest lesson I took from that experience was that I was doing it to myself; through the way I was living my life, this was very empowering for me.
When I got back home, I slipped again. That summer was a blur of parties and late nights, trying to outrun myself yet again. But by October, I could feel it all closing in. The darkness was back. I was standing at the edge of my sanity, trapped in the same cycle I swore I’d escaped.
By the end, I was so afraid to even pick up a drink, I knew where it would take me. I finally associated only pain to alcohol and not pleasure. So, at the end of 2017, I made the best decision of my life. I gave it all up, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, every escape I’d ever used. I haven’t touched a thing in nearly eight years.
A few months later, I made another decision: I gave up sex. I decided that I wasn’t going to date again until I’d done the work on myself. I wasn’t interested in random sex anymore; I wanted something real. It was also about healing my dopamine system. I had overloaded my brain’s reward circuitry for so long that I needed to detox from everything for a very long while. It was part of my rewiring.
At the start of January 2018, at 41 years old, I was finally a free man, 27 years of partying behind me. Free to start doing the real work on myself, without all the things I’d used to escape my inner world.
I made another definite decision: I would learn how to overcome the patterns and emotions that had driven my old behaviours. I remortgaged my house twice, once to pay off most of my debt, and again to give myself the freedom to study without financial pressure.
I put my meditation practice at the centre of my life and started studying for hours every day, all the while continuing to run my personal training business part time. Gradually developing my coaching skill set and deepening my understanding of the mind. From day one, I started coaching a small number of people, learning by helping others while working on myself. I set up a personal development group that met on weekends, to practice teaching and strengthen the muscle of delivery in real time.
That was the true beginning of my journey, and the birth of Internal Flow.
But there was still one final shadow to integrate.
Four years into my recovery, I faced a truth I’d buried my entire life which was the root cause of a lot of my issues.
I am a bisexual man who never allowed himself to be.
I grew up in an environment where that part of me didn’t feel safe to express. My uncle was gay and was pretty much disowned by his parents, and that memory imprinted deeply. I hid my truth and lived in denial for decades. That denial turned inward, my shame became body insecurity, and my body became the battleground for my identity.
Owning that truth set me free. It was the final piece of my puzzle, the moment everything clicked into place. My confidence skyrocketed, my energy balanced, and my self-worth became unconditional.
My addictive personality nearly destroyed me, but it’s also the reason I’ve been able to dedicate nearly a decade to my work. I’ve transmuted addiction into devotion, devotion to growth, learning, and helping others.
My life went in circles for years, the same patterns, the same suffering, over and over again. It all began to change when I finally surrendered to my situation and made a definite decision to turn my life around. Everything started improving the moment I gave up drinking with no resistance. During my own recovery, I lost my best friend to a heroin overdose and my brother to alcohol and drug abuse. That loss only amplified my motivation to develop my skillset. Meditation and books saved my life, I’m eternally grateful for both.
For a man who had no interest in education for half of his life, learning has now become my greatest passion.
Your Turn
I turned my chaos into order through a systematic process of inner transformation. Now, I help others do the same.
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