- Hi, in this video I'm
going to be sharing with you
what I learned from taking LSD.
Now, just to be clear,
I don't condone the taking
of psychedelic drugs,
and this story happened 45 years ago,
and it nearly killed me.
But I did learn some
important lessons from it,
and that's why I thought
it was worth sharing.
To set the context,
this is the second in a
short series of videos
in which I'm taking
stories from my own life
to share with you in order to illustrate
how I've achieved a position
where I feel enormously wealthy
in terms of emotional and mental health,
and I wasn't always
that way, I should say.
In each video I'm picking one
of the Anxiety Freedom Cards
to illustrate my message,
and the reason I'm doing
this is to show you
how you too can achieve a life
free from anxiety and stress.
And the card that I'm picking
today is the observing self.
And this is a part of you
which is pure awareness.
It's the part that stands back
and sees the bigger picture.
It watches your life unfold as you go
through the rollercoaster of daily life,
but it doesn't get involved,
it's pure awareness.
And it's, you might say it's a metaphor,
but it's kind of a part that,
of something that's
within every one of us,
and we access it when we're calm
and relaxed and relatively still,
when we can see the bigger picture.
And you'll see later why this is relevant.
So yesterday I spoke about,
well, in the previous video, rather,
I spoke about a time when I was 15,
and my mum said something
that had a big impact on me,
and in some ways it shaped me
to becoming a psychotherapist
later in life.
In this video we're skipping
back to 1973 when I was 17,
and engaged in normal teenage behavior,
which basically is taking daft risks.
And to explain the shirt, I
started (laughs) playing guitar
in 1964 when The Beatles
were in the charts,
but when I was a teenager, Jimi
Hendrix was doing his thing.
And I was hugely inspired by his playing,
not so much the noisy stuff,
I liked the more lyrical,
the gentle side of Jimi Hendrix.
And (laughs) so in the spirit of
the three things that were
always gonna be in my life,
which were sex, drugs and rock and roll,
I thought I'd share a little bit of Jimi.
So let's play this.
This is the introduction
from "Little Wing."
("Little Wing")
So yeah, a little bit of
Jimi Hendrix for you there.
Let's go back to '73, then, what happened.
I was with three friends,
and we took off for a
weekend in North Wales
in a caravan and in a Fiat 500,
so it was one of those
really early Fiat 500s,
the tiny ones, and we
all packed into this car
and drove off to North Wales.
And we all took LSD,
and none of us stayed
sane, stayed straight,
which was a stupid thing to do anyway.
And during that trip I had an experience
where I was absolutely, totally convinced
that I was about to die.
It's hard to put it into words now,
it doesn't make sense now,
and in fact a lot of what I experienced
I can't really put into words.
But it set me on a path of
wondering what had happened to me
and trying to make sense of the world.
And also, the thing that really
freaked me out at that time
is that I had an experience
which I can only describe
as realizing that time was not linear.
Now, I know that sounds crazy,
stoned, and all the rest of it,
but for me it was absolutely real.
And it was so frightening
that I honestly thought
I was going to die.
And what did it teach me?
Well, (laughs) it taught me
not to take LSD, for one thing.
I was educated as a scientist.
I was good at maths,
physics and chemistry,
and I did engineering at university.
But this experience taught me
that there's something that
is essentially mysterious
about our existence in this world.
And embracing this sense of
mystery and questioning it
has helped me to stay balanced, I think.
So although there's a logical,
analytical, scientific side to me,
there's also a part that understands,
or doesn't understand, embraces
a sense of mystery in life,
and I think that's healthy.
The other thing it taught me
is that living through an experience
in which you're certain
that you're gonna die
helps you to live a better life.
It helps you to prioritize and value
the things that matter in life.
And thirdly, our sense
of time is personal.
It isn't linear the way we think it is.
And in fact I know that when I play guitar
and get completely lost in
it, time can stand still.
And I just like to play with this idea
that time, you know, Eckhart Tolle,
"The Power of Now," he writes
about being in the moment,
and in a sense in my
therapeutic work I use a lot
the idea that the past and the future
are stories that we tell ourselves.
They don't exist, you know.
You can't breathe in the past,
you can't breathe in the future,
you can only ever breathe in the present.
And there's that lovely saying,
the past is history,
the future is a mystery,
and all we have, really, is right now.
And it's a gift, and that's
why it is called the present.
So yes, for me time isn't linear,
but it is created by narrative,
it's created by the stories
that we tell ourselves
about the situation that we're in.
And the final thing it taught me
is that you can survive anything
if you just keep breathing.
So please scroll down, leave a comment,
let me know what you think about this.
I'd love to hear your comments
and to hear where you stand on this issue.
So just to summarize, we've
talked about the observing self,
a story about me being 17
years old and taking LSD
in a very risky and rather stupid way,
but it inspiring me to learn
more about myself, more
about the universe.
Please comment below,
and whatever else you do,
don't forget to keep breathing.
