Retrocession Changed My Life!

At one point, I was lying on the floor next to my bed, so depressed and anxious that I couldn’t make myself move a couple of feet into my comfortable bed.

For most of my life, I was ceaselessly optimistic. I believed things would get better, even during the worst times. Eventually, I stopped believing that.

I spent eight years working as an attorney after going six figures into debt for law school. Theoretically, I was a fantastic attorney. But because of my mental health, I was failing miserably.

Depression, anxiety, and alcohol weighed heavily on me. Panic attacks became a daily struggle. I did the only thing I could imagine doing: I retired my law license. It was permanent. My mental health had cost me my career and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I made the only decision I could make and left it all behind.

Leaving law was the right decision, but it didn’t relieve my depression and anxiety. In fact, I struggled worse. Yoga, meditation, therapy, spirituality, and self-help offered temporary relief. Eventually, even yoga and meditation stopped working. I settled into the belief that I would die broken, depressed, and anxious.

The beginning of the end of my anxiety and depression came unexpectedly.

I learned to sit with my suffering and understand how it felt in my body. I developed a process for tracing a present-day reaction back to its source. One night, sitting on the couch feeling intensely anxious, I noticed a heavy pressure on my chest and asked myself, “When have you felt like that before?”

I found myself confronting a childhood memory. In therapy the next day, I returned to that event. I saw how fractured my view of the world had been and how self-hatred had taken up residence in my being.

I loved myself for the first time.

I never again suffered a panic attack.

But that session was only the beginning. I kept locating the sources of my remaining anxiety and depression and refining the process I used to sweep away the detritus of life that was running—and ruining—my life. Drawing on years of meditation, obscure therapeutic processes, and a massive dose of desperation, I synthesized these approaches into Retrocession.

I ran it constantly. Every time a reaction appeared, an unpleasant sensation arose, or anxiety or depression returned, I followed it to its root and worked until it was cleaned away.

My anxiety and depression faded. Then I tackled jealousy, anger, low self-worth, irrational fear, and procrastination. I moved from a world filled with pain and suffering into a life with space to breathe, space to grow, and space to build.

Difficult things still happen. Sadness, fear, and hurt still arise. I am fully there for the emotion. Then it passes, leaving no residue.

I am not offering a belief system. I am speaking from experience and personal realization.

Retrocession changed my life.

Continue Exploring

Read “How Retrocession Works” for the three movements behind the change described here.

Read “What Is Retrocession?” for the canonical definition of the process.