How I Went From Unhappy Stoner To Traveling Meditating Entrepreneur – Introduce Yourself #2

My life changed when I googled how to get laid.

After typing those 4 words into a search engine, I discovered pick-up websites. This got me interested in NLP (but not the pick-up scene).

NLP led me to books about Buddhism. Before long, I was reading about Taoism, Hinduism, Kabbala, mysticism, Reiki, psychology, self help, personal development, spirituality, and so on. I knew I had to try meditation.

So I pulled up a chair, got comfortable, closed my eyes, and turned my attention to my present experience, vaguely trying to concentrate on my breathing or to work through some NLP technique.

I no longer felt as though life happened to me. I felt that I could change my life from the inside, instead of being changed by external events. I had tools to help me now. I felt empowered.

How to meditate

I concentrate on the breath. Our minds think constantly throughout the day, and it’s seemingly impossible to turn these thoughts off.

The more I watched my thoughts, the more unnecessary this mental chatter seemed to be. And I could see how damaging my habitual thinking and beliefs had become.

So now I was watching my thoughts and trying to keep them positive and less judgmental.

You can change your thoughts, your character, and even your immediate environment from the inside out

The combination of meditation and watching my thoughts stopped some negative thought patterns and beliefs. At the age of thirty-three this was life changing.

Within a few days of practicing five to ten minutes of daily meditation, my dark moods stopped.

As my dark moods lightened, so did my personality. I smiled and had more time for people, and consequently they smiled back and had more time for me.

Affirmations

I also started affirming things in my head whilst I was totally relaxed within meditation. I affirmed things like “I’m happy”, “I’m enjoying increasing my income”, and I affirmed things so I would meet girls.

I affirmed I would meet my wife. I met her. And I married her.

Here are what I affirm everyday in the morning at the moment:

• I am happy, I am calm, I am kind
• I am enjoying increasing the love, health, and happiness in my life
• I am enjoying increasing the passive profits to my businesses exponentially
• I am enjoying helping and inspiring other people to build businesses and increasing love, health and happiness in their lives
• I am enjoying increasing the love, health and happiness in the lives of the people around me

But another thing happened that was truly life changing.

Clearing the smoke

I had been a cigarette smoker since the age of eighteen—a habit I truly detested. My clothes smelled, my breath smelled, I smelled.

I’d resigned myself to a life of cigarette smoking and thought that giving up smoking was just another achievement that was beyond me—along with having a girlfriend or any meaning in my life.

Then one morning I woke up and didn’t want to smoke a cigarette. I was fully expecting to get the urge to smoke at some point during the day.

At the end of the day, I sat and looked at a pack of cigarettes on my coffee table. This pack of cigarettes had no more hold over me than any of the other objects on my table.

Days passed. Weeks passed. I never smoked again. I left the pack there as a reminder. Finally, I threw it away.

Lifting the head fog

Marijuana affects different people in different ways. Many of my friends maintain that they work better whilst smoking it. I have nothing against weed.

Personally speaking, weed demotivates me, harms my short-term memory and, generally, forces me in on myself.

However, as I’d given up smoking nicotine, I’d also stopped smoking weed. At the same time I’d increased my exercise routines, ate better food, started to drink less and took fewer other drugs.

My memory, cognition, and creativity all improved within days of starting meditation and stopping smoking weed.

Suddenly, I regained the childlike enthusiasm and interest in the world that had been beaten out of me by school and work-life.

Website

I was spending a lot of time online researching and discovering. I’d always wanted to create a website for myself but had decided that HTML and web publishing was beyond me.

But, finally, in 2005, I managed to create a three-page static site with HTML at RobCubbon.com.

That’s how it all started, Steemians. Next time I'll go on to explain about how I grew the business.

Over a decade later and I’m living in Chiang Mai. I haven’t worked since 2008.