Throughout my life, the most impactful lessons I have ever learnt have always been through some degree of suffering. I believe this is because suffering causes me to start asking the questions that really matter … the sort of questions that force me to begin looking inward. All of us will suffer many different things throughout life, and one of the most constant, recurring experiences in mine was loneliness. It didn’t appear as loneliness to start with though – it appeared as a desire; a yearning in my teenage years to want to leave everything and everyone I knew behind … to spread my wings, travel the world and experience new countries, places, people and situations. It was almost as if there was something deep within me, searching, longing to find something it knew was out there, and that it might be found in these new experiences.

In the years that followed, I visited many countries all over the world and met new people everywhere I went. I even joined the Royal Marines, went to war a couple of times, and got shot. By now, my unsatiated desire had morphed into a sense of feeling incomplete. As I began to search for what was lacking, I looked for completeness in romantic relationships and intimate encounters with women but, needless to say, never quite found it. The more I searched, the more women I hurt, the more women rejected me, and the more I kept coming up empty. 

What had once started off as a mysterious desire, a call to adventure and exploration, had actually led me down the path of incompleteness, guiding me smack bang into the middle of a neighbourhood where the only thing I could possibly explore was a deep sense of loneliness. I was suffering, albeit silently, for how could a supposedly self-perceived tough man, who believed he needed to be seen in a certain light, ever reach out and tell someone that he is suffering loneliness?

I had a very loving family, a network of very close friends, a job, money in the bank and, for the most part, freedom to do as I pleased … and yet, despite all of that, I still felt incomplete and desperately sad. 

Whilst reading a book called A New Earth by Eckart Tolle in 2022, something happened that I will call a spiritual intervention. I read a line that stated: ‘One thing we do know is that life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you’re having right now’. 

It felt like something awoke within me and, as it stirred and became even more aware of itself, I was shown in my mind’s eye a number of interconnected events, each one leading to the other – why I had unconsciously made the choices that led me to the places I had been at exactly the right moments in time, which allowed me to meet the people I had to meet, who all helped influence my unconscious state of mind. That state of mind was the continuously changing sum total of a never-ending equation, based all on external factors leading me to a place of inner turmoil and suffering, forcing me to begin asking the questions being birthed within from a place of immovable authenticity.

You see, what I had actually gone in search of was the understanding that happiness, and what would complete me, was never going to be found externally. The language of suffering is feelings and emotions, and my loneliness had all been self-inflicted by looking everywhere but within for my sense of completeness. 

When I read this back, it seems so obvious … and that maybe it’s something everyone else already knew, that it was just me alone who didn’t get the memo. But that cant’ be the case, can it? if it is, why are there still so many others trapped in the self-perpetuating loop of suffering broken hearts, loneliness, loss of loved ones, identity crises and numerous other human woes? 

I realised that without suffering the very thing I was lacking, how could I have become aware of it?! We are programmed to feel the absence of the things we desire, and we have to lack in order to suffer; we have to suffer in order to awaken, and we have to awaken to become aware of who, and what, we truly are, which can never be explained in words, and only felt once we become aware.