I ‘Think’ I Was Enlightened

Episode Resources

• Listen to ‘Bones’
• Watch the award winning ‘Bones’ music video

Welcome back to The Nick Broadhurst Show. I’m your host, Nick Broadhurst and you can catch all of my work including my music, my music videos, blog posts, podcasts and everything that I do over at iamnickbroadhurst.com. And my music is available everywhere that you listen to music including iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Deezer; all those platforms, but if you do listen to Spotify head to iamnickbroadhurst.com/spotify and that will take you straight to my artist profile.

And that song you were listening to is one of my songs called Bones, “I’m taking all the hits head on. I feel it in my bones,” and that song is incredibly relevant to today’s episode, so let’s dive into episode number 25.

I’ve been talking about this on my tour at the moment and it’s a story which I share really candidly and feel pretty vulnerable about, to be honest, and before I started to share this I did get some advice from one of my mentors, Johnny Pollard, and he said to me, “The best thing that you can do is to make people feel okay about wherever they are at in life in that moment.”

And for me, you know, I never want to preach. I never want to talk to you from some fake ivory tower. For me, this podcast is an opportunity to be real. That’s it. And an opportunity to share of course, but mostly for me it’s an opportunity to just be who I am, which is so exciting and to share everything that I experience; all the high’s, all the lows, and all the lessons that come from that.

And in that Instagram world, I think it’s beautiful to celebrate the beautiful things in life, honestly I do, and I think to some degree Instagram gets a bit harshly criticized sometimes. I mean, why not celebrate the beauty? But here’s the thing: there is polarity in everything.

There is support and challenge in equal measures at all times. This is the nature of the universe. There is black and white, there is Yin and Yang, there is hot and cold, love and hate, and if we are going to celebrate the good, which is the support, should we not also celebrate the challenge, right?

And I think that’s where things like Instagram can go a bit short sometimes, is sure, celebrate the beauty, but celebrate what it means to be human and that is to experience the support and the challenge, and there is so much beauty in the challenge. This is where the growth happens. This is where much of my music comes from. Two of my songs, Take me Down and Bones, they came from immense challenge and now for me, they’re a thing of beauty that I get to celebrate, I get to perform these live which is incredible.

So I’m going to tell you a story which happened to me last year, and this is a story I’ve been telling on the Open Wide tour, and if you’re coming to Adelaide or Perth in the next couple of days, I can’t wait for you to hear this story, because for me it was a turning point, a huge turning point.

So, I found myself at the beginning of 2017 in a really strange position. I’d never been here before and that was… I was depressed. You know, I couldn’t believe it; I have lived such a charmed life, a really charmed life, a beautiful life full of abundance, and travel and amazing homes and great schools and incredible family and friends. I’ve never really had a lot of challenge in my life. Outside of things like divorce and things that, you know, we have to go through sometimes.

But I found myself at the beginning of last year in this place of depression and I could not believe this was my reality. I just couldn’t believe it. This is not me. This is not Nick. Nick doesn’t get depressed. What’s going on?

One morning I was in the kitchen, and usually the kitchen for me is a haven. It’s a place of meditation, really. I love cooking so much. It’s a beautiful thing. Melissa walks in and she sees me this morning and she can tell… she can tell I’m struggling, and for no particular reason I’m on the verge of tears.

And so Melissa says to me, “Look Nick, just stop for a second. Stop focusing on yourself. Stop. Look up. Look around you. Look what you’ve created. Look at the life you have. Look how much beauty there is around you. You’re just not seeing it.”

Now of course I knew there was a lot of truth to what she was saying, but in this state of suffering I registered it, but I chose to ignore it. So, I wanted to try and change my state, so I left the kitchen and I walked down to North Bondi, my favorite spot in North Bondi, which is the outdoor gym. And I’m on my knees, on the grass, doing some arm circles; just warming up my shoulders before I go and do my workout; my chin ups and pull ups and stuff like that.

And I’m doing these arm circles and all of a sudden both my arms get thrown back behind me, thrown back. I’m on my knees, my arms back and my head goes right back behind me, and all of a sudden I feel this massive burst of energy bursting from the bottom of my legs, from my knees, rushing through my body and bursting out through my head. My arms are back, my head’s back and it feels like I’m in some kind of cosmic energy tunnel. Imagine being in like a wind tunnel, on your knees, getting blasted and trying to hold on for dear life; that’s what it felt like.

Now, I lost track of time completely. I probably looked like a complete nincompoop, but I was being held in this cosmic tunnel of energy and I couldn’t escape it, and I’m just holding on, holding on for dear life; holding on, holding on, holding on. My head’s back, I’m looking up and I hear this voice out of nowhere, and this voice says to me, “You must be of service. You must be of service. You must be of service.”

And if I didn’t think I was already crazy, I felt even more crazy in that moment because I clearly heard this voice, and all of a sudden this energy just stops. My arms come forward, my head comes forward and I’m left in this position of realizing the depression was gone, completely gone. Instead, I stand up and I am now in the complete polar experience. I’m now experiencing complete bliss in my calling.

And I’m going to use the term ‘universe’. You can call it whatever you like. It could be God, source, love; whatever. I’ll call it the universe, but I believe in this moment I was gifted the feeling of what is possible as a human, as a human being; the feeling of being nothing but love.

So, I walk around that week; for a whole week. Everything I see, everything I touch, every person I talk to, everything I taste; everything is nothing but love, nothing but bliss. I call this my Jesus moment or my Buddha moment because I imagine this is what someone like Jesus or Buddha would have felt most of the time, and it was unbreakable. You could not break it.

Melissa did not know what had happened. She didn’t know who I was. She’d never seen this before. I’d never experienced it before and I was so grateful I was having this experience, but here’s the thing: there’s always polarity, right? So, a week before this happened I’m thinking, “Oh my God. I’m depressed. What’s wrong with me? I must be chemically imbalanced. Oh my God, I’m freaking out.”

So I booked in to see a doctor and I’d heard about this Russian doctor and he had some crazy techniques, so I thought I’ll go and have a chat with him and I’ll share. So I walk in there feeling like Buddha and doctor death runs some tests on me, and I come back a few days later, and he gives me the sort of prognosis that you never, ever want to hear.

Just imagine. Just stop for a second and think, think of those words that you don’t want to hear, right? That’s what I was told, and so, all of a sudden that state of bliss was snapped and I was taken into a much deeper, much darker depression. And that lasted, no joke, for about nine months. I couldn’t snap it, I couldn’t snap it. I’m going to share with you tomorrow what snapped it. It’s so cool. I can’t wait to share it with you.

But in that time, I just refused to look up. I refused to see what I had around me. I chose to live in that state of fear and then I was driven into a deeper state of fear by the doctor. So much fear that his words permeated every cell of my body. I went from 72 kilos to 60 kilos in the space of a few weeks. That fear literally burnt me away. That is the power of fear, right?

Now I’ve come through the other side. That diagnosis is no longer relevant at all, but the lesson is there and the lesson was to look up, and I finish my podcast with this every time now because there is always support, always, it’s always there, and while I chose to live in fear, all around me I was surrounded by love. Melissa, Leo; their love was unconditional, it was there the whole time. I just refused to see it and there was more support than that of course.

So if you stop, and feel free to pause this podcast if you need to, but think about a challenging time. You might want to close your eyes. Like, really feel it, and in there somewhere while you might see a lot of challenge, in there somewhere is the support. So take a moment to think about that; to feel it, really live that experience, live that challenge and then look for it, because I promise you, there is support in every moment, in equal measure.

That is how the universe works. That is Yin-Yang, that is black and white, that is love and hate, that is hot and cold, that is Shiva and Shakti; it’s there all the time if you look; and without it, without that divine order, without that balance, the universe spins out of control. So next time you feel challenged, I just want to encourage you to remember this podcast, remember these words and just remember to look for the support.

So I hope you enjoyed that story, and tomorrow is a very, very exciting episode because I managed to capture on video a confession of mine which was at 03:41am on New Year’s Day when I couldn’t sleep, and it became an inspiration and the birth of this podcast. And I’ve decided to strip the audio off that video and share it with you. It’s so candid and so vulnerable, but that’s cool. That’s what I’m here for, so don’t forget to tune into that one. It’s going to be beautiful.

For all the show notes on this episode, you can go to iamnickbroadhurst.com/25, and you’ll also be able to get the full transcript of this show, and I would be so grateful if you can head into iTunes or your favorite podcast app and leave me a 5 star review and a comment; please, do leave a comment.

And I must say, I spent this morning reading all the comments. As of today, this podcast now has 101 5-star reviews, which just blows my mind in the space of a few weeks. I am so grateful that this resonates, because first and foremost, this podcast is a way of me to be of service, of service to myself because I get to talk about the things that I forget, I get to teach what I most need to learn, and my only hope is that you get the benefit from that as well.

I would love to hear from you, so please tag me @IAmNickBroadhurst on social media, and use the hashtag #TheNickBroadhurstShow, or leave me a comment below (I read every single one!). And if you could take a minute to leave me a 5 star review on iTunes I would be very grateful.