From Darkness to Awakening

At thirty years old, I found myself sitting alone in my dark room.

No job. No money. High-functioning anxiety, depression, and a drug addiction that I couldn't escape.

But the real darkness wasn’t the room.
It was how I was experiencing life inside my own mind.

I was about to use drugs again, promising it would be the last time — a promise I’d made a thousand times before.
But something was different this time.

A few months earlier, something extraordinary happened on what seemed like an ordinary day.

I was walking back to my desk with a clipboard in hand when it hit me without warning. Something shifted. The best way I can describe it is like getting your eyes tested by an optometrist.

You know when you’re looking through that device with different lenses, and you look through one, and suddenly everything becomes clearer. That happened to me, but from the inside.

I didn’t have the words for it back then, and I didn’t know what I was seeing. But I was cracked open. I had a deeper sense of awareness and caught a glimpse of a different world.

That moment didn’t' fix” everything, but it revealed something that transformed who I was and changed the trajectory of my life.

It didn’t give me all the answers, but it showed me that there was more to life than the noise in my head.

That moment opened a new realm of possibility.

Seeing In a Brand New Way

Not long after, I lost my job.

At that moment, it felt like another failure. But in reality, it was a release—a shedding of the things tied to the old version of me. Life began to mirror this internal shift, clearing the path for something new.​

Another thing I let go of was my addiction. Do you remember when I said I promised to stop and that it was different this time? This was why. That final night felt like a loving farewell to an old friend—a coping mechanism that had once helped me find relief from pain and suffering that I was grateful for but no longer needed.

I no longer saw myself as broken or weak. I saw a person simply doing the best he could with what he knew to feel better.

I was letting go of all that shame and judgment, and as it began to fade, they were replaced by something I hadn't felt in a long time: self-love and compassion.

I was experiencing the relief I had been searching for outside myself for decades.
I saw that when we let go of shame and judgment, we stop creating our own suffering.
And when the suffering dissolves, there's no longer a need to seek relief outside of ourselves.
Because the peace we are chasing has been within us all along.

The addiction wasn't the real issue; it was my way of finding relief from feelings I didn’t know how to be with and the experiences I’d been through.

But when my relationship with myself changed, everything else in my life did, too.
I never touched a drug again.

The Light and a New Understanding

I was laying the groundwork to process what had been trying to surface for decades.​

Now, the emotions and memories that were buried for years began to emerge.​

I cried more than I ever had before. Several tissue boxes got a good workout.​

But I wasn’t having a breakdown — it was a breakthrough.​

For the first time, I wasn’t afraid to feel. I wasn’t numbing, avoiding, or distracting myself; I began giving myself the space to process everything I had been through. This wasn’t easy at times, but there was so much beauty in it.​

I had shifted — profoundly. It felt like I was peeling back the layers that had long concealed my true self.

Driven by a deep desire to understand more, I immersed myself in reading about mindset and spirituality and pursued Holistic Counselling and Coaching training.

I was like a sponge, keen to absorb as much as I could while exploring answers to the questions that had always burned within me:​

• Who am I?

• Why do we suffer?

• How do we find peace?​

These questions, along with learning from incredible mentors and teachers, guided me to a deeper understanding of life and the mind—insights that resonated deeply within me.

I came to see that our experience of reality is created from the inside out—not by external events or circumstances but by how we think about them in each moment. We don't live in the world itself; we live in the stories we tell ourselves about it.​

These internal narratives—the meanings we attach to ourselves and our lives—are the root of our suffering. But when we change our perspective, we change our experience.

This realisation transformed everything for me. It became a compass, guiding me whenever I felt stuck, overwhelmed, or lost, reminding me to look within for clarity and peace.

Today

This understanding is now at the heart of everything I do.​

Because I know this to be true:​

You are never as lost as you think you are.​

Beneath all the noise, you're only ever one insight away from a completely different life.​

Outside of Coaching

When I'm not coaching, you'll find me immersed in nature, exercising, travelling, spending quality time with loved ones, or singing (badly) to music in the car or at home.​

I love my sport, and I'm a passionate Hawthorn supporter, which sometimes involves a bit of yelling at the TV!​

But most of all, I'm grateful to be creating a life with my beautiful partner, Rosemary—a life I once never thought possible.​

An Invitation to Remember

If you're feeling stuck, weighed down by past experiences, or overwhelmed by the noise of your own thoughts, please know:​

You are not broken.
You are not your struggles.
You are not your past.

Everything you need is already within you.​

Like the sun behind the clouds—even when you can't see it, it's always there.​

So is your light.​

And once you catch a glimpse of it, you'll never see yourself the same way again.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you!

With love,
Peter