The Courage to Stop Resisting Where Life Is Taking You | Guy Lawrence

Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Guy:
There was a point in my life where everything just seemed to fall apart at once. My girlfriend had broken up with me, the stock trading dream that I was exploring at the time was dead. Um, I was pretty much broke. I felt completely lost, and then I got T-boned or T-barred by a car while cycling through Sydney. Now, look, I know that, yeah, it sounds dramatic, but looking back 20 years later, I see that, that moment for exactly what it was, and that was the universe getting my attention because I was pushing so hard in a direction that wasn’t right for me. I was ignoring what I already knew deep down, and I didn’t have the courage to stop. So I wanna ask you something today, and what this podcast really is all about is where in your life do you already know something needs to change, but you’re still resisting it? Let’s do this.

Guy:
Today, this podcast is about are you saying yes to life? It’s about are you willing to take bold, courageous action in your life that is coming more from the heart than the head? It’s about letting go of the resistance to what is in the way of allowing us to do that. And from my experience, the only way to do that is to do it and learn from it from there. I remember there was a point in my life I hadn’t wa- I’d been in Australia about a year, so this is going back 2005, okay? And I had, I was going, I was in the self-help phase at this point. I’d listened to a lot of Tony Robbins, which I’m very grateful for. His Unlimited Power 2 series were fantastic. It really got me thinking outside myself.

Uh, but I’d just spent that time with my dad, if you listen to my solo podcast, around the shed, and building that, and these beautiful memories that were building within me. But anyway, d- I, I’d arrived, and I’d been doing this wealth creation seminars. So I had it in my head that in order for me to be happy, if I make lots of money, I can then be happy, and I was going down the route of fixating on making money. And the way I was gonna do that was through stock trading, day trading. And I invested very little money that I had. I’d actually borrowed money as well to invest in this stock trading course and to start, um, day trading while I’d just finished becoming a fitness trainer and was working at the Sydney University.

So at this point, I was living a double life. Now, as I was investing my time and energy more and more into the stock trading, I was sometimes staying up till 3:00 in the morning to trade, and then I, I would have a few hours sleep, and then I’d go in and cycle into the city. It was crazy when I think back about it. But I’m a stubborn person, and I was so determined to make this happen. I’m like, “I’m gonna do whatever it takes.” I’ve kinda got that bit in me. But what it was doing on hindsight was that that determination, that pushing to make this happen, was actually hiding and keeping me distracted from all the core wounds that I hadn’t healed within myself, that I didn’t even know were there.

And big ones for me were unworthiness. At some level, I didn’t feel that I had the ability to, to truly, um create something of my life. And so it was kind of the stock trading and this making money was distracting me from these core wounds, and so I never had to face them. ‘Cause it was like, “If I do this, I never have to deal with all that anyway.” That was bubbling underneath, even though I couldn’t articulate it. I’m not sure if you can relate to that. So through this determination, I was dating a girl at the time as well, and I could see that this, this was straining ’cause I wasn’t myself. I was getting so more fixated, so more invested in, “I gotta make this work to make my life some meaning out of it, something out of it.”

I was missing life. My girlfriend was getting very unhappy about all this, as you can naturally understand, and she broke up with me. Uh, surprise, surprise. And I was devastated, and I was getting to the point with the stock trading where I was almost gonna quit as well. And f- the, the thought of me quitting this was just unbelievable at that, that moment in time. It… Like, I was gonna feel like a true failure. Little did I know I’d been digging in the wrong place. So From that point, I remember, uh, uh, two weeks later it was pretty much after, uh, my girlfriend broke up with me, I was contemplating about the stock market quitting and, um, I was cycling home and it was a Saturday morning.

There wasn’t a car on the road, and there was a roundabout at the top of Coogee. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Coogee in Sydney, but there’s this really steep hill. And as I was cycling, it was my right of way. A car was coming up the hill, and it didn’t see me And I remember everything went into slow motion. I thought, “Oh my God, this car’s not seeing me.” And it hit me, T-boned me head-on on my pushbike. And I remember the bike went under the car, and fortunately, I actually rolled up onto the, the bonnet and hit her windscreen. And she continued to drive up the road, lost control of the car, and drove off into the hedges where the houses, the houses and all these hedges and grass.

And I came scuttling off, off the car. And I, I, I’ll never forget this moment because I was just, like, looking on the floor, laying on the floor in pain, just kinda checking myself. Luckily, I, I wore a bike helmet ’cause my head hit the windscreen. And I could just see my bike was crushed, and I was devastated. And I’m like, “How am I gonna get to work?” ‘Cause I was financially s- struggling s- uh, because everything I had was borrowed money in invest- in this stock trading. I was living payday, paycheck to paycheck, just enough to eat and pay my rent. Honestly, that was it. ‘Cause I was so determined. Like, I would’ve gone homeless at the time.

Like, that’s, that’s where I was at. And I was devastated because I’m like, “How am I gonna get to work Monday?” Not even thinking about if I was injured or not at this point. I was just numb from the shock. And this woman lost it. She was screaming, screaming, “I’ve killed so-“, I never… She was, “I’ve killed someone. I’ve killed someone.” She had her head, and she was banging the steering wheel. So she clearly thought she had run over me. And, and I remember kinda cl- clambering my way up off the g- oh my God, holding my ribs. And I walked over to the car, opened the car door. Or I think the car door must’ve been… I can’t remember.

These are just minor details. Anyway, and I ended up comforting her of all things, which was the irony of it. And, uh, anyway, obviously there were people walking by, and they called an ambulance, and they, they, uh, checked her out. They checked me out. And then the ambulance, uh, took me home, which wasn’t actually that far away around the corner where I lived at the time. And I remember being, f- feeling really, really, really sorry for myself. You know, when you wake up the next day, it’s like my body, I couldn’t move. Fortunately, I hadn’t broke anything, but I was in a lot of pain. The, the g- my girlfriend had broken up with me. This is gospel’s truth. And, and then I was like, “This, the stock market thing is just not working.” And that was my escape plan. That was my escape plan for life.

And The lady, um, rang me that day. That’s where I was going with this. So the lady rings me, uh, ’cause we wanted to sort out the insurance, and I needed a new bike, and obviously she wanted to check on me. And we, we got talking, and she asked me what I, what I did for a living. I said, “Oh, I’m a fitness trainer.” And she went, “Oh.” Uh, she said, “I go to, uh, Vision Personal Training in Bondi Junction.” I’ll never forget this. And I was like, “Oh, I know that well.” Uh, I said, “My, uh, my ex-girlfriend, um- works there.” And she said, “Oh my God, who is it?” And I, and I said her name, Sarah, at the time, and, and then she went, “Oh my God, she’s my trainer.” I, I couldn’t believe it.

I’m like, “What are the odds on this happening here and now?” So, so, uh, in the back of my mind, I was like, “Did she, did she, uh, ask you to do that? Did she pay you to run over me?” Um, but jokes aside, I, I was flabbergasted. So then what happens, she then r-rings obviously my ex-girlfriend to let her know what had happened, and then so she rings me, and then when she rings me to see if I was okay, ’cause obviously the… we, we’d freshly just broken up. She then de-decided to tell me on the phone in that moment that she’d been cheating on me for the last three or four months as well. And, and I remember just being… That was like the straw that broke the camel’s back and, and I, I remember saying a few not so very nice words and, and hanging up, and I just lost it.

I lost it. I remember just crying in a heap on the floor, and I, I don’t even know how long I was there for, and it was a really sad, sorry day for myself in that moment. Um, so I share that with you ’cause I know what it feels like to feel helpless, to feel completely lost, to feel like there’s no way out. Uh, and that was for me as a, you know, early 30-something man who even emigrated to Australia because I was lost at that point, and I’d been ignoring the signs. In hindsight, I’d been ignoring the signs, and like I said, I have to– had to be dismembered to remember. Now, the irony of this story is as well, is that during that time, a few months prior, a good friend of mine who knew I was very interested in, in health and fitness had sent me a bunch of DVDs.

DVDs. So this is going back a while. Hey, yeah, 20 years ago. And the DVDs were a seminar held by a charity that was supporting people with chronic illness, mainly cancer and chronic illness, and he’d been nagging me to watch them for months. Months. And, uh, and there was a part of me that was like, just didn’t, didn’t listen, but it was a, in reflection, it’s part of me that was drawn to it as well. So- I, in my pain and in my suffering and in my feeling very sorry for myself and not being able to go anywhere because I had no bike and I was very sore, I started watching these DVDs that had sat on my shelf forever. And I was glued. I was glued and I… It was breaking all paradigms around what, uh, nutrition is, health is, what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been told, and it was like the complete opposite.

And if you’ve followed my podcast for a while, you probably, you know, know how passionate I am about these things. But I couldn’t believe it, so I w- I just got really compelled in this state and I reached out to them and just said, “Are you holding any more seminars? I’d like to come up and see this for my own eyes.” And they said yes. So with what little money I had over the next few months, I then pulled away from the stock trading. Just, I d- I had to take a break from it because it was driving me nuts, and got on a plane and went to the s- the, the weekend seminar, and then I was, I was like one of the only healthy people in there.

And, uh, where men– And I was meeting people that were overcoming ch- chronic disease through holistic approaches back in 2006, and this blew my mind. And I don’t even know why I, I was drawn. I just listened. It was the fir- like I’d been, in many ways, listening to my heart, but it was so confusing. I was really starting to drop in and listen to that calling. And what came of that, ultimately, was my protein supplement company, 180 Nutrition, that started in beginning of 2010. But in that period of time, I started really getting lit up by something I truly believed in that was more congruent with me, and I stopped resisting the messages that I kind of knew I was resisting, but I didn’t know how to deal with them at the time.

Now, I didn’t have access to podcasts like this at the time either. I was listening into Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, you know, I’ve mentioned that a few times as well. But now, 20 years on, re- reflecting back, it was clear that the universe is constantly been… was trying to get my at- attention, but sometimes I had to be hit hard to, to really grab my attention to move forward. And now I am watching that like a hawk. That is something, um, w- that as you tune into this more and more, the more you start to honor and listen to the signs without the resistance to it. ‘Cause they say, you know, the greater the resist- the greater the separation, the greater the suffering. So the more separate we feel from ourselves, the more… and the more we’re resistant and set in our ways we become.

So I always look at that moment as d- a gift. A- as, as hard as it was at the time, and I would have gotten myself out, like if I could hit an eject button, I’d have been out at any given moment. Trust me. But It was a gift because then it, as I pivoted into the 180, that company went on to become a multimillion-dollar company, and it became very successful. But it was, it came from a purity of heart. It really did, ’cause I, I didn’t really have business skills at the time. I had to learn so much, but I was driven by something far greater than just the me in me. It really got me out of a poor little me kind of paradigm, but I had to be really hit by a baseball bat by the universe for it to, to knock me out.

And then years later, as I knew it was time to move on to, uh, what I’m doing now from the 180, uh, it was like as it was coming, I had the foresight to see it more, even though I was still resisting. I was like, “Oh, I don’t wanna go through this again. Oh, I’m not ready for this.” But yet there’s a multidimensional aspect of ourselves that is beyond the physical, that is yearning to grow and s- expand and evolve, just like life. And if we keep resisting that and not allowing it, we gotta be mindful of where it’s at. And it’s always harder when we’re really struggling to pull, turn that around to when we’re actually developing a much deeper awareness to ourselves and pr- and, you know, we’re staying a step ahead of the game in some ways, and that’s just accelerating.

And there have been many choice points in the way. And the irony, it occurred to me when I was cycling back, that’s why I’m still in my beanie and my hoodie, it’s, it’s winter over here, it’s cold outside, was that roundabout that I got, um, hit off my bike on, um, many years later, it was the same roundabout that I received the phone call, ’cause I was walking back home that night from a cinema, um, that my dad died. When my mom rang me from Wales, ’cause he went into surgery, and he died under the operating table, and it was the same roundabout that I received the phone call that I got T-boned. Isn’t that fascinating? It did. It occurred to me, and I was like, “Wow, I, I wonder what the, the s- the, you know, the messages in all that.”

Maybe there’s not, maybe it’s just coincidental. But I don’t go past that roundabout without thinking about these, I guess, turning points, major turning points in my life, uh, that, that were there. So what’s the point of this podcast to share with you is that, yeah, don’t resist. What happens if we just let go? Just get out of our heads, be in our hearts, and just continue to flow and a-allow this and really surrender into and belie- not believe or know that there is a much deeper wisdom that is orchestrating the whole universe. Uh, that if we allow ourselves to, to listen to that and to be guided by that and to trust ourselves, our higher self, our wisdom, our truths, that who knows what we are capable of, huh?

Who knows? So go out there, do it. Be bold, be courageous. Life is fragile. Life is a blessing. It’s a gift if we, uh, choose to see it that way, and don’t take it for granted, huh? Anyway, I just wanted to share a story with you today, and I felt compelled to do that. Uh, let me know in the comments, uh, if this supported you where you are in your life, if you’re ready to just be bold and courageous in some action or decision that, that you’re doing. And, uh, yeah, maybe we, we’ll see you, meet in person one day somewhere around the world. You never know where I am. Uh, links are below if you wanna find out more what we’re up to. I’ll be opening the doors to some of my own work soon as well. Uh, but yeah, I’ll keep you updated on that. Anyway, much love from me, and I’ll see you soon.

Guy:
I’m standing here right now in Lake Taupo in a beautiful retreat space, and there’s a vast difference between an intellectual experience and passive listening to a fully embodied lived experience, ’cause that’s what retreats can do. They can help you land, start to truly reconnect to yourself, to others, to nature, and to spirit as well. There’s so much in it. That’s why we created Live in Flow, and that’s why we are so passionate about getting this work out there and bringing people together. If you wanna find out more when our next retreat or event is coming up, just check out the link below.