Welcome to The Crucible, Conversations for the Curious.
I am Hamish, your host.
This podcast is for anyone going through awakenings, trying to make sense of life.
Whether dark nights are the soul, needing to make life -changing decisions, struggling with addiction or critical illness, or simply realizing that their life as they know it is
not aligned to values and purpose.
You are not alone.
You can get through this, promise you.
Life is far more beautiful on the other side.
Hi everybody.
We are in for a great conversation today.
We are talking with Bryan and Bryan's from Dublin.
So you're going to have to listen because he talks quite quickly and we've been chatting and as he talks more quickly and more enthusiastic, the volume goes up, the level goes up,
the enthusiasm goes up, but he's got an amazing story.
He is a Gen X Techno Nerd.
fuses music and art, holograms, computers, computer science and he creates stuff, art, shows, you name it, all that kind of stuff.
So Bryan, thanks so much for turning up today.
Thank you so much, Hamish.
I'm really delighted to be here and appreciate you reaching out to me.
So yeah, great.
Really enjoying your podcast as well.
It's great work that you're doing.
So happy to be, proud to be part of it.
Lovely.
Well, I'm glad you are and I'm looking forward to have this conversation with you.
What got you into music and art and creativity and all that kind of stuff?
Because I know that is really dear to your heart.
Yeah, well, I started playing music when I was quite young, playing an instrument called the tin whistle, which is a very common instrument that people start out with in Ireland.
We were all taught the tin whistle in primary school.
They kind of stuck with me.
I liked it.
I was good at it.
So I kept it up reading my whole life.
And then my dad bought me a flute when I was in my teens.
My early 20s, I started going to this festival called the Willie Clancy Festival.
And so that's around about 2000 and like that's really the big festival in the world for Irish traditional music.
And that's kind of like, you know, really opened my mind to the whole community of Irish traditional music in a big way.
So I made this software then called TunePal, which was something I had been thinking about really since my early twenties.
In fact, since I was an undergraduate, my final year project and everything was this thing called TunePal.
What it is, is a software that you can play a tune and it recognizes the tune, it gives you the music score and then it allowed people to keep tune books then on their phones and
share tune books with each other.
So that became my PhD.
So I kind of combined music and technology in that way.
And then I released that one in 2009.
I gave it away more or less for free.
I mean, I used to charge for the app at one stage, but it's free now for everybody.
can just go to tunepal.org and use it.
And so then that really took the world off traditional music.
It was a totally new thing.
A whole generation of people come up to me at music sessions and trad sessions, whoa, you're the guy that made Tunefall, Tunefall changed my life.
So suddenly a whole thousands and tens of thousands of musicians got this technology and learned traditional Irish music with it.
So that was one of the big sort of things.
But I teach computer science and
I guess like I've always been an alternative thinker.
I love computer science.
I love coding and algorithm design and maths and I love basically how computers work, the thinking machines as Alan Turing referred to them as, but like I love the graphical aspect
of it.
I like drawing pictures and I like sound and stuff.
And then when I started teaching programming, I started teaching using this sort of a field called creative coding.
which is about using code, computer code, the actual language of the web, the internet, everything, the technology, the business systems of the world, but using the computer code
to make art.
And that there's no necessary output, but you're just in a flow state, being creative, being experimental.
And my feeling is that that's a really, really open mode.
You're in a great mode for learning.
And so I find over the years students really, I hope they enjoy it, but I definitely enjoy it.
And for me, it's this great crack, like seeing the little colors, the pictures changing, the sounds changing on the screen.
knowing that you have the capability to create that is really powerful, really powerful.
I mean, to get quite deep about it, I used to give talks about the psychedelic experience and virtual reality and...
You know, Terrence McKenna, I won't talk too much about this, but Terrence McKenna, he wrote about the virtual reality in the early 90s when it was really nothing, you know, it
was this huge big headsets.
But the idea of it, the idea of being able to create reality from computer code was in his mind.
And that's a great kind of mindset, the programmer's mindset.
That you can kind of treat life as a computer program.
And you know what, you're the programmer.
So if you don't like something, just go and reprogram it, you know?
And that's so, I'll give you a quick example of what I mean by that, right?
An awful lot of people I know, I'm in my 50s, a lot of people identify with their age a lot.
And they have birthdays every year and they're like, I'm getting older now.
And there's an idea that you kind of program yourself to become old by using the language of, by using all of that and getting old.
And then people use, too old to do that.
And then people are like, my leg is sore, so I can't do that.
I wouldn't do that.
All this negative programming, all this limiting, self-limiting beliefs.
So my thing now is I'm zero years old.
I wake up every day and I reprogram myself.
I just go in and reset the variable age equals zero.
Why not?
Because I am a programmer.
And I can.
There's nothing to stop me from doing anything.
You can think any thought.
You can do any thing that you want.
But people are obviously limited by their belief systems and their thoughts and their traumas and their pains and everything that happened as I was for years as well, really in
suffering and torment.
And I didn't want to be alive.
Didn't want to be alive.
I had a full on PTSD depression and came out the other side of it.
But that's kind of my view now.
And I think another great...
You know, like thing that I read earlier in my life was Alan Watts's book.
I don't know if people have read it, but I read this and it's all about not taking language so seriously and how we're programmed.
And basically it's a very, it also encourages people to be playful because it's a playful approach to the troubles and traumas that might come into a person's life.
So there you go.
That's a bit of, that's a few thoughts there.
But yeah, I love the creative thing and being in the flow state with computers and with music and making the colors come out.
And like I say, I all of these cool new machines there for making music, this thing.
And here's another thing about identity, right?
And you can identify and be anything, okay?
So now I'm a DJ.
I identify as a DJ.
I'm gonna update all my profile pages and everything.
I just got these machines a few days, know, a few weeks ago, but I'm already a master, like wouldn't say I'm a master of them, but you know, I'm playing around and I'm
absolutely great cracks.
So that's it.
I identify as a DJ woo.
Respect my DJ powers.
Absolutely.
Yep.
I love that.
You've well, we've got hours of conversation here.
We really have you've you've nailed so many things at about 180 words a minute, which is just brilliant.
Where do we start?
mean, so much you can recreate your own identity, you can re age yourself every year, every day, every moment, create your own identity, rebuild it all really, really powerful
things.
And we don't realize we're allowed to do that.
I mean, that was one of my biggest problems.
didn't realize I was allowed to change my beliefs.
mean, might sound stupid to some people, might sound mind blowing to some people.
But I mean, it sounds like you do that.
go, Hmm, I'm a DJ today.
And yeah.
Yeah, that's my kind of mindset now, but I have to say that took me, that took me, that takes what I would say balls, you know?
I talked to my, like I gave a talk about being creative in the computer science classroom.
It does require balls because you have to, you have to pretend initially and you're going to feel nervous.
I don't anymore because I don't really have those.
you know, feelings anymore, kind of go into the world and do whatever I want now mostly.
But you have to pretend.
Like if you're not comfortable being a DJ and standing up in front of people making beats, you have to do that and feel nervous and also make a complete hames of it a good few times
and get negative feedback and then keep going back and trying and trying.
But it does require effort.
But you have to, as they say, like you have to imagine yourself, in my opinion.
And it does require balls.
For example,
About 10 years ago, I started teaching yoga as part of my computer science classes because I just reflected about things that are important for young people to know.
And I think if you're working in computer science technology, then you should have practices like that complement all of the work that you're doing in your head all the
time.
In other words, you have to stretch your body.
You have to know that you are a body.
It's not that you have a body.
This is you.
your being is here.
And if you don't maintain this being, then the overall being is not whole.
and obviously I observed some of my students that they would over the course of their four years of study of game design or computer science, it started out really skinny.
And then as the years go on, they just pile on the weight.
So by the time they reached it, and I know that's from the sedentary lifestyle.
So I started teaching yoga and I'm not trained to teach yoga.
do my own practice, but that required
balls and I had to stand in front of a class of young people, not knowing anything about how to teach yoga.
And I had to do it, like write it down what I'm gonna do with them and then teach them all the different things.
And then I just got better at it through repetition.
But I'm not, like I said, I'm not a yoga teacher, not trained as a yoga teacher, but that required balls and you have to have balls in life.
Not that you have to have balls, but I think to grow, you have to have balls.
In other words, you have to be prepared.
Being uncomfortable is fine.
Being uncomfortable, being uncomfortable from the Zen point of view, from the Buddhist point of view, there's no difference.
There's just experience.
And if we can learn to perceive suffering and non-suffering in the same way, then you essentially can elevate yourself out of suffering.
You know, if you can just see pain or whatever as a sensation.
But that's hard to do as well.
mean, people study years of meditation to achieve that, that, that.
Or sometimes people can be just forced by their own circumstances to have to just accept their pain and just play along, you know?
So, yeah.
Radical acceptance is a very, very powerful thing to have to do.
And at some stage you have to, you have to go, this is life.
This is this, this is whatever, you know, the conversation I had this morning on the podcast.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it really, really is.
And I love what you said about
you know, having to get uncomfortable.
I worked behind the camera for years in the TV industry.
I never wanted to be in front of the camera.
And now I am.
And all that resistance, I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do it.
Fucking hell, I'm doing it.
And I'm loving it.
And it's great fun.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, it's, is whatever you resist seems to be the thing that you got to end up doing that painful thing.
Mmm.
So yeah, so let's find out a bit more about your story, because obviously it's not all music and there's a darker side to it as well.
So can we go into that a little bit on what basically what went wrong?
Let's call it that for now.
Well, let me see.
So things really were not going well maybe for me for a few years, but it was due to life circumstances.
just found myself, I mean, I I got involved in some businesses with my ex-partner and I just didn't want to be there anymore.
then in 2019, just had a really, really bad year.
My mom passed away.
and I had to sort of hold it together.
was really struggling.
I had to hold it together for the year.
And so I held it together pretty much for the year, but I'm pretty sure that was a year just like I experienced a lot of traumatic things.
And then found myself at the start of 2020.
Just being in a place where I didn't want to be, definitely did not want, the lockdown obviously started, facing into, I don't know, indefinite misery.
and living with a person I didn't want to be there anymore.
I knew I had to leave, I couldn't stay.
And so basically I moved out of the place where we were living.
I moved in with my dad at the start of the lockdown.
And I hadn't got a plan.
That was the thing.
I really was very, very weak, I would say.
Like I had, you know, my emotional strength was low.
I was broken hearted and I was broke.
A lot of financial debt, money owed everywhere.
And really having to start again.
And I see these memes sometimes where there's like a mattress on the floor and it's just a guy by himself.
And that's what happened to me at the start of the lockdown.
And I couldn't really cope.
I had no plan, nothing.
My sister actually, interestingly, I'll show you this.
I forgot to bring this.
My sister got me this lovely book at the very start of when I moved out and I knew I had to start a new life.
turning dreams into plans.
I wrote down lots of stuff on the first page of that.
I felt so low, about my goals and stuff, you know?
And from then it was a downward spiral, all right?
So first of all, the loneliness by myself in my dad's place, maybe playing video games, started to drink because I really couldn't control my thoughts.
I was endlessly thinking about my life problems from morning to night.
And I just lost control of my thoughts.
The only thing that really helped me a little bit was you could smoke a cigarette.
That would stop them for a bit, but then I started chain smoking.
And then that just made me more anxious, right?
And so then I started drinking because I drink every day then.
I have to drink.
I didn't get into the habit.
Maybe I should have just started first thing in the morning, but I would go through the horrors during the day and then I started drinking in the evening time.
And what happened then, I stopped being able to sleep.
and I just found it impossible to go to sleep.
I'll be lying in bed tossing and turning.
And then finally when I would go to sleep, I felt myself having terrible nightmares.
So I'd wake up like literally in a cold sweat, dreaming about all these events of my life.
And these are the only real I realized that is what people have PTSD.
When traumatic events happen and they start to just reoccur and you're obsessed about them.
So this was happening.
then a lot of while I was going past.
absolutely couldn't sleep in a really terrible form, then I managed to get ZopiClone.
So I got a ZopiClone, I don't know if you know them, but they're a sleeping medication.
And so I got a ZopiClone, wow, that knocked me out for whatever number of hours, great.
So then I managed to start getting ZopiClone pretty regularly.
And of course, the thing about these was that they're for short term use, of course.
And the great thing you did take one and then I would actually feel myself, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, I'll never sleep, I'll never sleep.
was wash over me.
I would sleep and it was so great to be able to switch off the thoughts.
That's actually what I really wanted.
I wanted oblivion.
I wanted not to have to be, know, not to have to face my life or my problems.
And so after a while, then of course the zombie con stops working because your brain builds up a tolerance to it.
It's not a long-term one.
And then I was taking like one or two to try and knock myself out and also drinking as well with them.
Okay, so I'm not gonna go on, I don't wanna blame alcohol or Zop and Clown either.
I got into very, very bad life habits.
Then the next thing, sadly, loads of things happened during that period of about three years.
I stayed at my dad's place for a while.
I then moved into a tent, staying on some land that my friends owned down the country.
And again, absolutely broken hearted, miserable, I arrived there.
My friend set up this beautiful bell tent for me to come and stay in with my little dog at the time.
And again, I was there in my, I'm thinking, how have I ended up here?
I'm living in a tent now, know?
Again, all these negative, like whatever.
But I also had these incredibly huge life problems that I had to sort out.
I couldn't do it because COVID was just ongoing.
So there's nothing could be even done about them.
And then end this rumination, rumination for morning to night.
And.
Then I managed to acquire Xanax.
Brilliant.
First time I took a Xanax, all my pain went away.
I thought if I could only get these now for six months, I would be able to sort out all my problems, get my new place, start my new life and everything.
And so then I found a doctor that will prescribe them to me for months.
I don't blame my doctor.
My doctor is very, very nice.
They just did not know that you're not meant to.
protect these things long term.
And also I was, as they say, doctor shop and I get some here and there, whatever.
So I managed to get myself like a pretty much endless supply of them.
And I initially started trying to not take them every day, but it was impossible.
And so I found myself then taking Xanax every day for about a year or maybe I could be longer than that, maybe about a year and a half.
And obviously, you know, they're very, very habit forming.
And the anxiety that you get when they wear off is horrendously worse.
it's like a bad, it's like you imagine the anxiety from a hangover.
It's that kind of anxiety.
It brings your anxiety slowly, slowly up.
I found myself after a year and a half of being honest.
I was really messed up.
I couldn't do anything or make a decision.
My sister would say, come stay here for a while.
I go over there.
I'm so miserable.
Help me talk about my problems all the time.
go over to my dad, stay there for a while, talking about my problems all the time.
And still at the same time, keeping up a bit of yoga practice and also having to go in and teach online, classes every week.
It was really hard.
I don't know if it's the right thing to say, but many times I had a bottle of wine on one side to numb myself and my thoughts so I could even stay focused for my students.
So it was all that kind of challenge.
And then I was moving around for, let's see, where else?
Finally, to sort of get this story out of the miserable part, it was very, very low moments, many, low moments.
As I say, my ability to make a decision or do anything for myself was kind of lost.
I was just in such pain.
People talk about physical pain, and in my sense, I actually felt this is mental torment all day, every day.
And then in the cycle of...
withdrawal and getting back into the booze and passing out, blackouts and everything.
It's terrible.
I love myself.
Even I love myself in that stage.
know, but my mind, I remember we were saying to friends, I said, my mind is messed up.
I've really, I've destroyed my brain now.
All this like self-defeating stuff.
And I felt I had, felt I had anhedinia as they say.
I remember going to Sligo to a retreat to try and like hang out.
bottle of wine in the car on the way down, glugging it away, one and a half Xanax in, crying, writing my suicide note in my head over and over again, know, endless OCD
thoughts.
And at the end of the night, this retreat, we went all went down to look at the moon and it was a beautiful full moon.
And I just absolutely felt horrible.
You know, everyone's going, the moon is so beautiful.
Wow, it's so great for nature.
I felt like just kill me down.
I don't want to be here.
And that was it.
Look at the beautiful moon, which is the most beautiful thing on like existence is gorgeous as Allah what says, it's the plenum, the fullness of total joy.
And with something like that, like that was a moment I just knew I'm totally lost, you know?
So finally I ended up staying with a friend and I got onto them and started taking Sertraline, loads of side effects initially.
So I had to stop the Xanax, know?
Terrible withdrawals, messing up and down everything.
Finally, I went out one day and I got a glass bottle.
I was just thinking about suicide.
I don't want to be here anymore.
I slit my wrists, not my wrists very badly, but I started cutting my wrists like this.
And I like, that's it.
I was finding, wanted a way to die.
Didn't want to have to face my life or my problems.
And that was my low point then.
My friend brought me into A &E.
I spent 12 hours in A &E.
Again, just completely disorientated.
I totally disconnected at that point.
I didn't even feel connected part of my body, you know?
But I was totally helpless.
I'd given myself up at that point to the care of others.
I was incapable of really looking after myself.
And if I was left alone by myself, I would probably try to kill myself.
That was my thoughts were like that.
So, finally I got into the acute ward of Vincent's Hospital.
I was there in isolation for 24 hours, going, whoa.
wow, how has this happened now?
I'm in a psychiatric hospital.
You know, what's gonna happen now?
After 24 hours, then in the acute ward for a week, everything is really lovely in there.
The staff so calm.
You they were the right people.
My sister even was gonna look after me, but that would have been so wrong, because they'd have been all around me, Bryan, whatever.
Whereas in there, they're just calm, and they just listen to you.
And I told them all my stories and everything, and they understood.
So I was a month in hospital.
After a month they decided I was well enough to go out, but I didn't really feel well enough.
I was actually so unwell, I was thinking I'll just go back and live with my ex-partner again after all the fucking trauma, because I just couldn't look after myself.
And luckily my sister said, no, you're not going to do that.
We are going to get you an apartment.
So I got an apartment in a place in Dublin called Ratt Mines and I moved into this apartment and looked, I remember paying an absolute fortune for it every month.
to start again.
didn't care.
The money was nothing.
Irrelevant.
I was either going to die or I started again.
That was the way it was.
So started there in this apartment and it took me probably another three to four months in the apartment and sometimes I've like just mentalness, know, crazy thoughts and to be
honest, some really bad drugs as well kind of came into my life at that point.
But I was on the searcher lane.
And then finally, I think around about Christmas then, I went on holidays to Gran Canaria with another really great friend.
So you have such brilliant friends all the time.
And my family, loving family, I loved them so much.
And my friends went over to Gran Canaria and something changed when I was over in Gran Canaria.
And that was, I sort of, the searcher lane as it were, kind of kicked in, in a really nice way.
I remember smoking some weed over there, going for a big long.
and imagining what my life was gonna be in six months and feeling really positive about that.
For the first time, I actually felt well about imagining a better life for myself.
And then I kind of tapped into, I think, a mental process, which was the thing that Sertraline gave me back was control of my thoughts.
So when I started thinking, you know, these negative things, blah, blah, and feeling bad, I could say, no, I'm not gonna think that.
And I would actually start thinking.
happy thoughts about myself and about my life and doing positive things like going for my run, doing breath work, doing yoga.
And those things would start to make me feel good.
That was such a game changer for me to actually do things that are positive things for my life and for those positive things to make me feel well and happy.
And so then I tapped into that.
And so there was a few things I remember from that was first of all, stick to my plan.
Whenever then I would feel like stressed or whatever I find my thoughts, I go stick to your plan.
This is what you're going.
This is where you're doing right now.
And then it would always bring me back to my plan.
And when I went back to my plan, then I felt good and I felt like I was on the right path.
And I stuck to that, kept going back into that one and identifying with that one.
And then finally everything came clear.
Another thing is about, we were talking about radical acceptance.
was a time, I rounded by Christmas time.
And I just said, that's it, no going back.
I'm here, I'm starting a new life.
This is brilliant.
I love it.
I'm a happy person again.
I'd taken a semester off college because I was just too sick.
then my university was brilliant.
They supported me no problem.
And then I came back in the second semester, started teaching again.
But one amazing thing happened again, talk about radical acceptance.
I remember one time being in my apartment by myself.
And I had sorted out lots of things and I kind of got a little bit clearer.
And I was there by myself one evening and all the negative thoughts started coming back.
Bryan, you fucked up.
Bryan, you're a waste.
Bryan, can't be by yourself.
Don't be by yourself.
And every thought that came into my head, I said, yes, I know, it's fine.
I accept.
No problem.
They were like, you know.
You can't do that and you're a waster.
You never go back to it.
No problem.
I just said, fine, I don't care.
I don't care.
No problem.
I said to myself in my head, all of those negative thoughts.
And strangely then they kind of lost their power over me.
You know, they lost their power over me.
People talk about transformational moment, but that was a transformational moment for me when I decided not to accept my own bullshit.
You know, my own thoughts were the things that had driven me crazy all those years.
And I finally stood up to my, if you want to say myself, but this unconscious process, which was driving me mental all the time.
So over the time then I got my own place.
I sorted out everything.
Not quite, we still have financial problems.
They don't bother me.
They don't worry me anymore because they're not even real.
They're problems that the matrix wants to put into me and make me stressed about, but there's just people working in offices at the end of the day, right?
But my, you know, all the stress and the hatred and I really wanted to kill my ex partner.
We were so, we just had gone so far apart.
We're great friends now.
We've put it all behind us and we laugh when we do those things that we used to do before to hurt each other.
We laugh at each other now because we know that they're just like behavior patterns or they're triggers.
We throw grenades at each other.
We even say that, stop throwing grenades.
You know, but we have kind of worked on our problems now.
It's interesting as well.
I decided because the other thing I felt
at one point that I was going to inflict intergenerational trauma on my nephews because I knew I was, I just kind of felt like I was, was out of here.
I had to carry, for example, one stage, I had to carry Xanax with me.
I was on the campus because I was afraid I was going to throw myself off the roof of the campus.
We just got this beautiful new campus, which we're looking forward to all this like, you know what I mean?
The kind of storytelling that
this campus we'd waited for so long and you're gonna be the person to throw yourself off the roof of the campus.
That's what you'll be famous for.
Going on in my head, know, just kind of, be straight up with you.
Those were genuine words that repeated themselves in my head all the time.
That's why I have the Xanax in my pocket, just in case it got too bad, you know?
So what was I gonna say?
But yeah, finally, what I was saying is my...
Ex-partner, we never got divorced.
We're not probably gonna ever bother with any of that stuff.
It's just, it's all the matrix again.
You know, we live happy lives now separately.
I've totally moved on.
I live in a beautiful home.
I have a lovely new boyfriend.
Like it's a different, totally different kind of love and relationship, but it's also very independent, you know?
I don't want to get my stuff tied up with anybody else too much anymore.
I want to be strong and independent by myself.
And that's the thing that happened, I think, in my relationship.
I lost a lot of myself to this person.
It was a person that maybe satisfied all my needs.
And also we got really tied up in all of our business together.
And when that didn't go well, then I got drawn into all of that.
I think it's important for people maybe to try and be strong themselves.
Young people, anyway, I'm not gonna give out about it, but like, it's just, you have to be strong yourself.
Yeah, but that's the main thing.
There's a few good ones.
A few other things, importance of keeping looking after the basics, I think.
By the basics, mean, obviously go back to your breath.
And one thing I do every day is swim half breathing.
And I find that absolutely brilliant.
That kind of helped me keep my sanity a little bit during the time.
So I was going through those really hard times.
And another thing that is my yoga practice.
So again, if I find myself overwhelmed of too much to do or get stressed, I'll go for a run as a priority, you know?
If you've lots to do and you're getting overwhelmed, I think if you just like look after your physical body first, because you are a physical being, you know, like there's a, you
are everything.
You're a spiritual being, it's physical being, but your physical being is, if you nourish your physical being, then you can exist more fully in this realm.
So I'm sorry.
Also you can achieve your goals.
You can do your projects if you're physically strong and if you are healthy.
But it's okay to not be healthy and it's okay to be sick and it's okay to be addicted to alcohol.
As Gabor Maté would say, you probably know, mean, many people know of his work, but he says if a person's been drinking alcohol for 20 years and they're lying on their bed,
you're dying of cirrhosis, liver disease, the first thing he would say to that person is you are not
That's an identity.
And I think at any point a person can become anything.
People give up, people in active addiction give up and change their lives spontaneously.
So that means it's possible.
And also it's possible to do with support and help for friends.
And it's also, I feel very okay to be sick, to be depressed, to be unwell.
know, a lot of the depression is somehow it can be.
self-perpetuating.
So I knew I was depressed.
The thought that I was depressed made me more depressed.
You know what mean?
I am depressed.
I used to around telling everybody I have depression.
I am depressed.
I have depression.
I'm depressed.
have PTSD.
Telling everybody.
And so this kind of reinforced my identity as a person with depression.
And another thought which really came into my head was my mum sadly had depression for at least 12 years before she died.
and probably are possibly caused by her menopause.
Maybe it was undiagnosed and if she had had a different treatment, if she'd had, for example, a HRT or something, maybe she'd have helped to regulate her emotions a lot.
But she went into a kind of a 12 year depression and she spent a good bit of time in hospitals.
She had an ECT and a lot of really, really very, very bad depression, know, catatonic.
And it was really, we all supported her.
We all didn't really know what to do.
But the thought in my head when I was sick was it's in your family.
You can't do anything about it.
It happened to your mom and now it's happening to you.
And it's just your destiny.
You just have to accept your depression and you're going to kill yourself.
You know all this kind of self storytelling stuff.
the mind can really be our greatest tormentor.
I really believe that the mind, if you can kind of master your mind to some degree, you can, you know, you can, you can, you are so powerful, so powerful that you can master your
emotions and your triggers and recognize yourself.
It's totally fine to feel pain and to feel trauma and to be depressed, but to know yourself as a person that's six inches above being.
you know, observing yourself being depressed, to identify with that higher consciousness self, but the radical acceptance as well.
Like I had to radically accept, as I say, my life was absolutely fucked.
I owed money to everybody.
Yeah.
My relationship was totally not what I thought it was and so on.
You know, I had to radically accept that I was wrong about almost everything in life.
And I had to just say, yes, it's fine.
It's okay.
But everybody, once you do that, as I say, it's very liberating.
Because now I would say, and the words of Alan Watts often resonate, I'm under no obligation to be the same person I was five minutes ago.
You know, so you're always ready to reinvent.
Here's an interesting one for you, right?
At the start of my depression and at the start of my descent into madness, it was a true descent into madness, right?
I wrote all of this plan down here in my book.
And on my 50th birthday, right?
This was after three years of hell that I wouldn't wish on anybody.
I actually found all of the things that I had written in that book that they actually came true.
all of the things I had, every single one of them.
I said, want to have my own house.
I want to be financially independent.
I want to be free.
I want to be back teaching and doing all the things I love doing.
I'd written all of this down.
And I wanted to find a new person, share my life, a good friend, and all the stuff.
And I'd all of these things written down at the start of my stuff.
And then the rest of this book after this is all, all my pain is written in here, you know?
But it's so amazing, people talk about manifestation, but that's a true example of when I manifested a better life for myself, but I had to go through hell, real hell, feel.
Mental health and suicidal thoughts relentlessly for years, know?
Caused by a trauma, not something necessarily inherent, but caused by just traumatic life events that I found myself unable to cope with.
So it's totally possible.
And I feel now I am so happy.
I'm so well, I'm creative, playful.
I don't take myself too seriously.
I work really hard and do my yoga practice every day.
Freezing cold shares out my backyard in most mornings.
I do my running.
I'm doing all this amazing creative projects now.
I'm really, feel living my best life at 52.
I'm not even 52 at zero years old, I should say.
Obviously I do not have an age.
I do not identify as having an age.
I feel really, really happy.
And at my lowest times, I remember thinking, will I ever feel happiness again?
And the truth is, like, I don't know if you'd say it's worth it, but it definitely feels good now to be alive and to be happy.
And I don't want to die ever.
I want to stay around forever.
That is such an incredible story, Bryan.
And I love the way you've, you've joined all those dots backwards.
It's a conversation I had two or three days ago with someone.
He looked at his life that way when he hit the bottom and he yeah, this is exactly where I'm meant to be.
All the dots have brought me to where I am now.
and another theme identity, you know, you've, you, you identified with the drugs, with the Xanax, with this, with that, I'm this, I'm that, I'm that.
But when we.
As you said, you have six inches above and you know, I have a problem.
don't I'm not PTSD.
I'm struggling with PTSD.
You know, when you start to look at it, you're changing everything, aren't you?
And that's, again, you're taking responsibility for your life rather than giving it away.
Exactly, yeah.
And that's empowering for people because people then realize that they can actually make decisions.
A thing I found really hard was making decisions during that hard time.
And now I realize you just make a decision.
It's actually not that hard.
You just make it.
And actually language is very powerful because once you decide something and you use the language to yourself, as we understand, you program your subconscious and you program your
reality around the words that you use.
So yeah, definitely.
And I observed that a lot in other people as well.
And I hear the language that they use now because, and I can relate to it because I've been there myself.
And I see that that is, yeah, something that you can grow from.
absolutely.
Yeah, I'm a car crash victim.
I'm an alcoholic.
I'm an addict.
I'm a rape survivor.
You all these things.
It's no, you're a person.
Those are events you've gone through.
Let them go.
Radical acceptance.
happened.
Shit happens.
How are you going to respond to it?
Yeah.
exactly.
And another one that I hear people as a recovering alcoholic or as a former alcoholic.
So that's an identity with, but it's all fine.
I mean, I don't want to judge anybody either because it's just different perspectives.
Like we all have different perspectives on the same thing.
I mean, from a spiritual perspective, there's really only one consciousness that looks out through all eyes.
And it's worth remembering that when you look at somebody and you see a person's behavior Just know that that person's behavior is you you know in a different form.
That's that's it That's my spiritual understanding of reality I don't know if it's because I deeply understand that now or just because I've said it to myself so many times But it's
always I even see that like it Yeah, as I say you can just see different people at different stages and know that that's you as well
you know, experiencing a different form of reality in different circumstances.
that and that takes the pressure away doesn't it you you then realize I then realize that that person's going through their own experiences doing it their own way and there's
nothing wrong with it.
There is nothing wrong with it.
You know, I can't tell you to change.
You're experiencing it your way and then hopefully you will learn from that and go I wasn't I was a morbid idiot wasn't I making making a nightmare out of it.
I want to I want to have fun and be as you said
joyful, peaceful, not take myself seriously and next, next experience.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, think we talk about like alcohol.
It's worth it.
We're maybe chatting about that for a little bit because I don't drink anymore.
And like, I also go to pubs a lot and I drink a lot of beer still because I play traditional Irish music.
And so I'm around the pub environment and everything.
But it's interesting now being in the pub and being being sober and yeah.
So you just have to accept, it's obviously such a poisonous and toxic substance.
really people talk about it, I now understand it now as well.
It does keep people at a low vibrational level.
What that means for me is that, for example, in my time, okay, I was drinking because I was traumatized, but people who drink to socialize are people who drink to relax.
That's the big problem.
Drinking because you're traumatized and because you need to numb your pain, I understand.
Drinking to relax and socialize is traumatizing yourself.
know, alcohol is a traumatic substance because obviously it's poisonous.
And so like, while it does give you the buzz and it takes the pain away, whatever, for a short period of time, you have to understand that it's a poisonous substance.
It's like, for example, if you want to drink shampoo every day or a bottle of bleach, you're going to feel sick.
Same thing with alcohol, you know, it's a poisonous substance.
I think what happens is people get hangovers and then they drink more because they have a hangover.
And once you get into that one, that's the problematic.
If you can actually tolerate your hangover and not drink, I think you're less likely to become an alcoholic.
But this is how it's so habit forming because people drink and then they have a hangover and actually they feel a little bit more anxious the next day.
I do.
I definitely would have.
And you would,
beer relaxes, and it doesn't really, it doesn't really do, I don't know what exactly it does, but you crave it, and that's the problem.
When people drink in a daily thing, in order to cure their hangover, they start drinking.
Because then you realize you can pretty much stay buzzed and hangover, drunk, slightly drunk all the time.
And that's how it's easy for people to slip into alcoholism without even knowing it.
Or for people without really any traumas that they're covering up, they can easily slip into it.
They're being tricked on a massive scale.
Somehow I feel when drink driving was more prominent, there was more of an understanding of the dangers of alcohol.
know, this was maybe back in the eighties and we were kind of told it was dangerous in school.
But I think all that has been abandoned because it's just as it's so obviously ingrained in culture and ingrained in people's experience of the world.
There's alcohol everywhere, the pubs everywhere.
It's unquestioned.
In my country, being an alcoholic is almost a, there's an element of nationalism about it, which I find sad.
Why?
To me, it's a form of mass manipulation by the kind of Irish state.
The Irish state generates a huge amount of revenue from, I don't know if I can even say, Diageo company, whatever.
Diageo basically, which is a UK,
multinational alcohol company that obviously does not care about the wellbeing of their consumers.
They don't, they can't.
They just look at a new market and there are people that are paid in those companies who don't think about that.
They just think, how are we going to promote our brand in this company country?
Great.
We'll get pretty girls as they do in Africa, going into the bars, giving away free Heineken.
they don't, this is great.
We're going to increase our brand and we're going to increase our brand loyalty all this time.
We're going sponsor football matches and whatever.
And then the Irish state makes a massive amount of money.
We make, think, something like nine billion a year.
I think it's nine billion from Apple and then something like nine or 10 billion as well from Diageo.
And so that funds our universities, it funds our hospitals, it funds the politicians.
And so that's why there isn't an incentive.
I realize now the state just wants to maintain, the state is its own entity that just wants to keep everything as it is.
So there's an unquestioning
Acceptance.
Young people it seems are challenging this acceptance of alcohol as being a thing that people do to socialise or whatever.
Because young people have video games.
They would meet up in their homes and they play Xbox games together and they get their buzz out of that.
So they're like, why would I go and drink alcohol?
But as I say, the Irish state makes a huge amount out of it.
And also you even see on TikTok all of this Guinness nationalism bullshit where people are like, the point of Guinness is the best one, whatever.
I feel, and I do comment, but like, you know, nobody really gets me.
I do comment, like, if you have three pints of this, you're going to feel sick for about two or three days afterwards.
Why doesn't nobody talk about that?
You know, it causes diarrhea, digestive discomfort, flatulence, obesity, stupidity.
You're going to have more accidents.
Everyone's going around, this is great.
I love this one.
So I just think that needs to be challenged a little bit.
You know, the idea that drinking alcohol is actually fun.
Yeah, you often see like my hippie friends and everything.
They're the first ones out on the dance floor.
Most of us don't drink alcohol anymore.
We're the first ones out on the dance floor.
You know, we'll camp, but we'd be up until eight o'clock in the morning around the campfire having the crack and having the chats and the tunes and everything.
So we don't need alcohol.
But actually an interesting thing is the idea, which we don't have in Ireland and you don't have in the UK either, but it's the idea of being calis-ober.
So as you say, everybody's journey to sobriety and recovery and healing is different.
And in other countries, there's this concept called Calis over.
And I know that cannabis, for example, is a cure for alcoholism for many people.
Many people stop drinking when they discover cannabis.
And sadly, that's not available in the, you can get it under medical thing, but by depth, you could get it to cure your alcoholism.
Sadly, you can't, well, why not?
We need to question these assumptions.
so I'm the same in Ireland as well, but in lots of places in the world, people and people you shouldn't do it.
In my opinion, everybody's recovery is different.
If it goes to AA is your recovery route and that's your, you know, the thing that maintains you every day.
But if you also want to switch to something, which is in my opinion, not as toxic, not toxic, it just has a totally different thing.
many, many of us would regard cannabis as a medicine.
And many of us would regard it as being a supplement that enhances our lives.
It's not like that for everybody and people have different points of view and I accept all the different points of view.
But that could be a route to sobriety for some people as well.
And I think it's important to acknowledge that.
That's happening in other countries.
Germany, people are growing weed.
They're growing because it's legal now for 50 million citizens.
Again, if you look at Keir Starmer in the UK, he talks about keeping it illegal and that the discussion is not even part of the political discussion over here.
So we need to be a bit more mature about how we regard, you know, I suppose the realm of substances that alter conscious and alter our minds.
Similarly, psychedelics.
Right now we're in the middle of magic mushroom season and there's a great culture now in Ireland of going out picking magic mushrooms.
and drying them and they can be very therapeutic.
My friends run an inward bound institute, is, they run psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands for one week and they have clients from all over the world where it's illegal
and they have a really, really safe held mushroom experience.
And things like that can elevate a person's consciousness for long term.
Similarly, like, I don't know, the other psychedelic medicines like ayahuasca, there's ayahuasca retreats happening a lot around Ireland.
They're kind of underground, but they can be always found.
But they're not part of the mainstream.
And of course they're all illegal and people have to kind of seek them out.
So there's that element of danger around this, is because of the illegality and because they're not really discussed.
Similarly, I'll just throw this last one in, it's about toad medicine.
I don't know if you've heard of the toad or smoking the toad.
Yeah, so that is the strongest, most powerful psychedelic.
And for many people that have had it, and I've had it four times before my descent into my mental health thing, know, so these things are not even a, they don't cure you or
anything, but they can elevate your conscious and give you a different experience of reality.
The toad is an extremely powerful psychedelic and.
really, it brings you so present into the moment.
You're totally aware of being yourself alive and you know that you're the most important thing, the center of the universe and the universe loves you.
you know, can see some people describe it as like seeing their soul.
And that's what can happen as well.
You can kind of see your consciousness or experience it in a really profound way.
So these can be very spiritual tools for people as well.
Yeah, so that was just a thought on the toad.
The whole psychedelic thing is intriguing, isn't it?
mean, ketamine, full stop, great for PTSD, absolutely brilliant for it.
And it's coming through slowly, but without going down the conspiratorial route too much, you you mentioned the alcohol and it does.
If you've got a society just bubbling, you know, you haven't got to use 1984, you can just use alcohol just to keep them there.
Once you start free thinking, you're a danger.
I'm a danger.
Most of my guests are a danger.
They could say, know, well, fuck this, you're not doing it right.
You're limiting us.
We're going to stand up.
And that's the way things are going.
You know, I don't want to go down that route on this conversation.
But
Cause that could be a whole other podcast to be honest.
know, there's just, it's so much to talk about in that field.
You know, like I think just to even sort of touch on it is, is a, like there's, it's just a very deep subject.
Yeah.
But the Ketamine is amazing as well.
Yeah.
I think for me,
I think the medication which worked really well with sertraline and I wouldn't recommend anybody takes it or whatever because it has to be done with things like CBT.
You know, this was I discovered after a while, just take it.
It's going to alter your brain chemistry, but you've got to do the work.
You've got to do the work, as they say.
You've got to do the CBT and the reprogramming of your brain.
But for me, I wanted I didn't want to something that was going to just give me an instant fix.
Even though ketamine, the
The work that they're doing, for example, MIND Foundation have the ketamine clinics now all over Germany and all over Europe, and they run these amazing psychedelic conferences
for neuroscientists and therapists.
But yeah, it's slowly making its way over here.
But yeah, there's a whole, you know what, even the doctors get paid from the alcohol industry.
So there's a kind of invested interest in keeping people kind of sick and stupid.
And it's interesting as well that during the...
Russian wasn't too sure if it was the Russian Revolution, but they made the price of alcohol really really cheap cheaper than milk and so they just kept the population pissed,
you know while they were basically Whatever taking control of people So it's true as well alcohol is a a is the ultimate mind control drug, but it's for a whole culture
that that was a what they did in South Africa.
And I'm not quite sure when it was but it was you'd get paid with the DOP.
So you'd get paid labour, and you'd be given the alcohol and yeah, people would fight people will get drunk, it would subdue people.
It worked.
Unfortunately, it works.
But you've
was it?
George Orwell says, give them beer and football and petty squabbles.
And that's enough to keep them occupied, you know, and drama and the movies and things like that.
That's it.
Yeah, that's George Orwell.
I don't know the exact quote, but.
It's it's chilling.
Just that.
Yeah.
But I want to tap into you what you said then you you had the sertraline but you had to do the CBT.
You're taking responsibility for your life.
That's what you said.
You've taken you've had to take that responsibility.
You've had to look at your identity.
You've had to stop being that victim and fix me, fix me, fix me.
It's like, no, I'm going to fix me.
And
That's, yeah.
important bit.
You ayahuasca, you have to integrate.
I guess with ketamine, you have to integrate.
I guess with mushrooms, you have to.
It's easy just to, you know, take the toxins, take the medicine.
You have to heal yourself.
You have to grow, you have to grow out of the thing that you are.
And the radical acceptance is very important because you have to 100 % accept where you are in order to grow forward.
You can imagine yourself, right, wow, I am a survivor, I am healing, I am on my growth journey.
You start saying these things, you program yourself, and then your life experience grows out of your everyday pain into a person who's experiencing pain but is growing out of it.
So suddenly you become a hero to yourself.
So yeah, as you take action and work on your plan and move forward.
I think as well, certainly for me and from conversations I've had, you are a hero if you have found yourself in that dark place, but and you've used the Xanax to not kill
yourself.
You've used the alcohol to not kill yourself.
You've used all these things.
You, me, 10 % of the population are
fucking heroes because we found something that got us dying.
Wasn't healthy.
It kept us alive.
And then the clever one, fortunate ones, we've gone, okay, this crutch is breaking.
I now need to own my life, sort my shit out.
And yeah, we are the heroes.
And then you're hero again, because you sorted your life out.
And then the next trouble, next thing hits you and you've got to climb over the next one.
Yeah, peel another layer.
Yeah.
But definitely, I think once you overcome something, hope I will keep this kind of positive mental approach to life that I have now.
I feel if I fought my own thoughts for three years and I survived, I kind of feel like I could do anything.
I can achieve anything now.
And I do feel very happy because I'm stable and well.
mind is not troubled by that sort of endless rumination anymore.
Fabulous.
yeah, it's true as well and that's why we shouldn't judge people who are inactive, as they say, inactive addiction.
And I don't judge anybody who drinks alcohol or takes Xanax or anything like that because as you say, sometimes you just have to do it to stay on the planet.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that is it.
We're all making sense and that works.
Being happy and sober works, being high as a kite works.
But at some stage we've got to change those experiences, haven't we?
And grow.
Exactly.
is a great mindset to have, you know, to always imagine that you're in a learning mode and an open mode and there's always something new and every experience is to be valued for its
uniqueness.
I don't know if we have time, but there's one small story I could tell you.
Yeah, I remember being at Azora, which is a big festival in Hungary.
I was giving a talk on Friday and...
I was so excited to give this talk.
I was very, very nervous.
And on Wednesday, my laptop broke.
And so that was it.
And I had no laptop then to give my talk for all these people at Azora.
And I remembered a talk that I had heard the previous day.
And this is the story.
The story is about this yogi who was so advanced.
that he was able to communicate with the spirit realm and could levitate and perform very advanced yoga techniques.
And a person visited this yogi who was in an advanced state of cancer and he was dying.
And the person said to him, why don't you just cure yourself off the cancer?
You know, you have all these yoga powers.
And he says, no, this is a very interesting experience.
I am waiting to see what this is teaching me.
So then I thought,
Fuck the laptop, I'm here at Azora.
This is the best place in the world, you know?
It doesn't matter, this is teaching me something.
And it teaches me the importance of just going with the flow and letting go.
And I could have been there, damn, my fucking laptop is broke.
No, this is a disaster.
Instead I just went for it.
had a backup of my USB.
It was actually an amazing talk and I was really happy.
But I chose to adopt that approach, you know, which is like that everything can teach us something.
Brilliant.
I think that's the way to go, isn't it?
It is it is be prepared.
Be truthful, be authentic and be you and yeah, as you said, have fun.
Have a lot of fun.
Cool.
Bryan, this has been a fabulous conversation.
I've I've I've enjoyed it.
I'm energized and yeah, where can people find out more about you?
I know you said you're you're a lecturer, but also what what else can where else can people find you and what you do and things like that?
So I have a blog, it's bryandugan.org, b-r-y-a-n, dugan.org, d-u-g-g-a-n.
And I put all my projects, I've been putting all my work and my projects up there, my art and music and stuff up there, and also teaching related stuff.
So you can find me there.
I'm also very easy to find on all the socials because my name is Scooter500, S-k-o-o-t-e-r-5-0-0.
So you'll find me on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn.
By all means, reach out if any of these
If you want to say hi, whatever, welcome to reach out and say hi.
So yeah, you can find me there.
Yeah.
where else can people find you?
Because I know you're on stages from time to time.
So where can people find you later this year or maybe next year?
And so I'm gonna probably do something.
Well, let's see.
The next big event.
I don't have anything planned.
I've nothing coming up.
I'm going to be at GodotCon in Berlin in about two weeks.
Yeah, one interesting thing though, if you want to read a thing, Nature Magazine just recently did an article about a project that I worked on called I Am Danny.
So if people want to read that one, I'll actually post that on my blog as well.
so that's a super cool, it an art project all about a chap that came to life in 1997.
I came to life.
The guy that made it is called Sean Davidson.
And I even put this cool art project together, but it's in nature magazine.
If anybody's interested in reading that one.
you can probably find me on TikTok cause I'm going to start doing TikTok live streams of music and art stuff as well.
Brilliant.
Well, I'm already following you on TikTok.
yeah, we're looking forward to some of those.
What I'd like to do as well, Bryan, is put one or two of your little excerpts of some of your your music and your lives just through the podcast, just so people can have a little
stop and go, wow, this is cool.
So yeah, we'll definitely put some inserts in.
So I'll get some videos off you later for that.
Yeah.
Great, that's so good.
I'm actually doing a kind of a show reel video, as they say, like I've got one draft of it, but I'll finish it off and I'll send it to you so you can get loads of stuff from
that.
That would be amazing.
And then one last very important question.
What is your superpower that you've got from turning your life around?
It would be, and this is the ultimate one, not to take yourself seriously and not to take the things that happened to you in my life, I don't really take them seriously anymore.
I think everything is hilarious.
So that's a good way, like to see your problems from the perspective of this is just life, this is funny.
And I suppose not to take my thoughts too seriously, my emotions too seriously.
Your emotions will lead you astray if you follow your emotions.
You have to...
like be six inches off the ground.
Brilliant, brilliant, I love it.
I think that is odd on, it?
Yeah.
Fabulous.
Well, thank you so much for showing up and all that enthusiasm and humor and yeah.
was an absolute pleasure speaking to you, Hamish.
And I hope that was okay.
you know what, as I say, you know, you're doing really great work.
I watched two of the podcasts this morning.
I got two totally different perspectives, lovely stories.
And I wish you every success with the, you know, with the podcast and growing, growing the audience.
Cause I think it's really good and important work that you're doing, sharing these stories.
Wonderful, that's ever so kind.
Thank you very much.
I am very fortunate and I enjoy it and it's great fun, so yeah.
Yeah, great stuff.
I'll share your work widely.
Brilliant, thanks so much.
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