My name's Jonathan. I'm a writer, speaker, teacher and coach, but first and foremost, a student of life. (Actually, that's not who I really am, but I don't want to dive into that now because I might scare you off...)

I've been trying to grow and improve myself since I was a teenager (I'm now 49). I've read hundreds of self-improvement books by authors like Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Ken Wilber and Eckhart Tolle and been to many workshops and seminars given by the same people. (You might say I was a bit of a personal growth junkie!)

Over the last 20 years, I've also explored how different meditation and breathwork techniques, yoga, Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), laughter therapy and other transformational modalities could help me to improve the quality of my life.  

In 2006, I felt the urge to start teaching what I'd learned to other people. Over the next seven years, I gave motivational talks and training for companies in South Africa and ran many transformational workshops and retreats for people wanting to let go of their 'stuff' and positively change their lives. 

But all the while, I couldn't help feeling that I was missing something and not really making the impact on people's lives that I wanted to.

I also had a profound experience when I attended a free talk given by one of the world's top motivational speakers and authors.  As I watched him in action, with his matching tie and handkerchief strategically placed in his suit's breast pocket, flashing the perfect smile and speaking at a hundred miles an hour to convince people to attend his next high-priced, life-changing workshop, it all seemed a bit phoney to me and I thought, "I never want to be like this man". 

I'd had a dream that I would one day become a top motivational speaker writing books and travelling the world to speak to large audiences who would be hanging on my every word since I'd been a teenager. But now that dream was lying in tatters on the floor of the high-priced conference room and I wasn't sure what to replace it with.  

So, I decided to change tack and I took an opportunity to go to London to help a friend of mine launch a new business there, which is how I met my wife. We got married 5 years ago, I moved to the UK permanently and my wife and I had a son.

This changed everything for me. It gave me an entirely different perspective on life and I realised that the vast majority of what I'd learned in the first 42 years of my life was simply not true and would never make me happy. 

I felt that I'd been lied to by the world and all the so-called 'experts' in personal growth I'd listened to and followed over the years. No one was telling the whole truth and nothing I'd tried really seemed to work to make me happy.  

I felt betrayed and really, really angry about this, and to be honest, about the whole mess that was my life and the world. This was despair and rage like I'd never experienced before. 

These powerful feelings really frightened me because of what they made me want to do to myself and others. I felt alone, desperate, trapped and sometimes suicidal. 

But fortunately, I wasn't alone.

I'd been regularly studying and teaching a book called A Course in Miracles for about 10 years without really understanding what it was saying, but suddenly, it all started to make sense to me.

And it became clear that rigorously applying the profound teachings of the Course by practising its daily mind-training lessons was the only way I was going to be able to work through the intense negativity that was arising in me. As these intense negative thoughts and feelings arose, I'd breathe in deeply and let go of them using simple ideas contained in the Course's daily lessons and some techniques I've developed and refined over the years. 

Sometimes I needed to talk to my wife, who thankfully is also studying and reading the Course, and I found our regular, small discussion sessions with others about the Course's teachings extremely helpful. It wasn't always easy, but I could always let go and restore my peace of mind in the end. 

In hindsight, although the experience of this mid-life crisis combined with spiritual awakening was by far the hardest thing I've ever had to go through, I wouldn't change any of it. 

I now see everyone and everything completely differently and understand things I didn't understand before. I can feel a depth of love and compassion for the struggles and suffering of others in a way that I couldn't do before. It's made me a better person and a better coach and teacher, and I'm now able to help people in a way that I simply couldn't conceive of before.  

While life continues to present its inevitable challenges, I can now let go of negative thoughts and emotions almost immediately or just choose not to get upset in the first place. Mostly, I'm in a 'Flow' state where I can do what I need to do at home and work (in my other life, I'm a business consultant) without feeling much stress or negative emotion.

All that's left is a simple, easy way of living in the moment without unnecessary thoughts about the past or future or any of the dark emotions that used to disturb me so much.  

Being happy and in 'Flow' is where everyone wants to be, but very few people manage to achieve it consistently. That's because they're trying to get into Flow in completely the wrong way. 

Conventional wisdom teaches that we need to improve ourselves by learning new ideas, techniques and skills, and when we've attained mastery of these, we'll be healthy, happy and in Flow all the time. 

But can you see the problem with this philosophy? It assumes that you aren't good enough as you are and that you must continually improve your insufficient self to be happy and successful.

This just perpetuates the false sense of insufficiency that besets almost every human being, guarantees you'll never attain real happiness and Flow consistently and keeps several multi-billion dollar industries that rely on people's continual search for the answer to their problems going.