The Stone In My Chest
This week I want to tell you about the period of my life when I went through a prolonged experience of dying a slow death.
The weeks of fear… two trips to hospital, and the thing I finally understood about the heavy stone I’d been carrying in my chest.
Have you ever secretly carried a heaviness in your chest you can’t quite shift?
I recollect sitting at my desk in my office, during a particularly high-stress period of running my start-up business, certain that something was wrong with my heart. There’d been a heavy pressure sitting in my chest that I’d been aware of for a while.
I could feel irregular heartbeats from time to time, and a scary thought began to arrive. I’ve got to get my heart checked out… I’m in my 40s and I might be on the verge of a heart attack.
I lived in fear for weeks, my mind filling in the blanks and I’d often lie awake monitoring my own chest in bed, as if it were a machine about to fail.
Some days I’d come home from work and burst into tears upstairs, where the kids couldn’t see me crying. It felt like the whole world could crumble at any moment. That’s what my mind was telling me. I was firmly stuck in worst-case-scenario mode.
My wife Linnea was an unflappable rock in those moments, and I was, and still am, so grateful for her steadiness. I remember once saying to her “If I lose the business, we won’t be able to pay the mortgage”. She calmly said, “Well, we’ll just sell the house and figure something else out”.
Wow. Love her for that.
But even those sage words didn’t stop me from feeling like I was physically dying. So I went to hospital to have my heart checked. When you’ve got a weight in your chest like this, the doctors will prioritise you. And over about a year and a half, I actually ended up going to hospital twice, because the feeling wouldn’t leave, and because a weight in the chest is not something you should ignore.
I was terrified as I waited for the results… terrified they’d come back and tell me my heart really was failing. Both times, the tests came back clear. There wasn’t an issue with my heart.
The relief, however, was short-lived, because the heaviness remained. What was this stone sitting in the middle of my chest that no scan could find?
The answer was anxiety. And my anxiety, over time, had manifested into a physical, bodily sensation. A heaviness I carried every single day. One that I eventually realised was my body telling me something I’d been refusing to accept for years.
What I was really afraid of
I was running Celestial, the drone company I’d built with my own two hands, and something I was extremely proud of. The business was doing amazing, pioneering work, flying shows around the world, using hundreds of drones in the sky as a new artistic medium, in front of thousands of people.
Every time we flew a show, roughly a million pounds’ worth of hardware would go up into the sky, and the team and I would spend the next ten minutes praying nothing failed, no one got hurt, and the whole swarm of drones would land safely again.
No one ever did get hurt, and we gained one the best safety records in the world. But building a start-up company on new technology, with all the associated glitches, hiccups and live-audience risks, was inherently anxiety-inducing, especially stretched over many years.
It’s worth noting that I’ve always been attracted to pressure. Something about how being in pressure environments makes you feel alive.
I directed high-profile films for fifteen years, and that was very intense. On a film set, time is money, with every hour on a big-budget TV commercial costing anywhere between twenty and fifty thousand pounds.
As the director I was making quick decisions under pressure all day long, and I thrived in it. But running a drone company was different. Film had decades of precedent behind it. This was a brand-new industry built on early-stage technology, which meant the risks were very high.
So part of the heaviness I was carrying was born from the nature of the business itself. But there was something else underneath it that made the heaviness far more frightening.
I was being pulled in another direction, away from my business. Quietly, and powerfully, towards an exploration of mortality.
My panic attacks were triggering memories of near-death experiences I had across my life…. and I started to realise that perhaps I was meant to explore mortality. But I was terrified of this. Death, after all, is a taboo in our society.
So I kept this calling a secret. I ended up training as a soul midwife (death doula) on the side and I wasn’t telling anyone, because I was so scared my business might lose sales if people found out the founder was sitting with dying people in the local hospital in his spare time.
And the more I pushed this calling away, the heavier the stone in my chest became.
I flirted with leaving my own business for two or three years. But it was a mixture of loyalty and fear that kept me going. I was loyal to the business I’d built, and felt responsible for its wellbeing.
I was also frightened of losing my paycheque, my security, my safety. At one point, a doctor was so concerned about my health that he wrote a letter signing me off work altogether. The letter told me to stay home, but I kept going to work anyway. Not out of toughness. It was the fear and loyalty that kept me stuck. That’s how deep the denial ran.
If you’re carrying something similar, please know how common this anxiety can be. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 470 million people globally were living with some kind of anxiety disorder in 2023. It’s the single most common mental health condition on earth. Whatever the stone in your chest is, you are not broken, and you are very far from alone.
How I broke free
I won’t pretend I have a cure for the stone in your chest. All I can tell you is what happened to me.
I made a change. I stepped away from my career in entertainment. I stepped away from that identity. I walked out of my comfort zone and into the unknown. I explored mortality, following a breadcrumb trail of instinct that eventually led me down the path to the work I now call Aliveness.
The relief was intense, but it didn’t come after it all worked out perfectly. The relief came the moment I decided to make the change. The simple act of choosing a different path brought a lightness I hadn’t felt in years, and I could sense the heaviness lifting from my body, as if I was finally putting down a very large stone.
The panic attacks stopped, and I don’t get those anymore. I do still feel the occasional wave of anxiety from time to time. But I can recognise it for what it is, and I’m able to witness it rise, remember that it will pass, and then watch it go, as if it’s flowing down a river into the distance.
I now sleep better than I have in my whole life. My health and energy have come back, and my mojo has returned. And the best bit is that I now trust my own instinct more than ever. That trust is carrying me somewhere I couldn’t have imagined when I first started making films as a teenager.
These ideas are at the heart of what Aliveness is, and why I teach it.
The stone in my chest wasn’t a warning that my body was failing. It was a sign that my body was refusing to let me keep betraying myself. My fear of death, my fear of change, my fear of the unknown, had kept me frozen in a life that no longer fitted the person I’d become.
The moment I turned and faced the very thing I’d been avoiding, my fear began to lose its grip. And in its place, life came rushing back.
That’s the essence of the Aliveness practice. It’s not to think about death morbidly, but to use the fact that our life is finite to stop postponing the life we’re actually meant to live.
Come and practice Aliveness with me
On Saturday the 14th of November, I’m thrilled to be teaching the Aliveness Practice at the Jung Center in Houston. Famous psychologist Carl Jung has been a big influence on the development of Aliveness, so this is a real honour.
The two hour session is online, so you can join from anywhere in the world. If there’s a stone in your chest, or you feel yourself being pulled towards a change you’ve been too afraid to make, this is the work that helped me put my own stone down.
As well as simple 2-minute daily practice, the novel techniques in this workshop are designed to give you radical clarity, so you can make the decisions that will set you on the right path, towards your life’s deepest purpose.
Please join me live on Saturday November 14th
10am–12pm CT / 4pm-6pm UK
$40
“A colossal reframing of my existence. What I got from the workshop is that I can stop making and remaking the decision to commit my life to art, and just honour that decision. To give myself to it with love, glee and a sense of adventure.”(Jeremy)
“Looking at life through the awareness that our time is finite did not feel dark or confronting. Quite the opposite. Looking back from the perspective of an older version of myself brought a remarkable simplicity to questions that can otherwise become incredibly complicated. What matters? What am I postponing? What would I regret not becoming?” (Monica)
One important note before you go. If you do have a weight in your chest, please get it checked out, like I did. Doctors will look at it straight away, and it’s not worth taking a risk. And if the fear or heaviness is persistent, remember that making a change in your life can be powerful medicine, but it isn’t a substitute for the actual care some of us need. There’s no shame in needing it.
This week’s question:
If there’s a stone in your chest right now, what do you think it’s trying to tell you?
Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.
