Menu
Menu
Sharing a snippet of my life story with you
Hey I’m AJ! (אפרים נתן)
After suffering through a traumatic childhood filled with family addiction, neglect, emotional/physical abuse, and losing my mom at an early age in life – I was lost. The real journey began really early on life when my parents separated at age 6 with a very detrimental environment for any child between their fighting parents. This always lead me to question the narratives presented to me and figure things out on my own. After a custody switch and my dad re-marrying, my life took a very interesting turn. In the span of a year, my grandmother, mother, and dog had died. With no one to talk to and growing up in New Jersey where all males are hyper-emasculated and not allowed to show feelings – I had no outlet.
Luckily I had friends who I was close with, almost as family. These friends really brought me out of these hard times, but also enabled bad behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and drugs at a very young age. In my teenage years I discovered that not only was I not healthy for me to be home, I could rely on the friends I made to make a spot for me in their home. My dad and ex step-mom did not really enjoy not having this lack of control over me, so they sent me away to a wilderness therapy program and therapeutic boarding school based on the cult Synanon/CEDU. This is where life would begin to take me a new trajectory. Although these programs were very abusive both emotionally and physically, I decided I was going to work on my trauma here and take what I could out of these programs to bring with me through the rest of my life as well as some of the best friends I ever made.
Upon graduating, I went from one of the most restricted parts of my life bound with crazy amounts of rules to the most unrestricted I ever had in college. In college I went deep into various drug/substance abuse – albeit in a safe manner. In boarding school and prior to, my interest was sparked in neuroscience/biochemistry/drug pharmacology. I taught fraternity brothers how to safely use drugs and of the purest kind through lab tests and chemical reagents. I also gave over how these drugs will affect the brain and what they can and cannot mix the drugs with and general safe practices.
Eventually, I started pulling things one by one out of my life that weren’t serving me. I grew tired of blacking out on alcohol and it was the most dangerous drug I was doing, so I stopped. Then I stopped smoking cigarettes, stopped doing Xanax, etc. until I reached to a point in life that I was going to only ingest natural substances such as weed and mushrooms. At this point I also was growing healthier with my diet, eating all organic and sourcing meat/dairy from local farms I would travel to as well as spring water. I couldn’t believe how amazing I was feeling after going on this path, and truthfully I was craving more. In my next living situation at the end of college, I lived with a vegan guy who really tuned me onto the idea of a plant-based lifestyle. It aligned very well with my morals and my spiritual ideas at the time, as well as health trothing revelations – so I went vegan – and what I discovered after blew me away.
I immediately felt lighter, headaches I had since I was kid were non-existent, and was staying noticeably healthier than ever before – even around others that were sick. I began playing around with water fasting and sobriety at this stage, and found I truthfully did not even need substances in my life anymore. Sobriety was “trippy” enough as it was, and I enjoyed having my full feeling and body/mind in –tact at all times through my ongoing experiences. After a back and forth with weed, I finally ditched it and now live a sober healthy lifestyle for years.
These days I’m incorporating various health modalities such as organic vegan diet, herbalism, cold/heat exposure, water fasting, earthling, getting out in nature, gym, hiking and deep conversations with friends. The holistic lifestyle encompasses all aspects of one’s life spiritual, physical, emotional, professional, and social. When one is aligned with their purpose and living a lifestyle based on a WHOLEistic approach that is organic and healthy – we can come to find balance and help refine ourselves – which is the never ending journey until we end this lifetime.
