In this personal narrative, Aaron Doughty recounts his journey from growing up with ADHD and relying on Adderall to discovering meditation as a transformative practice. He explains how the side effects of medication (sleep loss, appetite suppression) motivated him to seek alternatives, leading him to a simple candle‑gazing meditation that gradually expanded to longer sessions. The practice produced vivid sensory experiences, heightened presence, and a profound shift in perception, allowing him to discontinue Adderall within two weeks. Through meditation he became aware that thoughts generate experience, recognizing a direct correlation between thoughts, emotions, and life outcomes. This insight sparked a broader spiritual perspective: he views himself and everyone as spiritual beings undergoing a temporary human experience, connected by unconditional love. Reflecting on a difficult childhood, he reframes past hardships as sources of gratitude and growth, rejecting a victim mindset. He emphasizes intentional co‑creation, aligning with flow states, and suggests that any activity fostering inward awareness—whether formal meditation, walking, or music—can facilitate spiritual awakening. The video concludes with an invitation for viewers to reflect on their own experiences and a call to share the content.
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These ideas are going to maybe trigger something inside of you. Maybe by me explaining my situation, my life experience, you're going to get certain little triggers inside of you where maybe you can resonate with it. Maybe you connect to it and maybe you're going through this right now. Now what I'm going to talk about in this video is the idea of my spiritual awakening. I want to talk about what that really entails for me and kind of what I got out of that. Now, a little bit of a backstory when it comes to this. I grew up in a family— I grew up having what is called ADHD. And what this is is something where you go to a doctor and they say, hey, you have this condition called ADHD. And what it means is, is you can't focus, you have trouble focusing. So here's some pills called Adderall or Ritalin. I took Adderall and they're going to make you focus more. And really, I took these for years and it did make me focus more. It made me feel like I could get more done. It made me focus in a much clearer way. But the side effects— there's a but here— the side effects are that it was something that made it to where I couldn't sleep very much at night and then also I couldn't eat as much. So me having a fast metabolism, wanted to gain and get bigger, it was harder to do because it was harder to eat. And I started to do my own research, what I came across— and it wasn't— didn't take that long of research to figure it out— but I came across the idea of meditation and ADHD and the benefits of meditating for the parts of the brain that's concerned with memory, with the ability to focus. And as I began to study this more, it became very apparent to me that, one, there's only positive side effects from meditation, and then two, that I I didn't really need Adderall to get me to this point, but I didn't find that out until I actually started meditating. So what I did was is I would sit down. At first it was just for like a minute or two a day. I would sit down and what I did was is I decided I was going to stare at a candle flame. The reason was because I heard that, uh, somewhere that if your eyes are wandering around, it's more likely that your mind is wandering around. So what I did was is I stared at a flame and it would kind of keep my mind focused in a more easy way. And after doing that for even a minute the first day, the second day I did it for a couple more minutes. It got to the point to where after a week of doing it, I was easily meditating for 10, 15 minutes a day. Uh, and I began to love the feeling of it. It was like when I would meditate, what I would do is my thoughts would slow down and there was like a new presence about my energy. Like literally I remember my sense perceptions began to change, like the way that I translate, the world began to change. And I don't mean this in a very like, you know, weird way. I just mean this in the sense that like I felt like when I went to, I went to work the next day and I remember walking around and just touching things and everything felt new. Everything felt fresh. Like I felt like there was a whole new vividness to life. I felt like colors were brighter. And I know that if you've maybe read this before, I'm sure other people have said similar things, but I really felt like everything was more vivid. I felt like I was really starting to live for the first time, you know, within 2 weeks, completely got rid of Adderall. All of a sudden, my mindset, my mindset, all of a sudden my mindset began to change. I began to see things differently. I ultimately began to just understand a correlation because as I began to become more aware of my thoughts, I began to see through my whole life, I was able to go back and to see kind of why certain things happened based upon how I was thinking based upon like why certain things happen, like lessons looking back, but more so it was just understanding that thought creates experience. Like I understood that certain situations I was in, I created maybe from a subconscious level. But the idea is that when you begin to meditate, what happens is you begin to become conscious of what before was unconscious. So as I became more aware of this, I began to see that anything, and I began to really realize that anything that you can possibly see was first created from imagination. It was created from thought. And because of that, I began to understand that there's a correlation between the thoughts that I have, the emotions that I have, and the results that I get in life. So from that point forward, it really began to change my perspective. Now, another part of this was I began, I began to become a more spiritual person. I don't really like the word when people say, you know, I'm becoming a more spiritual person because I believe that everybody, whether they're aware of their spirituality or not, is a spiritual person. It's just some people are more aware of it than others, or they maybe resonate with the idea more so than others. And even then, the idea of spiritual is just a label anyways, so it really doesn't make much difference. But what I began to understand was that I began to go inwards, which simply means I began to meditate, watch my thoughts, and I began to resonate with certain ideas. And one of those ideas was understanding, or at least like, once again, this is my belief, but I believe that everyone is a spiritual being having a temporary human experience. Now what this means is that we're ultimately all connected to love. It's a feeling. And because of that, I believe that we're all connected through this feeling. And that's why unconditional love was taught by, you know, all the great masters of our time. The idea is that these enlightened masters all preach the same idea. What I found out for myself at least was that I began to connect more to the idea that I'm a spiritual being having a temporary human experience, that this experience that I'm having is something that is very flexible. It's something that can, that I have a part in and all I, you know, what I can do and what I can focus on is allowing myself to create what I want in my life by steering my thought in the right direction, by having the right mindset, by having the right intention. When I began to become aware of this, it really began to change the effect that I got out of life. I then understood that I was never a victim. Like growing up, there were certain things that happened in my childhood with me, like me and my brother especially, where we were outside working for like 8 hours a day sometimes. Sometimes we were locked out of the house and we had to do, you know, we went through certain things. We weren't able to really have friends. I wasn't able to really have friends till I was about 15 years old. And because of that, it had a certain effect on the way that I thought. It made me focus a lot more on school. I became very passionate about speaking, forensics debate, because I saw school as an outlet to get away from having to do work all day at home. But the idea is that when I went through all this and I became more aware of this, I began to be grateful for the situation and I realized how much I learned from that, like how much benefit there was in that, even though it appears to be a negative situation. And I think the reason that I see that as something that's positive, um, is the reason I get a positive effect out of it. And really, I was able to go back through my whole life and look at things like this and really come at peace with a lot of things that I experienced in my life. And ultimately it's propelled me in that taking even more action and knowing that there's an unlimited amount of power inside of every one of us. And I think spiritual awakening really is about just becoming more of who you really are. Aligning with your flow state, finding out what you love to do. And I think that the way you find that is by going inwards. Some people call this meditation. It could just be the idea that you walk through a park, that you become more aware of your thoughts, that you maybe listen to music. Anything that puts you into a flow state is going to be something very powerful for you being able to connect to who you are, for you to be able to align with this part of you, the spiritual awakening to me really is just the knowledge, the awareness that there's a correlation between the thoughts that we think, the beliefs that we have, the emotions that we feel, and the results that we get. And then aligning with that so that we consciously are able to co-create the experiences that we want. And then from that space, also knowing that we're all spiritual beings having temporary human experiences, and that from that we can feel more connected to each other and knowing that ultimately we're all one. So that's my genuine story as to my idea of spiritual awakening, or the idea that me becoming more aware of who I am. And I hope that maybe you're able to reflect back on you a little bit and see if maybe some part of that resonates with you. I think if you're watching this video, at some level this space has opened up inside of you already, and if not, then you're well on your way. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Feel free to like this video video. If you liked it, share it if you find it of value and you think your friends would gain something from it as well. And much love to you. All right, bye.
