Nathan went from bedridden with severe fatigue, migraines, and agoraphobia to hiking and camping with his son. The Gupta Program's meditation and brain-retraining helped him break a lifelong "push-and-crash" cycle and recognize his body's safety signals. Over a year, he progressed from 10-15 steps daily to 10,000 consecutive steps.
My name is Nathan, and before I really fell ill, for about a year I kind of noticed being really brain foggy, just not quite very sharp, feeling like I hadn't had my morning cup of coffee. And then just like one day just got like this massive migraine and it just never went away. So like light sensitivity and dizziness and, um, and then slowly the fatigue came and just this like intense, this intense, like, anxiety situation because none of the doctors could tell me what was going on. Every time I would go outside, I'd have panic attacks from the sun or, uh, from being dizzy or just being overwhelmed by all these symptoms. So my safe place became my home, and then that became the only place where I wouldn't have symptoms. I So I got agoraphobia and I was stuck at home. I was, you know, napping for a couple hours a day. Post-exertional malaise. I, you know, I was really stuck in this, this like budget world where I only have so-and-so many points to spend. And as soon as I go over that, I would get these crashes and it would come with like emotional crash the next day. I would feel just like drained and I would feel like I'd messed up because I was having these symptoms and I hadn't controlled my life well enough. My GP, who refused to do a home visit, just over the phone was like, "Well, Nathan, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I've been practicing for 40 years and I've never seen a patient like you in his 40s who can't get out of bed. Like, you're 40, you can't get out of bed. You should probably go to the ER." And I knew that that would just be like impossible at that point. You know, like I'd, I, it'd probably been a year since I'd been able to be in a car and tolerate the movement, the vestibular movement. So for me, you may as well have asked me to get on a plane and go to Timbuktu, right? Like it was just impossibly far to just go to the hospital. So I got home care support to come in and feed me and to help me go to the washroom. And then eventually I got into a care facility. So I went to live where someone at the end of their life would live. I was there for a year and a half with a lot of people with like, you know, end-stage dementia. I had access to a physio, I had access rehab assistance. Over the course of 6 months, I went from bedbound to being able to like transfer into a wheelchair and tolerate, just tolerate being in an upright seated position. And it was around that time that I found the program. I just did one video from one module once a week. Like I really moved slowly. I started to feel how my body wasn't in safety and started to recognize within those first, that first month or two, how for 5 years my body had been told this story: push and, you know, thou shalt crash and fear the crash at all, fear the crash, fear the crash. And so recognizing that, like, I'd been in this environment that was completely backwards No one was saying you're safe. And so that was a real aha moment for me early on, like, oh, like my body doesn't know what it feels like to feel safe. So really like those first 3 to 6 months was all inner meditation work. The stuff about brain retraining and things like that, like, you know, I couldn't do because I was, you know, I was more or less bedbound. I had like 10 steps a day or 15 steps a day. So, you know, it did eventually get there and You know, I did last week, I did 10,000 steps 2 days in a row. I took my son camping, which honestly, last week I took him camping for 24 hours. And I had reserved the fact that like, one, I would never go camping again in my life. And two, that there was no way I could imagine taking him camping and having the energy to like, you know, parent while camping. And, and I did that 2 weeks ago. I was sitting on the beach with him and I honestly thought like, This is a miracle. Like, I had given— years ago, I had totally given up on the idea of this even being possible. And a year, a year ago to that day when we're camping, a year ago, I was doing like 10 steps, and him and I were literally working on going up 4 stairs and down again, and that was all I was doing, you know. And here I am on a beach having having driven on this super windy road in Canada. It's the Sea-to-Sky Highway. It's like perched over a cliff and it's 45 minutes of this. So if you think that like over the course of a year, I've gone from like, you know, counting just standing up and putting pressure on my legs to like steps to stairs to distances to hundreds of steps to thousands of steps and now to tens of thousands. Like it's been, it's actually mentally hard to sort of like keep up with.
