Audiobook: The Inner Path By Geoff Bell-Devaney - Intro

There is a path to greater happiness and fulfillment within each of us. As we begin exploring this inner path, we will begin to truly know ourselves. We will start growing in awareness, wisdom, and inner peace. This audiobook version of The Inner Path: A Guide to Living a More Mindful, Fulfilling and Spiritual Life can help you successfully navigate your own inner path. It can help you awaken to your inner truths and your true self - to the infinite depth of peace, presence, and power that is within you.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Jeff Bell Devaney.

Welcome to the audiobook version of The Inner Path,

A guide to living a more mindful,

Fulfilling,

And spiritual life.

Introduction I began experiencing debilitating panic attacks shortly after celebrating my 30th birthday.

Some present.

Here I was,

Young,

Healthy,

And apparently going insane.

My mind was racing,

My stress level was through the roof,

And my future was quickly imploding.

All systems were on red alert from an invasion that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside of me.

I had absolutely no idea what was happening.

I'd never had a panic attack before,

Much less experienced them on a daily basis.

I was beyond confused.

I seriously thought that I might have been losing my mind or something,

And in some beautiful way I eventually did.

Nonetheless,

At the time,

I quickly began feeling profoundly helpless,

Scared,

And alone.

Before the panic attack started,

I was living a pretty good life.

Five years earlier,

I'd graduated from one of the top business schools in Canada and then lived and worked in a number of places like Japan,

Whistler,

And the Caribbean,

Exploring life and the world and pursuing my passions at the time of surfing,

Skiing,

Snowboarding,

And off-road motorcycle riding.

I was young and seemingly invincible and trying to have as much fun and excitement as possible.

My life was one big adventure.

Just a few months before the panic attack started,

I'd spent the whole summer down in Baja surfing with friends before driving back up to Whistler to start a new job at a heli-skiing company.

My future was looking bright.

But now,

Suddenly everything was rapidly changing.

Seemingly out of the blue,

My life was being turned upside down.

These panic attacks were starting to put a serious cramp in my lifestyle.

How could I keep exploring,

Playing,

And having fun if I couldn't even sit in a restaurant without totally sweating bullets?

It didn't help,

I suppose,

That from the beginning,

I hadn't told anyone what I was experiencing.

Ultimately,

I didn't want to admit to myself or anybody else how much I was hurting and how much constant pain I was in.

I was suffering alone,

In silence.

Looking back now,

I was in complete denial of my emotions.

The masculine dilemma personified,

I suppose.

I didn't want to acknowledge my pain or let other people know what I was feeling because that would have meant on some level that all of these new uncomfortable feelings were,

In fact,

Actually part of my experience.

That they were real.

And if they were real,

Then there was probably a really good chance that they were always going to stick around because after they'd first shown up,

They hadn't gone anywhere.

And if they weren't going anywhere,

Then that would likely mean that I would probably always be in pain and never get my old life back.

So naturally,

I didn't want to tell anyone about them.

I just wanted them to go away.

Can you see where I was coming from here?

I figured that if I could just tough it out and ignore my reality,

Things would eventually get better.

That everything would go back to normal.

That didn't happen,

However.

Everything started to get progressively worse and my reality soon became much more difficult to ignore.

The frequency and intensity of the panic attacks quickly increased and I soon had to quit my job and leave Whistler.

When that happened,

It became clear to me how someone in my position,

With nowhere else to turn,

Could easily end up on the street,

Homeless and lost,

Forgotten.

Fortunately,

I was able to stay with various family members,

And while I was extremely grateful that I had somewhere to go,

The last thing I wanted to do at 30 years old and having lived all over the world,

Was move back in with my parents.

Staying with my sister for a while in a cool little town in the Rockies was one thing,

But my parents?

That most definitely hadn't been a planned extended stop on my world tour.

It quickly became apparent that these panic attacks were clearly not going away no matter how hard I tried to ignore them.

I started to become concerned that these uncomfortable feelings were actually going to stick around forever and that this nightmare was going to become my permanent reality.

I feared that things were never going to get better,

Only worse.

Nonetheless,

I still didn't let anybody know what was happening to me.

I had so many questions with seemingly no answers and kept them all to myself.

What was actually going on inside of me?

Would things ever get better?

And what if they didn't?

Where was I going to end up then?

What would ultimately become of me?

It wasn't until quite some time later that I would find out.

It wasn't until I'd lived this hell for a year and a half and couldn't live it any longer that things started to become clear.

It wasn't until then that I realized I had indeed received a birthday present,

A present that I had never asked for and at the time most certainly didn't want,

A present that would end up profoundly changing my life.

You see,

One day I realized that I was running out of gas.

My ability to persevere in the face of such an intense and constant challenge was rapidly fading.

I could no longer continue battling the ever-present panic attacks and my profoundly stressed-out existence.

I had reached the lowest point of my life and felt utterly hopeless and alone.

I was in constant,

Intense pain and couldn't find my way out of it.

I was despondent.

In that moment,

It became abundantly clear to me how someone could decide to end their life.

I didn't want to even consider that option,

However,

And vowed to keep fighting as best I could.

I didn't want things to end up like this,

But had no idea what to do.

All I could think of was to try to somehow improve my self-confidence,

Which I now see as an admittedly heroic but ultimately misguided attempt to simply cover up my pain.

So I went out and purchased a half-dozen books that I thought might be helpful.

The first one I read mentioned the concept of surrendering to a higher power,

Which was something that I had absolutely no interest in even considering.

I didn't want to give up.

I wanted to overcome this,

To beat it,

Not give in to it,

Not surrender.

Plus,

I had no desire whatsoever to believe in any god or religion or power greater than myself.

Yet,

I was utterly lost and afraid.

I was in so much pain,

And my will to keep fighting it was almost gone.

So with tears in my eyes,

And believing in nothing but my desperate and desolate future and not knowing what else to do,

I dropped to my knees and repeated a phrase that I had read in that new book,

Thy will,

Not mine.

And then it happened.

The panic attacks suddenly stopped,

And a deep calmness came over me.

I was,

After a year and a half of absolute misery,

Suddenly at peace.

Total peace.

And just like in the song Amazing Grace,

I could,

For the first time,

See.

I was no longer blind.

I was awake.

It was as if the painful shell of unconsciousness,

Of ignorance,

That I had been unknowingly living in up to that point had instantly broken apart and fallen away,

And I had been freed from my suffering.

And in some profoundly new way,

Everything suddenly made complete sense.

I could now see that my whole life,

Including the intense pain and confusion that I had been experiencing over the past year and a half,

Had been perfectly designed to bring me to that very moment,

To that moment of awakening.

I was also able to see that there was a whole world inside of me just waiting to be explored and understood,

A world of truth,

Insight,

And emotion.

And since that moment,

I've been doing my best to search for the truth,

For the truth about myself and life.

I've been investigating my inner world and growing in insight,

And I've been exploring and learning from my emotions.

I can now clearly see how important it is to acknowledge and embrace all of our emotions,

For if we don't,

We're missing out on one of the most beautiful and vital parts of life,

As well as the key to a truly meaningful one.

And that is something I couldn't understand before my awakening.

Back then,

When I was overcome with challenging emotions,

All I could do was let them drag me deeper into suffering.

But after my awakening,

As the stillness I had been experiencing started to fade and more emotions once again came back into my life,

At times very intensely,

I began to more clearly understand how paying attention to their lessons could allow me to grow in insight and awareness,

How my emotions could enable me to become more real and empowered.

And I was also able to see,

Most importantly,

How they could help me remember and realize,

With greater depth and duration the longer I have continued on this inner path,

The peace and presence I first experienced at the moment of my awakening,

The oneness with life,

With my true self,

With the present moment.

Before my awakening,

I didn't realize the importance of my emotions.

I was basically just living the typical unconscious human existence of constantly avoiding my uncomfortable emotions and chasing those that felt good,

As so many of us inherently do.

I didn't know that our emotions are an infinite source of wisdom and the path to a life of greater happiness and inner peace.

In fact,

I didn't know anything about my emotions.

I was emotionally unaware.

I was emotionally unintelligent.

Until that point,

My life had been all about the physical,

Doing things like pushing my limits in a variety of extreme sports and the intellectual,

Studying endlessly to score at the top of my university classes when I needed to,

And tenaciously spending several years learning to speak Japanese,

Even though it was something that by no means came naturally to me.

Despite having an abundance of both the physical and the intellectual in my life,

What was missing,

I came to realize,

Was the emotional.

By not having any connection to my emotions,

I had no true connection to myself,

To others,

Or to life.

I can now clearly see that life runs much more smoothly when we have all three elements,

The physical,

The intellectual,

And especially the emotional in place.

When we are not engaged in the physical realm,

We can lose our fluidity,

Our balance,

And our sense of play.

When we aren't stimulating ourselves intellectually,

We can become stagnant,

Incurious,

And set in our ways.

And most importantly,

When we aren't connected to our emotions,

We can't know the truth.

When we aren't in touch with our emotions,

We are alone.

We can't see that life is supporting us in every moment,

That it is constantly guiding us,

Teaching us,

And helping us heal.

When we aren't in touch with our emotions,

We are willful and lost and unable to comprehend our inherent spirituality,

Our inherent divinity.

When we start to acknowledge and embrace our emotions,

However,

We can begin growing in self-awareness.

We can begin to know ourselves.

And that is ultimately what this book is about.

It is about knowing ourselves.

It is about acknowledging all of the different parts of us and all of our experiences.

It is about discovering our deepest truths and our deepest fears.

It is about letting life in so that it can let us in,

So that it can teach us,

So that we can become more insightful,

Empowered,

And connected to a deeper source of authentic creativity.

The first time I experienced this deeper form of creativity was while writing this book.

At the time,

I was doing Julia Cameron's course,

The Artist's Way.

One morning,

I was writing in my journal as the course entailed and asking the universe what I should do with my life,

When suddenly words began moving through me that were not my own,

But at the same time were very familiar to me.

Every day over the course of the next few weeks,

I sat down to do my morning journaling and had the exact same experience.

And each time I did my best to get out of the way and simply write down the words that were coming through me without influencing them in any way possible.

Remembering nothing at all of what I'd written each day,

When I read the collection of my journal writings as a whole from start to finish,

I realized,

Much to my surprise,

That they comprised a complete book,

One describing the path,

The inner path,

To a more mindful,

Fulfilling,

And spiritual life.

In hindsight,

I believe that all of the insights I had garnered since my awakening opened the doorways for this book to come through me,

To be heard and expressed by me.

I believe that when we listen deep inside,

We can hear our innermost truths.

And the words in this book are my innermost truths.

I didn't so much write this book as live it.

As we begin listening to our own innermost truths,

We can start knowing ourselves.

We can begin seeing our lives with greater clarity and compassion.

It is my hope that this book can help you do that.

That it can help you more clearly know yourself and be able to more confidently navigate your inner world,

So that you can discover all of the wisdom,

Peace,

And happiness that can be found there.

As we start investigating our lives,

We will begin learning from them.

We will begin growing in awareness and insight.

We will heal.

As we embrace and explore our inner world,

We will start experiencing deeper presence and greater equanimity.

As we begin to more fully know ourselves,

We will start to live a more authentic,

Empowered,

And fulfilling life.

We will start to realize our true potential.

And we will begin to remember who we truly are beyond our hopes and our dreams,

Our successes and our failures.

We will begin to know ourselves beyond our names and our narratives,

Our fears and our frustrations.

We will begin to remember who we truly are.

We will start to awaken.

We will start to awaken to our true peace and our true power.

To our true purpose and our true self.

To the present moment.

To life.

To love.

Reviews

Thank you so much for sharing your book. I so look forward to hearing each chapter. I especially liked hearing your story. It really helped to know your experience and how much I could relate to it.

I look forward to listening to this audiobook. Thank you for sharing.
✨🙏🏼💜✨

Thank you for writing this book and recording it with your own voice. It moved me. I look forward listening to it.

This is brilliant, thank you for sharing your story with us, and for your lives, Geoff! You have such a special, loving way of reaching your listeners' hearts. Thank you 🙏🏽💚✨️. Looking forward to listening to your whole book. And yes, I used to have those pesky panic attacks too. Things have changed thanks yo mindfullness 🙏🏽🧡🤗✨️

Wow, so beautifully said and well explained. I want to live like that. Thank you for sharing your story, it’s beautiful and touching

I greatly enjoy listening to Geoff narrating his book. I am also gaining so many valuable insights and tools through taking part in Geoff's live sessions on Insight Timer. Thank you for sharing your gifts, Geoff.

I’m very interested to hear this entire book. Wow, wonderful work here. I’m so curious about your story. 🙏🏼✨

This is so interesting!! I’m so curious to hear the next chapters!! ❤️✨✨✨❤️❤️❤️✨✨❤️❤️

So much wisdom, in your words! Self discovery it is ongoing throughout your life. Blessings🙋🏼‍♀️🌷🙏💜j