Overcoming Feeling Lost with the "Zoom Out'' Technique

Lost: unable to find one's way; not knowing one's whereabouts

- Oxford Dictionary

One particularly dark night recently, the power went out while I was in bed.

When I jumped up to find a torch, it was pitch black and I found myself lost and disorientated somewhere in the short hallway of my home.

As I pawed for walls and doorways to find my bearings, an irrational level of fear and borderline panic started to form.

This physical sensation was then accompanied by a series of additionally irrational thoughts:

What if the power went out because a clever intruder cut the wires to rob me?

What if there are ghosts in here?

What if this is the solar flare they’ve been warning us all about and there will never be electricity again? …

…Bump….I find a doorway and my bearings and the fear subsides to a cold sweat and a loud beating heart.

I found my torch and tried to get back to sleep which was a challenge after the adrenaline dump.

The next day in the morning light I got to thinking about how awful the feeling of being lost is, even for just a few moments and what the sensation does to the mind.

I wanted to come up with a plan for next time, should this happen again and the thought that brought me the most comfort was – geographically, could I ever really be lost? 

It occurred to me that if I just zoomed out to a slightly wider scale in any scenario, then I could always know my place. 

I might not have known where in the hallway I was, but I did know I was in my hallway which is in my house. 

I know that my house is in a town called Hunchy.

Hunchy is in the region of the Sunshine Coast. 

The Sunshine Coast is a region in the state of Queensland. 

Queensland is in Australia.

Australia is on Earth.

Earth is the 3rd planet from the Sun.

Layer by layer my mind can imagine with Google-Earth-Like imagery where I am in time and space to approximate precision.

So, if I was just willing to broaden my definition of where I was (ie. zoom out), even just by one or two layers, I came to the conclusion that I could never really ever be physically lost at all.

I once was lost, but now I am found, Was blind, but now I see.

- Lyrics from Amazing Grace

Feeling Lost in Life

Being lost and scared in my own home, a private experience I never shared for fear of ridicule and my own personal strategy for next time got me thinking. 

I wondered whether this strategy could be applied to the metaphorical version of feeling lost?

The kind of “lost” where you don’t know what you want from life or what to do with yourself.

I have felt seriously lost in this context several times in my 41 year old life so far, the most recent event occurring quite strongly at age 37.

I’m not a big star sign kinda guy but it did interest me to read recently that age 37- 42 in astrology is described as “the fog of life”.

A period where you start to question the things you believed in that got you to this point. It’s often followed by significant life changes leading into what some would commonly call “the mid-life crisis”.

Car Accidents & Building Law Firms

After my divorce my motivation for being a Lawyer and running my Law Firm came to an end.

Self Help experts say “know your Why” and for me I had created my Law Firm after my wife was in a very serious car accident.

She was nearly killed in a head on collision and as I arrived at the scene, paramedics were working to save her life. The haunting scenes of smoldering cars, firemen, police and medics will be hard to forget. 

Bedside, praying to any higher power that would hear me, I begged the universe to let her stay and took a vow to always look after her if that could happen.

My prayers were answered and despite coming as close to death as you medically can – she survived.

My drive to create my law firm to provide for us both was unparalleled. 

I could outwork anyone and I did for many years, which was weird even for me because I was always relatively lazy in my past and relied on charm, charisma and just enough natural intelligence to get by.

With a laptop in my lounge room so I could be at home with her while she rehabilitated, I created a successful business capable of providing for us both.

Within 2 years I was so busy I needed an office and staff and it kept growing from there.

My drive to build it was my way of taking care of her, but ironically, somewhere in that very process I drove myself into burnout and started self medicating with alcohol to treat the stress.

In the volume of work I was doing to provide for the person I cared for most, I lost her. 

It was never that I even enjoyed the practice of law, but the commitment I made that day beside her bed drove me harder and harder.

Eventually the gap became so wide and even after having two children, one day we both conceded that we were no longer in love.

It was a confusing time for me coming to terms with the irony of my own devotion somehow contributing to the end. 

After the divorce, my heart was no longer in the business and as much as I tried, I just no longer cared enough to responsibly practice.

I had drifted into the fog of life, alone and without a clear “why”.

Finding Myself….Again.

Looking back now I intuitively did zoom out from the identity I had created as a Lawyer and found that beyond that, I was a Human-Being. 

A man who, despite feeling confused around Career, could improve his general physical health and from there, create a better personal environment conducive to clarity on life purpose and direction. 

I needed some rules to follow to manage my life in order to make it through the Fog. Here is how I went about it.

Audit What Needs to Go

The easiest and most obvious place to start is to identify anything that is harming you OR at the very least, not helping you.

Alcohol at the time was my most obvious poison. 

It had to go.

As a daily “drink to you pass out” individual, I knew this would be rough. 

Taking away my medicine, the only thing that could numb my pain, meant that I would be feeling many things that I’d been putting off.

The stockpile of unprocessed memories & neglected emotions had filled the basement of my mind and giving up alcohol was opening the door to that room. I had a lot of cleaning to do. 

It felt overwhelming to confront the room full of unprocessed issues, but it was so rancid in there that unless I made a start I knew it would rot my foundations and compromise the whole structure of who I am.

Without alcohol to turn the volume down, I soon discovered my next most important priority to address  – my neurotic mind itself.

At first, it got very loud and very negative. Not even in my sleep could I escape it, if it wasn’t nightmares then it was insomnia because I started to fear the astral torture.

So, I booked a trip to the Psychologist and it was here that I was introduced to the idea of meditation.

Transcendental Meditation

A google search of meditation styles revealed an article by comedian and recovering addict Russell Brand for Transcendental Meditation.

I found a teacher nearby and soon found myself in the uncomfortable experience of being before photographs of deceased elderly Asian men in robes, holding a white handkerchief in one hand, a piece of fruit in the other while my teacher sang in Sanskrit.

This wasn’t in some ancient temple, it was in my teacher’s living room in the suburbs. 

She offered me a secret mantra that I say in the quiet of my mind repeatedly for 20 minutes each morning and night.

Any doubts of the validity of the method were soon relieved when in just two weeks of practice I felt an unbelievable level of inner peace. 

I had never felt that calm before. 

It wasn’t that it magically made my problems all disappear, they were all still there, but it gave me a new calm place to see them from.

My mind would still race with thoughts about my problems (worst case scenarios etc), but instead of believing each and every one, my only job now was to simply notice these thoughts without judgment.

I was taught there is nothing inherently wrong with any thoughts, even the most dark neurotic twisted ones.

By simply observing them without judgment or adding further layers of guilt or shame to yourself for having them, followed by gently returning your awareness to your mantra, a gap is created between the mind and your experience of it. 

Initially just 5 minutes alone with my mind was torture, but over weeks and months, the 20 minute effort morning and night became possible and switched from a painful chore to the time I most looked forward to in my day.

Upgrading the Body

After subtracting alcohol from my daily life, I naturally had more energy and FELT like moving.

I started off by joining a Gym within walking distance from my office and started a fairly standard bodybuilding type routine.

That first 3 months of lifting weights and being more active, coinciding with no longer drinking and actually eating a healthy diet, was one of the most satisfying periods in my training history. 

Without the copious amounts of alcohol (and crap food that often went with it), my body was for the first time able to devote it’s energy to building my muscles and melting my fat away.

For anyone that has ever started lifting weights, there’s an extra special period in the beginning called “Newbie Gains” where your body responds better than it ever will again and you get stronger very quickly and gain muscle easily.

This plateaus out of course and the improvements become smaller the longer you train, but it’s a very rewarding time and the dopamine reward was enough to hook me in.

So much so that I went on to over-do it and injured my hip while squatting heavy loads (a labrum tear which was a stabbing pinching type feeling).

Not to be discouraged, I decided that while I did some rehab to mend my hip I would find activities for my upper body and anything else I was still capable of.

By chance, I saw a video on YouTube about an Israeli athlete named Ido Portal and it lit a curiosity for Movement that I had never felt before. 

I googled if he ever taught in Australia and by sheer luck found out that he was coming to Sydney the following month so I bought a ticket to a 3 day Movement Event that would forever change the way I looked at fitness.

The seeds at that event were planted and I went on to practice Handstands, Rings, Acrobatics & Locomotion on a daily basis. I also took up BJJ and took pride in developing a body that could surf, skate, climb, yoga and do almost anything I asked of it. 

I developed incredible bodyweight strength and before long I was being asked to teach others.

Clarity of Mind

With a clearer mind and a strong body, life in all aspects just seemed to be better.

My business did better, I fell in love with a wonderful woman who I would see for the following 4 years and my connection to my kids was rich and beautiful.

Yet there remained something unanswered still within my heart. 

My work as a lawyer was done and without my original why it became increasingly apparent in my ongoing audits of my life that the next most harmful thing to my health was the nature of this work itself.

I worked in Property & Corporate Law in highly regulated, tightly controlled environments governed by numerous regulatory bodies and much larger corporate forces like Big Banks.

The legal system itself, while important and serving a purpose, is painfully slow and expensive and after running my own business for 10 years, I realized I had nothing left to prove in this industry which I simply didn't enjoy.

I had already withdrawn from most social events, largely because they were all mostly centered around drinking alcohol and it was difficult to find many lawyers in my world that didn't have some sort of existential pain they didn't numb with liquor or fast cars.

I had just turned 40 and I felt my values changing deep down so I made the call to sell my firm and change careers. 

The Next Chapter

The novelty of telling people was I was retired wore off pretty quickly knowing that my sale proceeds only offered me a short window to figure out what was next. 

I had been asked to teach “Movement” having now become more than competent in various disciplines such as handstands, rings and locomotion so I started doing that online and in person.

The digital creator economy had always fascinated me and as someone who had come from such a tightly regulated industry that relied on having staff and premises and expensive licensing, the idea of being a one person creator harnessing the internet was highly appealing.

I built my first online course, Locomotion Flow and that first sale felt like pure alchemy. That someone on the other side of the world, paid me upfront and my computer sent them access to a video course I built in the cloud all while I slept – was pure magic.

I also had students reach out for online training and so my new direction naturally started to reveal itself.

I can talk about Movement all day and not get tired, I can practice all day too if you let me, so it’s not something that feels like work especially when I compare it to the stress of sitting in my law firm.

My dream lifestyle now is to live like this:-

6am - Wake Up - Meditate, Stretch and drink a Coffee.

7am - Work on my online business for 2 hours.

9am - Train.

11am - Eat.

12 Noon - Work on my online business for 2 hours.

2pm - Tidy up my place.

3pm - Pick the kids up from School and spend the rest of the day playing with them in the yard, in the forest or at the beach.

I like to teach in person a few hours a week here and there too but not be overloaded by that in the 9-5 sense to get by.

I also like the idea of frequent holidays and adventure trips.

Time to see friends a few times a week, whether a few evening sessions at BJJ or something similar in healthy environments is also a priority.

Catching up with my family members often is also high on my list.

But what I crave most on a daily basis is to feel a peaceful connection to my life and the world around me. A sense of meaning when I start my day and a way to feel like I am making the world a better place for at least one person each day. 

It’s a constant “practice” this whole thing we call life and just like training, I’m not sure it can ever be perfect. 

So the next best thing is to just focus on just one small thing each day to improve and over time, let that compound into the life of your dreams. 

Feeling lost is going to happen sometimes. When it does, zoom out and just notice those thoughts. Stay patient and the next step will reveal itself soon enough.

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If you need assistance with online coaching which includes not just movement, but also stillness and all my Life experience to date, please reach out: [email protected] 

Resources mentioned in Video:

Transcendental Meditation - https://tm.org.au/ 

Kajabi Online Course Platform (My Affiliate Link): https://app.kajabi.com/r/NR26aaNy/t/2... 

Ido Portal (Movement Culture) - https://www.youtube.com/@portaldo

My free Ultimate Lizard Crawl Guide: https://www.aarongriffiths.com.au/ult... 

Locomotion Flow Online Course: https://aaron-griffiths-b25a.mykajabi...