This has been the most important week of my entire life. Yes, very dramatic, I know. But I think the situation warrants the hyperbole. I’ve spent the last six years in chronic back pain, the entirety of my twenties.

Throughout this journey, I’ve tried what feels everything physically on a holistic level, excluding surgery, injections, medications.

For the last year I’ve been in a program called the ​Back Breakthrough Blueprint​, what’s felt like the first genuine solution to my condition.

I signed up knowing that the route would not be linear, that it would take time, patience and resilience, and that there would inevitably be highs and lows to fix my back on a physical level.

But I broke down again on Monday, exactly like I did a week prior.

What the fuck is going on? I wondered.

I’ve been in the program for a year, and after breaking down this week, I capitulated. Team, what do I do, I asked the BBB community. I need encouragement; I need help.

I was meant to break down three times in the last month. I was meant to travel deep into my heart of hearts, my lowest low, because the universe is urging me to ask for help.

When I did, the stars aligned.

“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction,” writes author and speaker Alain de Botton in The School of Life — an incredible book which provides insights, stories and wisdom which peel back the veil of human nature and illuminate the complexities of what it means to be alive.

It ain’t supposed to be easy.

“It is a very real — albeit very inarticulate — bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development which it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well, properly well, through a stage of falling very ill. A breakdown isn’t just a pain, though it is that too of course; it is an extraordinary opportunity to learn.”

God, the universe, fate — whatever you want to call it — presented a new path, one I’ve long neglected. I can train my body and have the most structurally sound lower back, but this pain will never change without healing on an emotional level.

I have to understand who the hell I am before I truly become who I know I could be.

The BBB is the best thing I think anybody can do physically to strengthen their lower back, and I will continue to implement the moves from the program to build a strong back and foundation.

But I’ll never escape this prison without confronting and releasing the energy stored inside of me, deriving from childhood, from anger, pain, guilt, fear, any of the sundry emotions we store and carry throughout our lives, rarely confronting.

“Even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment,” writes de Botton, “we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury — what we can term a set of ‘primal wounds’.”

There’s a lot I have to work through; this is why I’m on this earth. This is why I’ve been dealing with this pain; it’s even why I’ve left home, seeking my own path, identity and freedom. Perhaps that was one threshold, that of leaving home in the physical world.

But perhaps more importantly, I’m ready to cross the threshold from childhood into adulthood on an emotional level by making peace with my past.

I’m embarking on a spiritual odyssey, giving everything I have to know myself.

It’s going to take education. I’m starting with the books Y​ou Are the Placebo, by Dr. Joe Dispenza, and ​Healing Back Pain​, by Dr. John Sarno. I’m also using the app ​Curable​ to guide my journey.

It’s going to take professional help, as I’m starting psychotherapy here in Tokyo.

And ultimately, it’s going to take belief.

Through journaling, meditation, breathing, and a holistic approach to life, I will unlock what has been holding me back for so long.

You have to want to change everything with all of your heart and soul, and that’s where I’m at, not just sprinkling this on top of whatever I’m doing in life with one foot in healing, and the other foot just trying to act as if things are alright. No. Things are not alright.

“What the breakdown is telling us above anything else is that it must no longer be business as usual,” writes de Botton.

“Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge.”

I wouldn’t erase a thing about these past six years, because everything has led me to this moment.

In the past three days, I’ve already learned lessons and had revelations that’ll help me see more clearly for the rest of my life.

I’m asking the universe, god, the great mystery for signs, and they’re already showing up. Every single thing has led to the next; every season, every chapter, every flare-up and break down, tear shed and word penned.

I’ve met countless beautiful souls on this path of pain and healing. I’ve gained so, so much, and I’ll always be grateful for what I’ve been through.

And while this adventure has indeed just begun, the pain won’t hold me back anymore.

Just like the BBB, this won’t be linear. Like anything worth striving for, it will take patience, faith, and unbelievable persistence.

But this is the most important work I’ll ever do in my life, and I’m ready to cut out all other distractions for a while to give it my undivided attention. This too will take time.

But I’m not the guy with back pain anymore.

That part of my life is over.