EP 107 Anxiety, OCD and Spirituality with Chris Mason

Our guest this month is an Anxiety and OCD therapist who shares his journey of curing his OCD. Chris started developing high levels of anxiety from when he started going to school which was fed by some of the stories he was told around religion. He reacted against this by becoming an atheist but the damage was done. He battled intrusive thoughts about death, about hell for years. Even in cartoons that he watched on TV, like the Simpsons these messages about hell were reinforced. There came a point in his life where the fear was so intense that he wasn't functioning. He was obsessing over death. It was during COVID too so he hadn't seen friends in a month. He cried for five hours and then starting wondering if the problem was not death but OCD, so he went on YouTube and found a video by John Glanvill, who was to become his mentor. Slowly, Chris was able to look at his thoughts and question them. He now considers himself an entirely different man. But it took dedication and persistence and he says he is still working on himself. He knew when he watched the first video that the man who had recorded it was going to help him. Some of the things that this man talked about felt too far fetched but because Chris was getting results, he kept with the programme. Part of the work is to face your fears head on and do the things that you have up to now tried to avoid. I met Christ at Toastmasters which he joined long before I did to conquer his fear of public speaking. The idea is to sit with the anxiety rather than try to avoid it by doing some ritual that the ego promises will resolve the issue. As his mentor shared with him how he went to Peru and did ayahuasca, Chris felt the desire to experience something similar, so he found a Magic Mushroom retreat near him. He shared his insights into that experience with us on the podcast. It is now his end goal in life to experience something similar to what he experienced on that retreat without the mushroom. It's still work in progress but his life has been truly changed by the experience, although not as much as he thought it would because he had started doing the work long before turning up at the retreat. To work with Chris, head over to his website with this link.