About Divine Soda

This website is dedicated to transcending suffering for individuals and humanity through a deeper inquiry into spirituality, truth, and healing. These areas are the essence of the journey required to transform yourself beyond your current limitations and experience the beauty of life that is infinite peace, love and joy. I believe this process is the single most important thing we could be focusing on in this age of atrophy and chaos. We’ve been spinning our wheels looking outside of ourselves for the answer to our problems when the answer was right in front of our face all along. The answer is and has always been you.

Depression

When I was 17, I experienced a traumatic event that instantly made me severely depressed. My family took me to our family doctor who promptly diagnosed me with major depression and prescribed anti-depressants. I quickly stabilized from my stresses at the time, and because of this, I never bothered to explore my issues any further. To me, my parents and the family doctor, this unusual reaction didn’t signal a call to address anything deeper than the event itself.

And so most of my 20’s were spent living the “‘normal” life. After graduating college, I would go to an office job just like all my friends, earn good money, and indulge in alcohol/weed/entertainment in my free time. I never saw this as much of an issue, and even had moments of joy and contentment living life this way. But deep down I realized that these moments were fleeting, and I never stopped desiring a more meaningful life.

It wasn’t until I would attempt to come off the medication that I would be rudely re-introduced to my darkest demons. I must’ve tried about 7-8 times to ween myself off during the 17 years I took anti-depressants, each time failing miserably. This would trigger a familiar spiral into the deepest despair I could ever imagine. For months I would wake up every morning and literally vomit from the sheer magnitude of fear and dread I felt towards life.

I was far beyond the point of functioning in normal society, and so after each of these episodes, I ran as fast as I could back to the medication, swearing to myself that I would never try that again. I would say, “Just face it, you are going to be on medication for the rest of your life, and there is nothing wrong with that.” But deep down, I never wanted to accept that this was my fate.. so over the years, I inevitably tried again and again.

A journey in self-development

It wasn’t until I was 27 that I started becoming more curious about the ways I could improve myself and my mindset. I was living in NYC at the time, and I finally managed to find a therapist that I actually got along with. I went religiously for 2 years and started to become more and more aware of how my mind worked. I saw all the limiting beliefs, false assumptions, judgments, and delusions that were directly contributing to my experience of depression and anxiety.

I read numerous self-help books, listened to podcasts and attended support groups. I learned that there was such a thing as the ego, and that identifying with this false sense of self was the root cause of all suffering. I was introduced to Buddhist philosophies, visited monasteries, studied the teachings, and practiced mindfulness in my every day life. I also cleaned up my diet over the years as I learned more and more about the foundational principles of true health.

Understanding the lies

It was also around this time that I started to deeply investigate the world around me. I was making such progress with my personal growth, I now felt a calling to shift my focus to issues that were bigger than me and my own problems. This inquiry took me down a deep rabbit hole of learning about all the lies, deceptions and toxicities we were born into. I realized that in so many ways, life was literally like the movie “The Matrix”.

I thought to myself, it’s no wonder why so many people are depressed! It’s no wonder why so many people are sick, diseased, without energy or vitality, without joy or love, and without meaning in their life. These are all symptoms of a sick society that has completely lost it’s way. We have thoroughly separated ourselves from our Godly nature, the truth of who we really are, our connection to each other, and the world around us. For me this was absolutely huge to understand, because now the suffering and despair made so much sense. It was no longer some vague mystery, but rather a very clear narrative that explains all of the root causes of our problems.

Despite the truth of these realizations, I had to discover the hard way that all this darkness in the world was not the ultimate Truth (with a capital ‘T’). It’s very easy to get stuck here and become quite pessimistic and cynical about the state of humanity and its future. But there is in fact a higher truth to reality that we can ascend towards if we remain open-minded and free from dogmas and ideologies (even the noble ones).

Awakening to spirit

I was never a religious or even spiritual person, but along my journey I started to realize that there is so much more to reality than we can perceive with our senses and measure with conventional science. So much more. And we are all a part of this magic, whether we choose to believe it or not. The reality of our spiritual nature is so far beyond the mere intellectual understanding most of us get caught in. The only way to grasp this reality is to taste it for yourself, experientially.. and there are specific ways to do this.

This is essentially what all the great wisdom throughout human history has been trying to tell us. That reality and the human potential is absolutely infinite, and we all have the ability to tap into better versions of ourselves if we choose to do so. This gave me tremendous hope for life in a way that I had never experienced before. At times, it was as if I was a kid again and life was mysterious and wonderful in ways beyond my wildest dreams.

In fact, that is what life actually is.. but a dream. A hallucination of sorts. The ultimate delusion. Once you understand this, and I mean really get with it, everything changes.

All the petty worries, problems and concepts lose their power over you.. because they don’t actually exist in the concrete way we think they do. They are delusions. Life itself is an illusion. Many who come to understand this can get stuck in a state of nihilism, where everything in life is meaningless/pointless. It’s a quite natural conclusion to reach, but it’s still not the ultimate Truth. To those I urge, keep going.

Meaning, purpose and love

So if life is just an illusion, then what is even the point to living? What is the point of going to work, having a family, or even living in service to others? Well, if you push through this state of mind and keep inquiring into the Truth, you realize that if life is truly infinite, magical, and sacred, then we can basically do whatever we desire with it. This of course doesn’t mean the end of challenge.. challenge and adventure are intrinsic to what life is all about. But it does mean the end of living on someone else’s terms.

What I ultimately realized was that life is not merely a series of difficult/unfair circumstances that are all happening to me, but rather it’s an infinite field of potentiality that can serve as my greatest teacher if I would drop the victim-hood mentality and stop clinging to, identifying with, and hiding behind the story of my struggle.

This is truly step #1 if you want to find an end to your suffering and live a more meaningful, fulfilling life. You must be willing to drop your story. Drop the identification with all your problems, your traumatic past, the people who have hurt you, and the society that doesn’t give a shit about you. Of course this doesn’t mean that all of those things aren’t valid, or that they didn’t directly contribute to your current state of suffering. But after a period of necessary analysis, introspection and acceptance of your past, you must be willing to go beyond that if you want to truly liberate yourself from yourself.

And so that is what I’m here to explore, for myself and hopefully in community with others. I’m done with the suffering. I’m done being controlled by my past lower vibration habits that only serve to keep me stuck exactly where I am. I want to grow beyond myself and towards the infinite of meaning, purpose and joy. If there ever was a “point to life”, I believe this is it.

If any of this resonates with you, then I welcome you to join me and together we can explore how to live a better life. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please reach out via the contact page. ❤️