If you just found Breakthrough That, welcome! I started this Substack as a way to explore how real change happens. I’ve been a transformative coach for over 22 years and have worked and trained in numerous modalities. But what I have come to see is that real change seems to happen in the intersection between identity, insight and embodiment, all three, not just the ideas in your head.
The blogs I share here are built from real life experiences, whether my own, my wife Linda’s - who is a co-writer here - or insights we have seen from working with clients. I treat this Substack a bit like my laboratory! Yes, you’ll see some science and data here from time to time. We work with EEG and Heartmath tools, and I am a bit of a geek at heart, so you’ll also see me delve into things like neuroscience, epigenetics, and other new ways of understanding change. But it’s the lived experience that matters and which brings it to life.
At the heart of this Substack are the significant health challenges that Linda and I went through, and primarily it’s the way we came through them that matters here. I had seven years of chronic fatigue but after some significant insights changed the way I saw the illness, I made a quick and swift recovery in just 6 weeks. I have since published peer-reviewed research on how the Three Principles understanding can help people change and have helped numerous clients on their recovery journey. Linda was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and thrived through treatment, without losing her hair or having other side effects. Her approach was so different to mine, that I began to see how important embodiment practices really could be in helping change really land. This Substack is the amalgamation of both of our journeys, and what we continue to learn from our own experience and our client work.
To get up to speed with the key ideas that form the basis of the work here, I’ve put together and linked below five posts that I’d suggest you read through. In fact, if you read nothing else, start with these:
1. Completing the Circle: Reconciling the Three Principles, Nonduality, and Quantum Creation
If you want the actual philosophy behind everything here, this is it. Where the Three Principles and non-duality gave me peace and genuinely helped my body to really begin to settle down during my CFS journey, I always felt something was missing: any sense that we could actively participate in creating our lives, not just find peace with them. This is the piece where Linda’s recovery journey helped me see how those two things really reconcile, and also see the space where free-will and participation really come to life.
2. The Day I Forgave, Let Go, And Measured It on a Brainwave Scan
How do we know when insight really lands? In this two part blog, I used an EEG headband and tracked what happened with my brainwaves as I went into a deep meditation. I wanted to process through something I had been holding onto that I had been stuck with for some time. I saw how things could be different insightfully, but it wasn’t changing anything. So I took myself through the same process we take clients’ through. If you’ve ever wondered whether identity change is just a nice idea or something you can watch happen in real time, this is where the data starts to become really interesting (and the geek in me gets excited). Note: This is a two-parter. Part one is my subjective experience of the meditation. Part Two has the full data and shows how that experience mapped to my brainwaves. It is linked at the bottom of part 1.
Read: The Day I Forgave, Let Go, And Measured It on a Brainwave Scan
3. Meditation Wasn’t for Me — Until Life Gave Me No Choice
Linda's own first post, in her words: a raw account of what it actually took to go from "meditation isn't for people like me" to using visualisation daily through a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. If you want the embodiment side of this work, not just the theory, this is it.
Read: Meditation Wasn’t for Me
4. How Peace Turns Any Path Into Healing (and What the Man Who Ate 34,000 Burgers Can Teach Us)
When we think about healing there are so many different modalities out there that it can seem like an endless maze to find the ‘answer’. But what if there is something fundamental that matters behind all these different modalities? In this blog I share the story of Don Gorske - affectionately known as Big Mac Man. He’s eaten Big Macs only every day since 1972 and is healthy and alive and well. It sounds like a joke, but his story helps us see something fundamental about who we are and our power to create. This is a great blog to send someone who may be feeling overwhelmed by a medical diagnosis.
Read: How Peace Turns Any Path Into Healing
5. Why Awakening Feels Messy — And Why You Don’t Need to Fear It
If things have felt chaotic lately even though you’re doing “the work,” this one’s for you. In this piece, I explore why growth so often looks like things falling apart before they come together, including an honest account of Linda and me going through exactly this ourselves.
Read: Why Awakening Feels Messy
What’s next:
I sincerely hope you find these blogs enjoyable, informative and eye opening, especially if you have been on a journey of change yourself, and want to understand better how you can really make change land. I’d love to have you stick around. Subscribe below if you haven’t already. New posts will be sent to your inbox as soon as they are published, and feel free to comment on anything here. I read everything and often the comments and questions become seeds for new blogs.
Thank you for being here!
With love,
John x