Meet Mike McGregor, Breathwork FacilitatorTaking Leaders
Past Talking

“None of my achieving earned me peace. I couldn’t outrun the emptiness inside.”

The cool, crisp sheets stuck to my sweaty skin as I frantically tried to pull and kick them off. My breath shallow and rapid. I was disoriented and scared. I crawled out of bed and on to the floor. I fell through the floor and through the world itself. Endless falling. Time distorted: seconds felt like hours, and minutes passed in a blur. The stillness of the room contrasted with the urgent panic, my ears full of the sound of my rapid breathing and my heart thumping. Sweat dripped down my face and back. Was I insane? Was I dying?

I was engulfed in whatever this was. I tried to escape it by moving around, going outside, but the spinning and terror crippled me and I became worried about what other people might think. I felt insane. I found the most peace in a foetal position, crying and sobbing on the floor.

“None of my achieving earned me peace. I couldn’t outrun the emptiness inside.”

This confronting moment had been building for decades, continued intensely through all the bright blue days of summer, and took years and years to heal. This was the bursting of a large emotional boil that had been accumulating and festering for so long. This moment was my breakdown, and quite literally a breakthrough to a new life. I was 36 years old.

From the age of 12, the colour in my life began to turn to grey.

When I was a teenager, Mum was chronically sick, my family was emotionally disconnected, and school was difficult for me. I watched in disbelief and horror as Mum’s dementia took her humanity, withered her body, and stole her love of life. At 16, I escaped home to avoid witnessing the end of this slow-motion horror show. I carried my inner chaos and fear out into the world, alone.

After losing Mum, in the next decades I would lose my brother, then Dad, and I’d leave a series of failed relationships behind me. In hindsight each relationship was an attempt to seek comfort and refuge from my inner chaos, a persistent emptiness, and so many unnamed pains.

My response to this was to seek refuge in my mind. I embraced a ‘rise and grind’ mentality, threw myself into cognitive excellence, drove my career, chased progression, engaged in more than a decade of competitive CrossFit.

“Instead of turning the volume up, I learned how to listen deeply inwards.”

I qualified as a commercial pilot, became a police officer, progressed my corporate career. Yet none of it earned me peace. Then, the morning of Christmas 2016 came to break me loose. At the right time and in just the right way, the loving, healing intelligence within me, and within all of us, applied a pressure I could no longer ignore. Instead of resisting, I began to listen. 

From that moment, I started to put the pieces of myself back together.

“Instead of turning the volume up, I learned how to listen deeply inwards.”

I’d spent more than 20 years breaking and smashing myself into pieces. I had tried to escape my inner chaos by turning the volume of everything up, to drown something else out. I’d disconnected and separated from myself to drown, contain and isolate the pain.

Through support from friends, counsellors and coaches, and my own intuition and self-love, things changed. Over the next decade I went from healing wounds, to fresh new growth, to blooming I had no idea was possible.

I have walked through the valley of my own shadow and I now hold incredible compassion for others encountering this, in its unique form, in their lives. It’s important to me to be the helping hand somebody else takes hold of in their darkest hours, because I relied on so many of these myself, in so many moments over the years.

With love,