What Happened To David Wood

I still have conversations with people on occasion who bring up what happened with me like 8 years ago. Since this comes up occasionally, I am going to mention it one more time and this will probably be the last time I mention it on social media.

On May 20th, 2017 after years of struggling emotionally with non-stop drama which I can admit was at least half self-inflicted (I am not responsible for the actions of others, only having them in my life in the first place and how I interacted with them) I was a broken man who had made a lot of money, gained incredible influence, and it was crumbling apart very slowly and painfully.

I couldn’t figure out why this was happening as it was like a string of back to back painful losses that eventually put me into a state where I was reacting with some kind of PTSD to everything and my creativity shut off, traded for behavior that was running around putting out fires. (I’m not just saying ‘PTSD’ you can ask my brother. I had lived through things you can only describe as ‘terror’ – and that is about all I have to say about that.)

So I was talking to a friend about the pain I was in as she was a good listener, and she told me about Ayahuasca and how it had changed her life. I had never heard of it, so I looked it up.

After looking it up, I was intrigued as I had ran into some healing stories and at the time, my heart was quite broken. The mother of my son had ran off with my son and vanished and I basically used to sit there in front of my computer all day zoned out and desperate, waiting for a message telling me where she and Gabriel were as I loved her and of course, was in complete emotional agony about it all the time.

In addition to that, my business was slowly falling apart. Although if 2-3 things would have happened differently, that business would still be here and be prospering, it doesn’t matter. The combination of my actions not turning that business around and the constant pain of not seeing my son was too much for me. My mind was essentially “shut down” and I could only gather enough emotional energy temporarily to pump people up on calls and webinars. But the problem I had with all of it was:

I felt like a phony. I was teaching people about a dream that at one point I had actually lived, but essentially all of it in one way or another had been taken from me. I had made millions of dollars a year and travelled the world – now I was putting all of my money back into the company in a non-stop string of failed attempts to turn it around, and I couldn’t even see my son.

So when I would pop on and talk about lifestyle, the only thing that mattered to me – which was my family – was taken from me. So I felt (regardless of the cash flow I had at the time) like I had failed and my dream was meaningless.

So when my friend talked to me, I felt empty. I didn’t know what Ayahuasca was, so I looked it up.

I was intrigued by it, so I called a bunch of shamans in Costa Rica to ask them about it. After talking to about 5 of them, I determined that these people acted like they are a part of some creepy cult (these people seemed more like they were a part of Heaven’s Gate than that they had some sort of awakened nature to them – and that is still what I think about it).

So rather than going to a shaman, I looked up what was in Ayahuasca, which is really a decent amount of DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) and an MAOI inhibitor. Well to be frank, that is pretty easy to mix up in your house (not that I am encouraging that). So I ordered a DMT containing plant (Acacia) and Banisteriopsis-Caapi (an MAOI inhibitor) to Puerto Rico before I did the infamous “lemon event” in Puerto Rico.

While I know you are thinking at the moment (if you remember this) that you know where this is going, I promise that unless you have actually talked to me about it, you don’t.

So on the morning of May 20th, 2017 in Puerto Rico (it was a Saturday) I mixed up 15 grams of Acacia Confusa and 150 grams of Caapi into a banana-spinach smoothie. I wrote out an intention of why I was going to drink it, which was decently short. I wrote out a prayer to God that he could help me to this, to just heal my soul of all the pain that I was in.

Now before I continue – you should not for any reason put that much Acacia Confusa into a concoction and drink it. It is too much. But I did as I was in a lot of pain. So I figured if I am going to go for it, I might as well go all in.

(this has been a repeating philosophy in my life)

So after writing the intention, I put on some Tibetan flute music and choked down about a coffee pot worth of the most disgusting tasting smoothie I had ever tasted. I laid down and closed my eyes, waiting. After about 30 minutes, the ‘oh shit’ began to happen and I started to question whether I should have done what I was doing, but by that time, it was too late.

I’m not going to get into the whole experience of that moment as this post would be 30,000 words or more, but I will say that the next 7 hours I still consider to be in the top 5 most important experiences of my life. I was taken on a spiritual-psychological journey through every memory of my life where I could see every moment of my existence from every possible perspective. The pain that I was in was dismantled, and I could see that I had caused everything in my life and was responsible for it. Not like some sort of personal development statement, but as a realization that there is nothing in my life that I did not directly cause through a chain of actions that led back to the time I was born and then, beyond that.

The beyond that I am not going to talk about in this post.

But at the end of 7 hours, I was a new person in a universe that for all intents and purposes was also new. My life changed that day, and for the positive in a way that I cannot express or describe.

Bad habits I had for years broke apart, but not in a “I am trying to change that” kind of way. My old way of living and being just ended.

Well, that was pretty awesome. I am still somewhat convinced that if that is where it had ended, I would probably have a following of 10 million people by now.

But in the chain of decisions creating my situation, I had attracted to my life some people who were dark in their core. The next day I woke up, and I told the person I was staying with about the experiment. I wanted to share it with him as I had only experienced perhaps one other thing in my life that was equally profound but in a different way. The previous experience was impossible to replicate in any kind of predictable way, but this one I had a formula:

Set up some intention in a nice environment, mix up some DMT and MAOI inhibitor tea – and drink it. Pretty simple formula.

So he said he was going to try it with me a couple of days from then, and at the last minute he bailed and said that he wanted to go to a shaman instead. At the time, I wondered why. But in a few days, I went to take the tea again, this time setting an intention to understand the highest impact I could have on the world.

But this person, who I am not going to mention in this post, was a dark soul. I had my Acacia Confusa on the kitchen table—at the house where I was staying—were spiked with methamphetamine while I wasn’t there. I didn’t know. I found out in the hospital when toxicology came back with extremely high amphetamine levels. I have never in my life taken amphetamines; the only way it got into my system was through that contaminated mixture. What felt like an awakening on Saturday turned into madness a few days later.

This experience was quite different than the first. Awakening turned into madness. Rather than healing from any form of pain, I was screaming and clawing all of the skin off of my face and back. I would like to say that this is the end of the story, but it was the beginning of a personal experience of losing your mind.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever lost your mind before. It’s not very fun. But the problem with doing it, is that the part of your mind that would normally notice that you have lost your noggin also gets lost. So you would think that a person who is otherwise intelligent would notice if something about them is massively off – particularly if there are a lot of people around them telling them about it.

But what actually happens, is that yes, if you were sane, you could see yourself acting insane. But if you have lost your grip on reality, the part of yourself that regulates this perception dismantles. Well, this is the kind of thing that can happen to a person if large amounts of amphetamines (which probably should have killed me) are mixed with something that requires quite a lot of skill and care, such as Ayahuasca.

So you have the normal maddening effects of amphetamines combined with visionary effects of Ayahuasca. Trust me, this is not a good combination.

Now, before I continue (this story by itself is maddening) I want to make myself clear:

Never in my life, not a single time, have I ever taken amphetamines on purpose outside of very minor amounts for prescriptions for ADHD medicine which at the time of these events, I was no longer taking.

I have never:

• smoked amphetamines
• injected amphetamines
• consumed amphetamines in food
• or anything like that.

Partially, this story would be more powerful if I could claim that I did it on purpose. Why? I could use the whole “I was a drug addict” approach to the situation and “I got help and am clean.”

The problem with that approach, is it isn’t true at all and I’m not going to say something that is false to get views and sympathy even if it probably would be better for my image.

No, I was not taking amphetamines.

I can take responsibility for being around that person only as they never should have been in my life at all. I can take responsibility for my own actions that led to both the attraction of the overall situation and the people that in more intelligent times in my life would have never been a part of my circle at all.

However, back to the madness.

So if you ever do lose your mind, the problem is you cannot tell.

People around you can tell you about it, but you cannot keep track of it yourself. You just think that you are experiencing a new reality and the part of your mind that you are certain would be able to distinguish this simply doesn’t work anymore or you’ve convinced yourself that the other part of your mind is right and the critical part is wrong. Either way, your ability to distinguish sanity from madness dismantles and you can’t see it – because if you do notice it, it will go away and is no longer madness.

Of course at the time, the amphetamines plus a large dosage of Ayahuasca made me feel like I had super powers and inflated my ego to heights that I didn’t know you could go to.

I went from completely broken – to totally healed – to destroyed entirely.

To put a long story short, this situation led to the infamous event where I appeared on a Facebook live rubbing a lemon on my face, acting like I had powers and commanding people to do this and that. I would like to say I remember that event, but I only remember the “cosmic” level of social implosion that happened for me afterwards, which resulted in the utter and complete dismantling of a brand that up to that point was seen as transformative, and the bailing out of basically almost everyone that I cared about on me.

To be fair to them, the situation was actually insane, and they were scared. I would like to say that I have an explanation for all of these events and why they happened, but I don’t. However, it left me with:

• No money
• No social reach
• A collapsed business
• A mind that didn’t work right (for about 2 years after that I couldn’t construct ideas or sentences properly and what I said went from being convincing to essentially making no sense all the time)
• A lot of anger

This is where it gets into the next bit – which is how do you deal with being treated like some sort of demi-god all the time to where people won’t listen to ANYTHING you say? (At some point in my life I was more influential than Andrew Tate and I went from that to where nobody would answer my phone calls.)

Well I didn’t deal with that very well. The part of my self that probably could have dealt with it well was broken. The part of my mind that knew how to get out of the situation was destroyed. The mind that had built myself to the heights of success that I had experienced didn’t work anymore like it used to. I couldn’t remember anything very well. I couldn’t concentrate on normal things, let alone complex processes. I couldn’t even very well remember who I was or what had gotten me to this point.

This began a very long process of self healing that could not be sped up through any mechanism that I knew of at the time. I did several thousand hours of meditation. I read probably 400 books. I re-trained my memory. Probably the effort spent in rebuilding myself in terms of hours of sheer will-power has been ~10,000+ at least.

But the greatest battle I faced through all of this is the battle I had inside from being abandoned by my family and having my son taken out of my life and the person that I loved the most in the world turn her back on me when I needed her the most. The emotional feeling of lack of self worth and feeling like I am nothing after that has been nearly impossible to overcome.

While I would like to say that I am 100% there, I cannot claim that. In some ways, I am a better person than I have ever been. I can say that my mind works better than it has at previous times in my life in most ways. My sanity has been restored for a long period of time and I understand how to prevent something like that from happening again.

In other ways, I am still battling the sense of a lost self. The power that I have with people I have had to rebuild from less than zero and it has been more difficult than the first time I built it, because I have had to overcome a skepticism that I never faced in my life while battling a sense of loneliness and abandonment from not ever being able to hug my boy and tell him that I love him.

But in all this, I have persisted forward.

If you ask what has driven me to move forward in spite of the incredible pain, I would like to claim some sort of reason that is bigger than it is, but really it is just that I have great habits. I wake up and regardless of how I feel I discipline the mind for 5-7 hours daily, 7 days per week. I workout and my body is in shape. I eat well and manage my energy.

I’ve battled my way through suicidal ideations that wouldn’t go away no matter what I did and broken them apart with sheer force of will. I’ve struggled through rebuilding a Facebook account from zero to the current level. From being able to put a Facebook post out and do a half million dollars in sales from a single piece of copy to pushing as hard as I can to make $10000 or $100000. From living in a van to creating hundreds of millions in sales, then back to a van again I’ve climbed my way back.

I don’t know where all of this is going.

What I do know is that as long as I live and breathe long enough, that I will rise to greater heights than I have ever been. There is a lot to overcome – the greatest problem that I have is market perception. The person who spiked me with the amphetamines, I don’t know why he did it. I don’t know if he was trying to unalive me, or if there was some other motivation. It didn’t succeed completely as here I am, but it did succeed at temporarily taking my life that I knew from me and reducing my social power to near zero.

But I am still alive. I am not defeated. And given time and friends, and I will rise again and take so many people with me that it will seem like all accomplishments of the past are nothing at all but a speck of glory in time that seemed designed to simply show us what is possible and to demonstrate where we can go together.

I would like at this point in my life to say that I have everything figured out.

I don’t.

I would like to say that everything I have ever touched has turned to gold.

But I’m not Midas and I think he died in the end anyways.

I would like to claim that the next thing I will do is going to work better than anything I have ever done.

But I don’t know if it will.

I can’t predict the future and to my chagrin I don’t seem to have magical powers that operate in some sort of consistent or predictable way.

But what I will tell you is this:

David Wood is rising again.

I will fight through any obstacles that present themselves in my path. I will climb over mountains, swim across rivers, fight giants that appear in my path, and accomplish greatness.

While I may not have magical powers, I do have incredible gifts. I have the power to uplift others. I have the power to speak life into those who are around me. I have the power to speak belief into people in a way that changes the course of their destiny. I am a builder of leaders and an orchestrator of dreams.

More than anything, I am sharing this with you to inspire you.

You probably have not been through what I have and I hope that you don’t ever need to go through it to teach you the lessons that I had to learn.

If you are still here, there is nothing you cannot overcome.

You have another chance.

You have another day.

If the world rains loss on you but you are here, you are alive and have the power to face another challenge and win.

And if you lose the next challenge that presents itself, you can rise again and you can overcome the next.

You are not perfect, but you have the ability to be more perfect every day and as you keep fighting, you will gain power to fight and the new obstacles which present themselves will be overcome easier and easier.

If you have the ability to see and understand, you can build understanding even if your current level is low. If you have a mind that has been weakened by pain you can strengthen it through the force of your will. If you have a heart which is broken you can rebuild it, even if it is tough.

There is a way forward for you.

I believe that the future is going to present great challenges. I believe that some of these challenges will affect us in ways that are brutal to live through.

But we will survive.

We will eventually find our way back.

And when we do, we will thrive in a more powerful way than we ever have.

If you are willing to take this journey forward with me, I believe there are great things that we can do.

I believe we can make a powerful impact on people.

I believe we can raise up a new generation of leadership.

I believe that we can make a greater impact than we have ever made.

If you were ever hurt by these times – I apologize for any part I had in your pain and hope that you can find it within your heart to forgive me. More than that, I hope we can move forward and build something greater than we have ever built.

I don’t know why I decided to share this today.

I suppose there is someone on my Facebook who is probably struggling. Maybe your struggles are greater, or maybe they are less.

Maybe your wife left you – or your husband.

Maybe you can’t see your children either.

Maybe you feel like a phony inside and are trying to reconcile where you are in life with where you thought you would be.

Maybe you at one point had great power, lost it, and are fighting your way back.

Maybe you are struggling and you wake up each morning wanting to end it.

Look, I’ve been there.

Maybe you’ve lived through something incredibly violent like I have, or had people who pretended that they loved you only to rob you of your wealth or your name.

I’ve been there, too.

No matter what you have been through, know this:

You are more powerful than you think that you are.

And you can rise again.

Fight through it another day and eventually:

You will be living in the dream that you have always had in your heart – because your vision does matter, and you do have the power to do things that are more incredible than you have ever done.

And through it all, if you ever need someone to talk to – I’m here for you.

Rise up.

Have victory.

Breathe life into your vision again.

And more than anything:

Take. One. More. Step. Forward.

And I’ll be there waiting for you on the beaches of the world.

Have you been through some crazy life experiences that in the end made you better than you’ve ever been?

Let me know in the comments.

Love ya,
David Wood
Mentor of the New Leaders of the World

P.S. Follow my posts for empowering content and share this with someone you know. And know this:

I appreciate you.