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On this episode of Oh...You Didn't Know, Road Dogg and Casio welcome Marcus "Buff" Bagwell to the program! Marcus talks about his history, recovery, redemption, future plans and everything in-between!

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Anonymous

Let the essay begin..... I remember the first episode the D-O-GG mentioned he practiced something called mindfulness. I didn't say anything then, but was curious who got him started. After hearing Buff, I'm guessing it was DDP? PSA: That shit is legit. I started practicing mindfulness about two years ago. I wasn't in the best of places. No. It wasn't substance abuse. I was at my wit's end and had heard good things about it from multiple different sources. I decided to give it a shot. Seriously life altering. The first time I meditated, I actually fell asleep. I was at about the 25 minute mark of a 30 minute meditation and was a silence in the recording. When I woke up, I couldn't believe I had fallen asleep so quickly. Usually we're talking 45 minutes minimum up to complete insomnia. The only reason I stuck with it is to make me fall asleep at night. Then I started noticing changes. Bad things inside my head started to vanish. I think the first thing I noticed was small things that used to give me anxiety no longer did. Once I noticed that, I was hooked. I'm legally blind and used to be extremely self concious about it.. Self concious to the point where I would get anger based panic attacks in situations where it was obvious I couldn't see well. That's a very bad thing. I've taken taekwon-do on and off since 95 and I'm known for not seeing well, being the second most flexible person there behind only the yoga instructor and hitting incredibly hard, even by black belt standards. I've broken legit baseball bats with my shin on bad days and been in a room with 300 black belts and have more than one of them come up to me baffled by how hit like that. I used to go out running first thing in the mornings becuase I can't really see tthe puddles so I just run through them. If somebody is coming the other way and I don't see them soon enough and splash them and say something stupid.......That would not be good. Those panic attacks were gone in about six months. Other weird as hell side effects: I used to bite my fingernails. It's a bad habit I never broke. I stopped without even trying to. I just all of a sudden had to start cutting them. The length of my dreams used to be 10 to 20 seconds long. They're now a minimum of 45 and i swear I've had them longer than two minutes. It's tough to tell because you're actually in the dream. These things are so long and vivid that now I know where people who get visions or whatever happen to them when they meditate just fell asleep and things went nuts. I've battled major depression for a while. I was on one medication and looking for another to go with it when I started meditating. I very quickly stopped looking for a second and I'm starting to go off the first one now. Cognitive distortions are when you think of something in an unrealistic way. I mean this in a very basic sense that literally everybody does. Stuff like somebody saying something and you taking it the wrong way. With the exception of the most popular cognitive distortin amongst all people, catastrophizing, I don't get them any more and don't catastrophize any where near as much or as hard as I used to. I've changed quite a bit and do a lot of things now that I never would've before. I've been so impressed with the progress I've made that I now have well over 100 audiobooks on mindfulness and almost all of them are by somebody who has a PhD in some type of psychology. Since the book that got me started (the mindful way through depression) is considered a third wave version of CBT, there's a ton of those books in there, too. I even have books for mindfulness helping with things I don't have or even know somebody who has. I have one for mindfulness with bipolar disorder and one for mindfulness for borderline personality disorder. At this point, I'm basically just listening to anything I can get my hands on by somebody with a foundation in psychology. I've found that foundation keeps the spiritual weirdness out of it. I think the one thing I've heard that I agree with the most is that mindfulness should be viewed towards the brain like exercise is for the body. In it's most basic form, it's basically concentration training and anchoring yourself in the present moment so you don't swell on the past or worry about the future. The benefits I've gotten for what I'm actually doing is insane. At this point I consider myself a buffet Buddhist. My thoughts on god and religion can get insulting fast to a believer. I view my buddhism more as a philosophy than a religion. Taoism can be either or. The fact that I associate with anything associated with a religion speaks volumes to anybody that knows me. I typed all that nonsense because a lot of people struggle with a lot of things. Mindfulness, especially if combined with CBT, can help with a lot of different things if you try it. MBSR is for people with severe pain or who are terminally ill, for example. If you're getting formal help for something that's bothering you, I wouldn't stop that. The good thing is you don't have to in order to give a shot. I wish I did it decades ago. It could've saved me loads of suffering.

Rob Graves

Glad we’ve still got Buff.