How I Bent Reality… or Maybe It Bent Me

What a near-death diagnosis taught me about the limits of science, the power of belief, and the mystery in between

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade

It started with the kind of dizziness that makes the floor feel alive.

One minute I was fine. The next, I couldn’t get up. Forty minutes on the ground, half-conscious, too weak to move, trying to slow my breath and convince myself this wasn’t the end.

When the EMTs arrived, everything looked “normal.” Heart, blood sugar, blood pressure a little high. They said I was dehydrated.

Maybe they were right. But the truth is, I wasn’t dying of thirst. I was caught between two versions of myself… one still clutching the old life, the other already reaching for the new.

I’d been manifesting a change for months—better health, more purpose, a new chapter—and it felt like life had finally lost its patience and slammed the accelerator.

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The Big Idea

A few days before the collapse, life felt oddly in-between.
Things were good… better than good in some ways.
I’d slowed down, pulled back from the grind, was meditating more, writing again, spending quiet mornings in my own company.

But underneath all that stillness, part of me was restless.
The old habits—workaholic rhythms, comfort food, a drink at night—were still orbiting. I was happier, but not fully changed. It was like the old version of me was whispering, “don’t forget who you were,” while the new version was whispering back, “then you’ll never become who you’re meant to be.”

Physically, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
I’d been on TRT for years, using a small dose of anastrozole to manage balance. I took Cialis daily, not for performance but for vascular and muscle benefits… something I’d written about and vetted through the science (Liu et al., 2005; Mimit Health, 2025).
It wasn’t reckless. It was routine.

Then came the creatine.
I’d ordered a new brand… gummies, sweet, easy to overdo. I’ve got a sweet tooth and an impulsive streak; it’s not a great combo. Over about a day and a half, I probably downed fifty grams. Without much water. Add in summer heat, stress, caffeine, and a creeping blood pressure that had been ticking higher, and I’d set the stage for a biochemical car crash.

That’s the part no one tells you: an acute kidney injury doesn’t usually come from one bad choice… it comes from a dozen small ones colliding in the perfect sequence.

When it hit, it hit fast.
First the lightheadedness, then the spinning room, the sweat, the collapse.
The body’s way of saying, “You’re done negotiating.”

And in that moment—on the floor, half lucid, the paramedics checking vitals—it felt less like a medical event and more like a cosmic interruption.
As if life was saying, “You’ve been rehearsing transformation long enough. Let’s see if you can live it.”

That’s where this story really begins.
Because what followed wasn’t just an injury. It was a boundary moment… between physiology and psyche, matter and meaning, control and surrender.

For years, I’d practiced presence, taught surrender, visualized healing.
But this time, I wasn’t sitting in meditation trying to do the work.
I was living inside it—stumbling through fear, certainty, surrender, and back again—learning what my own frameworks actually feel like when your life depends on them.

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The Breakdown

The tests came back with numbers that made no sense.
Creatinine through the roof. Protein in the urine. It should have cleared by now, but it wasn’t.

Weeks passed.
Every lab came with a new kind of dread. I tried to stay calm, to stay “in practice,” but the waiting is what breaks people. The waiting is where the mind invents its own monsters.

Then the biopsy results arrived.
My nephrologist called, voice careful in that way doctors use when they’re about to say something bad.

“We found amyloid deposits.”

That’s the kind of sentence that rearranges your insides.

I’d treated patients, coached people through crisis, written about resilience and purpose. But the second you hear your own name next to the word amyloidosis, everything goes quiet.

The statistics start running through your head like a slideshow: incurable, blood disorder, heart failure, kidney failure, two-to-ten-year prognosis.

I remember just sitting there, staring at my hands, not feeling like they belonged to me anymore.

That night I didn’t sleep.

I woke up at 3 a.m. soaked in sweat, staring at the ceiling, rehearsing a thousand what-ifs. The part of me that studies quantum biology wanted to analyze it. The part of me that teaches identity transformation wanted to transcend it.
But there’s no transcendence when you’re staring down your own mortality.

You just feel everything.

The next day I called my family.
We sat around the living room—my brothers, sisters, my mom, dad, nieces nephews… and I told them what was happening.

No performance. No stoic “doctor voice.” Just truth.

We cried together.

I told them what I was thinking… about life, about death, about the fact that I’d rather die consciously than fade slowly.

And for the first time in my life, I said out loud something I’d always kept private: that if I ever got to the point where I couldn’t function, I didn’t want to hang around for the slow decline.

I expected shock or argument. What I got instead was unconditional love.
No judgment, no panic… just presence.

And somehow, that broke me open in a different way. I had never done that before in that way. Leaning in to being held and helped by the people who have always had my back but perhaps I did not always see it or appreciate it.

For years I’d helped other people, including family, face this kind of moment… clients with cancer, heart disease, autoimmune collapse.
I’d been the one saying, “You’re not your diagnosis. You’re the consciousness behind it.”

But when it’s you, all of that gets tested.
You find out whether your beliefs are just ideas or actual ground you can stand on.

Honestly, I handled it all worse… more scared and destroyed… than I ever thought I would be. Or maybe I did it just right? I don’t know. Part of me wishes I would have been braver. But I love my family so me like that.

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Living the Practice

After that conversation, something in me softened… and something else cracked wide open.

The fear didn’t go away. It just became more honest.
I stopped trying to outthink it. I stopped pretending I was above it. In truth, I had no choice. It had its way with me and I was obliged to let it.

I wasn’t sitting in meditation every morning doing structured breathwork or visualizations like I’d done in the past.
Instead I was engaged with it all day long… one constant conversation (battle may be a better way to describe it).
It was happening all the time.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, sure I could feel the disease moving through me.

Then the next morning, I’d make coffee, sit in the quiet, and feel a strange calm spread through my body… like something deeper than me whispering, You’re okay Jade.
It wasn’t positivity. It wasn’t denial. It was both terror and trust woven together.

The swings were pretty violent.
One hour I’d be convinced I was dying and consumed by fear.
The next, I’d feel this unexplainable certainty that I wasn’t… or if I was I could handle death.

And it wasn’t just mental. It was visceral. My whole body was participating… fear in the gut, calm in the chest, a strange clarity in the head that only came after paralyzing anxiety.

Looking back, it was as if years of studying, meditating, breathing, teaching—all the intellectual work—had built an infrastructure in me that could now run automatically.

I didn’t have to “do” the techniques. My system knew them by heart.
So instead of practicing belief, I was being it… inconsistently, imperfectly, but completely.

Some days I’d spiral.
I’d think about my mother losing a son, about unfinished books, about whether I’d wasted my life chasing meaning that couldn’t save me.

Other days I’d find myself walking through my neighborhood at sunset, feeling the air on my skin, and this deep knowing would surface… it’s not over. This isn’t how it ends.

I also felt there was work to be done. And then I would feel this is over and I should be proud of how I lived, loved, created and grew.

That back and forth never stopped.
It wasn’t clean or linear. It was a storm of contradictions.
But within it, something started to shift. The panic didn’t vanish, but I could witness it. I could hold it without letting it consume me.

That’s when I started noticing my body changing.
The swelling faded. My energy returned. The labs started moving in the right direction.

At first, I didn’t believe it. Healing doesn’t usually work like that, especially not with this diagnosis.
But the numbers didn’t lie.

My nephrologist was confused. My oncologist was cautious.
More tests. More waiting.
Then the call came.

“Jade… we’re sorry for everything you’ve been through. It’s not AL amyloidosis. It’s a rare, benign variant… amyloid gelosin. No chemotherapy required. Nothing to do. Let’s just keep an eye on the kidney’s to make sure they continue to heal.”

I didn’t celebrate. I didn’t cry.
I just sat there in silence.
Relief, disbelief, gratitude, confusion… it all landed at once, like every version of me was exhaling together.

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The Paradox

It’s only been a few weeks since that call.
I haven’t said much publicly. I’ve been quieter than usual… off social media, off the radar, watching life from the edges instead of narrating it.

Physically, I feel fine. Normal, even.
Happy, grateful, lighter. Some days I wake up and feel a rush of pure relief.
But then there’s this other feeling underneath it all… like something fundamental has been rearranged.

I can’t quite find the old rhythm.
The world looks the same, but I don’t feel like the same person moving through it.
Something in me definitely died… something subtle but deep. The version of me that thought he could steer everything, reason with reality, push or pull his way into outcomes… he’s gone.

What replaced him is quieter. Slower.
More curious than certain.
I don’t feel “healed.” I feel different.

It’s strange how life works.
One moment you’re staring at your own mortality, bargaining with the universe.
The next, you’re told you’re fine… and somehow, that’s just as destabilizing.

Relief can be its own kind of shock.
I find myself smiling at random moments, then suddenly feeling this wave of… I don’t even know what to call it. Gratitude, yes. But also reverence. Fragility. Awe.
Like the ground is still soft from the quake.

I keep thinking about the phrase “bending reality.”
Everyone wants that to mean control… to manifest the outcome they want.
But maybe real manifestation is what happens when reality bends you… when it cracks the shell you’ve been living in so you can finally see the world without filters.

I don’t know if that’s what happened here.
Maybe it was coincidence.
Maybe it was medicine and timing and hydration and luck.
Maybe it was consciousness doing what consciousness does… collapsing probability into the only timeline that could teach me what I still needed to learn.

All I know is, I’m still here.
And whoever this version of me is, he’s more alive than the one who fell to the floor in June.

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The Practical Takeaway

People ask me what I did to get better, expecting a list… supplements, breathwork, visualizations. I’m not sure I did anything at all.

But that’s the strange thing about manifestation: when it works, it never feels like a technique.

It feels like coincidence.

In the beginning I tried to “do” the work… meditate, visualize, repeat the mantras. But as the weeks went on, it stopped feeling like a practice and started feeling like a presence that lived with me.

I’d wake up terrified and whisper, I’m okay.
Not as affirmation… more like instinct.
I’d catch myself throughout the day feeling the outcome I wanted as if it already existed.

Not forcing it, just being it.
And when fear came, I let it flood me. I didn’t resist it; I folded it into the field.

That’s the paradox: the deeper I surrendered, the stronger my agency felt.
The less I tried to command reality, the more it seemed to organize itself around me.

People talk about “manifesting” as if it’s shopping for outcomes in the quantum store.
But it’s messier than that.
It’s living in a constant dialogue with uncertainty… equal parts creator and creature.

The moment you think you did it, reality corrects you.
The moment you think you had no hand in it, reality winks back.

I’ve experienced this before:
The hand that healed faster than predicted after I saw it whole in my mind for months.
The book deal that unfolded exactly as I’d visualized, right down to the elevator ride and the conference table… except the table was rectangular, not round.
Each time, it felt supernatural when it happened… and perfectly rational in hindsight.

That’s the nature of this work… it erases its own footprints.
When consciousness collapses probability, the resulting world feels inevitable.
So you’re left wondering: Did I bend reality? Or did it bend me?

Maybe both.
Maybe neither.
Maybe that’s the point.

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Final Thoughts

I keep circling back to the same question:
Was this all coincidence?
Or did something actually move beneath the surface… some intelligence that rearranged matter and meaning just enough to save my life?

Part of me thinks it’s complete bullshit.
I mean, come on. Bodies heal. Labs fluctuate. Medicine misses things all the time.
That’s the scientist & clinician in me talking… the man who believes in data, mechanisms, and evidence.

But then there’s the other part of me. The one who has been teaching this work and seeing it first hand.

The man who has seen tumors shrink on scans that shouldn’t have.
The man who’s watched someone cure incurable hepatitis B from doing this work (watch that story here), whose friend Gary’s Hughe’s disease simply disappeared, whose client Darcy’s pain evaporated overnight. And countless other stories.
Are those all coincidences too?
Maybe. Probably.

But how many coincidences add up before you start to wonder if “coincidence” is just the name we give to something we don’t yet understand?

The truth is, manifestation… if that’s even the right word… has to feel like coincidence.
That’s the only way reality could work.

If consciousness is truly entangled with matter, the moment the probability collapses, it would have to appear rational, obvious, inevitable.
Because that’s what reality does… it self-corrects. It hides its own magic behind logic so we don’t lose our minds trying to make sense of it.

So maybe I didn’t “think myself” well.
That phrase drives me crazy.
No one thinks themselves sick, and no one simply thinks themselves whole.
We engage with life. We co-create with forces that don’t fit into PowerPoint slides or PubMed abstracts.
This isn’t mental gymnastics… it’s spiritual physics.

Maybe that’s all this was.
Maybe my kidneys healed because biology is resilient and luck was on my side.
Maybe belief had nothing to do with it.
Or maybe consciousness did what it always does… it joined the conversation and helped nudge the system back toward coherence.

I honestly don’t know.
And I’m okay not knowing.

I feel lucky.
I feel bewildered.
And I feel like some part of me died so another part could finally live in that space between skepticism and faith… where science and spirit aren’t fighting anymore, they’re just… talking.

Maybe that’s what bending reality really looks like.
Not fireworks.
Not proof.
Just life quietly rearranging itself until the impossible feels obvious.

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PS: If this story resonates—if you’ve ever felt caught between science and spirit, certainty and mystery—and you’re ready to explore how belief, biology, and identity intertwine, that’s the work we do inside Next Level Human Coaching.

It’s not about positive thinking or trying to control reality.
It’s about learning to live in dialogue with it… to rewrite, rewire, and retrain the mind and body so you can meet whatever comes next with coherence and grace.

Spots are limited, but if it’s time, you’ll know.
👉 www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching

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References

Liu, P. Y., Death, A. K., & Handelsman, D. J. (2005). Androgens and cardiovascular disease. American Journal of Physiology–Renal Physiology, 289(1), F3–F16. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajprenal.00034.2005

Mimit Health. (2025). Tadalafil (Cialis) as an anti-aging and pre-workout supplement: Science-backed benefits. Retrieved from https://mimithealth.com/blog/tadalafil-cialis-as-an-anti-aging-and-pre-workout-supplement-science-backed-benefits