We cannot teach people anything. We can only help them discover it within themselves. Galileo, they say if you speak to somebody at the level of the mind, you'll speak to the mind. If you speak through your heart, you'll speak to the heart. And if you speak through your lives and your life is a story, your change lives. Deepak Chopra. Today, we're going to share with you our journey to discovering the power of the temptation for managing service and juice stress. Some of you may be curious, what accent is that? Others may be thinking, he doesn't look like a soldier. And some of you may just be waiting for someone else to speak. I invite you to suspend your judgment to stay present and let's explore this path to inner wellness. I'm Michael and this is my partner Beck. My journey started in 2010 when I was deployed to Afghanistan as part of mentoring task force. I was an infantry section machine gunner. My initial experience of Afghanistan was one of sweeping valleys, snow cap mountains, and the joy of little kids coming up to us with smiles asking for lollies and bottles of water as we did patrols. Unfortunately, the reality of war is that it's not all postcards. And on the 24th of August, I was involved in a three and a half hour contact where my section 2 I see was shot and killed. I was returned to Australia, suffering full body involuntary muscular twitches. I was to the point where trying to drink from a water bottle or eating my food, I'd spill it on myself. I struggled lighting a cigarette. The conventional treatment I was put on numbed me and as you can see made me gain weight and just withdraw from my friends and my family. I didn't want to attend Christmas, I didn't want to attend birthday parties. I just went into a shell of myself. I was put on medications and started drinking a lot of alcohol. I was drinking around a bottle of alcohol a night just to numb some of the feelings and the thoughts that I would have at night. The medications stopped me from feeling anything. Fair enough, it stopped me from feeling too much about my deployment. But when you're sad, you're supposed to be able to cry. And there was a lot of times when I'd be thinking about things and I'd say to my partner, I really feel like I need to cry, but I just physically can't. This was the medications and this was the treatment that I was prescribed. I was suicidal and homicidal. Thankfully the support of my partner Beck gave me the strength to turn around and move on to a path of healing using alternative therapies and I'll allow her to talk a bit more about that. So our journey has had so many ups and downs. As you can see from this photo, being a carer for some with PTSD can take a really heavy toll on even a healthy person. This is what I call the ripple effect. I was depressed. I was lonely. I'd isolated myself. I suffered from so many illnesses and I had debilitating back pain that would leave me bed ridden for days and months on end. I had a lot of great weeks on end and it really wasn't helpful for my caring for Michael. But I did believe that my only priority as a carer was to care for Michael. My stuff, it wasn't even an issue. It just became backseat sort of stuff. When doctors told me that Michael would be on psychotropic medication for the rest of his life. I knew that things had to change. He was 25 and from what I could see, the supposed gold standard treatment was only making him dramatically worse. So I went searching for real solutions and I had to lead by example. So I turned to Google. And I got lost down that rabbit hole for a solid 12 months. I watched, I read, I researched, I contacted world leading academics to find real solutions. And to my surprise, there was a lot of acceptance for alternative treatments in other coalition countries, including the US and Canada. Google introduced me to a whole new world of healthcare. Food is medicine, cannabis as medicine. The importance of having a healthy endocannabinoid system, which I've never even heard of before, yet alone even knew that I had one. Yoga and meditation as a spiritual growth and healing tool, peer to peer mentoring programs helped us see that we weren't alone in this at all. And eventually, flotation, when I heard Joe Rogan speaking about it, I knew that the benefits were profound. But it took me six months to convince Michael to get in the tank. So two of the most important points that I've learned over this continual journey is to take responsibility of your own personal health and wellbeing. If we had continued to follow the doctor's orders, I have no doubt that Michael would have taken his life by now, or at least had multiple attempts. And number two is to find multiple modalities that resonate with you and to use them together to enhance their overall benefits. For us personally, we've found the two most symbiotic, cannabis and flotation. But allow Michael to explain flotation. Thanks. So as you've heard, there's a range of alternative treatments that have actually helped me regain a quality of life. But there's a select range of things that I actually attribute solely to flotation. One of the main things, in particular that I noticed after my very first float, was the overdue rest that I needed. Because I'm sure a lot of you are aware, veterans suffer from insomnia, night sweats, night terrors. These things don't allow you to get a proper night's rest. And so for me, as well as the adrenal fatigue from being in a combat zone for eight and a half months, I found that getting in that tank and hopping back out, it was like I caught up on four years worth of sleep that I'd just been missing out on. That allowed me to reconnect and almost come back to life as who I was. Another massive part of floating is it's helped me reconnect with my emotions. For a long time, as I said, I was numb. I didn't feel anything. I wasn't a proper partner to back. And so through floating, I've learned how to be happy, confident, how to love again. These are all emotions that were gone to me with complementing through cannabis and over time, I've gradually been able to in the tank get to a point where I'm now starting to reprocess some of the issues that are traumas that I experienced in Afghanistan and view them more in a positive frame of mind. And this has allowed me to not have such harsh triggers when I am remembering or reminiscing on things or it comes to an anniversary. We're now trying to start an organisation or have started an organisation in Australia called Weed and Warrior and we're active advocates for a range of modalities, yoga, flotation, nutrition, cannabis, trying to educate not just veterans but the broader service community about how you can manage your service problems and regain some form of equality of life. I would ask all of you who are either own tank centres or are starting tank centres to consider investing in veterans, invite them into your place and provide this experience that has immeasurable benefit. We're grateful for the opportunity to be here and I'd like to thank you all for listening to us.