Everyone’s healing journey is unique, beautiful and often times messy, especially in the beginning. And even sometimes messier is the life that led to our healing journey.

Andrew Aponick, like so many of us on this path, was raised in an often times chaotic household where abuse played out in its various forms. Not being a stranger to trauma, Andrew developed an extreme addiction to opioids while abusing most other drugs. For nearly 15 years Andrew was a slave to drug addiction.

Although an expert on human physiology, having earned a masters degree from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, as well as a strength and conditioning coach and personal trainer, deep down inside, beneath the surface, Andrew suffered greatly. Exercise and bodybuilding was one of his many addictions, and it led him to fitness modeling and working in entertainment and Hollywood on both sides of the camera where drug abuse and addiction run rampant. A place where, incidentally, many trauma survivors are drawn.

Andrew eventually hit rock bottom and found himself in a prison cell at the age of 33. It is from there that he decided to begin his healing and sobriety journey and to live in service to others as an activist and journalist as he eventually ran a nonprofit, Solutions Institute. Like most of those who have struggled with addiction, Andrew wasn’t quite ready to surrender. It wasn’t until Andrew began studying trauma, sitting with plant medicine, doing shadow work, attending 12-step meetings, working with a sponsor, getting back in touch with nature and taking his spiritual discipline seriously that he finally stayed on the healing path.