My name is Akshay Nanavati, and my purpose here at Fearvana is to help you do 3 things:
1. Find your worthy struggle
2. Live your worthy struggle
3. Fall in love with every moment of the journey
We all have a worthy struggle waiting for us. It could be running a marathon, building a business, writing a book, raising a child, playing chess, anything! The path itself doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you give all of yourself to find it, live it and love it, because if you don’t seek out a worthy struggle, struggle will find you anyway, as it has often found me. As long as that struggle is worthy of who you are and who you want to be for yourself and for the world around you, that journey into Fearvana and beyond is what takes us from simply existing to fully living.
I call it a worthy struggle, because the road will be hard. It will involve challenge, struggle, and sometimes intense suffering. But that is not a bad thing. Adversity is one of our greatest gifts and a necessary access point to reach the next stage of our personal evolution.
The real question to ask yourself is not what is my passion, but what is the struggle I am willing to endure. Struggle comes before passion my friend. Passion is the result, not the starting point.
Through my work, I am blessed to be able to help people just like you create amazingly blissful lives by harnessing the power of fear. Although my training might seem unconventional and counterintuitive, countless people have transformed their lives from average to exceptional using my techniques and strategies.
I’m also no stranger to embracing and using fear to become the most extraordinary person I can be.
After moving to Austin, Texas from Bombay, Bangalore and Singapore, I overcame a lifestyle of drug addiction that killed two of my friends in high school. When I then decided to join the United States Marine Corps, two doctors told me that boot camp would kill me, thanks to a blood disorder I was born with. But I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Not only did I complete boot camp (with a twisted ankle, no less), but I was chosen as the honor graduate in Infantry school and went on to spend 7 months in Iraq where my job was to walk in front of our vehicle convoys to find explosives before they could destroy our vehicles.
That was just the beginning of my understanding of the positive power of fear and struggle. In 2012, I left a comfortable corporate job to drag a 190-pound sled 350-miles across the world’s second largest polar ice cap for a month. I’ve swam through underwater caves, almost been killed by a falling boulder while glacier caving, experienced severe altitude sickness while climbing in the Himalayas, and suffered through heat exhaustion while running across countries. But my greatest struggle came many years after the war. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and consequently struggled with depression and alcohol addiction that drove me to the brink of suicide. I then spent years studying neuroscience, psychology and spirituality to not only heal my own brain, but figure out what does it take to live a happy, succesful and meaningful life.
That is when I rejected the label of PTSD assigned to me and created a new one – Fearvana. I define Fearvana as the bliss that results from engaging our fears to pursue our own worthy struggle. I then wrote a book about the concept called “Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear Into Health, Wealth and Happiness.”
Fearvana Website: Click Here
Akshay’s Book:
Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear Into Health, Wealth and Happiness - Akshay Nanavati
Other Recommended Books:
Black Hawk Down - Mark Bowden
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us - Steve Leder
Recommended Movies:
Black Hawk Down
Hacksaw Ridge