Finding Self Love when SBF Robbed Me

how can we come back from such harsh setback?

“Damn it, I fucked up royally.” I said to myself as I watched my FTX balance go from half mil to 0. 

Just like that, SBF robbed my savings, my dreams, and my dignity. The savings that I had been frugal all my life – skipping fancy restaurants for cheap Chinese takeouts (they are good tho), living with 4 roommates in a cramped SF apartment – all robbed just like that.

Devastation, hatred, fury were raging in my body. I can’t forgive these crooks and their buddies for robbing my freedom and my life. 

These emotions then quickly devolved into fear, panic, and self-blame. 

“How can I be so careless? How can I screw things up this badly?”

Feeling naked for the first time in my life, before I knew it, I was beating myself up into a deep downward spiral. 

— 

I was stuck in this rut for a few days as I watched more of this drama unfolding in realtime on Twitter, but eventually I knew I had to stop and climb out of this hole, or else I’d be consumed by the never-ending negativity that had engulfed so many other victims. 

I returned to the one true thing I know – meditation, a practice that I had long ignored. After a full 30 min session, I was able to find solace in it, and strangely enough, a revelation popped into my head.

“Love yourself; Be kind to yourself”

This message hit me like a rock and knocked me out of the negative state. With that message, all my past journeys to find self love – to hypnosis conferences, meditation retreats, ayahuasca in Peru, and biblical teachings – all came back to me. Thus I began a quest to dig deeper into self-love and to apply it to myself.. 

Self Love Requires Consistent Practice

Self-love requires intentional practice because by default we are wired to be negative. This is due to our biological survival instinct – always looking out for threats to protect our physical and ego safety. In layman’s terms, negativity outweigh positivity by a factor of 5 to 1 (check out my hypnosis blog https://bryanliu.blog/stumbling-into-a-hypnosis-conference-changed-my-mind-literally/), so no wonder it is much easier to get into a downward spiral instead of an upward one. 

To help myself find more self love, I engineered and applied a simple process to myself to replace negativity with self-love.

These are the 5 techniques to I used to form self loving habits:

1. Break the state of my current thinking pattern. Quickest way to do so is by hacking the body with Power Poses. Hold your Power Pose for 10 secs and feel the change. (Power poses are like Superman poses)

2. Quiet my mind by shifting focus from the brain to the heart. Once the attention is on the heart, expand the conscious awareness to the universe and feel its majestic (I am just a speck of dust in the universe). Then draw in the feeling of love from the universe into my heart. 

3. Look down at my heart and smile. The only person who can love me is me. By smiling to my heart, I point the happy emotions from smiling right back at my heart. 

4. Anchor every inhale to breathing in love, and every exhale to spread love to others. What you give out you get in return, this is the third law of physics.

5. Apply positive affirming self-talk by saying “I am receiving love from the universe” and “Bryan (replace with your name), you are loved because I love you.”

Whenever I find myself stuck in a downward spiral of self negativity, I apply these techniques, and magically feeling of confidence courses through my body and melts away the negativity. Like the sunshine after the hurricane, self-love, self-respect, self-appreciation reveal themselves once the negativity clears away. And with that, I stopped beating myself over things I didn’t have control over and stopped being fixated on the loss.

Losing my savings with FTX sucked, but I can view it with love and realize that it is just a number in the bank account – I can always make more. Once I freed my attention from the traumatic event, I can free myself from being a victim and instead focus on empowering myself through self-love. In times like this, self-love is the one resource we can give ourselves and no one can rob that from us. 

If you find yourself often in a downward spiral, I hope you can find more self-love by applying these techniques. During these trying times, we can all love ourselves more.

Smile to Your Heart, my friends.

—

I wasn’t going to share my experience publicly but I did make a post on Reddit and have gotten quite a lot of responses (99% haters, but 1% reached out to me cuz they were also affected). It tells me many are suffering from this episode, and we need to support each other in times like this.

So, I’m going to write about my experience with FTX in 3 parts:

• Part 1 – Finding self love when you got robbed

• Part 2 – How I am turn this into a constructive and positive outcome

• Part 3 – What I learned about money

If this story resonates with you, pls comment below, I’d love to hear your story