Introduction
Introduction By: Patrick Nolan
Welcome to this week’s ChapterKey. I’m Patrick Nolan, and today we’re entering Chapter 6 — Exploring Your Elements.
In this powerful and personal chapter, Paul walks us through the unraveling of a life that looked stable on the outside, but was quietly fractured within. What emerged from that moment was the foundation of the Decode Framework: the recognition that healing isn’t just about the body. It’s about the interplay of Mind, Body, and Soul and what happens when we start treating them as a unified system.
Whether you’re newly diagnosed or years into your journey, this chapter will help you reflect on what’s been calling for your attention, and what you’ve been trying to outrun.
Exploring Your Elements
Written By: Paul Cobbin
Narrated By: Paul Cobbin
(For narration goto the ChapterKey Audio Edition of this chapter)
I was walking through Suva city in Fiji, days after the CAD diagnosis. My fitness level at the time was relatively high and walking was something I did quite a lot when visiting international cities to keep my physical health in peak shape for the rigours of international business. I remember the day quite clearly. I was walking between a meeting with the minister for infrastructure and my next one with the Fijian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
To fill time I rang the chair of my corporation back in Australia to advise him of my fresh diagnosis with CAD and CSVD. The call itself was rather matter of fact, even procedural to be honest, but the moment after I hung up I needed to stop and sit under a Betel Nut tree to gather my composure. When I say ‘gather my composure’, I’m talking all out emotional upheaval culminating it terse words being shouted at the defenceless tree and a healthy dose of crying, not in pity of my diagnosis, but in drawing a line in the sand of my life long career.
I was fractured. My body felt quite fine, I was fit, I ate healthily, yet my mind and soul were smashed. This wasn’t my first rodeo with a chronic condition but it was the first one to impact my career. That feeling of my career disappearing under my feet was as real as standing under a shower. Work life, as I came to enjoy it, would be over. In addition, part of my recommendation was to reduce travel and refrain from dangerous environments like my sojourns to Papua New Guinea. Danger was what I did for a living and I cherished the opportunities of doing business on the frontier of humanity.
But, in that short phone call I had personally called a halt to that life, I knew at that moment, that I had voluntarily kickstarted the demise of my professional career and I was shattered. That moment under the Betel Nut tree was the starting gate of internal struggle between my three elements. What started as a subtle moment became all out brutal competition for my limited personal resources.
My mind was having a field day, with Charlie running wild, playing with my emotions and encouraging thoughts of the apocalypse. As far as Charlie was concerned, I was doomed.
My body refused to give up its dominance as the stoic survivor. Fitness had to be maintained, or the wheels of civilisation would definitely fall off. So I did more laps in whatever pool I could find, and I walked extra kilometers every day, with my watch dutifully coaching me toward continuous improvement.
Again, if I’m brutally honest I had no idea my Soul even existed at this stage. As far as my capitalist self knew. The Soul was some wu wu approach to religion so my spirituality just got left behind entirely.
The breaking point of my internal struggle with the diagnosis happened when I was back home in Australia. I was a few months into the CAD/ CSVD diagnosis and I began to get aggravated easily and that’s when my wife gently stepped in suggesting I needed to talk to someone about my mental health. I talk about this in more detail elsewhere, but my point is, the moment felt like a strategic failure indicating that the focus on my physical health without addressing my mental health was patently floored and the single-element approach collapsed when I called a psychologist and we explored the root cause of my dilemma.
The physical fitness had to continue to facilitate mental and spiritual rehabilitation but it was clear a functionally integrated approach was necessary to uplift all my elements.
As the subject of my own survival, I had to each element to have it’s own truth and somehow I had to give all three of them an equal voice if I was to have an empowered diagnosis.
