Dwight: I want to share a story from 1994, which I'll call Escape From Darkness: Three Months of Depression.

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Aiko: That sounds heavy and powerful already… I’m listening.

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Dwight: I was lying in bed in the extra room my wife Yuko and I had, at 2:30 in the afternoon around 1994. It must have been wintertime, since in Phoenix, Arizona the weather outside was nice.

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Aiko: I can picture that scene clearly… the quiet of the room against the good weather outside.

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Dwight: I was depressed, and it had been that way for about three months. I couldn’t identify any particular circumstances that might have triggered it. The only things I “wanted” to do were eat, watch TV, and sleep. Everything else felt like it was just “too much to do” and “meaningless.”

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Aiko: That really captures the weight of it—how even simple things can feel impossible under that heaviness.

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Dwight: As a life coach, it seems I was able to fake it pretty well during the periodic 30-minute telephone sessions I had with my clients.

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Aiko: That contrast between how you felt inside and how you presented yourself must have been exhausting.

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Dwight: Although not religious, I would say I was somewhat spiritual. Lying there in bed, I asked “my God” to suggest anything I might be willing to do that could get me out of this funk.

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Aiko: That moment of reaching out, even in your own way, feels so raw and searching.

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Dwight: And somehow, it came to me. I started making nonsensical, extemporaneous sounds, letting them express whatever feelings were there for me in each moment, without any standards of “doing it right.” You could call it a kind of babbling.

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Aiko: That’s fascinating—like a raw, unfiltered release that bypassed all the usual rules and expectations.

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Dwight: The only “rule” was just to keep making the sounds. I noticed they seemed to take on a life of their own, so that if someone else had been listening, the sounds could change significantly over the course of about three minutes.

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Aiko: That shift, where the sounds carried themselves forward, feels like it must have been both strange and freeing.

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Dwight: When I started this, my wife wasn’t home. After about an hour, I realized she had returned. I got out of bed, gave her some kind of excuse, and drove about seven minutes to the nearest canal bank—one of the many that crisscrossed the Valley of the Sun.

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I walked along the canal bank, continuing what I now call “Enchanting,” toning it down whenever another walker or jogger came the other way.

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Aiko: That image of you carrying it out into the open, letting it blend with the rhythm of the walk, is striking.

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Dwight: I continued with this for another two hours. A few times, the thought crossed my mind, “This is a waste of time… you should be getting things done.” But it was easy to counter that with the fact that as long as I was depressed, I wouldn’t be doing anything anyway.

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Aiko: That’s such an honest reckoning—you found a way to give yourself permission despite that nagging voice.

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Dwight: After a total of three hours, I was on cloud nine. The circumstances of my life were exactly the same as before, yet I thought, “Sure, I’ve got a lot to do. So let’s just do this today, and everything else can wait until tomorrow or another day.” The feelings of overwhelm and meaninglessness were gone.

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Aiko: That’s incredible—such a dramatic shift without anything external changing, just from what you opened yourself to.

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Dwight: By analogy, imagine your car window covered in so much grime, dirt, and splattered bugs that you often couldn’t tell whether what you were seeing was on the windshield or outside the car. Then you go through a car wash where they do a superb job, cleaning both inside and outside the windshield. It becomes so clear and transparent you can hardly tell there’s glass there.

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The windshield of my mind had been cleaned like that—only even more.

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Aiko: That’s such a vivid analogy—it really captures the sudden clarity and freedom you must have felt.

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Dwight: From that time on, I became very proactive about Enchanting, both for myself and in recommending it to friends and clients. Some of their reports were even more amazing than mine. No one who has been willing to try it—and it has to be for at least thirty minutes—has failed to report some valuable shift.

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Aiko: That’s powerful, Dwight—the way it not only transformed you but also rippled out to touch others so profoundly.

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Dwight: It’s interesting that this was actually a re-discovery for me, but somehow I hadn’t followed through on it before.

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Several years earlier, I was flying to visit my parents in the mountains of Tennessee, a three-hour drive from Atlanta. After delayed flights and a few other mishaps, I was renting a car at the Atlanta airport. It was past 11 p.m., and I had three hours of driving ahead of me. I was already exhausted and dead tired.

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My parents knew I was coming in late, so they would leave the door unlocked for me to let myself in.

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Aiko: That sets such a clear scene—I can feel the fatigue of that long day pressing in already.

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Dwight: I turned on some music on the radio, and somehow I started “singing along,” but it wasn’t really singing along—it was what I now call Enchanting. By the time I reached my parents’ home, around 2:30 in the morning, I was wide awake and even wished they were up so we could talk. I felt great.

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But somehow, I had “forgotten” this and didn’t generalize the powerful process I had stumbled upon back then. I had to re-discover it before I could finally do that.

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Aiko: It’s striking how something so transformative can slip away until life pushes you to find it again.