Meditation, breathwork and plant medicine have all played a role in helping Britton move on from his past as a “mindless warrior”

By Sam Riches, March 14, 2022, /TheGrowthOp/

Eben Britton didn’t know who he was without football.

After six years in the National Football League, his career was over at the age of 28. Injuries had caught up to the 6’6” and 310-pound offensive lineman who left the sport “physically, mentally and emotionally destroyed.”

Playing the game that he had dedicated his life to since he was 12-years-old — one that had brought him purpose and validation and identity — was no longer an option. So he started writing about it instead.

In articles for publications like Playboy, Leafly and The Cauldron, a short-lived digital venture from Sports Illustrated, Britton revealed that cannabis was his preferred method of pain management throughout his career.

In an interview with New York Post in 2016, he also said he consumed the plant before three of his games, games which were among “the best he ever played.”

Britton’s openness that he preferred plant medicine to pharmaceutical painkillers was celebrated in some corners of the sport but fretted about in others. He touched a nerve, but more importantly, he had found a purpose for the next chapter of his life.

His use of cannabis “felt like the only true thing I had to share about the physical experience of what I had gone through, Britton, 34, tells The GrowthOp from his home in Los Angeles. Prescription anti-inflammatories wreaked havoc on his digestive system and painkillers made him “feel totally insane.”

Cannabis was different.

“I could come home from a long day of the grind, I could smoke some cannabis and I would feel mentally, emotionally and physically decompressed,” he says. “I was able to recover. I was able to connect with my loved ones. I was able to get a good night’s sleep and wake up the next day feeling rejuvenated and ready for another day.”

After one of Britton’s articles highlighted his injury history, dependence on Adderall and relationship to cannabis, his agent called.

He wanted to connect Britton to Kyle Turley, a former NFL All-Pro offensive lineman, who, in retirement, founded his own hemp-derived CBD company, Neuro XPF.

“I think you two have a lot to discuss,” his agent told him.

Britton was well aware of who Turley was. Growing up, he had modelled his game after the former star.

“He was one of the guys who was my idol growing up as a young football player, a true offensive-line trench warrior,” he says.

Turley had been reading Britton’s work and asked him to participate on a panel of athletes at the Southwest Cannabis Convention in Phoenix.

Britton wasn’t sure what to expect, or why his story was particularly important but he felt “drawn to [his] purpose” of sharing his experience.

At the conference, beyond former athletes, he met medical consumers who were military veterans, cancer survivors, families with children with seizure disorders, people from every walk of life that were benefiting from cannabis.

“It really set me on this quest of learning everything I could about the history and science of cannabis, but also about the importance of sharing the truth of our experiences, and the transformative nature of sharing what we’ve gone through in our lives,” he says.

That motivation is also the impetus for The Eben Flow: Basic Tools to Transform Your Life, a book Britton released last month that documents his life in football and the methods he used to repair himself after leaving the game.

“I wanted to distil down all of the information that I gathered, the things that had really worked for me and the basics for establishing a fundamental level of well-being in your life in a very accessible way that anyone could pick up and started applying to their life, the moment they read it, to start feeling better,” he says.

Throughout his life, cannabis has been one of those tools. The plant has always been successful at reining in his ego.

“No matter how far out I would get flung on an ego trip of being a warrior, a football player, the star athlete, cannabis was always something that would bring me back to the centre,” he says.

In retirement, as he began to unpack the traumas of his life and confront the pain he’d previously been able to ignore, he started to pursue psychedelic therapies, including psilocybin, LSD and Ayahuasca ceremonies.

“What these plants truly do, is they provide you with the gift of being able to let go of your baggage, and all the traumas and the pain and the things that we’re carrying around on our shoulders day in and day out, that are having a definite effect on our behaviours, our psychology or personality, how we relate to the world and ourselves,” he says. “The plants allow us the experience of letting go of needing to carry all of that so that we can get back to the truth of who and what we are.”

Meditation, breathwork and support groups have also all played a role in Britton’s post-football life. Tools that he says “are really about reintroducing people to the majesty of themselves.”

Formerly the co-host of Mike Tyson’s Hotboxin’ podcast, Britton now produces and hosts his own podcast, also named the Eben Flow, where he regularly discusses his use of plant medicine and his life after football.

He says athletes, in particular, have a stage to share their experiences and a responsibility to speak from an “authentic place.”

“I would argue that most pro athletes, and even beyond that, most highly productive people in the world, have experienced immense amounts of emotional or physical trauma in their lives, which is part of that seed that creates the paradigm of thinking we need to overachieve to prove our worth to the world,” he says. “Plant medicine is an invaluable tool in relieving us of that burden. It doesn’t make us less productive, in fact, in many ways, it lightens our load to such an extent that we become the greatest versions of ourselves. I think it’s an invaluable tool in anyone’s life journey of coming back to themselves.”

This article was first posted on TheGrowthOp.