Scott Russell
I woke up bleeding.
The gauze packed into my neck — the wound from an abscess the size of a baseball that had been cutting off my airway — had dried to the pillow. When I rolled in my sleep it tore free.
I went into the bathroom with a razor and a pair of tweezers.
And I started digging into my own neck.
I was convinced there was gauze still inside the wound. There wasn't. To this day I can't tell you what I was pulling out. What I know is that I was in full flight from reality — a man completely separated from his own mind, lost in the wreckage of what heroin had made of me.
That bathroom in Nashville was my bottom.
Not because it was the worst thing I'd ever done.
But because somewhere in the blood and the panic and the silence — I finally heard it.
This has to end
Before the Darkness, There Was a Kid From Syracuse.
I grew up in Syracuse, New York. Single mother. Irish Catholic. Tough love and backyard football on every holiday. Straight-edge kid. Against drugs. Against cigarettes. Full of zeal for the game and no idea what was coming.
My father was a Marine who built a life on the west coast without me. I never had the "dad left me" syndrome — you can't miss a stranger. But I was a boy who had to figure out how to be a man without a blueprint. There was a low-level fear in me I couldn't name. A nervousness I couldn't shake.
Drugs and alcohol fixed it.
For a while.
The first time I shot heroin I felt something I'd been searching for my whole life without knowing what I was looking for. Warmth. Completeness. Relief from myself.
I remember thinking: I don't want this to end.
I knew I was screwed.
The Disease Travels With You.
The heavy hand of heroin clutched my throat for years. Hollow face. Feeble frame. I fled Syracuse to South Florida chasing treatment — couldn't hold 60 days clean. The street became my pillow. I bounced around in what I can only call motel hell, got mixed up with the wrong people, and fled north to Nashville convinced a change of scenery would save me.
It didn't.
This disease travels with you. It doesn't care what state you're in. It doesn't care that you moved. It will rear its ugly head until you either get sober or die.
I've done both.
In Nashville I fell through a floor of darkness I didn't know existed. Speedballs into my neck. The abscess. The hospital where the doctor cut me open without a single word and sent me on my way.
That night in the bathroom with the razor and the tweezers — that was the most insane moment of my existence.
And it was the beginning of the end of the war.
June 13, 2016.
I was 29 years old. No money. Deteriorating health. Bleeding from the neck and arms.
By the grace of God I was sponsored into a program in South Florida. And something happened in those early days I still can't fully explain.
I woke up one morning with a thought I had never had before:
I'm going to be okay.
Not trying to be. Not hoping to be.
I am.
That thought met me the next morning. And the morning after that. Three days in a row it rose with me like the sun.
In all my years of forcing and willing and begging my way toward recovery, I had never felt that. Because I'd always been trying to make myself okay.
Now, for the first time, I simply was.
I was a knucklehead saved by grace. And I was finally ready to cooperate with it.
Getting Sober Was the Starting Line.
Then the Real Work Began.
A thought arrived in recovery and refused to leave — a spiritually-centered clothing brand. Not recovery slogans. Not Christian merchandise. Something that bridged the gap. Something that wore the message without over-explaining it.
I had zero business experience. I learned to screen print my own merch by hand. I built it grassroots — starting in Broward County and working my way up through Palm Beach — one shirt, one conversation, one community at a time.
Each shirt carried a message. Each customer walked with a purpose.
The brand caught fire across South Florida.
2019 — From The Grave Podcast was born.
Someone invited me on a podcast to talk about FTG. The moment I sat in front of a microphone, something in me recognized its home.
I started hosting my own show — raw, unfiltered, zero script. Spirituality. Recovery. The psychology of transformation. What it actually costs to become someone new. The podcast grew. My voice started traveling into college auditoriums, treatment centers, prisons, high schools, and nonprofits.
2020 — I received my mantra.
I became a practitioner of Vedic Meditation — and it changed the texture of everything. The way I moved through the world. The way I heard silence. The way I understood what was happening underneath the surface of my own mind.
This wasn't spiritual hobby. This was the beginning of going deeper than I'd ever gone.
Somewhere in those years — I found my community.
The CrossFit recovery communities across South Florida showed me something I hadn't seen modeled before: people in recovery who weren't just surviving. They were living. Fully. Loudly. With everything they had. That mattered more than I can put into words.
I was learning that sobriety wasn't the destination. It was the launching pad.
Then a Toxic Relationship Sent Me to Therapy.
And Everything I Thought I Knew About Myself Broke Open.
I didn't think I had trauma.
I was wrong.
About three or four years into sobriety I started seeing a therapist — not because I wanted to, but because a relationship had forced my hand. I walked into that first session convinced I was pretty well put together for someone who'd been where I'd been.
My therapist had other plans.
He was profoundly strong. Gentle. Commanded respect without demanding it. And he challenged everything I thought I was.
Week by week — for the next five years — he introduced me to parts of myself I had never been willing to see. The victim triangle. The patterns passed down through generations, from person to person, decade to decade, each one carrying pain they never asked for and didn't know how to put down.
I started to see it so clearly. And it hurt exactly as much as clarity is supposed to hurt.
The work wasn't loud or dramatic. It was slow. Consistent. Often uncomfortable. The most unglamorous spiritual work I've ever done — and the most important.
Once a week for five years. Through the great and the ugly of living one day at a time.
I came out the other side knowing things about myself I couldn't have learned any other way. And I came out carrying something I'd never had before — genuine compassion for the version of me that was just trying to survive.
That's where self-love actually starts. Not in a moment. In five years of weekly honesty.
The Meditation Got Deeper. Then Breathwork Arrived.
In the last couple of years my meditation practice has gone to places I didn't know existed. Working one-on-one with my teachers, going into the most wounded parts of myself — places I never knew how to see, let alone heal.
Then, almost two years ago, I was introduced to breathwork.
It was easily the most profound spiritual experience of my life.
Nothing short of the same happens every time I practice it. The entirety of your life lives in the body. Breath work allows what has been stored for years to release. There is a life stored within that I am learning how to feel again.
January 2026 — I went on retreat.
Twelve people. One week. No phone. No books. No noise.
Wake up. Three hours of meditation. Thirty minutes of breathwork. Eat. Two more hours of meditation. Dinner. Sleep. Repeat. Type shit.
An entire week of uninterrupted practice — going deeper than I had ever gone, with no way out and nothing to hide behind.
I came back from that retreat on fire.
Not the frantic kind of fire. The quiet, focused, finally kind.
The kind where you start listening to the purpose within.
Now We Build.
FTG has taken on a life of its own.
I stopped trying to control what it becomes and started following where it leads. I pour love into it however I see fit in that moment — and then I follow. It has led me to the right people at the right time. The right city. The right friends. The right work.
Right now that looks like:
A podcast dropping weekly. A YouTube channel growing with multiple videos every week. Writing. Speaking engagements being booked. A coaching program being built — for people in crisis, for people chasing purpose, and for high-functioning humans who want to go deeper than their résumé.
This is what gets built above ground when you survive what I survived.
Not by accident.
Not by grinding.
By following the thing that won't leave you alone — and trusting that it knows where it's going.
There is nothing to figure out.
Only more to let go of.
This is life lived From The Grave.
If Any Part of This Sounds Like You —
You didn't land here by accident.
Whether you're searching for someone who actually gets it, ready to do the real work, or just trying to find something honest in a world full of noise —
This is where it starts.