‘I hit rock bottom and wanted to die – then I imagined I had a year to live’

Former cage fighter Traver Boehm had decided he was going to end his life in the afternoon. He was 40 years old and within the space of a few months, his pregnant wife had suffered a miscarriage, their marriage had collapsed and his gym business was failing. 

With everything important in his life crumbling away, Traver decided there was only one way out: suicide. But first, he wanted one final surf.

‘I literally had the day planned. But then when I was on my board, getting my ass handed to me by the ocean and fighting to get air, I realised I didn’t want to die. I thought ‘What am I doing?”‘ Traver tells Metro over Zoom from his house in Costa Rica, where he divides his time with his home in Colorado.

Making his way back to the beach he came up with a different approach to his problems.

‘The road back to normalcy and health just felt too much – I didn’t have the energy,’ Traver explains. Instead, he decided to spend a year imagining he was living out his final months.

During the radical social experiment, which he carried out in 2016 and called the ‘One Year to Live Project’, Traver made amends with ex partners, ran a marathon illegally, sat with men nearing the end of their lives in hospices and even spent 28 days alone in the dark at an ashram in Guatemala.

‘I was in a room for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no break. There wasn’t a single drop of light and I couldn’t even see an inch in front of my face,’ he recalls.

The tiny room where Traver stayed contained little more than a shower, a sink, a toilet and a sleeping platform reached by a ladder, along with a yoga mat and meditation cushion.

Three times a day, a member of ashram staff would push containers of vegan food through a flap in the eight-inch door that kept all sound, light, smell and contact from Traver’s room. The only way he could mark the passage of time was through the number of meals he’d eaten.

‘For the first eight days, I exercised and meditated. I was bored,’ he recalls. ‘I tried not to masturbate the entire time, but there really wasn’t much else to do.

‘But then the darkness in the room took over and I began hallucinating. I was crying and screaming, sobbing with grief. After that I lost my f***ing mind – I had conversations with people who weren’t there. I even had a full day and a half where I thought I may actually have died.’

When the 28 days were up, Traver emerged pale, emaciated, half blind – and worried if he’d ever return to normal.

‘It was scary that my eyes didn’t work and I was also very motion sick. If I saw any movement whatsoever, like a leaf moving, I wanted to throw up,’ he remembers. 

Traver had been released from the room at sunrise, so spent the rest of the day in bed. Although he was sick in the night, by the following morning he felt physically better – and profoundly altered.

‘Being in the room, I had the very visceral experience of “I’m going to die and this is exactly what it will be like”. I will be alone in a pitch black box in the ground – or hopefully cremated – so it was monumental to realise truly how insignificant I am,’ the 49-year-old explains.

Having experienced his own brush with suicide, his moment of enlightment spurred Traver to commit to ending the suffering for other men by writing books, training as a coach and setting up a social movement.

Believing men to be in the midst of a ‘loneliness epidemic’, he says they often feel a lack of purpose. ‘We are not meant to live in a cubicle under fluorescent light, eating s***food, not moving our bodies and denying our drive,’ he explains. 

Indeed, it was a pattern Traver saw in his own life, before his marriage ended. ‘I was addicted to a lot of things,’ he recalls. ‘I drank energy drinks in the morning, then on my way home from work, I’d smoke a joint. I would probably have a beer or two at night – more if I was out with the boys. I would look at porn every day. I wasn’t well.’

So, as part of his drive to help others like him, Traver started a movement called Man UNcivilised that offers a supportive community where men can create and sustain healthy relationships and do things they love doing.

Since it began five years ago years ago, the initiative has groups in 50 countries around the world and holds workshops for men and women. He claims to have received letters and emails from many people telling him that the movement has saved their lives and marriages. 

With a website that lists Traver’s achievements as meditating naked, running a marathon illegally – because he couldn’t be bothered to register — and flying to Ireland to learn how to make a knife, it begs the question: why does he need his life challenges to be so extreme?

‘I just like to do stuff’, Traver says simply. ‘I just want to follow my heart. It took me being 40 and losing everything before I decided to not try and fit in anymore.

‘Ultimately, I’m not the one going back to a cubicle to work 60 hours in a job I don’t believe in, so I can pay for a house that I don’t really want. So, how am I the crazy one?’

Find out more about Traver’s book, 28 Days in Darkness, here.