"Taylor Cavanaugh: from jail to Navy Seal, back to jail, to suicidal, to French Foreign Legionnaire"

"This is life, man, it's not a fairy tale... But I knew there was a higher purpose."

Chad and Taylor hit the range for some “lead therapy” before filming this week’s episode.

Therapy, indeed. Taylor has lived quite a life.

Taylor grew up under a single mother and struggled with substances and temptations as a young man, “when distraction would come in, I had absolutely no moral compass, my true north was skewed.”

Chad asked Taylor to specify, “what were the things that were taking you off course?”

“Alcohol and girls… I didn’t realize that you don’t have to be doing evil things to be stacking karmic death.”

When Taylor went to join the Marines, the recruiter told him that he needed to clean up his record before he could enlist. Taylor’s extended probation could be expunged if he spent four months in jail. After serving alongside hardened criminals at age 23, Taylor was released from jail. “It was like day after Christmas at midnight they let me go and this CO [corrections officer] goes, ‘what are you gonna do, man?’ I was like, ‘I’m gonna go be a Navy SEAL.’ He laughed at me.”

And that’s exactly what Taylor did. But Taylor still had to get through boot camp and BUD/S, “I was right in where I knew I needed to be and I was so grateful for the opportunity. It was hard, but I was locked on, no going out or anything… I made it all through by the grace of God… ended up going to Team 7.”

After a near-drowning in the midst of a storm while serving a security role for then-President Obama in—of all places—Cabo, Mexico, Taylor headed to his first overseas deployment in Yemen. “I'm shooing camels off trying to land C-17s… I was just happy, man, you know, happy to be there.”

But after he returned from Yemen, Taylor was “going hard in all directions.”

“I hit a guy in a bar on a training trip and I was like, one shot. That's all it takes… Felony charges. They’re flying brass up… Now I'm getting sued. Now, all this stuff is, is compiling.”

Taylor served in Iraq with a pending jury trial, and when he returned he was sentenced to a few more weeks in the clank along with four years of probation.

This pattern of getting into sticky situations in the most unexpected of places continued at a Jimmy Buffet concert where Taylor got drunk and adversely repossessed someone else’s golf cart, which “snow balled” into getting tazed multiple times by San Diego Police.

After that, Taylor was pulled from not only the SEALs, but the entire Corps. He took a general discharge and signed out, then went back to jail.

After jail Taylor took a handsomely paid gig supervising a 750-million-dollar project, but the combination of pills and a booze fueled a further descent towards rock bottom, “speed wobbles are starting. It's coming to a head but I'm the last one to see it.”

That’s when a religious experience changed his life, “And and then I was like, maybe I'll jump in the volcano. Then that was a moment where I'm like, you're going to jump into a volcano, bro. Are you fucking. You're out of your mind. You can't even kill yourself in a chill way, dude. You're just doing too much. And it kind of made me laugh a little bit… That God voice man spoke to me and it was like, you pussy, listen to your internal dialog. Dead serious. I was sitting on a log. I can hear it as plain as day… And I’m like I’m going into the French Foreign legion, eight days later I was in Paris.”

In typical Resilient fashion, Taylor Cavanaugh’s transformation came from the combination the external and internal discipline required on the Battlefield, “prayer, getting connected with the higher frequency, mindfulness.”

To hear more about Taylor’s Resilient rise back to the light—from busting illegal gold operations in the jungle and running security in Algeria— tune into the full episode and subscribe to Resilient Times!

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