VISION, ENTHUSIASM, IMAGINATION
AS A PRIORITY
Here’s what happened with me. True story.
My father was a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and took courses in positive thinking and all that. I never knew what it was about because my dad didn’t really explain it.
We did go to a church and I became seriously interested in TRUTH. When I went to college, I majored in philosophy because I expected my professors to teach me what was truth. They didn’t. What a college teaches, if it’s a good college, is the HISTORY of truth-seeking, not what truth actually is.
So I graduated from college actually more confused than when I started. What college did teach me was how to learn. I recognized early on that I was stupid about lots of things, but if I could at least learn, I’d at least grow smarter.
Eventually, I attained a job in marketing and was employed such that I could support a family and this went along pretty well until 1996, when I was FIRED, and unjustly, I might add. Plus, my wife asked me for a separation, so suddenly I was unemployed and living by myself. I made attempts to get a new job, but was so miserable, nobody would hire me and I was feeling very old and not even forty.
What happened was that I then spent two years doing virtually NOTHING other than feeling sorry for myself, plus co-parenting two wonderful children coming into their own. I went back to school for massage therapy and this took another full year.
After entering the workforce as a massage therapist, my back started to hurt. I mean, it hurt in a way that wasn’t like a pain in the back, but like a chronic hot poker all along my pelvis and up into my lumbar spine. I was employed by two chiropractors and they adjusted my back at least weekly with little improvement.
I had been exposed to the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and had read it and thought it a kind of simpleton how-to manual. One day, I picked it up and started reading. It was like a different book because suddenly it made total sense. What I took from it was that the mind is a kind of accelerator and that THOUGHTS are not static, but expansive. Where one places their thoughts tends to expand in a kind of magnetic way that organizes one’s life experience around one’s perceptions of what’s possible.
I finished the book for a second time, set it down, and pondered what it was that I REALLY WANTED because it wasn’t riches. What I had previously wanted was to throw a WRENCH into everything I had been taught, because I was still extremely caught up in finding TRUTH. The pain in my back was now a constant and it felt that this was debilitating me on every level. So I realized that the one thing I now wanted was to be free of PAIN.
I pictured it. I imagined myself 100% pain free. I saw myself leaping and jumping, shouting with joy.
This took approximately 60 seconds, then I said to myself, “Who am I kidding?”
Two days later, a woman who years before had given me several colonics phoned me. She invited me to TRAIN in colon hydrotherapy, since I was a massage therapist, suggesting that I might find it interesting. My response was pretty much: No way!
This is the natural process: You ask for something. It comes to you. You say: No way!
I studied colon hydrotherapy because I was talked into it. As my training partner and I practiced colonics on each other, after about ten, my back pain greatly diminished. I was totally taken off guard. It took me a while to connect my bizarre healing of my back pain to my reading of Think and Grow Rich, but when I did, I was undeniably amazed.
After my training partner and I opened our own professional office for colon hygiene, I decided to see how many colonics it would take me to fully clean myself out and expected this would be no more than twenty colonics in a row. This extended to ONE YEAR and then about another six months. I then began to wonder: how do I get myself OFF colonics, because they made me feel great and I wanted to feel a similar fabulous without the colonic.
It dawned on me that I could get OFF the colonics the same way I had gotten into them: Focus on what I wanted next and fully PICTURE IT. I did that.
A few days later, a client invited me to hear a dietary expert, Tonya Zavasta, speak about the raw food diet. I told her, no way! But this client twisted my arm. She said, “Come on!” So, I went. Even though Tonya was totally chill about anybody becoming 100% raw, she opened my eyes to the foods I was consuming and they were mostly all cooked. What I did was to jump in and for two months, ate almost 100% raw plant foods.
What happened was that I no longer felt the requirement to give myself a daily colonic. Thus, my vision twisted into reality, again.
THIS became my inspiration. I began to THINK MYSELF RICH. Any problem I happened to be confronting, I’d STOP, and picture myself in the solution versus seeing myself with a PROBLEM I couldn’t solve. Thus I envisioned myself out of my tiny one bedroom apartment into a larger apartment because my two children were living with me. Then our two bedroom apartment morphed into a three bedroom, three bath apartment, then I bought a house where I had MY OWN apartment and my kids had their own. I went from driving a beaten-up 1986 Ford LTD that broke down all the time to driving a Mustang convertible. I went from having no social life to having amazing girlfriends and going to lots of parties and wonderful events.
I kind-of found a truth and it was MY TRUTH.
So, years passed by and I went from almost forty to age 60. I’ve worked with hundreds of people and I tell them all the same thing: it matters less what you EAT and more what you THINK. I even studied HYPNOSIS because at some point it seemed that many of my clients were unable to get beyond themselves and stuck in a repetitive pattern of negative self-talk.
Here’s the thing: I’ve gone from a mostly dogmatic approach that TRUTH is mostly regulated by HISTORY, and outside factors, to the idea that anything is possible. I’m all for the idea now that anything is possible and that’s what I encourage my clients to imagine: their truth. Who am I to tell them what to get excited about?
Insert VISION, ENTHUSIASM, IMAGINATION. You do it. Don’t ask me to do it for anybody else. Other people are too weird. Too many minds to read. Go there yourself. Where?
You tell me.