Happy to be here and I am so happy you had me in mind to be involved in this process, to be able to share with your audience.

Yes. Thank you. It was an interesting time in my life where I am coming up on 39 years of sobriety on July 30th. I remember when I got clean, I had been clean for maybe a year or two, at that point, maybe I went back to graduate school and studied counseling and psychology. I remember going home at night and watching the power of myth, listening to Joseph Campbell, and what I heard him say was, follow your bliss. I was working as a financial analyst at the time. I worked in corporations under various titles, but in the finance world, I have been a financial analyst, cost analyst. It gave me the wherewithal to realize that I needed to follow my bliss. I needed to listen to my own unique self and follow that passion. So, I ended up leaving my job and for two years, I was just trying to figure out who I wanted to be when I grew up.

I was really good at being a financial analyst, but my heart was not in it, and so I had to listen to what my heart was telling me and follow my bliss and get in touch. I was in the process of doing that. That is why I was able to hear his message, it is this idea of tuning in, an inside out process and listening to my heart and asking myself, 'Where's my passion? Where is my heart? Follow the heart, follow your bliss'. That is what I did and it came to instead of analyzing numbers, being able to help people unlock, based on my book, because that's what I was doing. I was imprisoning my own way around addiction and then chronic pain. He said that in the Power of Myth, "Your life is where your pain is." So, the only way out is always through. I realized that I have this masterpiece within and my job is to access that and then express my unique self, my uniqueness. Because, there's no one like me and by accessing my potential and my gifts, I can offer that to the world. That's what I decided to do.

This has been a long journey, maybe not long, because depending on geographical time or whatever, 39 years, 4 decades is not that long, but it has been very joyous. I will say that because I have been able to do it and learning how to do it more and more, I feel more enthusiastic and excited about life than I ever have. So that continues to grow. Even though my body is not the same as it was 40 years ago, my mind, my heart and my spirit are strong.

I think that he used that phrase because his audience is mostly the people in the West. People in the East have known this from time immemorial, especially in India. I have not been there, but from what I understand, you can feel it. It is something you grew up with. You do not know anything other than that if you grew up there. But here, we have not been blessed with that deep spiritual connection. I am speculating, but I think it is because of the audience he is talking to and then he is also going back to some of our mystics. There are eastern mystics. So, all truth is the same. It may seem different, but the literature or argument about it, there's more written in the east than it is in the west. And now the west is trying to catch up, but there is an embrace of the east. But once again, our truth is reflected in different domains, but I think it really does come out from what I understand, when he talks about potentialities and whatnot, he is talking about the existential philosophies and theories about that. So now we are going back to talking about Victor Frankl, Erich Fromm, William James and some of the philosophers. I can even mention Emerson and some of the others, they have had these ideas, so just maybe claiming it, saying that it has always been there, but when you are talking about potential and potentiality, to me that reminds me of the existential philosophy in psychology, and I am very familiar with those folks and that way of being or that philosophy. I quote Soren Kierkegaard a lot because he talks about one of the common forms of despair is not being yourself. All the existentialists talk about potential, making choices and how you access that, "are you being honest, in terms of being able to accept responsibility for how you are? Whether you are giving your gift to the world or are you hiding out?"

Yeah. Well, I think it is interesting that you said you had to come to the west to find yourself and then really be able to go back to what they were teaching, but there is something about people trying to say that you should be this way; and this is one of the challenges. The Buddha talked about this in terms of even getting to stream entry. If you want to talk about it, that way, the personality and getting rid of rituals and understanding the cultural frames, where we think it is a cookie cutter and everybody is like an assembly line, everybody is the same and even if you think about our educational systems and whatnot; it is like one size fits all, instead of realizing everybody is different. We basically teach linguistics and logistics in terms of Math and English, but there are multiple intelligences. There is emotional intelligence, there is spatial intelligence. There is intelligence that has to do with being able to track or read and be out in nature. We limit what it is we value and then we want to put everybody in a box and say, you should be like this person or that person. It is interesting because you were talking about leadership, initially. When I wrote my book proposal, I proposed writing a book on leadership. Then the publisher came back and said, "No, we want you to write a book on yourself", because my proposal was to write about leadership, but to talk about your personal development. Because to be a leader, you have to be yourself. This is what Warren Bennis talks about in his book "On becoming a leader." It is this idea of beginning with the individual self. All organizations begin with the individual self, but we get some communities and I find this in the east, just like you talked about, the community is more of a focus than the individual self, but at the same time you have to do both. You have to have the individual development of the individual self and the development of the community. So in my analogy, I talk about the me and the we. And so, the "we" have to take precedent, but the we is only as strong as the weakest me.

I was talking about my framing of leadership. Leadership is something where you share power and you empower. Stephen Covey Jr. wrote a book called "Trust & Inspire" and I had the opportunity of hanging out with him in Copenhagen for the presidential summit, a short while ago. He reminded me, and his dad talked a lot about that leadership is like servant leadership, you are not there for yourself. If we stay in an existential frame, Viktor Frankl talked about self-transcendence. And I say it all the time, you got to forget yourself to find yourself.

When you forget yourself in service, when you are given what you are, what you have to offer to the world for no reason, just to do it because it is the right thing to do. It is for the greatest good, for the highest good, you actually find yourself. There is this kind of paradox of being your best self, and sometimes some of us might be selfish and we are only thinking about ourselves, but then there are some of us that are selfless, do not think enough about ourselves, but we may have to be ourselves and then be selfish to be selfless, if that makes any sense.

This is what you are discovering. Everybody's path is different. That is why each person has to go inside and figure out, 'Okay, this is my situation, this is the world that I've been placed in, and how am I going to hollow it? How am I going to make it holy? How am I going to find myself and share myself?' So, that is what it comes down to, but we don't talk about that. We do not really learn that in school. Our focus is on learning subjects, learning things out externally. It is not learning about what we could be learning about. We can be learning about is who we are. How do we relate to our mind, body, heart and soul or spirit? We have four dimensions that we have to exercise. We have to understand, how do I do that? How do I make sense? How do I take responsibility and say, "No, I need to be who I am, not who you think I should be or who you want me to be"? And believe it or not, that is the first choice that a leader makes. And that is to be yourself.

Yeah, because when you should, that is a judgment. It is a subtle thing. But when we say, "Okay, this is good, this is bad", that sets up a duality and there is a part of us that is, if we want to perceive good, we are going to repress the bad. The reality is the only way out is always through, "How can we have an awareness that embraces everything? And instead of saying that, good or bad, saying it is helpful, it is not helpful, it is wholesome, it is not wholesome". We can start looking at it that way and it is not about you.

Here is a suggestion, when you say you should do something now and you are getting into a place where you have an inner conflict because you think you should be doing this rather than doing what you know how to do. Because there is some outside agency or could even be internally because of the limbic programming, some authority figure in the past has said something to you that you consented to be true and it is actually affecting your ability to be yourself, it is locking you up. It is just the language you use. Because language organizes our thoughts and how we see things, the language we use is very important. When I say should, then there is a judgment. That is saying, "Okay, no, this is what is offering, I can make this choice freely", based on what I want to do. So, I say to people, do not should all over yourself. In some things, even though it might say, "Well, I should do this or I have an obligation to do it", I do not have to use the word should. I am still making a choice. It is a free choice. We can use it, I want to do this. I intend to do this. I am aiming to do this versus feeling like it is some outside agency. So, you are not wholehearted in your endeavor.

It is heartfelt and it is connecting. When we come from love, when we come from embracing. I was just thinking about this because we have this tendency when somebody does something, we say, "Why are they doing that? They should be doing this other thing", and what I know from my experience is that if you see things the way people are seeing things, you would do what they do. There is a direct alignment with how people see things and what they do. If you want to understand somebody, you just have to be able to see things from their perspective. You do not have to agree with it, but there are 360 degrees. So, depending on how you look at things and where you are when you are looking at things, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, it is going to affect your understanding. We want to understand ourselves and to me, this is the interesting thing because we hide from ourselves.

How do we know the secret self is inside that nobody knows about and we try to hide from people? Well, you can figure out things by noticing your attention will follow your intention. We have to be able to have the self-awareness that allows us to uncritically observe what is happening so we can see, "Oh, when I do this or when I think this way or when I do this, then this happens, then I have to learn from that and I have to understand that maybe before I make a choice, I have to reflect on it". Of course, this is what the Buddha did with his son. He taught him that before you do something, you have to reflect on whether it is helpful to you or others or not, and if it is not helpful to both you and the others, it is not to be done. And that is before you do it.

Then there is reflecting when you are doing it. Like I was saying, in real time, you can self-correct or that is not going to be helpful. Then you dial it back or you change course. Then afterwards, this idea of reflecting, what worked, what did not work? We need to examine that. We need to figure stuff out. We need to get clarity about what we did and what the consequences are and own that and realize that we can change. We make choices, whether we are conscious of them or not, and this is what the existentialists are really clear about is this idea of you are responsible, whether you are conscious of it or not. You have to be conscious of it or be aware that if you are letting your unconscious or your habit patterns do things that are harmful, then if you are not aware of that, if you are not observing that, then how can you change it? 90% of maybe even more of what we do is habits. These neural nets or these programs that we have running that are happening, whether or not we are paying attention or not. Our job is to start to examine what habit patterns are helpful, which ones are not, not right or wrong, good or bad, but what is helpful and what is not.

Yeah, it is very important because you have to be careful that you can have that righteous anger, and anger is anger, whether it is righteous or not. It is a hindrance. It gets in the way of us being able to be present and to see clearly. We can channel the anger and channel it for good. I am going to use that energy to create something good or to bring more compassion and more wisdom into the situation. It is definitely realizing that when we have these negative emotions, they are referred to as the 5 hindrances, like sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, which is another way of saying, apathy or depression, low energy and that really has to do with not having any interest in what is going on. You are just kind of spacing out, and then the worry, restlessness people know and then the doubt. Those mind-sets that when they are present, they have to be acknowledged and dealt with. We deal with them in a multiplicity of ways. Sometimes we deal with them by ignoring them or repressing them and that does not work. What works is being able to embrace them and see them and then know it is okay. Doubt is in the mind. So, what is the antidote to that? The antidote to that is to seek, to investigate, ask questions, to explore, bring curiosity to bear. But we know if we stay in doubt, it is going to color everything and reflecting on it is not going to be good. We can say, "Okay, this doubt in mind and we can direct our attention to something else, to the opposite of doubt", of wisdom or understanding or seeking to understand or say, oh yeah, I just need to let go of that and then focus on what I am doing now or whatever way, but to divert attention.

Sometimes, as I get more mindful, then it is, "So now I need to get intimate with the doubt". Notice when there is doubt in the mind, how does it affect my body? How does it affect my ability to see? How does it affect my ability to feel connected to myself and others and start to explore it? So, at some point we have to get to the point where we get intimate with those hindrances, whether it is sensual desire, ill will, having low energy or apathy. It is only by seeing it and understanding it that we are able to get free from it or not be imprisoned or locked up by it. I would say those 5 hindrances are ways of being locked up.

Yes. Thank you. It was very important and it was an amazing experience when I reflect on it, I still learn from it. At the time, I was working at what we used to call The Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program at the UMass Medical Centre in Worcester, it is a medical school now. It has been referred to as a centre for mindfulness and whatnot, but this is going back to 1983. So, this is going back almost 30 years. Phil used to teach at a place called Omega in Rhinebeck, New York. He used to teach a program called Beyond Basketball. It was like a fantasy camp and people would come. He raised money for one of his teammates, Eddie Mast, who died of a heart attack and this was a way to raise money for his family. John and Saki Santorelli, they used to do this. It is called mindfulness-based stress reduction now, but they used to do these training for health care workers and they were there at the same time. They knew Phil and Phil was talking to them and this was in 1993. They had just won 3 NBA championships in a row. Phil wanted to bring somebody in to help the players deal with the stress of success, because no one has ever had that kind of success. You got people coming at you and whatnot.

When he first approached me, this was before MJ retired and before his father was murdered. We had not anticipated that this was a proactive move, this was Phil doing what he does, where he is always looking to help his players, the body, the mind, heart and the soul. He saw them as whole people, and he wanted to give them all the tools they could use for success. When I got there, that crisis was not anticipated. That was not why I was going in there. I was going in there to help them deal with the stress of success. But once again, when I got in there, it was like, okay, how can I serve? How can I help? It is like, "Okay, you have got to embrace it. This is it, there's something here", when I talked to the team, I talked about this idea of this is a crisis. I said, "In eastern philosophy, when there is a crisis, it has two meanings. One meaning is danger, which we know about. The other meaning is opportunity. So, we can create space between stimulus and response and in that space, we get the freedom to choose". So, I altered how they saw it. I said, "Okay, so this is an opportunity for people to step up. This is an opportunity for us to actually get stronger and let us relate to it. It is as if the glass is half empty or half full, both are right. But if we focus on half full, focus on it being an opportunity, then that is when we change that.

Then we talked about how we can be our best selves. I talked to them about being a spiritual warrior. But let's put it in context, I went with Dr. J in college. I have been around pro game. I have been with one of the most elite players of all time. When I went in there, I had a level of street cred. And besides, I grew up just like a lot of those folks, me with southern Baptists, but there was a lot of connection to them and what I did was I just created a vision of possibility saying, "Hey, we are here, we can go this way or we can go the other way. And if we go this way, you have to be a spiritual warrior. You have to be able to get comfortable being uncomfortable and it is just a great opportunity. So, what do you choose? I suggest we go this way. We go for the gusto". We say, "Okay, this is going to be amazing". Then, when I talk to them about being in flow and I say, "What I am teaching you is going to make you flow ready, you cannot enter flow. The more you try to enter flow, the more you won't. But if you do these certain things like being in the moment, managing the moment, being clear about what your goals are, and then getting immediate feedback, being willing to adjust and change, to self-regulate your thoughts, feelings and behavior, I did not call it the masterpiece, but I was basically saying, then your life is success. We have these abilities and adversity, our latent abilities are going to express themselves, but it is having a certain mindset and realizing, "Oh, this is what I did. This is how I overcame substance abuse, this is how I overcame having chronic pain and I used to play basketball, and I have been around the game and so you want it to flow, you want to be able to grow, then let us do that". And so that is what I offered.

It totally expanded my role with them because I came in and I had full access. I was in the locker room, I was all there. But to be honest with you; there was a part of me saying, "Okay, they just won 3 championships, what do I have to teach them"? That is when I just forgot myself to find myself and say, "Okay, my job here is to serve". That is what I did. When I forgot myself, I found myself and I just talked about sharing my experience, strength and hope; this is how I dealt with adversity. I said, "Okay, this is going to be great. This is an opportunity here and let us go from there."

That was a transformation and we were making it up as we went along. When we were talking, Phil had this way of being, not only when I was there, I had presentations with them, but a lot of times it was intuitive. It is like, "Okay, we have to talk about this, we have to talk about that". There was no one that had done this before, so I was making it up as we were going along. I was like Indiana Jones. We were making it up as we went along, but we know what the principles were. The principles do not change. They are timeless and they are universal. It was the principle of being in the moment, managing the moment, coming with a wide view, coming with this attitude of, there is a lawfulness here and we just have to align ourselves with the way things work. This is a friendly universe. There is a lawfulness to it, and we have way more power than we ever imagined and if something happens, we have to choose what we want to choose based on being present and being compassionate, being loving, seeking to understand. The ultimate stress reducer is understanding, and you understand by reflecting on experience and being willing to change. This idea of getting feedback, embracing it and saying, how am I going to relate to myself, how can I access my masterpiece and offer it to the world, in this case, my team? In my case, whoever I am working with, I would not even call them a client, they are my friends that I am offering to serve.

Yeah, my thing with them was just, sort of making suggestions and just watching them. I had been working with the Bulls for 18 months and when Michael came back in March of '95. Shortly after he came back, The Boston Garden was not available for shootarounds. Each team has a shootaround in the morning, they go over for a couple of hours, go through the plays, and then they shoot around on the court that they are going to be playing on. In Boston, especially in those days in the 90s, the garden was not available. So, we would meet in the hotel, in the conference room and the coaches would go over film. If you work with any athletic teams, they watch a lot of film and observe the other team and talk about what they are going to run and that sort of thing. So, we would do that, which was a ritual. We would go through that, then the coaches would leave and it would just be me and the players, and I would have maybe 45 minutes or so where I would take them through some exercises, have a little talk, and we do a little practice and whatnot.

So, when MJ came and when we did what I call awareness of breathing, where we were just sitting, closing our eyes and just tuning in to the fact that we were sitting and breathing, you might even say we were conspiring together, which is a positive thing. We were breathing in and out, and I remember MJ looking around watching people and seeing what they were doing, and then he just closed his eyes and then that was it. And in my conversation with him, he realised that I was helping them get to a level where they could start catching up with him. So, my thing was really helping them to understand why he was able to do things that he was able to do, but also to talk about, there is another level, and he was always interested in another level. So, now I could offer him some ways. And plus, Dr J. was like MJ before MJ was MJ, when we were in college at UMass, Dr. J could not go anywhere because the people would come around and he had that charisma and people would just come to him. So, I was probably one of the few people on the planet that could understand what it was like for Michael to be trapped in his hotel room and not be able to go anywhere and having people come at him.

I think my experience and my relationship with Dr. J really gave me a lot of street cred and then Phil trusted me to be in there and just them being able to understand that I was helpful. The thing about them is they would not dismiss anything out of hand. They will look and see if it was true. My role, my job was to give them a direct experience of the teaching so that they know it is not superficial. It is real. It is about being in the moment. Because they are committed to a level of excellence and they have this ability to experience cognitive dissonance or discomfort, this allows them to be more coachable. I remember people asking me and me reflecting on are they coachable because they are good or are they good because they are coachable? And my answer to that is because they are pursuing excellence and wisdom. It is like me. They could see it, because they are looking for it. If you do not believe it, you would not see it.

Yes. Well, I think that is one of the things that draws folks to athletic competition, whether it is the Olympics or whatever, because you see somebody in real time expanding the boundaries of what we think is impossible. The thing I love about sports that is really helpful is that there is a beginning, middle and end. Then you can focus and you can see it in real time unfolding the pursuit of a goal, the process, the journey towards the championship or towards whatever it is, whether you are an individual athlete or playing a team sport, you can definitely see that. But there is something about, about being in flow. There is something about really honestly and fully expressing yourself in the moment, especially when you have so much intensity with the pressure and be able to overcome that and to do things that are not easy to do; people recognise that, so, they could see that. It is interesting because I really have been focused on teaching and learning, not just learning things. If you think about my process over the last 39 years, I have averaged over a book a week during that time. I have done a lot of practice. I have lived in a meditation center for six years. I have done a lot of practicing, even 90-day retreats, but I have done a lot of other practicing, working with executives and CEOs and corporations and groups. I have done a lot of study and work and have experience going in and helping them to find themselves of what I talk about the me and the we, and developing elite teams and individuals. I have had that honor of doing that and a lot of that comes out of my own experience as a leader.

I have been doing this for decades. It is inspiring. I am learning, and I am evolving. I believe that if you want to learn something, you have got to teach it.

Yeah, to me, peak performance and pure performance is predicated on Maslow's peak experience, right? But we think we have a peak experience and that is the peak experience, but there is another level. So, when you say it is peak, it is almost like you have reached the peak. Now, I am talking about linguistics, what words mean and whatnot. And pure performance is where you are just performing and there is always another level, but you are not selling. I forget where I read it from, but we relate to our human experience as fixed points and the reality of who we are, we are ever changing events. And so, if you think about it that way, you reach a peak. When you say you reach a peak, on some level, the word means that you cannot go any higher; the peak of the mountain. So, that is where for me, pure performance is more static and stationary and also it is not identifying the peak out here as much as it is identifying your previous peak in yourself. If I say, you are not competing against somebody out there, you are competing against your previous best self or your previous best performance. But it is the reality that knowing that there is always another level and that it is fluid, it is dynamic, it is not stationary.

It is interesting because I am describing it differently than I normally would, because I am in a different perspective, but it is really talking about this idea of not thinking that you peaked, if you scale the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, then there is no other taller mountain, that is it. That is the peak, but what I am saying is, no, there is another mountain. And so, this is linguistic, this is language because people could use that word peak and mean different meanings for it, but what I am saying is, there is no 'peaking' because we do not know where the limit is. It is unlimited.

Does that make sense?

Yes, I like the way you phrase it and that is exactly it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, talks about flow. He talks about the autotelic personality. What he means by that is, you do something for the activity in and of itself. Like you said, in your role as an athlete, you are doing this in your role as maybe as a leader or as a dad or son or whatever. What he is saying is, it does not matter what you are doing, what matters is the intrinsic value you get from being fully deployed and fully expressed in the moment. The peak or the pure experiences doing it for no reason, just do it to do it, and to express it with the freedom, with being unlocked where you are not doing the "shoulds" or you are not doing anything else.

One way of looking at being in the zone of flow from a psychological point of view is being spontaneous at one's own will. You do not even know what you are going to do. So, you are in this creative energy. When I talk about pure performance, you want to briefly talk about martial arts as honestly expressing yourself. That is what it is. You are just honestly expressing yourself and you are letting it as an inside out thing. You start to understand that you meet with your mirror, that what is out here is a reflection of what is in here. If you keep changing what is in here and you know there is another level, then you keep evolving. And like I said, being an ever-changing event versus being a fixed point. Because, there is no being, there is a becoming. You are always moving. You cannot step in the same river twice and it is really more about understanding that wherever you go, there you are, and it is the same drill as can you be fully engaged, fully present and doing what you are doing, giving your gift to the world out of your own potentialities, out of your own uniqueness, which is unlimited.

Yes, I believe that and you can see it. It is interesting because I had this conversation and one of the things I noticed with some of the athletes that I worked with over the years is when they are competing with people, you will have people say, well, when the opponent falls up, do not help them up. I see my guys helping people up. Understanding that, yes, we are competing, after the game and they do this anyway. They have relationships and whatnot. I remember some coaches actually criticizing his own player, I will not mention the coach because he had a friendship with MJ. When he is saying, well, he is the enemy, you got to be mean and nasty and that is a different energy. It is challenging because you cannot always play in a way where you are hating the opponent. If you are playing against your brother, now, some people will say, "Well, on the court, I am just going to compete against him", but come on man, there are going to be people you like and then when you are doing the hate thing, it is affecting your ability and that is another hindrance that is affecting your ability not only being present, but it is going to affect your immune system. It is going to affect your ability to see clearly, your ability to have a rhythm or flow. So, we start thinking about it in ways that open us up. This is all about being unlocked, not having any restrictions, but I am not saying being out of control, but being in control, to be able to express yourself honestly.

You become it. You become it because it consumes you. I talk about it in a book about the two wolves and the Cherokee grandfather explaining to his grandson that there are two wolves inside of me for simplicity, we will say fear, which includes hate and as one wolf and love is the other wolf.

He says, "Not only is this battle going on inside of me, but it is going on inside of you and every human being." My grandson says, "Grandfather, which one will win?" And the grandfather said, "The one I feed", and so if you keep feeding the fear wolf, or you keep feeding the hate, then it is going to be predominant and that is going to block out or repress the love or you get consumed by it. So, now you have got on the hate glasses, everything you see is hate. Instead of seeing people or seeing that they are worthy of living, you just want to burn everything. And of course, one of the things, if you think about it, is self-image. One of the ways we deal with the fear of death or being out of control is we adhere to authoritarianism or authority figures or we conform. We just hide in plain sight, but we want to get rid of the sense of self. There is one way of escaping from freedom, and that is by destructing or destroying your sense of self so that you are no longer experiencing the fear of death or there is no self, there. So, you want to get to know the self, not in the way that you get to know the self, where you realize it is just an illusion, but no self where you just blow it up or you just destroy it.

This could be suicide bombings, but he was expressing this idea of just destroying everything. Because if you destroy yourself and of course, that is what he did, he committed suicide. One way to escape being responsible is by destroying everything, especially himself. That is just my interpretation of it. But it is consuming and it becomes a habit and you can see it. You can see it in this country, in the United States. Here you have this grievance politics and destroying and taking away. That giveaway is like "Are you devoted to destruction or power or are you devoted to love?" When you are devoted to love, that is being productive, that means embracing, giving people freedom, embracing everybody, not taking away and not blowing stuff up.

Yes. I call it AOF, a method of motivation. Ass On Fire, I got to a place where I could not keep doing what I was doing and I could not do it. A friend of mine came by my house, and he invited me to go to an AA meeting with him. When I went to it, and I looked at him and said, "Wait a minute, this guy, he does not have a problem. What is going on. I was very intrigued". So, I saw the possibility, the vision of freedom. He represented that and so when I went to the AA meeting and then I started understanding that it is a spiritual thing, I had to connect to some power greater than myself or what Viktor Frankl would call self-transcendence. I had to forget myself to find myself. I just said, "Okay, my life is unmanageable by me and I had to surrender". I had to let go, but it was not like I was surrendering like I was giving up my power. It was more like I was surrendering so that I can embrace my power. It was more of an embrace of my inner power, instead of looking for John Barleycorn or something outside of myself realizing that I had a divine spark. Once I accessed that masterpiece within and realized that there is an energy and a universe that I can connect to, and prayer and meditation, how I think and whatnot, I just rediscovered myself, rediscovered the masterpiece within that divine spark. I became a caterpillar crawling into the chrysalis and struggling to get out and then the struggle gave me the strength to fly.

Yes. I need to do that. I am a recovering perfectionist. Progress not perfection. I had to learn that over and over again. Suzuki Roshi says we find perfection through imperfection. I have been dealing with that. That definition is helpful, because all the research says that we are happy first, then we are successful, but we act as if we will be happy when we are successful, but the reality is, if you have a progressive realization of a worthy ideal, now you are getting into Lao-tzu territory where a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. So, each step can be celebrated and seen as a progressive realization of moving towards that thousand-mile journey.

Pockets of stillness, silence and spaciousness. It is just getting connected, getting with myself and being able to through prayer, meditation, I read, I do all sorts of things, but it is really getting back to myself, getting back to identifying and embracing the greatness within me. It is like that divine spark. It is that spirituality. It is that feeling of love. It is just realizing that there is love there. I just have to be still and know. A lot of times it is really as simple as just sitting and just being with myself and just noticing.

The other one, the spirit moves through me, I am just a channel, but I get out of the way and allow that energy, that love to flow through me. It is really about what education talked about. He talks at a tomb in an application. It is letting the love flow through me, that is the attunement and then the application is when I go and interact with people, even with my inner self, to be loving. That is the application. Sometimes if somebody comes to mind that I had issues with then I can forgive them.

I would say it is the teaching that Jesus talked about. He said love everything and continual forgiveness.

Yeah. it is interesting and I will share this. I did 2 podcasts, I think with the School of Greatness with Lewis Howes and Tim Ferriss podcast. They both asked me 3 things that I know for sure were good questions. I answered them the same way. I did not realize I had done that until later. The 3 things I said was the only time we have is now. The only one you could be is yourself. And all you need is love.

Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate the way you created the listening and your questions were really helpful and really helped me express myself in a way that was really beautiful.

Just to put out there, it does not matter, you do not have to be an athlete. You have this tremendous ability inside of you, this masterpiece, this divine spark and you can access it and develop it. It is an inside job, only you can do it and to the degree that you do it will be expressed in you offering something to the world out of your own potential and your own uniqueness.

I am just the messenger.