As for the rest of my life…

1) My last day at my old job is Friday and my first day at my new job is Monday.  I spoke with my new project manager this morning, and I really like him already.  He runs triathlons, so he completely understands needing time to get in a workout.  He seems knowledgeable and flexible.  I’m really excited for Monday.

2)Last night I had an interview to teach yoga at my gym… and the yoga program coordinator loved my sample class and teaching style  I don’t know when our time slots are going to line up, but I think in the future I’ll be teaching a weekly yoga class!

3)I am officially a part of a Thursday night adult gymnastics trampoline and tumbling class!  Last week’s class was amazing, and I’m super excited for tomorrow night.

4) My CPR/AED certification is turning into a GIANT pain to obtain.  The Red Cross keeps cancelling classes on me…

I’m not very verbose today, so I leave you with two quotes:

“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

“Decide what to be and go be it”

When I took my trial pill on Thursday night, I went right to sleep after.  I was tired all day Friday, and Zach and I did take a two hour nap so I guess I should have known, but I figured cutting it in half would help.  Regardless, I hate feeling tired and sluggish and I’m going to go drug-free on my flight home.

As for the actual flight itself – I was scared.  Even when pretty drugged up, the changes in altitude and changes in noise still really frightened me.  I practiced every time telling myself it was a normal noise or normal altitude change, and it was okay, the pilot meant it to do that – and obviously the flight was normal and we took off and landed just fine, so I’m really hoping if I continue to tell myself that every time, eventually it will sink in and I will trust in planes again.

To be honest though, I’m so frustrated with myself.  I know I’ve made crazy progress – I know when I go to therapy on Thursday my therapist is going to be shocked I was able to fly at all, but I just want it to magically not bother me anymore.  I hate that I’m scared of it.  I hate that it’s probably going to be a slow road back to being comfortable on a plane.  It makes me feel weak and irrational.

So I think the latest lesson is learning patience and tolerance with myself.

I went to my therapy appointment today intending to talk about fear of death.  I realized earlier in the week that the reason I’m so afraid of flight is I link it directly to death.  My doctor suggested that I look at it another way – not that I was afraid of death, but that I am in love with life.  He asked if I was afraid of eventual, natural death, 50 years or so from now and I said no.  He helped me to realize what I am afraid of is not getting to do everything I want to do.

When I thought I was going to die on that flight, all that flashed through my head was, please no, I haven’t gotten to get married and have babies yet.  I haven’t seen the world.  I haven’t had all of the experiences I need to have to live a full life.   I love life.  I love living.  I love challenging my mind and my body.  I love people and conversations.  I love nature.  I associate plane flight with risking losing all that to the unknown of death. No wonder I’m stuck and grounded.

The thing is… if I don’t fly, I don’t get to see the world.  I hamper my ability to be challenged by my job since it involves travel.  I hamper my ability to visit friends and family.  I essentially let part of myself be dead by continuing to allow my mind to tell me lies about flight.  I don’t want to do that any more.

Today, I cried a LOT.  I cried at my doctor’s appointment, I cried through this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH0YwGAuAOc, I cried as I used miles to book myself a round trip ticket home, leaving this Saturday.

Yeah, you read that right.  I’m flying on Saturday.  I’m flying on Saturday because I want to live.  I want to not be limited by fear.  I want to be free.  If I am not free and am limited by fear, I’m not truly living at all.

I choose life.

2) I’m attempting to sign up for an adult gymnastics class (trampoline and tumbling).  I want to deepen my acrobatic yoga practice and I’ve always been fascinated with tumbling.

3) My CPR/AED class was rescheduled for this Saturday, so I’ll check that off the list hopefully as of this weekend.

4) I’m done with chapter 5 of my NASM book, so starting 6 out of 18 chapters this week.

5) I’ve hired a financial adviser - big step for me to trust someone else with my $$, but savings just isn’t cutting it any more.

6) My last day with my firm is rapidly approaching and with it, my first day at the new job.

7) Zach and I are going to Les Miserables in October – can’t wait!

We’re also going to Citronelle in October to celebrate my new job.  We went to a wine-paired dinner in Napa and both absolutely loved it.  Expensive thing to get addicted to… hopefully Citronelle will be just as good!

9) Still petrified of flying and wondering what the hell I’m going to do about that

10) Made the best salad this week – orange pepper, jicama, hearts of palm, baby spinach, black olives, quinoa, chick peas, italian butter beans, tomato, zucchini, watercress, mushrooms, and lemon/olive oil dressing.  Not much excites me more than an epic salad (I know that’s very sad).

11) I’ve been pretty good with the gym, 4-5 workouts/week.  I’d like to get into a routine.

12) Zach got me addicted to a PC game called Dead Island about zombies.  I spent way too much time playing that in the past two days…

I’m really excited about my next job, but I’m more excited to take another step towards what I’m meant to be doing.  I know that I have so much potential.  I know that I have the motivation, enthusiasm, intelligence, and skills to really make a difference somewhere even if I don’t know where that is yet, but I want to find it!

I hope this new job will be to my old job what my current relationship is to my last relationship.  In my last relationship, I knew I was stuck but for the longest time just didn’t know quite how to un-stick myself.  When I finally did, it was like 50 pounds off my shoulders.

I hesitantly entered into another relationship with a lot of fears, concerns, and expectations.  Being in this current relationship defies every single thought I ever had about relationships when I was with my old boyfriend.  Things like “Fighting a lot is normal” or “We should want to spend all of our time together and if we don’t there’s something wrong” or “Affection and small gestures dying down is normal” or “Being constantly worried about a relationship imploding randomly is normal” were common thoughts in the past.

But guess what, Zach and I don’t fight.  We have some tension and get a little upset sometimes, but neither one of us has ever yelled at the other or purposefully said things designed to hurt.  We don’t want to spend all of our time together and neither one of us thinks there’s anything wrong with that.  We understand that it’s really important for people in a couple to still be their own people.  As for affection dying down – amount of cuddling never changed a bit since the first month.  He brought me flowers yesterday to celebrate my job change.  And I don’t worry nonstop about him waking up one day and deciding he isn’t in love with me anymore, which was basically all I thought about for over a year in the past (with valid reason).

Forgive me, for I do promise I can dig up a point somewhere in here… when you’re in an unhealthy situation for an extended period of time, you convince yourself out of self defense and delusion that all of the parameters are normal.  When you finally get out of it, you start to realize just how &*#*&ed up it all was.

This is what I’m anticipating happening with my new firm… I’m expecting to walk in and be like, “I’m ready to do XYZ”, and them to say “Oh we don’t make anyone do that here!”.  I’ll probably spend the first 3-4 months waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the “monsterface” to reveal itself.  Maybe it will… but maybe it won’t, maybe I will have successfully entered a healthy relationship AND job all in the span of 2 years… :-O!  I want my new job to defy all expectations I ever had about working.

But if it doesn’t, 1/2 life biggies sure ain’t bad.

Any reader of the blog or person who knows me at all knows I have STRUGGLED with my job for the past two years.  Being with my firm has been somewhat like being in an abusive relationship.  I feel guilty even writing that because I know there are so many out there who have it so much worse than I do – but all we can do is live inside our own bubble, our own frame of reference.  There’s always someone out there who has it worse or who has it better.  So I will continue.

My job to me has equaled success, security, social life, my self-worth… really just about everything over the past two years.  Consulting is more of a lifestyle than a job due to the fact that your firm essentially owns you.  I read a fascinating article about the psychology of it all the other day, and found myself stricken and disgusted at how often I was nodding along.

“Corporations…promote and empower the psychologically maimed. Those who lack the capacity for empathy and who embrace the goals of the corporation—personal power and wealth—as the highest good succeed. Those who possess moral autonomy and individuality do not…The corporation decides who has value and who does not, who advances and who is left behind. It rewards the most compliant, craven and manipulative, and discards the losers who can’t play the game, those who do not accumulate wealth or status fast enough, or who fail to fully subsume their individuality into the corporate collective. It dominates the internal and external lives of its employees, leaving them without time for family or solitude—without time for self-reflection—and drives them into a state of perpetual nervous exhaustion. It breaks them down, especially in their early years in the firm, a period in which they are humiliated and pressured to work such long hours that many will sleep under their desks. This hazing process… eliminates from the system most of those with backbone, fortitude and dignity.”

At least now I know why I can’t handle it, because I possess so much “moral autonomy”, “individuality”, “backbone, fortitude, and dignity”… hahahaha.  In all seriousness… I can relate completely to what this article says.  There were so many times I felt like I was crazy because I wouldn’t comply with the party line.  I was on a project where people were asked (forced) to work 16 hour days, 6-7 days a week, for months on end.  After my 6th week of it, I cracked.  I took a stand and I said I would no longer be available on Saturdays.  I know that sounds really small, but considering I was 6 months into my first job out of college, it was incredibly scary to do.  I had to get to the point where I didn’t care anymore if I got fired to be able to do it.

But why, out of my team of over 50 people, most with more experience, most with children at home, was I the only one?

That’s just one example of the many things I’ve seen here over the past 2 years, and I while I was on some pretty bad projects, I know there are worse ones out there.  But for so long, I was stuck.  Part of it was my 2 year contract but most of it was fear and not knowing who I’d be without my firm.

Then, something amazing happened. (Bear with me)

I’ve been flying DC to Houston, Houston to DC every week since February since my project is in Houston.  Back in February, on my second week in the project, I was on my typical Monday morning flight.  About 30 seconds after takeoff, I looked out my window to see flames shooting out of the left wing.  I remember thinking it looked like a dragon.  I remember thinking I was going to die.  The plane started to lurch and make awful noises.  People noticed.  They were mostly silent, shock I guess.  You could see some of them mouthing prayers.  The captain came on and said something along the lines of our left engine was running “rough” and we were going to make an emergency landing at Dulles (we took off from Reagan).  For the 10-15 minutes we were in the air, all I could think about was how I was going to die.  It was one of the most terrifying things that’s ever happened to me.

It ended anticlimactically, we landed normally and after some fire/emergency crews came to ensure we weren’t going to blow up, they let us taxi and deplane normally.  I remember telling one of my coworkers I didn’t want to go near another plane, and some random lady saying “you’ve got to get right back on the horse or it’ll just be worse”.  So I did.  We got rebooked on a noon flight and we were in Houston that afternoon.  And then I flew twice a week, every week… until July.

May-July brought a lot of changes on my project.  There was a lot of turnover (people are constantly leaving the firm) and our project environment completely changed from my first positive project to a very negative project.  My main issue was that we had to share cars and no one else was interested in living a healthy lifestyle.  Everyone else I could possibly share a car with on my team wanted to go eat heavy food and drink every night after work.  I just wanted to go spend 2 hours at the gym and pick up a healthy, light dinner.  We also got a new manager who was extremely high-stress to work for.

But I digress… in July I started to have some trouble flying.  It started very small, at first it was just during takeoff I’d be a little nervous.  Then, during takeoff I was a lot nervous and started needing to blast music the whole time so I couldn’t hear any plane noises because each made me shake.  Then, I was slightly nervous the whole flight.  One flight I took a Benedryl so I could be less conscious.  Another flight I got drunk first.  My final flight to Houston was Monday, August 8th.  As soon as we took off, I knew this was a different flight.  It was normal for everyone else, but every single change in volume (louder or quieter), every change in altitude, everything about the flight made me shake, cry silently, feel like I was going to vomit, and have a constant “I’m not going to live through this flight” thought loop.  Three hours of this.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of that week driving back to DC from Houston (24 hours).  I haven’t been near a plane since.  I have a vacation scheduled for my mom and I to California in November.  It was supposed to be my way of telling her I love and appreciate her, my way to give back to someone who doesn’t make enough to do things like that.  I don’t think we’re going to be able to go because I can’t even look at planes in the sky without having some level of discomfort.

BUT… these three weeks with no travel, these three weeks of working from home (that was the solution my firm/project came up with for while I was “healing”, which I do give them a lot of credit for) have changed everything.  I have realized that I am pretty damn sure my body chose to refuse to fly because going to Houston every week had become damaging and toxic to my health.  My subconscious decided to step in and protect me because I wouldn’t/couldn’t protect myself.  It has been an incredible gift.  I’ve been on the road 48 weeks a year, 4-7 days/week for the last two years.  I probably spend about 4 nights a MONTH in my own apartment.  I had no environment or time to stop and think, REALLY think about what it was doing to me.

I don’t regret any of it and I never will.  The things we experience and what happens to us, no matter how negative, becomes intricately part of our design.  Whatever occurred to make me this way was necessary and right.  However, even before this all happened, I was beginning to see the light of day.  I had started to look for other jobs.  On my long drive home from Houston, I had so much time to think.  I impulsively decided to get my CPT (certified personal trainer).  I actually paid and signed up for the course while on the phone in the car (with a hands free!).

These last three weeks have been like slowly waking up from a dream.  My views on my relationship with Zach have completely changed.  My views on my job and what’s important to me are changing.  I have fully dived into my personal training course, including a hands on workshop last weekend which was incredibly affirming.

There is nothing in the world that moves me like inspiring people to make better choices for their overall wellness.  There is NOTHING that moves me like helping someone realize they CAN do something that they never thought they could.  I choked up on the phone with my mom when we talked about training, helping people move better, live better, feel happier, gain peace of mind.  I got goosebumps at the workshop.  I think it’s fair to say it’s beyond a passion.  It’s what I want to live.

I won’t lie and say there isn’t still fear holding me back.  I’m about to take another job with another (MUCH smaller) firm whose values are hopefully more in line with my own.  I’m still not ready to leave the security of my business career.  But I’m looking into teaching yoga classes on the side.  I’m getting my CPT.  I’m doing free training sessions on family and friends.

I know without a doubt, I’ll end up in the fitness/wellness field.  It’s my fate. Kismet.

How I get there isn’t known to me yet, but as I listen and trust in the universe and myself, it will be shown to me.

And it will be AWESOME.

Whatever the metaphor, my peace was temporarily replaced with anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger. I struggled with it for about 3 weeks, willing it to go away, panicking more and more when it didn’t. My thoughts went wild – I was backsliding into anxiety, I would never be at peace again, I wasn’t safe, I was alone. I broke down and cried for a few days, and somewhere in the middle of crying I remembered this little thing to do, stop fighting it, stop running.

It’s so simple but it goes against everything we understand. When something is attacking you (perceived or real) your biological instinct is fight or flight. Fight in this case meaning I voraciously tried to “fix” my mind, tried to identify what my issue was and get rid of it. This was a fruitless effort because you can dig and dig and dig, and you’ll never get to the true bottom of an issue, there are layers upon layers of past events and feelings that make up who we are and how we are today. I tried flight too – ignoring it and pretending it wasn’t happening, pretending to myself it was fine. That was just as useless because I couldn’t lie to myself and cover up the squirming mass of worms that was my anxiety.

Ultimately, I had to do this: sit with it. Acknowledge its presence without dwelling. Go about my day and say to myself “I feel anxious, I feel bad, I feel weird – but those are just feelings. They pass and they are separate from who I am. They don’t matter because they aren’t me. They really have nothing to do with me, because I am the same always but they change on a whim.” After a few days, this calmed me down enough for me to remember that every feeling really is temporary. I wasn’t magnifying it by worrying about how bad it was or worrying about how long it was going to last or if it was going to get worse.

And now I have reclaimed my peace. Or I suppose, not reclaimed but enabled myself to see it again. Peace never leaves us – we go somewhere else and leave peace.  Think about that again – we leave peace.  Peace is always there, waiting for us to turn down our thoughts, get out of our head and come back to it once again. We seek it everywhere – in things, in events, in other people, in thoughts. We demand happiness and peace of mind from our loved ones. We demand peace from music, from vacations. But all we really need for peace is within. I am not saying you can’t find happiness from vacations, loved, ones, music, or whatever else you enjoy – I’m just saying that if you are unhappy nothing will make you happy until you find it again within yourself.

Good news is, it’s the simplest thing in the world to do so.

Bad news is, we’re not so good at doing simple things. We’ve forgotten how to just sit. We’ve forgotten how to just listen to small things like the birds. We’ve forgotten to truly enjoy our food, or even enjoy pleasant smells. We get used to multitasking, and then we become unable to derive pleasure out of one simple task. This is where meditation has saved me. Meditation is a re-learning, a re-discovering of the pleasure in simple things. This morning, I woke up early, practiced yoga, and meditated as the sun came up. I can truly say I appreciated the beauty of the growing light, and I can truly say I was very sorry to not have more time before work to just sit and just be.

Practice slowing down. Practice turning down the volume of your “manic mind”. Practice appreciation of the moment. Practice truly experiencing your five senses. In doing those things, you’ll reconnect with your peace.

“Peace is when time doesn’t matter as it passes by.”

However, recently, I’ve had some challenges with peace.  There are so so many different things that could have triggered it, and I spent a lot of time agonizing over which it was, but I don’t think I’m really going to get an answer.  And honestly, I’m not sure it matters.  I’m more concerned with how to remove this particular block and go back to feeling grounded and at peace.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice about what could possibly help me get back to where I want to, and it’s been a huge influx of information (along with trying to figure out what caused it in the first place) and I’ve been left mostly confused and unsure of the correct path to take.

So I think, what I’m going to try is just to sit with it.  Sit with it like a yogi.  When we do poses like pigeon or frog, I go to the edge of my discomfort, and I sit there and look at it and breathe.  It’s hard – often it doesn’t make the pose feel any better.  A lot of my teachers claim that when you look squarely at a sensation, it ceases to bother you.  I’m not sure that that’s true – but I do know that breathing through pigeon and frog’s discomforts has gotten me through and to the other side, and the other side has always been better for going through it.

So that’s what I will try with my mind – embrace the discomfort, embrace the uncertainty and the fear, and trust that although when it ends is not in my control, when it ends I will come out on the other side better for having experienced it.

I’m uncomfortable, afraid, confused, and a bit lost  – but I’m okay with that.

“What a caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.  If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies”

It must have been horribly annoying to be around.  I certainly find people like that drive me crazy these days, but I have a soft spot for them because I remember that’s who I once was.  I was a constant victim, always blaming my life circumstances and/or other people for my problems.   I wondered why I had no lasting friends.  I really was clueless as to my own self-destructive pattern.

So what changed?  Why is my life and my attitude so different now?  It’s not because my circumstances have changed all that much, there’s still a lot in my past and present that could be considered negative.  It’s all about your attitude, as I’ve stated SO many times on this blog in the past.  However, until you know that, and really internalize it, it’s almost impossible to change your circumstances.  It all started to happen for me when one day someone asked me this simple question “Why can’t you just be happy?”

The first time this question was posed to me, I was filled with righteous indignation.  The person posing the query just didn’t KNOW, didn’t UNDERSTAND what I had BEEN through, how HARD my life had been, how TOUGH I’d had it.  I wanted to be happy, of course, but I just couldn’t be!  I even ended up getting angry at him for asking.  He apologized, and backed off, but a few days later, asked again; I exploded at him.   After a few cycles of this, I started to wonder… was it possible that it really was in my control?  Was it possible that what was holding me back was… me?  One day, he said to me “Just be happy.  Just decide to be happy, let everything that happened to you in the past go.” And with that, for the first time in my life, it started to click.  I had years to go and millions of lessons to learn (and still do), but this is the key that for the first time made me realize that it was really up to me, no matter what happened in my life, I had a choice about how to feel.

This was my first tool.  It was someone handing me a hammer, and me starting to see it, really see it and realize that I had the potential to build a house for myself.   Over time with other lessons I gained the materials to make the house, additional tools.  I put in the work to put it all together.  Today I sit in a complete house. It needs maintenance sometimes, but the beautiful thing is I have all the tools to fix it.  A windstorm blows through and knocks the roof off temporarily, but with my hammer, some nails, and some roofing material, I put that roof right back on again, stronger and better than before.  Maybe even with a skylight.

1) Trader Joe’s Teriyaki Turkey Jerky:  OMFG, this stuff is smoky, a little sweet, a little spicy, chewy but not rawhide style, and has terrific stats (low calorie, no fat to speak of, not terrible sodium for jerky, and 11g of protein per ounce)

2) TJ’s Cinnamon Roll Bread:  Ok definitely not healthy, but compared to an ACTUAL cinnamon roll it’s like drinking water instead of a margarita.  140 cal or something per slice (don’t have it with me, purposefully strategically left it at the hotel otherwise it takes approximately 24 hours for me to eat a loaf), 1-2g of fat.  It doesn’t taste QUITE as good as a cinnamon roll but they’ve gotten pretty damn close.  And it has that buttery sugar stuff on it.

3) TJ’s sliced apples:  They somehow manage to get the most awesome fresh crunchy sweet apples, and slice them up for me and put them in a convenient bag.  They’re apples, so obviously the nutrition stats are great.  They don’t add sugar or anything either.

4) TJ’s temptation trail mix: This trail mix contains chocolate discs, peanut butter chips, dried cherries, raisins, almonds, and peanuts.  So what if I pick out the chocolate and peanut butter and eat it first?

5)Flattened banana:  Ok this tastes like banana bread, but all it is is dehydrated banana!

6) Cooked edamame: so salty.  Probably not that great for you, but so salty and delicious.

7) Peaches: They were in season for so long… getting to not be so good now

Sugar snap peas:  They crunch! They are sweet! Little peas come out of them!  They’re 35 cal/serving!

9) 12 month Swiss cave aged gruyere: I saved the best for last.  This cheese is like heaven in my mouth.  It’s sweet, mild, but incredibly creamy and flavorful.  Go get some right now! (also at trader joe’s)

Life updates:  Things have been pretty awesome in my world.  For a while I was lying to myself pretending that things with R were good/going to be okay, and it was destroying me and negatively permeating every other aspect of my life.  We finally broke up for good back in May, and I’ve never been happier in my life.  Self deception drains pretty much all of your energy and really has no positive benefits whatsoever.  I was just so afraid of the unknown and so convinced that I “knew” what was right even though all my intuition was telling my otherwise.

The months of June/July were really crazy.  I spent a ton of time with friends going out, time by the pool/at the beach, a lot of time working, and both my parents came to visit me.  I finally got on a new client at work in July, and it’s been pretty awesome.  Work is still crazy, but it’s consistent crazy, which I can handle.  I have a role where I’m doing something I feel is actually a skill, as in it would take someone (from my firm with the relevant skillset) a week or more to get up to speed on what I do, whereas in my other roles I’ve felt you could take anyone semi educated out of any company and train them to do my job in a few hours.  I’m in Pittsburgh, which I can drive to fairly easily from the DC area, so I don’t have to deal with plane schedules and checked baggage and all that crapola.

I went to yoga teacher training bootcamp in July.  It was great for a lot of reasons, mainly because I learned a lot about myself/the world from it, I learned a lot of yoga technical stuff, and I met some cool people.  I don’t think I got as much out of it as some folks though, but that was revealing in its own way.  I feel like I already did a lot of soul searching on my own, and a lot of the stuff being said at bootcamp was repeat (not that reinforcement isn’t important) but most people around me were lapping it all up like it was gold.  Which is what I did a year/few years ago, so I get it, but…  I guess I’ve always just been SO into self analysis and being brutally honest/open with myself and others that I really wanted it to be more about learning to “be in the moment” which is what I always struggle with.  I spend SO much time thinking about the future (whether it be good aka fantasizing, neutral aka planning, or bad aka worrying).  The times I’m happiest (and I believe everyone else) is when I’m just content with whatever’s going on at the time, concentrating fully on life as it happens, since life other than in the present doesn’t exist at all.  The past and future are really just in your head.

Teacher training also had a big focus on people upping their self confidence/feelings of worth, etc which is also something I don’t have a problem with.  It’s not an arrogance thing (although sometimes I know it comes off that way).  I think I’m a good person, but I think that about everyone.  I don’t think being a good person makes me special.  The only real difference I think is between me and someone else who isn’t as “successsful” or “content” or whatever is that they haven’t yet removed their blocks to their own power.  And I know I still have tons of blocks in between me and my full power, but the biggest ones (for now) are gone, so I’m in my power,  and anyone truly in their power is awesome.  It has nothing to do with me, it’s just part of being human.  It doesn’t make me unique or better than anyone else, it’s just where I am on my path.  I’m not really arrogant or even really confident, I’m just realistic and honest.

And guess what, you can do it/be it too.  Figure out whatever’s holding you down in your life, whether it be a job, a relationship, a way of thinking, a habit, and GET RID OF IT!  We all have so much natural power – the things human beings are capable of doing astound me.  We’re so malleable, so strong, so phenomenal, yet we impose all these limits on ourselves to keep us down.

Side rant: It really pissed me off at teacher training when people worshiped the guy leading training like he was a god or something.  He’s amazing, and he’s done incredible things, but at the core he’s just a guy who’s completely honest with himself and others and who has worked hard at removing the energy blocks from his life.  People elevating him to a status above themselves were really just limiting their own power.  Anyone can achieve it with determination, discipline, and practice.

So what are you waiting for?  No one else is going to crawl inside your head and do it for you…