When "Bad" Things Happen To Good People ...Like YOU!

When “Bad” Things Happen To Good People…

Like YOU!

If you want to see the impossible accomplished, attempt the impossible

Jim Killon

When “Bad” Things Happen To Good People…

Like YOU!

Gratitude is the answer, regardless of the question

Copyright 2019 by Jim Killon All Rights Reserved

The intellectual property of the author has been asserted.

No portion of this work may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the author except as allowed by law for critical commentary or fair use purposes.

This book is dedicated to each person who has found their true value in this human experience as a servant to all.

And To every person that is suffering in their personal issues until they emerge into their own awaiting greatness.

Other Publications by Jim Killon A Gringo in Peru- A Story of Compassion in Action Living Large Living Deliberately Atheists Don’t Eat Their Children The Best Damn Book About Sales That You Will Ever Read The Changes That You Deserve Infringe Me? A Solution to Consider For Gun Violence in America Silver Linings - Words of encouragement, love and being limitless Thumper’s Gospel - A cautionary tale of deceit, manipulation and destruction, in the name of Jesus Changes for New Hope Humanitarian Magazine

Introduction 2018 was the worst year of my life. Everything, and I mean everything, that could have been threatened was threatened including my very life. I had arrived in Peru in 2009 and created my humanitarian project called Changes for New Hope. After reaching over 5000 children with clothing and shoes, medicine for parasites, vitamins, school materials and recreational activities and teaching them life values and providing a meaningful childhood, everything crashed. My main sponsor and good friend vanished. Not as much as a call or email to say why. Then another friend who I had known for years, that had set up our website, which is how we communicated with the outside world, allowed the website to shut down. Because it was in his name, there was nothing I could do to recover it. He also vanished without a trace. My mother, well into her 90s, wrote from Maryland to inform me that she had lung cancer. A week later she wrote to say that my younger brother had colon cancer.

Overlapping these issues were the authorities at Peruvian Migraciones (immigrations) creating every conceivable obstacle to make applying for residency status in Peru as difficult as possible. Without residency status I was subject to deportation. A five hour bus ride with my documentation to the nearest office was wasted because I filled everything out in blue ink and they wanted it in black ink, for example. This went on for almost a year. A volunteer arrived to our project promising to be the best thing since sliced bread and turned out to be an incredible narcissistic obstructionist. July of that year I was violently attacked and almost murdered in front of my house by two drunk neighbors attempting to rob me. While I immediately reported them to the police, they in turn claimed that they were the victims and I attacked them which prompted a criminal investigation against me. After the attack, I moved within days to another apartment. The landlady promised a peaceful and quiet living condition which I needed to recover emotionally and physically. Within a week massive construction on the floor above me began. She hired a construction company to build apartments directly overhead which meant constant hammering, drilling and banging, making life unbearable. When I complained to her, her response was, “So I lied.� Then my laptop suddenly died, boof, gone.

I was contacted by the U.S. based organization that we received volunteers and donations through. They informed me in vaguest of terms that our partnership was being terminated because “Your values are no longer in alignment with ours”… after nine years. Sponsors could no longer support our project any longer and it seemed that Changes for New Hope was about to see the end of a long and compassionate run leaving the children as they were before I arrived, which I considered unconscionable. Our last group of children in our after school program had to be dissolved because the community leaders decided that the community building, that we had been using for eight years, was now going to be their community storage warehouse.

Emotionally, physically and mentally I was a wreck. I was angry, bitter, disappointed and discouraged, in fear of retaliation, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, what money I had was dwindling faster than I could save it and no new funds were anywhere on the horizon, my injuries were slowly healing but what, if any, permanent damage was yet to be determined. I did not have money for medical care so I had to allow myself to heal without it. Immigration authorities were literally making up rules for me to follow and contradicting their previous requirements. The state prosecutor was grilling me about my culpability in the vicious attack as to whether I initiated the incident, ignoring my self defense claim as clear as it was. Peruvian corruption is commonplace. All seemed lost and there was nothing I could do about it. If ever there was a time to give up, this would have been it. 2018, what an absolute stone bitch!

So here I am in 2019, writing about what a great life I am now experiencing. How ironic, right? What happened? What changed? Did I find a magic wand and make everything go away? How did I go from victim to victor? What is the secret?

This book is my offering to you to share that, yes indeed, seemingly bad things do happen to good people. It rains on the good and evil, the sun shines on the happy and miserable in life. If there is a secret, it is that it is within your power to allow things to turn around. I knew that I was a nice guy to the nth degree. I had dedicated my life and personal savings and tens of thousands of dollars of other people’s contributions to benefit the disadvantaged children of the Peruvian Andes. How could so many cruel and ugly happenstances fall upon a decent guy like me? I did not deserve these

series of back to back incidents. Bad things do happen to good people, we must accept that it is not only possible but probable. Knowing that the world turns like this is our first defense to prepare ourselves to manage and deal with it. I hate surprises.

Coming out of my 2018 was going to take a miracle, several miracles in fact, and I believed that those miracles were going to come from within me. And they did!

This is a book that you will want to come back to again and again for encouragement, strength and guidance so that your seemingly bad days will melt under your feet as solutions, victories and deliverance become the order of your days. If, and only if, you are prepared to put yourself in the path of solutions. Answers are sought and not delivered to your couch by drone service.

First, you need to understand that nobody knows exactly what you are going through better than you do and secondly, nobody really cares. Too much reality? You are alone in your journey even though people may empathize with you, they all have their own lives, issues and concerns which makes yours pale by comparison. I refer to this as the YOYO concept. You are On Your Own. I want you to know that this is actually a Very Good Thing because, if the solutions are to come from within you, they are a lot more solid and confidence building than if you had to rely on someone else to provide them for you from some external source. What if that source dried up, what if the person moved away, died or ran out of resources to help you? You would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle wouldn’t you? Solutions within you are yours forever. They are permanent and a resource that you can access anytime you need to.

“Bad” things will happen to good people like you and that is just half of the story. The other half is that, when bad things happen, we are forced to make decisions, choices and take actions that we may have never had to consider prior to the incidences and suddenly we find ourselves in a place that we never knew before. We became a stronger and more confident version of ourselves. When you come to realize that nobody gives a rat’s fuzzy ass about what you are going through and nobody is coming to your rescue then you start to get that survival instinct to kick in. With your back to the wall, you fight through the worst of it all and save yourself. When the options are either die or survive, we tend to survive. Until traumatic events occur in our lives, we tend to drift along in mediocrity and we get along by going along. I have

learned that this is death in a standing position and totally unacceptable. You have strength within you that you never knew about because you were never forced to use it. Successful people in every area of life actually embrace failures and defeats as part of their overall regimen to develop solutions and victories. I want this book to encourage you open all your doors of possibilities, even the ones that you may have never considered before. It is time to turn every stumbling block into a stepping stone.

If you want to see the impossible accomplished, attempt the impossible. Let’s do it.

Jim Killon with a group of school children in the Peruvian Andes teaching about health benefits of washing their hands and providing anti-parasite medicine and vitamin supplements. After a series of negative incidents in 2018, it seemed all but certain Changes for New Hope would collapse in failure. Today it is stronger than ever.

The Incarceration of the Poor Me Mentality

The first thing you need to do is jettison that attitude of self-pity. Why me? I don’t deserve this. You are not Charlie Brown, whining about life on every level. You are equal to every person that ever lived on the planet, believe that. You deserve every benefit of this human experience that life has to offer you. Why is it that, with each of us having twenty four hours in our day, some people are millionaires and others are poor? Why some people optimistic and upbeat and others are putting pistols in their mouths? Why are some people crushed by their problems and others seem to leap over their equally ugly issues with apparent ease? Is there a magic pill, a secret shared only with the very special among us? Are some people destined to be miserable? Is The Man holding us down? No, not even close to being true. It is your perception that makes it seem that way. In my life, looking back, the only one who ever held me back was myself. My fears and self-limiting beliefs. Of course we all want to think that we are always right so it must be the fault of someone else. That sadistic boss, that abusive spouse, those restrictive parents, the burden of rules and commandments of the church or teachers who never gave me a chance. Yeah, that’s it! Those people and institutions are the reason I am miserable. I was born without opportunities, without a decent education, no wait, it is my race, my ethnicity, my station in life, or maybe it is my lack of personal charm. Could it be all of these things combined? Now that you think that you have found the culprit of your misery, are you better off or still miserable? Excuses for your life as it is now will melt under any small scrutiny. Yet we defend our misery because it is familiar and change is scary, undefined, unfamiliar and probably painful too. And there were monsters under our beds as well if you recall.

How many of us lost a foot as a child getting out of bed in the night? Your adult fears are just as benign. The only difference is that they have an adult theme now, but equally impotent to hurt us. Most of what we worry about will never happen.

If we want a reason why we are miserable, living small and have so many problems, trust me, there are unlimited lists available for you to choose from right inside your own negative imagination. However when you look down at your feet you will see

that you are in the exact same spot as you were before the list was checked off. Do you want justifications for your misery or a plan to escape from it and live without limits? The life of the most successful and progressive among us can be yours. Now. It is because you are reading this book, I have to believe that you are one of the good folks that want to move from that spot and ease toward your own victories that, by the way, are already reaching out to you. You have to re-adjust your thinking. Your old perceptions have got to be jettisoned, as familiar as they are, so that you can make room for new and enlightened beliefs. Self-pity, by whatever name you care to give it to justify your inertia, is an incarceration, a jail cell without bars but an imprisonment all the same. Most people live in those jail cells all their lives. The secret about self-incarcerations is that the doors have no locks. You can look at the walls encasing you or push the door open and walk into the opportunities of a new life and better situations. Some people see thorns on a rose bush and some see roses on a thorn bush. It is all a matter of how you choose to see things around you in your life.

The fact that it is new and unfamiliar scares the bejesus out of most people and they will prefer the ever familiar even though it makes them miserable. Fear of the unknown. It is why people stay in abusive marriages. It is why people spend years on jobs that they hate that are actually making them physically sick. It is why people never start that new business or write that book or sing that song that has been in their hearts for years. They never did it before and what if people laugh? It is a matter of walking out, taking that first step, just starting. The number one reason why people fail is because they never start. Square one is not supposed to be a residence for you.

But people would prefer to wallow in their self-pity, blame someone else for their lack of success or affluence or life of dignity that they absolutely deserve. Then they go to a doctor to get meds for the conditions that they brought upon themselves. People swallow pills to sleep at night, pills to get going in the morning, pills to curb the appetite because we eat to feel better about ourselves, pills to calm down. Or people plop down on a bar stool and drink a little more and a little more until the problems seem to vanish for now but those issues are replaced by new problems. Alcoholism is its own incarceration. The fact that it is legal justifies itself to them. “It’s my life.” Sure it is, but please don’t refer to this as a life. You deserve better and this, my friends,

don’t you? Poor me mentality is death in another form. Numbing yourself from the life that faces you every day is not a solution but trading one misery for another. Have you ever wondered why the next relationship has the same problems as the last one?

The job you quit in disgust seems a lot like the new job with the same issues. Damn it this boss is as bad as the last one! You act just like my ex. We are already accepting that we are a victim, we just need someone to blame. We are a conclusion looking for evidence. Misery follows us everywhere we go. “Bad” things are our destiny we think.

Life sucks sometimes, I get it. That is inevitable. The Big Question is what are you prepared to do about it? Get angry? Wrap your arms around an attitude that is selfdestructive? Blame someone else for it? Sit in a corner and eat a bowl of ice cream? I submit to you that a small, consistent shift in your attitude and a different belief about what is clearly very real in your life will change everything all around. No one is going to do it for you because, as I have said, nobody cares. No one can tell you exactly how to make a new life that you deserve, happen. Not even me. All I can do for you is move some of the pieces around the board in your thinking and share with you what has worked for me. I can’t make you want it. Another secret is that it is found in simplicity.

There are some basic principles that every successful, happy and victorious person lives by and they apply to each new situation regardless of how ugly it is until a better answer emerges. How does that sound to you? Your first step is to get rid of that ridiculous attitude of self-pity. You need answers that serve you well and self pity isn’t one of them. You are going to need to get up, turn off the television and focus now. It is your time and those who are serious will do whatever is needed to make it happen.

The Blame Game? That is hustling backward. It is like taking the ladder that has been lowered down to you in the deep hole you find yourself in and using it for firewood to keep yourself warm down there. There is no cavalry coming over the hill blowing their bugle to rescue you. You are going to save yourself. You are worth it no matter what anybody else tells you and regardless of what your negative mind says either. Your answers are internally discovered not “out there” somewhere. Out there are billions of people with their own problems, issues and worries. Let’s ditch the “Poor Me” mentality, jettison the victimization. Start looking for ways up and out into the sunshine and a life of your own design. Let’s start exploring our limitless options.

The Way It Is and the Way It Should Be

I have always been a dreamer. As far back as I can remember I had struggled to understand why things happen the way they did when it seemed so unfair. Why did innocent people get pushed aside by cruel people whose motivations were selfish, destructive and caused so much pain? Whether we are talking about Nazis or a school yard bully doesn’t much matter if the intrinsic pain is the same. Why is ‘the way it ought to be’ such a contrast from the way things actually are?

For the moment, let’s set aside the nightly news broadcasts that depress the crap out of us with relentless doom and gloom. This book is focusing on your personal journey so mass media manipulations and distractions are for a later time.

In your life, you wonder why things did not go the way it “should” have gone.

“Should” being in quotes for a reason. Why? “Should”, according to who? You? What made you the measuring stick for what ought to happen and how? Maybe events did not unfold the way you hoped they would, or wished they would, but should? See what I am creeping up on? Your team should have won. Your lottery numbers should have come out and the college sweetheart should have married you. As my dear departed Dad used to say, “And a frog should have had wings so he wouldn’t bump his tail on the ground hopping.” But it just didn’t happen that way. You feel dejected and depressed. When our emotions are invested in how things should go, we set ourselves up for disappointment again and again. After a while disappointments are what we expect. We stop dreaming, imagining and creating because we already know it is useless. Nothing is ever going to happen the way it should, but when it does, we consider it a stroke of luck. Luck? Really? Good things happen because we create them my friends. We deserve the best in life and depend on no one else but ourselves to bring those great things to pass in our lives. The best in life is due us, believe it.

Life happens as it does. Not with you in mind or anybody else. Life is completely agnostic about who it happens upon like a river that washes through a gorge either providing nature with what it needs to grow or devastates a village. It is what it is. Life happens to us all and it is our interpretation of it that makes anything appear to be

good or bad. Some things of course are universally accepted as horrific by any standards, such as violent murders, rape and abuse of children. In actuality, before even those atrocities could occur, they are built upon many smaller issues that lead up to such tragedies. Maybe, just maybe, if we addressed our personal demons as they present themselves, collectively, a safer and more loving community would emerge.

What is a community if not many individuals? How far off are we from a “Live and let live” world where we do not recognize lines drawn between races, cultures, nationalities, sexual preferences, ethnicities, socio-economic differences, sexes or political ideologies? We like people who are like us, don’t we? We wish everybody was like us because we would no longer feel inferior to smarter or more accomplished people. We wouldn’t have to tolerate people who annoy us if they were all just like us.

We wouldn’t have to feel guilty if everybody made the same amount of money, drove the same kind of car and dressed the same. The cool thing is that you can have that life tomorrow. Just stop by any Army recruiter station and sign up. Otherwise, we have to accept that we are in fact all different and come from countless different backgrounds, cultures, socio-economic statuses and everybody has a right to live according to their own understanding of what they deem the best life for themselves.

As long as they are not hurting anybody else, why should you determine that their lives are right or wrong? Some people dress like beekeepers and other people are nudists, so what? If we try to press them into our mold because that is how they “should”, dress, vote, believe, marry, eat, educate their children and live then we can expect a life of frustrated disappointments because our “should” will never merge with their “should”. Is it any wonder why the world is so full of wars, conflict, hatred, disease, impoverishment and genocide? Their lives may not be your cup of tea, so what? Live and let live, flow day to day with an appreciation for all the differences.

I submit to you now that the reason we live in disappointments and devastation in our personal lives is because things did not go the way we thought they “should” have gone. According to our personal wants, desires, personal perceptions of what we believe is right and the agenda we brought to the game. What makes our way, best?

There is a word for this and that word is...Ego. We may think ego is only a “Hey! Look at me!” attitude or arrogance but if we expand the definition to include the attitude that we are the standard by which all the world is measured as good or bad, right or

wrong, pretty or ugly, normal or weird and us and them. We use our egos to draw lines, create borders, set apart that which we embrace and what we reject. Those egos form political parties, religions, elite country clubs, exclusive social organizations, street gangs, cults, rules, laws, regulations, restrictions, dues, fees, fines, reward systems and consequences to those who do not follow our egos.

We already know that we are right, we just need to get together with others who agree with us. Like egos congeal. As soon as those egos are challenged by opposing egos who don’t agree because they are equally sure of how right they are, arguments erupt. Fear and anxieties burst open because we dread the loss of position, face or station in life that we feel we deserved. On larger scales, bloody riots break out, and on an even larger scale, wars decimate the lives of millions. The twentieth century experienced wars and armed conflicts that killed more people that all the wars that ever happened previously in the history of mankind. Imagine if we fought to find ways to agree and mutually respect each other’s right to live according to our individual determination instead of trying to force our wills upon others. This starts at an individual level long before it becomes a community, state and national issue. John Lennon wrote, “Give Peace a Chance” which is as timely today as it was back when he originally said it. It starts with you, here, now, today. It is a solution that we can allow.

Ego creates that “should” mentality within us. Our disappointments, fears, anger, pain, anxieties whether emotional, physical or mental, comes from the conflict between the way we think it should be and the way it is. Think about that for a moment and see if you can you agree with it. It becomes a cross fire between our head and our heart. Only one can win and you decide which it will be.

Now, I am not asking you to go skipping across a meadow of daisies accepting anything and everything that comes your way chanting “Peace and love.” You have a job with responsibilities, quotas, and obligations. You probably have a family and friends that you interact with. Sometimes it is necessary to put your foot down when circumstances require it. To put your foot down without crushing toes is a skill, an art and to do so without ego-fuelled attitudes will be the secret to your success.

I want you to consider the issues that occur when you go through your daily life. The maniac driver cuts you off in traffic. He obviously saw you and almost caused an

accident. How did that make you feel? Check out the reaction you have. Internally, initially you may have felt a sense of fear of getting injured. But after that you felt a sense of rage maybe? Anger boils over and a feeling of indignation because of what that maniac almost did…to you! Thoughts start racing. Speed up, get alongside him, roll down your window, yell at him, cuss him out, flip him off. Seething bastard! Cut me off in traffic will you. You’ll show him won’t you? In a previous book I wrote in 2018 entitled, “Infringe Me? A Solution to Consider for Gun Violence in America”, I shared how many people die every year by gun violence. Many of those shootings happen during road rage incidents. Fatherless children grow up wondering what their lives could have been like if Daddy didn’t get out of the car to go beat up the maniac driver that almost hit us in traffic. As dramatic as this sounds reading it, it occurs thousands of times a year around the world. Anger, fuelled by ego that screams to us that we have been wronged, causes us to react in ways that could put us bleeding on a pavement, in a hospital, a court room paying fines, in jail or in a morgue. At the very least, we let that seething bastard upset our otherwise happy day. He took away my happiness. Did he really? Is that our perception of how it went down? Let’s review.

The reckless driver, wrong as he was, “almost” caused an accident. Adrenaline blast, slam on the brakes, swerve out of harm’s way and pull over to exhale and regain your composure. Are you hurt? No, check. Is your car damaged? No, check. Is the driver gone, out of your life forever? Yes, check. “But he got away with it!” you are thinking, “He will probably kill someone one day. He should be caught, arrested, fined at the very least, probably drunk or high and should have his license taken away.” Maybe he “should” but that isn’t going to be your call, is it? Are you okay? You did what you needed to do to stay safe and alive. The rest is out of your control… but that pisses you off so badly you can just taste it can’t you? Revenge would be so sweet. This is ego way out of control. What you think should happen isn’t going to happen. Grrr.

It is part of the reason why over 10,000 murders occur in the United States every year.

It is why divorce attorneys have offices full of clients waiting to see them. It is why jails are overcrowded. It is why alcoholism and drug addiction is killing our fellow humans.

Mental health professionals can’t prescribe medications fast enough to keep their patients from hurting themselves or someone else. It is because we know we are right and we cannot allow ourselves to be wronged. Nightmares and anxiety issues affect

every aspect of our lives because we hate that we were victimized, slighted, forced into something we didn’t want to do, made to stay late, fired, stood up, made to wait in a line too long, couldn’t find our car keys, missed an appointment, forgot a meeting, had to pick up after the lazy kids, or have jock itch. Pile several of these issues on top of each other and bingo! You’re ready to seal up the windows and turn on the gas. Suicide victims aren’t necessarily crazy. They usually have just lost all hope, they feel there is no way out, they have had all that they can take and ending it all seems like a reasonable answer. It may not make sense to any of us but their egos tell them otherwise. It affects some of the most improbable individuals but it doesn’t have to be the ultimate price when solutions, a new day is coming tomorrow.

I met a man who had five million dollars net worth before the 2008 economic meltdown. Afterward, he was only worth five hundred thousand dollars and was contemplating suicide. He couldn’t imagine being “poor” because it was an embarrassment to lose everything in the face of his friends and family. Everybody I knew would consider five hundred thousand dollars a helluva nest egg to start again from. To him, it was the end. When I reminded him that most of the people in the world do not have five hundred thousand dollars, in fact over a billion people on this planet live on less than a dollar a day, he reconsidered his plans. A shift in his perception and dropping his ego about what he “should” have in the bank saved his life. He knew how to make it once and could do it again. The market bounced back and he regained his original assets and then some. His ego almost killed him. Money is just dirty paper used to buy stuff that we think we need to feel comfortable, important, socially acceptable, cool, in fashion or sexy. Once we have food to eat every day, a place to stay that is comfortable for our family, our basic needs met sufficiently and maybe some rainy day fund set aside for emergencies, what else is money for anyway? Ego tells us we need to be in the 1% of all wage earners. Ego tells us we need this year’s latest, greatest, newest model replacing last year’s version that still works just fine. Ego keeps us feeling poor, insecure, feeling inadequate, separated, nervous and locks us in an attitude. Actions follow that we are not very proud of. It is because we have this idea of how things should be and it is a lie that we tell ourselves that destroys our happiness and who we could be if only we could let most of this go. Ego is a ring in your nose that society uses to pull you around.

I look at nature. Nature is a great teacher. I read about animals in the wild. A deer may hear a snap of a twig close by and his ears perk up. His breathing gets faster and his heart starts pounding. Fight or flight hormones kicks in. Adrenaline flows and he is ready to flee from impending or perceived danger. He hears the growl of a mountain lion and takes off across a field outrunning his predator. Once he is safely away from the danger he doesn’t tell all of his deer friends what a vicious bastard the mountain lion was and if he ever sees it again what he will do to him. He doesn’t give the lion another thought and goes right back to eating grass or whatever a deer does when they aren’t being chased by mountain lions. The adrenaline flow drops, heart rate slows and he is just a deer enjoying the rest of his continuing life. Animals in the wild do not have egos. Humans do. We like to remember every misdeed anyone ever did to us dating back to the day after Lincoln was shot. Those memories cause pain yet we seem to habitually rehash them over and over again, never healing. Constant pain.

A man I once had to work with told me about his divorce in full ad nauseum detail which took a few hours. To hear his story you would think it happened last week.

When he finally came up for air, I asked him when it happened. “Oh hell that was twenty years ago.” He was one of the most miserable people had I ever met in my life.

His ego of a perceived unfair and ugly divorce caused him to forever drown in his selfcreated toxins and inflicted them upon every person who he met. I’m surprised his shadow would even keep him company. Misery is in the past, leave it there.

What if we stepped back a bit and saw life as happening without us in mind. Certain things are going to happen. If we drive a car there is always a possibility that we will encounter reckless drivers. We may be involved in an accident. If we work at a job there is a high probability that not everyone was hired based on whether their personality was compatible with ours. There is a chance that the boss will come in and be in a bad mood and take it out on us. Customers may appear and vent their egos on us knowing that we cannot do anything but stand there and take it for fear of losing our jobs. Ordered food may arrive cold or late. A co-worker may be a slacker and cause you to double your work load. It isn’t a conspiracy against you, it just is life.

It “shouldn’t” be this way, but it is. What are you going to do about it? That depends on whether you will react according to an ego-based response or side step it like the

deer does. Would getting in the face of the slacker that caused you to do their work result in a conflict or lighten your load? What is a better way to go here? The slacker’s ego is up and running at full steam so two egos engaging is a recipe for disaster. You lost before you ever started if confrontation was the action plan that you had in mind.

I can’t tell you what to do exactly in every situation but I can share that an ego-less response is going to lead to the best possible solution. Guess what? It may not be what you thought would happen. It may not be what you wanted to have happen either because what you thought should happen is the ego dictating again. It may be quitting the job if the situation is intolerable to you and management won’t correct it.

I’ve done that in past intolerable situations and found a job that made me infinitely happier, even though the old job “should” have never allowed such illegal activities to occur. I had to ask myself if I wanted to be happy and content wherever I landed or was I more interested in being right and getting justice for the wrongs done to me. I couldn’t have both. I recognized that it was my perception to what was happening, perhaps not the way it actually was, that caused me to be so angry or resentful. Even if my perception was reality, it wouldn’t matter. Ask a child, who was not allowed to have candy before dinner, what he thinks of his parents. His perception is that they are unfair, mean and don’t love him. A week later when they buy him a new bicycle, he perceives them as being the greatest parents in the whole wide world.

Releasing the ego, as the lens from which to see life situations around you, frees you to see negative situations as simply happenstances and not necessarily a conspiracy against you, the punishment from a perceived deity or reason to rage because things did not happen as it should have. You are in this world; you are part of the whole and not the center of the Universe that everything else is measured against. You may consider this as obvious but in real life situations, people seem to act as though their view of every life situation is either how they believe it should be or it’s an outrage.

Obviously, I cannot cover every scenario in one book unless it would rival War and Peace for pages. However, once you understand the basis for conflict, that ego and the insistence that you know the way it “should” be and it is going sideways instead, you will find your “Ah-ha” moment of clarity. Once I starting practicing seeing circumstances as just the way some people are, neither good or bad, neither ignorant

nor amiable, just people being themselves, it was immensely easier to go through my day. They are who they are and not subject to my judgment of how they “should” be.

Some people, as you well know, are deliberately manipulative, vindictive or malicious.

The internal pain they must be enduring every waking minute of their lives has to be killing them. I urge you to try, hard as it would be, to have a sense of compassion for them. Not so much because they deserve it but because it is who you are. I forgive people, almost daily, who never ask to be forgiven, in fact their egos don’t allow them to think that they are even wrong. I forgive because it is who I have decided I will be. I let it go. Initially it was damn difficult to do for my first, oh, fifty years or so. It was difficult because, I knew in my head that I needed to forgive people as the perceived right thing to do but doing it flew in the face of my ego. I was the kind of person who had to right the wrongs of the World as though it were my responsibility. I was the avenging angel with a flaming sword. A personal crusader. I was miserable doing it though. It consumed my time and devoured every waking moment of my thought process. The secret about getting even is that you will never get even. It is impossible.

It is like getting rich. No matter how much money you obtain, there is a bigger number and someone else has it, not you. Once you obtain that number, there is another even bigger amount that you have yet to obtain. You become a dog chasing its own tail. Getting even is exactly like that as is every ego-fuelled endeavor. Once you right the perceived wrong or evil, you are never sure whether they got what they deserved. I gave up the superhero life because, while the “evil” was my enemy, it became apparent that I was their enemy as well and they were attacking me as their perception of attempting to right my wrong. After a while you forget who started it and what you were fighting for in the first place. Then you are just fighting out of pure ego. One man, wiser than I will ever be said, “Wars don’t prove who is right, just who is left.” Being right has a tremendous cost and I no longer care to pay the price. Now I’m free. A last word about forgiveness which inspired me comes from actress Lily Tomlin who said, ”Forgiveness means giving up all hope of ever having a better past.”

Preconceived Ideas and Belief Systems that are Keeping Us Miserable

The reason many people are miserable and see “bad” things happening all around them, to them and dread getting out of bed in the mornings is because they already have a mindset carved into their brains perhaps from as far back as childhood.

Negativity or what we perceive to be negative is drilled into our heads from the time we were able to crawl up to a light socket and try to put our fingers into it. “STOP THAT!” shouted our parents. Ok, the light socket thing was probably for our own good. However they never stopped shouting at us. Everything was forbidden.

Everything was too much trouble to do for you. You were bad for doing one thing or another. Positive reinforcement drifted in every once in a while but the predominate theme was how bad we are as children. Children back in my day were taught that they should be seen and not heard. Considering parents also had parents who were equally as negative, stressed, over anxious and abusive as their parents were before them.

Kids don’t understand that parents have things that “should” be happening but weren’t. Money was tight, there was never enough for the life they believed they deserved. The nightly news was a constant source of fear, doom, gloom, the enemies are at the gate, your social security will dry up before you ever get it, taxes are going up, the elections are rigged, some insect is bringing a plague that will kill us all, vaccines are doing more harm than good, terrorists are on every plane now, your spouse is cheating on you, the mechanic is ripping you off, the soap you have been using for decades causes cancer, the ozone is gone and we will all be burned to cinders soon, lobbyists are influencing politicians against your best interests and the education your kids is getting will park them at a 4th grade reading level at best.

No wonder the parents are stressed. They believe what they saw on television. What you see and hear you will become, it is inevitable. People do not think, they unconsciously accept what people, perceived to be smarter than they are, the “experts” tell them. The weather forecasters are right only about 20% of the time.

When I was a child, color television was a new invention. We were told that watching hours of color television a day will cause blindness. How many blind people do you know? Microwave ovens were also a new appliance in kitchens in the 1970s. Over

time, using a microwave will kill the whole family with cancer from the radiation poisoning. Has anyone gone to mass funerals of families owning microwaves? 1970s brought Killer Bees that were coming up from South America and would be a major threat to metropolitan populations making going outside impossible. Do you know anybody that was stung to death by killer bees? Zika virus? Nuclear annihilation? Fear is a mental disease inflicted upon the masses by mass media and social media every day. Whatever the doctor prescribes must be right because he is the doctor. That is a widely accepted “fact” however doctor error, called iatrogenic injury affects one in ten patients worldwide, did you know that? Experts don’t know everything but they know how to distribute fear and cause entire populations to quiver at the thought that their lives will be ill-affected in some uncontrollable way. Then they advertise to you their latest product which just so happens to be the solution. Fear and greed are the two most powerful motivators known to man. Ask any stockbroker how he makes a living.

Facts and truths. Isn’t it all an illusion? It is true because we all agreed that it is true so it must be true. True? Beyond some common sense things like “Fire is hot and the sun is bright”, everything else seems to be subject to interpretation. “Expert” doctors and physiologists knew prior to 1954 that the human body cannot possibly run a four minute mile. Roger Bannister broke that barrier and the following year dozens of others did it as well. Since 1954, thousands of athletes have accomplished the four minute mile, including high school girls. It was only a barrier because we believed that it was. About one hundred and twenty years ago the U.S. Patent office announced they may be closing their offices because everything that can possibly be invented has already been invented. It is only a fact if everyone embraces it as such, otherwise we can dream and imagine far beyond it and create our own realities that better serve our lives on our own terms. The perceived “bad things” that happen to good people like us fades as a new and glorious life emerges for us by our own design. The challenges become life lessons that help us know what works and what doesn’t so is it a “bad thing”? Is it possible to have a great day every day? Can we adjust our perception and expand our thinking to know that problems are challenges that ultimately become opportunities. Or perhaps a failed marriage, painful as it may be, allows us to find someone better suited for us? Or a failed business venture causes us to adjust our methods to try again differently where success is more likely?

Consider Colonel Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He ran a chicken restaurant for years and did a good business. The state rerouted the highway in a new direction and it no longer ran past Colonel Sander’s restaurant any longer. He lost his business and was living on $105 a month social security check. At age 62, he decided he wasn’t finished yet and took his secret recipe to every chicken restaurant he could find offering them his method in return for a 4 cent royalty for every piece they sold.

Over one thousand times he was told, “No thanks” but on his 1008th stop the owner said, “Yes.” Then another and another. In 1964, Colonel Harland Sanders sold his interest in Kentucky Fried Chicken for, what would be in today’s money, $16 million dollars. Was he a failure? Perceptions a week after the new highway circumvented his restaurant would have indicated so. Rejection number 1007 must have been quite convincing that failure was a reality. Perceptions however, are not reality unless you accept them as such. That would have been a Very Bad Thing for Colonel Sanders if he accepted what was obviously negative conditions for his business. Action turned it around. Attitude made the difference. Not accepting a seemingly bad, unfair and cruel run of luck made him a multi-millionaire and set for life. I submit that these “bad things” that happen to us can be some of the most enlightening opportunities that we could possibly imagine. If we look for the opportunity in every challenge we stop accepting things as “The way it is” and find the way out to a new horizon.

People who have heard my story or read my first book, “A Gringo in Peru-A Story of Compassion in Action”, know that I arrived in Peru in 2009 with the intention of helping disadvantaged and destitute children which has been the joy of a lifetime. The irony of this wonderful humanitarian project is that my timing to come to Peru in 2009 was prompted by my now ex-wife. A lovely bi-polar, alcoholic with anti-social personality disorder with a propensity for cruel violence had plotted my murder with a hit man. I overheard the arrangement made on the phone when she thought I was out of the house. The Baltimore City police refused to do anything because, according to them, “A crime has not yet been committed.” I had to be dead before they would intervene. So, for my own protection, I fled to South America. Earlier in 2007, I had visited Nicaragua and saw the deplorable conditions the children lived in and determined that I would do something about it one day. One day happened to be January 20th, 2009 and I had not returned to the U.S. to live since. The worst

imaginable situation that could happen to me became the most wonderful experience of my life ever since. Had I allowed ego to dictate my decisions I would have purchased a gun and sat in my house and waited for the hit man to come to me. There was no way that would have ended well. What “should” have happened versus what did happen made all the difference between thousands of children being reached with desperately needed humanitarian aid and somebody becoming a chalk outline on my hardwood floor back in Baltimore.

If we accept commonly agreed upon belief systems as fact and truth then anything that comes down from that source becomes “The way it is.” If that system is how things “should” be by some arbitrary authority then conflicts arise out of ego. To put a finer point on this, let’s consider organized religion. Nothing rattles the cages of people’s preconceived notions faster than suggesting that their belief system may not be, in a matter of speaking, accurate. Over the centuries, religions have dictated how it is “supposed to be” and those who oppose the teachings were imprisoned, tortured in unspeakably cruel manners and murdered en mass. Those fortunate enough to escape capture were relegated to the fiery depths of hell in the afterlife. On a smaller scale, family members have been shunned for their questioning and rejection of certain belief systems. Wikipedia refers to the practice of shunning as a form of mental torture. People have turned over countless millions of dollars, pounds, euro and other assets to support tax free organizations that in return stroke their egos into accepting that what they believe is right, correct and holy. The endorphin rush of being told by an ordained figure who claims to have the deity’s ear seems to be worth their time, money and questionable common sense. In fairness, some religious organizations do some amazing charity work but by contrast, religious belief systems have been responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people whether by warfare, mass slaughter or persecution. These are ego driven people, groups and organized mania to the extreme. We can all live in harmony and peace unless any one of us decided that our way is THE way and other belief systems are the wrong way.

Then conflicts arise and there are consequences. I believe and state without apology that organized religions have been the source of bad things that have happened to good people for many centuries and the stepping back and away from them is an opportunity that we have available to us to avoid further conflict. Rejecting the

tenants of organized religions that have imposed themselves upon millions for centuries ends the manipulation in our minds and awareness. We then begin to make decisions for ourselves without a standard handed down from a perceived authority as the way it should be. As Westerners, Christianity is the most common religion and is universally accepted as the one true religion. However, there are several million Buddhists and millions more Muslims, and millions more Hindis not to mention several million atheists that would disagree that Christianity is the only or correct religion or belief system. Even the various sects and denominations of Christianity are in conflict over a variety of doctrinal issues, using the same self-referencing book, causing even more ego driven separations between people. I do not embrace any religious belief system and I do not make recommendations to anyone as to what they “should” believe. The historical facts tell me everything I need to know as to whether a religion is freeing or incarcerating and that is all I care to say about this one.

I believe that the Dali Lama had the closest handle on the subject when asked about his religion. He simply stated that his religion is love. This sure works well for me.

Letting go of “–Isms” of belief systems and how it has to be or else gives me a great freedom that allows me to embrace humanity and love people as they are and perhaps through my example, people can also find the freedom to become their very best and special versions of their own selves as they see fit. Lighting a candle as opposed to cursing the darkness so to speak. We can only be one humanity if we erase those damned lines between us. Help me do this will you?

“Before you can convert a man you first must feed him” ~~ Ghandi Luigi shares pizza with Andean kids at his shop with a message of hope and love

Creating the World That We Want To Live In

Now let’s consider how to use our preconceived ideas to our benefit for ourselves and others around us. It is true that what we see and hear, we become. We speak the language we do because we have always heard it from the time we were born and it was fine tuned in school with grammar and proper enunciation. A child born in a multi-lingual home will speak all those languages naturally because their brains do not filter out languages that are familiar to them. We use forks and spoons as part of our culture and find eating with chopsticks or with our bare hands as awkward. In Asia it is the other way around. Our clothing is what everyone else around us wears. We are all products of our environment. What is familiar to us is our comfort zone.

Many of us were exposed to negativity and limitations from birth. We were taught by teachers, parents, social leaders, older siblings, neighbors and television what our restrictions in life are and “should” be. However, what if we broke the mold? What if we decided for ourselves to become limitless? What if we embraced the Albert Einsteins of the world who believe that imagination is greater than knowledge.

Knowledge is limited but imagination is ever expanding. What if we embraced the example Elon Musk who turned his fortune, after he sold PayPal, into an eco-friendly car company, then created SpaceX which, after two rockets exploded at launch, sent a third into space which made him a billionaire. Now he is on a venture to reach Mars in his lifetime. If that sounds a tad crazy, so were driverless cars, mobile devices holding every bit of public information known to man and on-demand entertainment a few decades ago. Someone had to dream bigger than what was already available.

You, my friends, can dream well beyond your current life and set of circumstances.

Consider Rosa Parks who saw human dignity beyond a seat on a bus and changed public policy for millions of people. Try to imagine what Jobs and Wozniak were thinking when they invented the personal computer which created a new product that did not yet exist and no one even knew what it was at the time. What is today is not the way it has to be or will always be. Everything changes, including your life and circumstances. It won’t always be easy but it will always be worth it. Parks was jailed, Jobs was ousted from the company he created. Mandela spent twenty seven years in

jail only to emerge later as the president of South Africa. People with courage created a life they decided they needed to live as opposed to accepting the status quo, the way it was “supposed” to be. Their decisions affected the lives of many millions. Most people are just trying to get one foot in front of the other. Just get through the day and get home in time for dinner. What if we saw life as limitless and possibilities being endless for us on a daily basis? Perhaps we have no idea what it is or how it will unfold to us but what if we allow ourselves the open mind and awareness that it is possible to live beyond our current limitations, expectations and circumstances? If you do not know anybody like those in your life right now, so what? I didn’t either. For the innovative among us there is no right way because we design it from scratch. No one told Henry Ford what a car should look like so he used his vision and imagination.

Ten years ago most people thought my dream and vision for a better life, helping relieve the destitution for thousands of Peruvian children was ridiculous and impossible. I had no clue how to accomplish such a task. However like energies attract and somehow we find each other. A man I met a few years ago introduced me to the new director of social development for the city of Huaraz where I live and she was sufficiently impressed by the enormity of my vision that she in turn, introduced me to the director of social development for Ancash which is like a state or province. That director brought me into meetings with mayors and leaders throughout the region and doors swung open for me to bring solutions, anti-parasite medicines, vitamins and other humanitarian materials as well as my life teachings to more children and families than I ever imagined reaching. The first domino to topple was to jettison my doubt that limitless possibilities existed. It was a matter of time and opportunity to converge. I knew it was possible regardless of who did or didn’t share my belief. I love what companies are doing now to also raise awareness that a better world is possible.

Rebok sells shoes but advertises “Be More Human.” Apple computer advertises, ”Think Different.” It is more than just making money. Profits are a result, the product gets them there but, the power to share potent life messages to the millions of people attracted to those products has intrinsic value beyond anything that appears on a bottom line.

On an individual basis, we each can live any life we choose and believing that we can is the first step to obtaining it. What does your dream life look like? Regardless of how

impossible it is in your current thinking or circumstances, what would you speak into reality if you could? If you will embrace that which you see and hear, you can become, why not fantasize about a great life for yourself and those you love? Without ego fuelled motivations, dream big, so big that it is ridiculous to others. When I talk to people about this, many want a great life of success and abundance to impress somebody else or out-do them. That energy is negative as is the energy of trying to prove to someone else that they were wrong about you. Such thinking indicates a need to practice forgiveness. If you run toward a goal while looking over your shoulder at everyone else you will smack into a tree. We can self-destruct trying to move forward if our hearts are in the wrong place. Your mind absolutely must be well prepared for the goal, whatever it may be, when you reach it. If you want to be rich, your mind must think in terms of being rich first. The wealthy were wealthy in their heads long before they were wealthy in their pockets. Those wanting a beautifully fulfilling relationship were not surprised when it arrived because they “saw it” first and acted as though they were already in it. They knew how they would treat their significant other. They spent time imagining how a day with them would be. When it appeared, they simply stepped into it. The athlete that ran a four minute mile was thinking about that time on the stopwatch when he was running an eight minute mile.

There are no surprises for the great among us. We saw it in our minds, envisioned it with such passion that the reality of it coming into being was fully expected.

Now, let me ask you what is the difference between them and you if you do what they did, can you achieve the same success that you want in your life? Will bad things happen to good people like you? Sure, expect it and be prepared to flow like a river around the rock in its path. If your vision is so compelling and well expected to arrive in your life, how bad are a few obstacles that indicate to you a different course of action is needed? The attitude of perception now works with you to see obstacles as opportunities. People do not believe in your vision? No problem, this wasn’t their journey. There is no money for the project? Money is in unlimited supply, contrary to common perceptions. Resourcefulness is the solution to any shortages. There are people who share your belief, enthusiasm, courage and would possibly partner with you in it. You will need to put yourself in the path of the resources. If I wanted to be an actor and I lived in Fargo, North Dakota, the odds of making it or being discovered are

about zero. I either have to adjust my location to Hollywood or New York or I have to accept that a shift in my plans to accommodate my life in Fargo is necessary. So instead of starring next to Angelina Jolie on the big screen, I may find my fame and success as a YouTube star and become a viral social media sensation. If I want to be a successful stock trader on Wall Street and that just isn’t a possibility based on current situations, I can be a stock trader equally as successful as a day trader from my home computer on a stock trading platform and never have to leave the house. Being flexible to accept and see opportunities as they emerge to you is imperative. The notion of how it is “supposed to be” according to preconceived notions kills so many ideas and successes. The mentality of “This or nothing” will usually result in nothing.

Drop the ego and open your heart and eyes to the amazing opportunities that knock on your door. Make them happen. Be innovative, be creative and never be timid. I reach out into the Universe for this…or better and expect the results to unfold to me.

One of my favorite stories is how Sir Richard Branson created Virgin Airlines. While stuck in an airport in the Caribbean with no seats available on any flights to get back to England, he turned his “bad thing” into opportunity for himself and others. He found a private plane company that would fly him to England as soon as he was ready to go. It was expensive and there were plenty of empty seats. He considered that there must be others also going where he was and stuck in the airport as well. He took a board and marker and wrote his advertisement. He said that he had a flight to England on a private plane leaving now and the price. Passengers filled the plane and he got to England, on a private plane, when he wanted to go, and made money in the process. He could have equally sat in an airport and complained about “The way it was.” Virgin airlines was a solution borne out of a seemingly bad situation.

What you are learning is that you will need to step out and away from what has been familiar up to this point if you want to create your own new and unfamiliar reality. In my book, The Changes That You Deserve, I shared that changes, while seemingly painful because the brain craves safe familiarity, are the very things that will free you and create the life and world that you want to live in. Changes are what you deserve, it is owed to you and you have every right to expect positive, wonderful and inspiring changes to unfold for you in your life. Are you ready to accept those changes?

Consider the Pilgrims that landed on Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.

The wanted a new life, a better opportunity that they couldn’t realize in safe and familiar England under the king at the time. Without a clear understanding of what they would experience in the “New World”, they sailed across the Atlantic determined that they would find a way to make it happen. There wasn’t a Boston to walk into yet, no Starbucks to plop down into and check emails. They stepped off the ship completely alone and with only what they could carry with them and built everything from scratch. Other colonists landed in other shores and from those very primitive beginnings progressed, because there was no other option except to die, created their new life. What is the difference between them and you, besides those buckles all over their clothes? What is the difference between ordinary people that invented things, cured diseases or discovered new ways of living and you? Courage? The courage to take the first step? The hardest part is always the beginning isn’t it? I wasn’t a writer and author until I started writing. Picasso wasn’t a Picasso until he picked up a paint brush. Steve Jobs was a college drop out in a garage until he and Wozniak walked out with a computer in hand. The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics in Ohio until they went down to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina built and flew the first airplane.

Nobody was anybody until they took action and put their thoughts into reality, forsaking what had been familiar until then. What is the difference between them and you? Not one damn thing, think about it. So, ready to start right now?

The graveyards are full of people no one ever heard of, people who lived their whole life doing the nine to five routine for forty years and died with all sorts of dreams and visions and opinions and ideas that never left their heads. When bad things happened to good people like them it was a disaster because they had known nothing but ordinary all their lives. What if you lived a life of profound joy and felt a sense of selfworth and celebrating victories big and small every day? The troubles, that everyone else allows to bury them, are only minor annoyances to you and you simply step aside letting it pass or else if it needs your attention, you manage it until it either is resolved or you know you have done all that you could and took it as far as was possible. It rains on all of us. The sun shines on all of us. We don’t get to make the call as to when or where it will happen but we can either complain about the weather or anticipate the inevitable and dress accordingly. Are you seeing the benefit of attitude adjustments?

The rain is no issue if you have an umbrella. Attitude and the way …you choose… to see the world around you and the people in it will make the difference between a great day and one that devours you whole. Same day, same circumstances, different attitude. It is time to start winning at this game we call life, starting today. Realize that no one is going to kill you and eat you. Remember no one cares if you succeed or fail more than you do. Everyone else is out there on their own little journeys in their own little lives. Remember that no one ever realizes a life larger than their expectations. No one grows larger than the perception that they have of themselves.

Many people seem to think it will take years of effort and earth shattering changes with uncertain results and no guarantees. In fact, it takes minutes and the changes need to only be small steps at first. It will cost you nothing but a dismissal of the urge to reject the impossibilities. If you steered your car a little to the left, in time you would be many miles in another direction wouldn’t you? If it’s where you want to go, great but if it is away from your destination then you have to adjust your steering.

In your brain has a capability called the reticulating activated system, R.A.S. for short.

Maybe you never heard of it but no doubt, you use it every single day of your life.

Simply explained, if you look for something, you will see it. It is a filter so you are not seeing and hearing everything all at once else you would go crazy. This is a tool that you can use for your own personal development. Try it and see if you can adapt it to your daily experience. First, take a look around you and try to see as many things that are blue. Now close your eyes and try to remember everything that you saw that was red. There may be as many or more red items but you were not focused on red so it was filtered out. You were primed to see blue things only. Have you ever noticed that when you bought a new car everybody was driving the same car? If you hear a new music tune you like you suddenly hear it everywhere all day. As humans we are genetically developed to notice things that have become familiar to us.

How can you use this to your benefit? Instead of looking for blue things, imagine walking out of your house and deciding that you will see four amazing things today.

Imagine deciding that you will encounter three people who exhibit kindness. Decide that today will be and already is a Very Beautiful Day. Play music that underscores that thought. Let your mind work for you and not against you. Let your thoughts

automatically search for the good that exists in life and flow into your pathway. There will be negative things too. The boss is still who he or she was yesterday. The significant other still might be in a mood. The neighbor’s dog still came into your yard and left his mark, again. Life continues as it always has but your attitude and focus is more on the beautiful things that you are anticipating. That is something that is within your control so control it. Now life begins to happen at your will and command.

You begin to start designing your life so the apparent “bad” things that rattle the cages of those around you are simple inconveniences anymore. I once read something that I thought was profound regarding how we choose to perceive happenstances around us. “If you hate someone, you are outraged just by the way they hold their soup spoon. If you love someone, they can spill the whole bowl into your lap and you will think it is just adorable.” I am sure we can all relate.

I believe and just know that a great day awaits me from the time I wake up. My feet hit the floor and I say “Thank you!” several times. I program my thoughts and attitude ahead of whatever might happen later. Even during 2018 when the whole world was collapsing around me. I refused to wait for it to get better before I was grateful. I stepped into the storm already grateful that an opportunity, disguised as a challenge, was soon to present itself. The challenges were still there but I deflated the power that they had on me emotionally and hence physically. Those who I felt abandoned by, I simply deemed irrelevant any longer to me or my project. People have chosen their own paths in life and if that did not include me any longer, that is the way it has to be and stressing about it is like scratching poison ivy. It spreads to every part of you. A crashed website means it’s time to find and develop a new website. Supporters bug out? There were others, and 2019 revealed several more whose compassion and dedication shone brighter than anything that had come before. My mother, at 92 with lung cancer as well as my brother who also had cancer was something I could do nothing about. I was relieved, of course, to hear that they were in remission. I had to steel myself for some very bad news possibly but I also embrace the Taoist philosophy that we are all energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed. It simply changes forms. The body that we inhabit is going to one day dissolve into nothingness but a body is not our essence. A PhD. In astrophysics that loses an arm in an accident is just as smart and knows everything that he did before he lost a limb. Whenever it is time

to shuck off this body, I embrace the idea that the energy my mom, my brother, you or I will always exist in some form and I hope it is the energy of love that will emanate out into the Universe from which it all came from. The two drunks that attacked and attempted to rob me July 2018, almost killing me was a horrific and violent experience forcing me to defend myself in ways that I never had to at any previous time in my life.

Facing my own mortality prompted me to create, what I trust will be, an annual legacy event. The Jim Killon Humanitarian Awards are being presented to other like-minded and altruistic individuals whose humanitarian efforts have made significant impacts in the lives of the disadvantaged and impoverished among us throughout the world.

How’s that for turning your lemons into lemonade? When the leaders of communities wanted their community centers back, which left us without a place to meet with our after school children, I thought about Colonel Sanders losing his chicken restaurant but re-adjusted his thinking and sold the secret recipe and became more successful than he ever dreamed. I restructured my focus to reach 10,000 children throughout the Ancash department (state) and address the de-worming of them with World Health Organization recommended medicine called Albendazole. I also added vitamin A to build their health and bars of personal hand soap to encourage washing hands which also is imperative for good health. Child morbidity drops 50% when kids wash their hands with soap. When the heads of the department of social development learned of my plans, they introduced me to the mayors, other agency heads and community leaders in various towns and villages assuring the success of my project. In nine years I had already reached 4000 children, my goal to reach 10,000 in 2019 alone seems certain. By the end of 2018, it seemed that Changes for New Hope was being forced to accept the end of the project. That was unacceptable to me and stepping beyond the obstacles, looking for the solutions and victories, using my R.A.S., those opportunities revealed themselves to me. Like energies do attract. Rolling along with the immigration authorities and ignoring the games that people play allowed me to do what was necessary and I now have my Carnet Extranjera known as my residency status in Peru. There is no right and wrong or good or bad. There was no conspiracy as my ego would have imagined. It just was a set of circumstances that happened one after another during a very tumultuous year. I had just two options, succeed or die. I’m still standing so you can believe that I did not simply endure and suffer but I believed that the best was due to me and the best was on my horizon. So far 2019 has been

unfathomably wondrous and amazing well beyond what stresses 2018 presented. I took some time off while I was re-structuring the project. I re-read books that I had read before because they now had a special meaning and more relevant, based on recent circumstances. I read the eastern philosophy of the Tao and found that much of what it teaches, I was already doing daily. It wasn’t unique, as I thought, but there was a whole ancient philosophy surrounding the life lessons I was learning the hard way. I had to realize that I was not obligated to set myself on fire to keep other people warm. I did not have to suffer to understand the suffering of others. I did not have to throw myself into impoverishment to be in tune with those who have nothing. In fact, Benjamin Franklin said, “You cannot help the poor by becoming one of them.�

The shift in my attitude and how I identified myself changed. I also realized that if my vision and goals were too small, that is worse than if they were too big. No one will applaud you for walking, it is ordinary. Almost everybody can walk. Run a four minute mile. I believe that if my goals were not so big that they were ridiculous, that people actually smirked to hear about them, they were not big enough yet. When I told those that I surrounded around myself that I was going to reach 10,000 children with the intention of addressing anemia by de-worming them, they laughed. Maybe just on the inside but their faces looked at me like I was telling them that I was going to be a cowboy on a ranch and raise unicorns. I was 62 years old, no spring chicken anymore.

My resources and donations had dwindled to almost nothing. The international volunteers that I tried to use to advance my project and share my sense of compassion with were just incompatible with our goals. They were late teen, twenty-somethings that were great in their first few weeks. Once the glitter and novelty faded and it became real work and dedication, it became exhausting. They missed their familiar home life. They missed their Starbucks coffee and high speed internet. I understood that stepping outside of their bubble was awkward. How motivated can anyone be when there is an expiration date to their time with us? I decided to partner with the teachers and directors in schools that were already on the scene when I arrived. They had a vested interest in the benefit to their children and actually did my presentation using my visual aids for me. When the mayors and community leaders opened their doors to me, everything I needed was provided. For more distant locations they provided transportation to get to them, meals and accommodations were provided

and they brought in the media to share our project with the region’s population.

People were offering funds to buy the materials that I needed and what was lacking I made up with my social security retirement benefit which came monthly. No one is laughing anymore. The impossible became possible. Action however, is what got me there just as your action will make your goals realities as well. The challenges and circumstances of the past, however miserable, had faded and the life that I created, first in my head and imagination, is a reality and a benefit for several thousand kids.

Bad things did happen to this good person but I could only fail if I gave up. The winner is a loser who tried just one more time. Am I a lightning strike? An anomaly that you encounter only once in a lifetime? I have shared in my magazine and in other writings that I consider myself nothing more than an ordinary man that gave an extraordinary damn. If I can do this, on a fixed income, at age 62, not even being fluent in the language, reaching out over hundreds of miles across glacier covered mountains at 3000 meters above sea level and rock strewn deserts that look like a moonscape, imagine what you can do right from where you are.

What Are You Addicted To?

Addiction. ad-dic-tion noun the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing or activity

What do we keep going back to? Things that we know make us sick? Things that are familiar but painful? We stay, do, eat, dress and live as we always had but wonder why nothing changes. Why are we choosing to suffer from the consequences of these “bad” things? Could these bad things melt if we alter our lifestyles, our thought patterns, the environment that we choose to live among, reject what no longer serves us well and embrace our possibilities without fears? The brain that we wished was responsible for our happiness is only designed to keep us alive and avoid danger. As primitive people, our ancestors saw flowers and butterflies walking through the jungle and felt one sensation. However all that changed when they saw tracks of a lion.

Focused awareness on the possibility of danger, their brains went into fight or flight mode. Where is it and can I climb a tree or outrun it or even fight it? Suddenly the butterflies were forgotten. Our brains actually enlarge the sense of danger to help us to create solutions if possible. In our memories the lions are what are most vivid.

The brain also has the capacity to surge the feel good chemicals, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin and serotonin into our bloodstreams so we can feel joy, happiness and contentment. That is something we have to trigger ourselves because it is not automatic. Like the lion, what we focus on becomes larger and engages our emotions hence the chemicals that are required to react to it accordingly from our brains. Adrenaline and cortisol, the chemicals that get us ready to fight or flee or freeze, flood our systems. That is where many of us get stuck. Locked in a focus of negativity. Frozen in anticipation of what could happen as we sit in cubicles, in traffic, in front of the television and at the end of bars ordering another drink to feel better.

Do we want to live a life without passion or positive energy flowing through us?

Probably not but we become so focused on the negatives, the “Bad Things” that we never poke our heads up out of our foxholes to see that better, happier, abundance of

resources and life as it was meant to be lived even exists for us. Maybe it’s not alcohol or drugs but it sure is an addiction. Consider women who divorce the abusive husband and marry another abusive husband. How many of us go into jobs that we absolutely hate with a passion? You haven’t had a raise in years, nor a promotion. You feel like you are totally unappreciated and just a cog in a money machine for a boss who would replace you in a week if you died. Yet you return faithfully day after day in hope that somehow, miraculously, it will get better and things will change. Take it from a guy who spent over thirteen years of his life toiling in a sewage plant, it doesn’t change no matter how much you wished it would. My fear and frozen state prevented the changes that I deserved. I was addicted to the ever familiar. People tend to accept what they don’t want justifying that the alternatives might be even worse. They go from cradle to crypt only wishing for a better life but never doing anything to create one. Do bad things happen to good people or do we allow, permit, accept and tolerate those bad things to happen? How much pain must we endure before we decide change is a must? What we think is bad for us is only determined by the pain it causes us. People who smoke do not consider it bad for them because of the pleasure it brings. It becomes a bad thing when a doctor shows them ugly spots on their x-ray charts. When the consequences of our lives outweigh the perceived pleasure we thought we gained we then seek a solution and changes regardless of its unfamiliarity or inconvenience. Why should we have to wait that long? Why does it take a disaster?

What if we woke up? You’re awake right now you might think. Bodily and mentally awake but how about enlightened to a new life and how to develop it. Let’s decide how to choose the life we want instead of believing we are incarcerated by our negative thoughts. Are thoughts actual things? Is reality dictated by our own consciousness of possibilities or are we only allowed to be acted upon by whatever comes down the pike toward us? What would you prefer? We see life based on our conditioning since birth. What if those who told us what we know were sharing what conditioned them? And what they were conditioned by was a result of their parent’s thinking from several decades ago. Hell, we are being programmed by thinking that may have sprouted from the 1800s. Do you think it may be time for new thinking?

What if our experiences were all new, adventurous and stimulating to create new realities for us? We can only teach what we know so it’s time to learn new and better.

When I was a boy many things you may take for granted today were space aged futuristic inventions only found on science fiction films. We are no longer in awe to see information appear on our computer screens as fast as we can type. Why is it that we feel that our successes in life are fragile, so few and far in between, a fleeting bit of luck but our troubles are the constant in life when it is not true? Could it be that we see it that way? Our programming in our mentality and thought processes subconsciously “sees” what we thought we would see. Our memories are conditioning as well. If I said the words “Cancun resort vacation” you may have thoughts of blue water, tropical sunshine and bikinis everywhere. Those were my memories. I smile and close my eyes allowing those memories and feelings to trigger those feel good endorphins and serotonin chemicals to help me relive that vacation experience. Now, same words “Cancun resort vacation” spoken to a mother whose child was swept away in the tropical surf and lost forever, the memories would be completely different and deeply upsetting. Our perspectives are different therefore our reactions are different. Instead of blindly following our emotions and perspectives, what if we could get in front of them and direct how we want to feel, how we wished to see the world and believe that the reactions would begin to reshape our world? Why do we need to be a slave to negative emotions and feelings? Are happy people just lucky? Are wealthy people rich because they inherited their money or were dishonest? Are people living their dream lives somehow genetically predisposed while the rest of us are not? Hardly. Happiness is a choice. Wealth is available to anyone willing to put in the time, focus and dedication. The life of your dreams is a matter of designing it and focusing on how to make it happen. Your brain cannot focus on two stimulations at the same time. Misery and happiness are conflicting emotions therefore you would have to choose one. It will not choose you. Break your addictions to television, gossip, mindless drivel on social media, the news reports, family drama, the passion to have the latest, greatest, newest, sexier and upgraded crap that drains your wallets and purses when your current possessions are a hundred times what most people in the world will ever have. Madison Avenue marketing, Hollywood influence and New York media moguls control the thoughts, fears, desires and concerns, dreads and futures of billions of people around the world with their influence and repeated images flashed to you throughout the day. What if you altered what you thought about, felt and experienced day by day and began a series of influences of your own making?

Break the addiction and decide for yourself what it is, specifically, that would bring you happiness and real inner joy. Most don’t have the first clue. We are going to fix that now. The problem is that many people want a great life like it was hitting the lottery. Just sit back and wish it into existence without taking one step forward. Some try to “marry well” only to find themselves on their third marriage by age forty. Some hobnob with those they feel will somehow bestow wealth upon them only to find themselves on the outside when their usefulness expires. You can see the problem can’t you? People attempt to find their fulfillment externally again and again. Their divorces, terminations from a dream job, the crash of the housing market or correction of the stock market is another series of “bad things” that happened to them. Have you ever noticed that your education is something that no one can take away from you regardless of external conditions. Why? Because it is internal, what is in your head is yours forever. Good or bad it is yours to keep and nothing and no one can take it away. How you use it is up to you. Including learning how to trigger dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin flow, reconditioning the perspectives you choose to adapt and jettison the ones that were dragging you down.

Mark Twain wrote, “The happy man sees the world as a happy place. The miserable man sees the world as a miserable place. Same world.” Abraham Lincoln said, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness, contentment and ultimate joy in life is a choice. Many think it is a result of circumstance. Some think it is determined by external things but I contend that this is reducing yourself to the “Take it as it comes” attitudes not much above the four legged creatures that we share the planet with. They react to their environment whatever it may bring them one day to the next. Humans have a consciousness beyond that and too often we do not accept it exists or use it in ways we could.

How can we change our perspective and perceptions about the circumstances that surround us? If we accept that there is nothing we can do about the weather, the angry boss, the nagging spouse or the rattle trap of a car then we understand step one. Wishing things would change isn’t going to change anything. Pray, wish upon a star or rub a lamp hasn’t worked except in Disney movies. However, we do have the incredible power to alter the way we see the “bad” things we encounter. Why do we assign so much power and influence of it over us anyway? The choice to remain in bad

relationships, a job earning less than what you are worth or in a situation that drains you of your sanity is ridiculous. Just because the past was good but the present state of things has eroded the joy of what was once good for you does not mean that you have to stay in the situation. The only reason that it is hard to leave is because a) You feel an insecurity about the unfamiliar future and; b) You are attached to the current situation by the chemical binds in your brain that recognizes the present as “the way it is”.

The brain does not like change. The brain deem change as painful so people will stay in violent relationships, fear of a new car payment means that they will drive their clunker, pouring money into repairs that ironically are more than a new car payment, arrive at a job that buries them in self-loathing and robs them of their personal esteem because, “What if I can’t find another job out there?” Trust me because I have been there. I stayed in a loveless marriage for over a dozen years because I felt it was “the right thing to do”, I endured a horrible job in a sewage plant because “What if I couldn’t make it doing anything else?” and drove a car with 221000 miles on it that was falling apart because a car payment would tie me down to a monthly payment that I didn’t have at the time. I was afraid to make people angry if my decisions for my own life rippled resentment and disapproval from my friends and family members. I had a fear of failure as well as a fear of success. I was so afraid of looking for another job and quitting my miserable one that I created an incident where I would be fired so I wouldn’t feel like it was my own decision. I did leave to abusive marriage and found someone worthy of me and I for them. I did find another job almost immediately that doubled my salary and I was infinitely more happy doing. I ended up driving one of two BMWs after realizing that I deserved to drive a car that wasn’t a rattle trap looking for somewhere to strand me along the road. I stopped being concerned about what friends and family would think if I lived my life on my own terms. I ended my existence in fear and began living with possibilities in life and if everything didn’t go “my way” I will enjoy the altered route and go where it leads me. In the end, I believe everything will be just fine and look for reasons why that is true.

If you are living in fear and anxieties you are experiencing self-sabotage. I know you can identify with it because you have been practicing it for decades without naming it

that. Self-flagellation because you don’t think you deserve the best that life has to offer you. So you accept the bad things, the undesirable things, the abuse and defeatisms and whine about it forever and a day however you secretly believe that this is all you deserve.

We fill our minds with “If onlys” and envy those who have it better than us, not realizing that they are no better than us just that they took life by the horns and decided that better was due them, just like life is due us. Their success should not create envy but a desire to emulate their success. If they can do it so can you. We see the end result and wonder how we could possible ever get “There” from our current “Here.” The first step is to start. Most never start. They live their whole lives at the starting line and never hear the call to begin their race in life. The first hurdle to leap over are your fears. Whatever those fears are that you perceive to be real (They aren’t by the way) you need to act in spite of those fears. Guess what will happen? The fears melt. I exited from my sewage plant job and went into sales because I had no job skills beyond being a mechanical maintenance technician and I was sick of pulling wrenches. Sales turned out to be the job I was born to do. I loved people. I loved learning about new products and services and finding innovative ways to offer them to my clients. I wore a suit and tie instead of coveralls. Carried a briefcase and not a tool box any longer and could come and go pretty much how I wanted to as long as I made my numbers. I became a top performer and many of my clients became personal friends. New opportunities opened up to me which contrasted greatly from my previous profession. I took the abundance of money that I earned and invested it wisely which gave me assets and a lifestyle that just a few years earlier I considered out of reach. Was it scary at first? Sure it was, I had no idea what sales was about and how to bring people around to accepting my proposals. What made me successful was my perception. Anytime the job seemed to go sideways on me, clients were unreasonable, the sales manager was sadistic or numbers slumped occasionally, I reminded myself of any typical day back in the sewage plant. A 3 a.m. emergency call that a piece of equipment broke down and I was needed in to repair it, which was outside in a blowing wind in the middle of January in sub-freezing weather. No matter how bad the moment was, it would never again be as bad as those days splattered in raw sewage, breathing chemicals and shivering so hard in the January cold that I

couldn’t get a wrench on the bolt. My perception changed the outlook of the current “bad” circumstances and I ploughed through it with a smile and with gratitude.

A better life is available for you as soon as you decide that your current set of circumstances no longer serve you well, regardless of how familiar they may be. It is time to decide that changes, lasting permanent changes, will be made immediately and made by you with intention and with deliberate effort. Decide that you will be one of the 5% that will take action because probably fewer than that actually will. Reading this book isn’t enough and if you don’t plan of taking action, you might as well stop reading now. (No refunds) You cannot read a book on fitness and get fit. Likewise you cannot read a book or a library of books about personal development unless you practice and consistently utilize the information every day.

You will fail several times in one fashion or another which is all part of the learning process. Unless your new life choice is to be a mercenary, it won’t be fatal. No one dies from trying over and over until they get it right. Your first failure was learning to walk. How well do you walk today? Another failure was math in school. How well do you do math today? Another failure was to get a date with that girl or guy that you had a crush on. No doubt you have been in several relationships since then with ease and grace. Driving? Remember the first time you got behind the wheel of a car?

Wreck any cars lately? Probably not. But initially it was scary, difficult and you thought that you would never get it right. Why should the life of your own design be any different? Give yourself a break and stop making it out to be impossible.

Success and victories in life are whatever you would like them to be. Progress is success not the finish line. Small wins do matter as much as the leaps forward. Every day that you move ahead is another day the past, the “bad” things become smaller and dimmer in your memory. A life of your own design and a destination of your choosing is available just for the asking, providing you are asking with specific intention. Being happy is not specific. More money is not specific. Define what it is that would do it for you without a thought of what others would think of it or if it is currently within the realm of reality. The light bulb was unrealistic in the days that Thomas Edison invented it. Dream big, so big that it seems impossible and ridiculous and make it real.

Once we accept that the status quo is suffering and the future as bright as we care to make it is pleasure, we have a handle on our own happiness. We do everything for the purpose of achieving pleasure or escaping pain. In an earlier book I wrote, “The Changes That You Deserve” people read it to see what they were missing out on. They deserved something and haven’t yet received it. Changes that would enhance their lives became a step to receiving their deserved rewards. It was a pull and not a push psychology and it made a difference in the lives of many who applied the practices that I recommended. People change when they are influenced to make the changes because they are no longer happy, satisfied, or content with how their present lives are shaping up. Moving people to action without force calls for an inordinate amount of finesse, skill and gentle persuasion. It also requires a willingness on their part too.

To share an example, I asked a group of my students what their absolute biggest dream would be if it were possible to obtain it today. We went around the room and people shared all sorts of ideas and wishes that they wanted. I then asked if there was a 100% probability of receiving it by travelling to the next town and meeting a man who would provide it, how many would go? All but one raised their hands. The lone dissenter said he did not trust anyone to give him anything. I then asked if there was a 50/50 probability that the man in the next town would make their dreams come true, how many would go? About 25% raised their hands. To them, a 50/50 chance of receiving it was not worth their time and effort even though there was a clear 50% chance that success was available. My third and final question was to ask if there was only a 5% chance that the man would provide their dreams, who would go? Only one person raised his hand. The added caveat from the students was that it had to be convenient to go, not at night, not in bad weather, not if there was something better to do at home and only if they could bring along a friend. In subsequent classes when I posed this same scenario the responses were similar. No wonder people never reach beyond the convenient and never obtain limitlessness in their lives. Unless it falls gently into their laps and is exactly the size shape color and style that appeal to them, they couldn’t be bothered. Around the world the result seems to be repeated.

Consider why only 5% of people ever do something significant that moves the human race forward while 95% accept whatever happens in life as their fate, bad luck, karma,

genetic disposition or only what they deserved. When I told my students that success in real life occurs about 5% of the time I thought they would break down and cry.

I believe that people do not want a life of mediocrity or drudgery. I believe that people would live an exciting life that stimulates every fiber of their being if they could clearly envision it, see it in their minds first and decide that as impossible as it appears presently, it is possible because if others have done it then damn it, it is do-able for them too. Whether it is to become a healthier weight, create a successful business, meet a compatible mate, enhance their sexuality with their significant other, become totally confident in interpersonal interactions or to cease a habit that they know is killing them. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe you can achieve. To anchor the benefit we must believe also that we absolutely deserve it. Our work toward our goals will, yes sir, yes ma’am will, result in our success if not immediately then eventually but inevitably. The life of happiness, a dynamic happiness that unfolds in every facet of our lives and engulfs others into our joy, igniting them into their own reality of prosperity, contentment and wonder is available today. (What? Today? Are you nuts Jim, I have obligations, responsibilities, plans, engagements and people to answer to.) Yes, starting as soon as you decide that you are ready, it is available to you. It is internal, it is going to begin inside your own heart and mind so forget about time and space and other people and obstacles because they are all outside of the realm where your changes and developments will occur. You do NOT need anyone else’s permission, how does that feel to you? You don’t need money, materials, you don’t need to go anywhere or send away for anything. It is all available right inside of your head, your heart and will be created by you like a director of a film, just say, “Action!” Just because you haven’t seen it yet does not mean it doesn’t exist. Have you seen China? Probably not but you know it exists, don’t you? Same thing here too.

If it is that easy, then how come everybody doesn’t embrace it? Why aren’t we all living in an enlightened and better world right now? Distractions. Lines drawn between us dividing us from being one humanity. Disbelief that is possible. Fear because change is somehow scary. Excuses, I don’t have the time, resources, education, support system, opportunity. Attachments to everything familiar.

Laziness. General apathy and manipulated thinking from those that ”know better.”

It will be a lonely journey at first but the question is only this; How dearly do you want it? What is a life of unlimited opportunities and joy worth to you in terms of a time commitment, life style adjustment and acceptance that it is possible and probable for you? So many have to see it first, meet twenty people that already experienced the positive changes and then and only then, maybe they will try it. They will die one day in total resentment of themselves but will most likely blame the world around them for their mediocrity. You will never embrace the life of your dreams if you cling desperately to the life that has so far, held you back for decades. If the Pilgrims never lost sight of England there would never have been a New World. If the Wright brothers never left their bicycle shop there would never have been an airplane flown over Kitty Hawk. If Roscoe Goose looked at the odds against his Kentucky Derby horse named Donerail with 91-1 odds against him he would have never rode that horse to victory and mark the biggest long shot win in the history in the Derby. If you want guarantees in life, stay in bed. If you will only bet on sure things for your life, you will forever be the wage slave, a drone of society and a plain vanilla in a world which most people out there are living in right now. Blame no one but yourself. Your best opportunities existed right at your fingertips and you let the life of your dreams, pass through them. On our deathbeds, the worst pain we could experience is regret. If you can find it within yourself to push back against me and tell me to get out of your way, that the best is yours and you are determined to find your dreams and make them the reality that you deserve, then I have pissed you off just enough to light your fire.

For those who cannot accept that “bad things� have to be the order of every day and be a permanent part of their lives, we have some work to do. I don’t see bad things as anything more than opportunities. I used to see them as problems, then challenges because that seemed more positive. Now I see them as opportunities because there is a lesson for me, specifically for me, to learn and grow toward becoming my very best self. I refuse to miss out on anything any longer. That realization only took me a half century to grasp. I wrote this book in hope that you will embrace what I learned and advance your own life in a lot shorter timeframe that I did. Let my foresight be your hindsight. I hope as well that you will stand on my shoulders and become ten times what I could ever envision and trust me, I can envision quite a lot. I hope that you put these lessons and new awareness into daily practice and share them with others who

will benefit from them. Once it becomes habitual thinking, it is as hard to break as a bad habit. It feels unusual for me not to meditate first thing in the morning. Gratitude for things not yet seen or experienced is as routine for me now as the cup of coffee that will follow. Remember, you won’t finish this book and everything instantly changes. This is only a beginning. It will take practice and dedication, to yourself, for it to become your new way of living. The results, just like exercising in a gym, will be evident in time as your make living large and living deliberately your new habit. You will become addicted to the results and you can never go back to a life of mediocrity again. How does that sound to you?

Waking Up, Become Aware and Fully Conscious

Autopilot. That’s where most of us manage every day of our lives. It is convenient of course, that we do not have to think about how to tie our shoes, walk or hold a fork in our hands. Beyond that, we need to be mindful of what we do, what we think, the choices that we make, how we go about our lives with other people and make decisions about the influences that we allow into our lives. Mindfulness is a focused way to live. There are so many distractions with ulterior motives that come at us from every direction. Buy this product, go to this movie, invest in this opportunity, meet this person, hear what this demagogue is spouting, care about this, share that, move here, visit there, spend your time with these people, vote for that candidate, believe this news program, hate that faction, wear these clothes, join our organization.

Experts estimate that the average person thinks between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts a day. That breaks down to about 3000 thoughts per hour. If your mind runs on autopilot there is a lot of things that will fill your head subconsciously. In fact almost all of your thoughts are out of your subconscious. Flashes of the past, impressions of things you see today are reflections on what you have experienced in times past. If someone says the word, “Dentist” to you, your thoughts flash back to sitting in a waiting area for two long hours waiting to sit in a chair where pain is the necessary evil to good dental hygiene. Your previous experiences color everything associated with the word dentist. This is true for about everything else imaginable. True not only for words but activities, experiences, your value systems and your preferences. Your fears of trying new things today are resultant of fears instilled in you from perhaps your childhood. People who told your that you were stupid, unattractive, clumsy, lacked ability or that you would never succeed stuck in your unconscious levels of your mind and paint every new experience and endeavour. Is that fair? Do you deserve that permanent branding? Of course not. So why not break that unconscious negativity now? What may or may not have been true decades ago, or even last week for that matter, is not true today. It is not your present reality. It is not who and what you are currently. Everything changes. Everything around you has changed. Where you are

living, what you do for a living, what you drive now, who you are living with, what is in your fridge, the pet you own, your group of friends, your vocabulary now compared to a few decades ago, the clothes that you wear, the music that you listen to and way to walk down the street has all changed over the years. In fact, the very cells that make up your physical form all regenerate every seven to ten years, did you know that? Yet most people think, believe and do the same routines that they have adopted years ago, even the negative ones. Doubts and fears, insecurities and self-flagellations are all still in place firmly locked into our subconscious thinking causing us to stagnate and incarcerate ourselves until our last dying breath. Can you think of anything more depressing than that because I sure can’t?

I shudder to think that that was exactly how I used to think of myself. I used to be filled with self-doubt and self-esteem issues. I did not believe I was as good as others who succeeded in life. I believed that my lack of a formal education in a university, my inability to break out of a lifestyle and conditions that did not serve me well and my belief that the other side of the wall was sure to be worse, inhibited my happiness, inner joy and personal victories which I now experience every day. I accepted whatever was tossed at me and considered myself unworthy of even those crumbs from the tables of others. My relationships, while too numerous to count, were unfulfilling and void of the love that I deserved. I took whatever jobs would hire me and accepted whatever pay was offered. I was afraid to ask for what I wanted and endured seconds when I knew I preferred a better option. I allowed my mind to believe in scarcity and that abundance was elusive and reserved for the select fortunate few. I knew that if anything went wrong in any of those circumstances it had to be my fault. Does this sound a tad too familiar? Can you relate to some or all of these unconscious belief systems running through your own head? I was raised by parents who grew up during the Great Depression and lack, hunger, poverty and desperation was just the way it was back then. The emotional scarring must have been horrific because as my parents and the parents of my friends who also grew up in that era always seemed to be extremely frugal. They saved paper plates and made trash can liners out of folded newspapers. They only bought what they absolutely needed and the thought of splurging on extras was crushed with memories of not having enough the next time when they would need money. The fear of impending

doom and emergency was ever present. Christmases were always small events and birthdays were just another day. Your new clothes were going to be your older siblings’ hand me downs. Even after that generation’s lives became affluent and successful, their mental conditioning was that money was elusive and scarcity was ever evident. People sitting in luxury recreational vehicles and well equipped cruiser boats would tell me how hard times were. While that may seem ludicrous to you, that same mind disease infects people today. Beautiful women think that they are plain.

Wealthy people think they are just getting by. Successful people in their fields feel their positions are precarious and may end any day now. People in optimum health frequent doctor’s offices because they think they might be sick. People in enviable relationships constantly wonder if their spouses are cheating on them. Why are people never content, satisfied and accept that life is a beautiful thing. Sure things could change but until they do, for good or for bad, enjoy it. Chicken Little was not a sage or prophet of your future. The sky is not falling. Fear in your head has physical consequences. Did you know that most heart attacks in the United States happen between 8am and 10am on Monday mornings? Do people dread going to work that much? Looks like they do indeed. So, how do we alter the perception that seems to be killing us and draining what joy we could have in our lives?

Well friends, I am so glad that you asked. Back in the day before the internet, YouTube and Vimeo videos made by people who cared about the rest of us, there were few resources to learn how to develop ourselves into the best we can be and gain what we deserve in life. There were these things lining shelves in stores called books. You had to buy them and take them home. You had to read them and draw your conclusions from your own perceptions. There was no feedback or sharing of ideas. Today, we have books like this one that you can load into your devices to read while on the go. There are mentors on YouTube by the hundreds that share content about self-development, meditation, guided imagery, self-hypnosis, intention, daily affirmations, tapping, self-healing through visualization, coping mechanisms, quantum physics, mindfulness, manifestation and altering belief systems that hold you back. Many offer retreats, seminars and workshops to go to in a group setting for your personal development. As well as reading this book and absorbing everything that you can from it, I recommend looking into every source of information and

instruction available that exists to get you There from Here. There is no excuse not to step into the life that you deserve. The wealth of information and practical exercises are limitless now. Remember my students? A mere 5% of you will do it though.

If you think that you don’t have the time, consider the time you spend in your car commuting back and forth to work every day. An audiobook can be listened to on the way and in just a half hour ride each way, you could hear the whole book in a week easily. If you make it a habit, you could conceivably listen to four dozen books every year. Do you know how many books the average person reads or listens to in a year?

On average, about four. The more successful people among us, the wealthy, those who make learning a lifelong habit, read two books a month. Leaders are readers. No one is smart enough to be able to stop learning. You have the time, if you make the time and commit to your own personal development. Unfortunately, many folks today will only stay interested in what they are reading for the duration of their coffee, or a tweet. We need to slow down, absorb the benefits of life around us.

Meditation has become more popular recently and those who thought that they didn’t have time for it are realizing the benefits of it that previously got away from them. In Zen there is a saying, “If you do not have enough time to meditate for ten minutes, meditate for an hour.” Once it becomes a “Must” in your life and not just a good idea, you will adopt it as part of your everyday experience. My own meditation time is precious to me and I find my entire day becomes centered regardless of hassles and obstacles because of the value of meditation and other similar personal growth and maintenance practices I use. While many attribute meditation as some sort of religious practice, literally anybody can use it. Deep slow breathing and exhalations while closing your eyes and focusing on just the moment until there is nothing else but the moment is the objective of meditation. When there is nothing on your mind but the solitude and peace, your mind is in a state of awareness and calm.

Whether you meditate for ten minutes or an hour or more, the benefits are immense.

Imagine stepping into your day with this fresh sense of calm. Everything that happens after that is part of your amazing day and what may not be so good is minimalized down to a minor distraction. Remember we do everything for the purposes of gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. An annoyance tries to interrupt our pleasurable sensation that we are carrying with us and therefore our brains seek to dismiss it. Try

The Terrible Toos

Remember raising children? If you don’t have children yet, just wait. Those of us with children know that parenting becomes oh-so-real when they turn two years old. The grandparents don’t come over to see your new baby as often, friends see you coming knowing that you’re going to share yet another great story about your baby and duck down the vegetable aisle. The baby is now two. Not old enough to take out the trash or clean up after themselves but too old to leave in a crib all day anymore. It is an awkward age. They learn that they want things and they have perfected their cries to morph into a scream that peels the paint off of your walls until you give it to them.

The terrible twos.

You also go through the terrible toos as well. It is when you believe the negative stories that run through your brain. Bad things happen to good people like you because you feel that the opportunities and solutions, the deliverances and happiness are reserved for other luckier people who somehow found the Holy Grail of a great life. Nothing however is further from the truth. It is impossible to have a wonderful life if you are throttled by the terrible toos. Limitations. Ceilings in your current life.

Incarcerations, self-imposed, that you may have accepted as true. Your brain goes to work to prove you are right. The brain is neutral and has no obligation to refute your perceptions. Your brain always tries to agree with you and will go so far as to find evidence to support your negativity unless you consciously arrest the process.

Thoughts are things of course, you know that by now. If you believe, even mildly, that you cannot do something, whether it is a sports activity, life enhancement opportunity, a relationship development or job advancement, you are absolutely right. The reasons that you create to support them is what I call the “Terrible Toos.”

You are too: Old, young, physically unable, uneducated, destitute, overqualified, ugly, fat, slow, far away from the resources, disconnected, otherwise engaged, oppressed, other wised focused, sick, weak, confused, poor, limited in talent, unremarkable or shy.

Guess what? Ludwig Van Beethoven the amazing composer was deaf. Helen Keller, an inspiration to millions, was blind and deaf, Franklin Roosevelt, U.S. president during some of the most challenging times in the history of the United States, was in a wheelchair for most of his life, Nelson Mandela, jailed for twenty seven years for resisting South African Apartheid, emerged as the president of his country. The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) created computers, the ipod, iphone and one of the most valuable companies on the planet starting when they were just in their twenties. Jobs was a high school dropout. The current Dalai Lama is influencing millions of people throughout the world at age eight four years old. Seventeen year old Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 after being shot in the head and survived. Vincent Van Gogh suffered from severe mental illness and produced some of the most beautiful art ever known. Life is only too hard if you allow obstacles to be your excuse.

Some people just won’t take “no” for an answer, so why do you? Imagine the odds against these people as they struggled to gain their objectives. Age, race, poverty, lack of resources, education, support from other people, neither health nor location in the world was a reason to give up or not even start. Yet the first bump in the road and we sit down claiming we can’t do something, can’t be happy, can’t accomplish whatever goals were a great idea just last week because it was just “Too” hard.

Impossible. We will claim that “We tried everything” and nothing seems to work. You bought excuses. Excuses are very VERY expensive. How expensive, you might ask. It will cost you your life. Your happiness was just a good idea, a wish but not a MUST. Every excuse can be boiled down to just four words, “I don’t want to.” All the other words are fillers and so much window dressing. I believe that you are better than that.

When something is a must, you will find the motivation and inspiration to succeed.

When you see accomplishing a goal is an absolute must, the obstacles tend to pale, fade and get fuzzy around the edges. You will find a way to make it. Your deepest thinking finds ideas and new perceptions that you can put into practice. Sometimes it wouldn’t work the first time you try it. Sometimes it won’t work at all but you have attempted to make it happen and your brain can never go back to sleep in apathy again. Every failed attempt encourages you to try something else to make it work.

Take a page out of professional sports. Every championship team lost a lot of games until they won and won again until they became champions. Many hit singers got

booed off the stage in their earlier years and continued until they became superstars.

The Beatles were told by a record label that guitar bands were on the way out and they would never be successful. Multi-Oscar and Golden Globe winner Meryl Streep was told she was too ugly to be an actor.

You never fail until you give up. If you understand that giving up is not an option for you, success is out there reaching back to you, today? Tomorrow? Next month or next year, it doesn’t matter. It is your vision your goal and your dream and nothing is too hard, too expensive, too far out of reach, too complicated to make it happen.

Likewise, you are not too anything to do it.

Consider that I was 52 when I arrived in Peru, with no knowledge of the language, culture, customs, I knew no one here and my ‘must’ was to develop my project for disadvantaged kids who I knew I could reach, somehow. One of the first articles written about me was a young woman who started her article by saying, “Just to show you it is never too late to start living your dreams, meet Jim Killon of Changes for New Hope.” She meant nothing derogatory by her comment but I realized that others were seeing me as an old guy, probably twice their age, starting a project that would inevitably take many years to accomplish. In fact almost all of my most noted accomplishments happened after that time. My artistic endeavors, learning how to draw and paint and sculpt, the exhibitions in museums and municipal venues didn’t begin until I arrived here and was accidental. Without knowing Spanish, I had to find a way to communicate and make my time with the children valuable and beneficial. Art was the solution. I dabbled, got better and ultimately I found out how much I enjoyed it and drew from my passions when I did art. Taking our art into museums was the next logical step. Boom, I became an exhibited artist. Pieces I thought were garbage, people were asking if they could buy.

I was so filled up with love and compassion gathering the children into a place where they were safe, happy and could have a meaningful childhood that writing about it in articles, blogs and ultimately e-books became a natural flow of events. Boom. I’m a published author. I was told to lose the ego when I called myself a humanitarian. The person telling me that knew me before anything noteworthy had occurred in my life. I countered that if I robbed one bank I was a bank robber. If I am actively doing

humanitarian work I am, in fact, a humanitarian. Once I realized that the issues surrounding the lives of the children and their families were also the issues in others around the world, I decided to write books like this one, so that what I learned myself and developed to help kids here can also help people around the world. Potentially, I can reach unlimited numbers of people via the publication venues that take on my books on their sites. What if I decided that I was too… anything? Fill in any blank. I would limit myself and the stories, the art, the benefit to humanity and the love I want to share would have gone to the grave with me. Aren’t you glad I decided not to? I sure am. Your “musts” in life give you that ever elusive sense of purpose so many lack.

When anything is considered too hard, too anything you are practicing self- sabotage.

Decide what it is that you want to do to improve and enhance your own life on your own terms. Maybe you don’t care to be a museum exhibiting artist, or a writer. Maybe you just want to learn to dance or play a guitar. So do it. People might laugh? Some might criticize you? What are others doing that impresses the world? Was I too old, too removed from Peruvian culture, too stupid, too ignorant, too uneducated, too poor or too discouraged to accomplish my goals? If I listened to others, yes absolutely.

I did not listen to them, what the hell did they know about being Jim Killon? Every mistake, every failure was a confirmation to them that I had no business trying to do what I was attempting. To me, it was a confirmation that I was getting closer to figuring out how to get it done, how to climb on top of all those stumbling blocks, (many the nay sayers placed there for me to trip over), turning them into stepping stones so that I could see farther than I ever could before. When I was awarded the David Chow Humanitarian Award in 2017 the world went silent. If anyone is still saying that I am too-anything, they are saying it out of my earshot. In 2019 I was named a humanitarian/ambassador by the Global Goodwill Ambassadors organization. Also in 2019, I was awarded the Books for Peace Special Award 2019, which promotes world peace and human rights issues. They are not saying it to anyone who is listening to them anymore. Am I great? You bet that I am but remember, I am no greater (nor lesser) than any other person who inhabits the planet with me, including you. I believed the impossible was possible. If you believe it too, then the results that I achieved can be yours as well, always embrace that. No one can stop someone who refuses to be stopped. The only expert about your abilities is you.

Keep a Journal

The day that I stepped off the plane in Lima, Peru I began keeping and writing a journal. In part because, if something happened to me down here, I wanted someone to have some idea what I was doing before I met an untimely demise. The other reason was that I believe that a life worth living is worth recording. I believe that that small nudge of personal accountability to myself will make me look for worthwhile things to fill my day that I will be proud to write about later and read about much much later in the coming decades of my own fading sunset years. I bought a simple lined notebook with a soft, flexible cover and have disciplined myself to add something to it almost every single day. I am on journal number 25 and have written over one million two hundred thousand words over the last ten years. I find myself getting lost in my thoughts and it becomes a challenge for my writing to keep up with my thinking. I may just note the happenings of the day or I may delve deeply into my personal reflections and attitudes about particular occurrences, what various people have done around me and how that affected my own thinking.

It is important not to allow yourself to let your journal become a bitch session. You can bring yourself down and depress yourself by vomiting out your bitterness and disappointments every day. Remember, thoughts are things. Your brain listens to your words you speak and makes them true in your head and later in your decisions which become your actions. Your eyes see what you write as well and act upon what you perceive to be true. Balance is the key. I use my journal to express my disappointments to unload my burdens also but I make a conscious shift to ask how I can adjust to the circumstances, what needs to happen to make the situation better or failing that, bearable. I look for solutions regardless of how presumably “bad” it may appear and because I know how to activate my R.A.S. (reticular activated system) to make my brain look for the solutions. Unless I am in 1943 Auschwitz, the negative situation can’t last forever. My journal is private and only for me to read and review. My wife doesn’t speak or read English which assures I can be absolutely candid in my thoughts and feelings. This is very important. Imagine if Anne Frank knew the world would be reading her diary and watching a movie based on it, how her writings

would inevitably be quite different and watered down from her truest and deepest feelings.

Being able to express yourself as honestly and candidly as possible opens the door for you to be more genuine and absolutely real. We tend to hide behind the masks we create for others to see and in time we begin to believe the masks are who we actually are. The insecurities that many people experience throughout their days are a result of feeling like a fraud and imposter. Why be afraid to be who you actually are? Those who like you will like the real you and those who don’t, you didn’t want them in your life anyway. Like energies attract so why pretend to be of one type of energy that is not you? You will forever be deeply lonely inside because no one knows you therefore cannot actually like you. Or love you. Or merge with you to help you to become a better and more fulfilled version of yourself. If you start being open and honest with yourself, in a private journal, then you can begin to open up in the real world and attract what you deserve, and I believe you deserve incredible things. The journal that you write in is the small first step to making that happen and is a valuable tool for you to use, in simplicity, to that end. Everybody thinks that they have to be a Hemingway or Shakespeare to be a writer. Thoughts on a private blog or putting pen to paper, as I prefer, is writing. Those who write are writers. No one is going to see it unless you choose to show it to them so who cares if it is a profound piece of literary excellence or the scribbling of you getting something off of your chest?

Another valuable asset that journaling provides you is time to write your successes.

Just like not needing to be a Hemingway, you do not need to have saved Gotham city from the Joker to be a superhero. Acknowledge your own small private, victories whatever they may be. I write about any person who has shown me a small kindness. I write about what I am grateful for. Gratitude is one of the most powerful energies that exist and to write about each one of yours will reinforce them. You also can look back and read about various occurrences where things went right, good things just seemed to fall into place for you and when you just felt like you were “in the zone.” You will find yourself looking for happenings to remember to put in your journal for the next entry. Your journal becomes a listing of positive and enlightenment recordings. You need to know that in twenty years you will only remember the things that made an impact on your life in some significant way. A birth of a child, your wedding, divorce or

life altering experience. Highlights. What you did that made you laugh or feel a deep sense of accomplishment on Monday, March twenty-third, seventeen years ago will be long forgotten. Humans today have an attention span of only five seconds, did you know that? A goldfish has an attention span of six seconds.

When you are eighty-nine sitting on a porch thinking about your life experiences, you will rock back and forth in a confused state of wonder. Where did the time go? What was your life about and what did you actually do for all those years? Unfortunately, negative experiences impact us more so than the positive ones and make a deeper impression in our memories so many elderly folks, in reviewing their lives will remember the tragedies and miseries more often. Write about as many happy, joyful and upbeat experiences as you can whether minor or major in your life because you want to drift back to them as you need a boost through the tough times. You will learn something new each day that you stay aware and fully conscious and writing them down will assure that the lessons learned will never be lost. Sometimes I sit and pull out a random journal which I keep together and read back on what I was doing a few years ago. Who was I with and where was I? What were the experiences of the time and what did I learn from them that is helping me today? I can also see from a current vantage point what I was doing and what I could have done better or differently that would have made more sense. I use my journal experiences to see progress I have made in my thinking processes. Part of what you are reading in this book came directly from journals that reflected some of my deepest and most regretful failures which occurred only because I tried to force a solution based on what I believed should have happened. Contra-wise, much of the enlightenment that you are reading came out of my reflections of wisdom that I have learned by years of trial and error and developments that happened when I followed a path of non-resistance and love. My first book, “A Gringo in Peru-A Story of Compassion in Action� was written completely from the journals I kept over my first five years in Peru. It shares what I intended to do, what worked and what didn’t. People I met that were true friends and made all the difference between success and disaster. I wrote about my innermost feelings of the fears and insecurities of living in a foreign country and my courage that I found to become a leader in the communities where I had groups of children. I read back to some optimistic ideas and some that were admittedly reflective of my, then

embraced, limits. Journal after journal I see myself growing out of the fears and selfimposed doubts and shaking off defeats as stumbling blocks that I learned to turn into stepping stones which allowed me to climb on top of and see farther than I ever could before. Just as it is hard to remember exactly when you became the height that you now stand, it is equally hard to remember how you became as experienced in life as you currently are. Using a journal to keep a record of things that you will want to remember and reflect upon and see your younger self develop is going to be fascinating for you. If you also write down your goals, dreams and visions for your own future, immediate and distant you can see yourself developing and you have a tangible form of personal accountability to nudge you toward those goals.

A life worth living is worth recording. Brilliant ideas emerge from journaling. Some of the most successful people do it every day and recommend it highly. Self-expression, while may be terrifying in front of a group of people, (some people would rather die than do a talk in front of a group) is simple, easy and encouraging to do in a private journal. The benefits that you will gain are too numerous to mention. It is another form of self-talk which is also encouraged. Your ideas, like thoughts, are real things.

Ideas become actions which move your life and those who you have influence with, in one direction or another. Instead of forming ideas and thoughts on the fly, premediated direction for your life is a much better way to manage your life. This is particularly true if you are managing a family, a community or a company. As one writer said, “There are no thoughts that your behaviors don’t betray.” Your actions become manifested thoughts so keeping a journal is a great way to stay ahead of the game of life. Being able to review what worked and what didn’t is an advantage that most do not have. It is because in my own life I have so many balls in the air to juggle that keeping a journal is imperative and critical to the success of my project. I will never have to ask myself in utter frustration, ”What the hell happened?” My journal entries were important in ending relationships that were no longer productive or beneficial in my life (spelling that, toxic). We all practice self-deception when we want to believe the best of someone. A manipulative lover that creates feelings in us that we wish weren’t there. A colleague that swears he never was told about a project. If you write a running record just for your own reference and it becomes time to part company, it is easier to stay committed to your decision when you can review a

pattern of behavior that you found increasingly intolerable over several months.

Promises become thinly veiled lies when you can point to a dozen other times when that same promise was made and broken. So, remove “bad� things from choking you, keep a journal, starting today.

Remember that you can also keep a journal of future things that you intend to experience. A dream book as it were. You can write your own list of expectations, desired outcomes, wish lists and review the list every so often, even daily to see how close your list is coming along. This is a first step toward manifesting the things your desire in life which I will talk more about in another chapter. Envisioning what you want to see happen is a first step toward holding it in your hands. Trust me on this, because it works.

Are We Devolving?

Whether you want to believe that we swung from our tails before we swung from our necks or you want to believe we stepped onto the earth looking just as we do right now is of no consequence. It is not my intention to rattle your belief system. What is of serious consequence is the devolving of humanity. When I was a boy during the 1960s and 70s, there was no internet, no cell phones, no email and no fax machines. If you wanted to communicate with someone you had to walk over and talk to them or use a telephone that was mounted to the wall or mounted on a table. Your words were in complete sentences and your voice tonalities and facial expressions were part of that communication. Vocabulary was very important to be able to express yourself in a wider and deeper way. Television had only three channels so radio, reading books and magazines had a particular importance. People read books. Libraries were places to hang out and we filled our heads with a wide variety of information for hours and it was fun. Today’s youth would have a hard time understanding or maybe even believing that life was so dull. We did not think so, it was all there was and we looked at our grandparents who grew up without television as primitive.

With that understanding, you might imagine what relationships were like. A close personal and intimate interaction took place. The human animal needs to be hugged and eye to eye contact engages brain chemicals that develop our emotional states.

Words are powerful and words are actually powerful. Conversations were deep long meaningful experiences that developed us as humans as lovers, parents, children, friends, neighbors and even enemies. It was important to know how to express our feelings and emotions, whether they were happy, angry, loving or rage.

Today, in our social media, instant messages, emojis and symbols, short letters such as lol, wtf, idk, smh are replacing actual conversation. I have sat in restaurants watching couples on dates, with each other, texting wildly. It turned out that they were texting each other. Aside from ordering their food, I don’t think they spoke five words the whole time they were there. There are actual laws now that need to be enforced to save lives that prohibit texting while driving. If I am in a ton of metal that is moving at sixty miles an hour what I do not want to be doing while I am driving is

something as distracting as texting. As soon as a cell phone dings, people immediately have to rush to see who is contacting them. There is a dopamine rush attached to such connection. Meanwhile, actual human contact never happens. This is just a small example of devolving of humanity. Disconnected or never actually connecting with others is one reason why “bad” things seem to pop up in the lives of people today. Miscommunications, lack of communication, avoidance of anything that we do not like means that we never learn how to cope. I recently read an article that talked about universities have become more focused on students comfort levels and less on actually educating them. If we never learn to cope with issues that we find uncomfortable or upsetting, then the list of “bad” things will grow and surround us.

Learning to deal with stressors and understanding that you may be at fault in some circumstances and then, how to evolve into a deeper human being by correcting your thinking is being replaced with simply avoiding it. People would rather “unfriend” someone and consider it a solution to a critique rather than trying to understand how to be a better person by adjusting their behaviors. I read an article that a Dutch town had replaced the crosswalk signals overhead with lights on the sidewalks because people were being hit crossing the street because they never look up from their cell phones. It would be funny if it wasn’t true.

The idea that our concentration is disrupted in a matter of seconds is quite telling about how devolved we are becoming. As humans we need to know how to cope and practice methods of coping. Americans in the United States swallow massive amounts of pills to cope. A pill to wake up, go to sleep at night, a pill to calm down at work, another pill to manage weight, hypertension, thyroid problems, stomach pain, ringing in their ears, and sexual dysfunction. Our own bodies were designed to handle everything that happens to us. Our brains trigger chemicals to flow into our bloodstream that will make us happy, calm, content, passionate, aware of danger, sense things that make us fearful and reactionary. Our brains have one job, to keep us alive and safe. Since the dawn of time we have been able to self-regulate our emotions and reactions or responses to what happens around us. When did we shortcut the human element with external substances? We become too busy to exercise so we take a pill to decrease our appetite. We don’t talk to our significant others when we are angry, we take a pill to calm down, avoid them and possibly find

someone else. Marriages fail in the United States at a rate of 50% as of 2019. This is your life! Consider someone going to a casino roulette wheel table and betting their life savings on red with only a 50/50 chance of winning. Our relationships have devolved as well. Marriages and long term relationships are disposable. Yet we ask the question, ”Why are bad things happening to a good person like me?”

So I wrote this book in the passionate hope that you will see that the changes in your life must come from you, inwardly first before anything externally will ever change.

Expecting situations and circumstances to change just because you want them to and you feel that deserve it, is like wishing for the rain to stop or for Tuesday not to happen next week. We want changes to occur in our favour but we are not prepared to do what is necessary for those changes to be possible. Hard realizations lead to easier changes. Things begin to change when you do. Resistance to changes means you absolutely love the way things are right now. If you felt that way you would never have read this book up to this point. Your reflections, responses, (not reactions) and attitude will turn the tide that washes against you. This is called in some deeper understandings as “raising your consciousness.” Consciousness is awareness of the here and now. The present and this eternal ‘Now’. One reason why people devolve and live in a constant state of stress, forcing their brains to surge adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream is worrying about the past or future. The past runs like an endless loop movie and we get angry and upset all over again. I was once involved with a woman who would walk into the room and verbally, and at times physically, attack me out of the blue. I asked what was going on and her response was, “I just remembered something that you did three years ago that upset me and I am upset about it again.” An emotional cripple her entire life, which today continues without me in it, fortunately. My suffering ended when I decided to make the change in my address, find a door and go through it never looking back.

Can we learn how to re-evolve and get back to our core sense of humanity? I believe that we can. I recently moved into a new apartment and the internet could not be hooked up for a few months. In that time, I decided to write another book, (my eighth entitled, “Thumper’s Gospel”) I read several books and discovered the Tao, about an ancient Eastern philosophy, I found time to exercise, which I had procrastinated for quite a while (years) and spent considerable more time in deep mediation. I began

doing more artwork which I want to share in our next exhibition and reviewed my list of goals and personal developments. I learned how to stop over thinking. That might sound weird as hell but I actually slowed my racing thinking process down to a stop so I could focus on one thought at a time. I could give my wife my full and undivided attention when she wanted to talk to me. I became mindful. I found a new place in my life which was overlooked, my “Now.” The longest distance in the world is between your head and your heart. I knew the present was important but my focus was on the twenty tabs that I had open in my thought process. I became in control of my thoughts, hence my emotions, reflections and attitudes. The place I reached in my meditation was profound. I felt like the unplugging from social media, emails and electronic interactions was a breath of fresh air and laughably unconscionable to most of the people I know that have never lived a day without it.

While this may not be your cup of tea, I submit that my day begins, not with checking my emails or Facebook posts first thing but with gratitude and deep breathing exercises which I will go into deeper in a later chapter. I set my mind up with centering meditation because, while I don’t know what will happen out there on this day, I do know that I will be able to find joy in it and contentment based on my preparation internally. Raising my consciousness. I make myself fully alive and aware, mindful and everything flows from that wellspring. My life energy, which we all are energy, is at a higher vibration and frequency and I am tuned in to receiving and recognizing every new opportunity and good thing that happens. The “bad” things that happen to you, happen to everybody including me. For me however, they are a minor distraction, a small annoyance that I step around, over or remove myself so I can continue on in my otherwise beautiful day. My good days are not accidents or rarities. The great days are the norm, not the exception. Do you know how you feel on your first day of a long awaited vacation as you rush out to the car heading to the beach? I feel like that almost every single day now. I have re-evolved. I wrote this book to share with you how I did it, how others are doing it and how you can experience this life for yourself and those who you care about. Sound good? Ok great, let’s re-evolve into our better selves, what do you say?

There Is No Bad Weather, Only Inadequate Clothing

I am not sure who said it first but I am saying it again, there is no bad weather only inadequate clothing. What we have perceived as a “bad” thing in our life is only life itself. Our perceptions shift with every piece of new information. We meet someone who we consider our “perfect mate” (the first mistake) and suddenly the birds chirp a little louder, the sun shines brighter and the air is so fresh and clean, just for us. Then a friend we trust let’s us know that this incredible lightning strike of good fortune is not all of what it seems. The person who has become a constant companion is known to be a user, loser and abuser. We are suddenly crestfallen, depressed and we spiral into a state of self-flagellation for being so stupid to fall for such a demon. The shift could happen inside of five minutes.

You may recall how totally elated you were to be accepted for a job that you applied for. It was close to home, great pay and benefits and you showed up for work every day with a sense of expectation and dedication. How did you feel about the job three years later? The dead hand of familiarity sets in, you became accustomed to the pay and quality of life it afforded you, the people there are just co-workers, not friends Monday mornings are your weekly dread and Friday afternoon cannot come soon enough. What happened? The job is exactly what was promised. The pay, working conditions, the challenges and your desk are exactly the same as it was three years ago when you arrived for the first time. Now it seems to be just a hollow experience of dullness.

Our emotional shifts based on life occurrences around us and controlled by those circumstances make us into puppets to our environment. Here in Peru, people complain that the weather in Lima is always gray and dreary, which it usually is. When I arrive in Lima after an eight hour bus ride out of the chilly Andean mountains I am overjoyed to be in a desert with my family in a near modern city, on the Pacific Ocean and to visit friends there. The fact that it is overcast and dreary is something that I never quite seem to notice. My perception is different because I choose to see it differently. When I go into desperately poor adobe villages to meet with the children that my project is helping, my volunteers from first world developed countries are

appalled and depressed by the living conditions and destitution that they encounter.

Some leave after only a week because the conditions are so upsetting to them that they cannot continue. I go into the same village and see children and parents who are happy to see me return. I look for a convenient wooden beam to set up a swing made of a thick cardboard tube and rope. I look at the feet of the children to see who needs a new pair of shoes. I check inside of those adobe houses to see who is sleeping on dirt floors so I can bring in large cardboard sheets to provide some insulation between them and the cold ground. I look for possible opportunities and begin my program sharing vitamins, anti-parasite medicine and small bars of soap to turn the tide of worm infestation, unsanitary conditions and general health enhancement. That is my perception, a better solution and possibility for them. I don’t see the destitution as anything more than what we need to address to make opportunities available for them. Then I entertain them by doing magic tricks for which I have become well known. As Robert F. Kennedy, former Attorney General of the United States and Senator for New York once said, “Some people see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not’”.

Opportunities, possibilities and a shift of fortune exists as soon as we decide we will accept nothing less than a better life than what we now have regardless of how good or challenging it might be at the moment. This will require a change. A change in our thinking and then a change of our habits. We are a creatures of habit. The notion of getting up earlier, even by a half hours is traumatizing. The idea that we need to do anything different outside of our comfort zones is met with resistance in our brains because as Newton said, “Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest until acted upon by a greater force.” That greater force is going to be something we call our ‘Why’.

People are clear about what they are doing, whether in our relationships, professional lives or social circles. We know how to do our jobs, how to provide for a family and where to go to meet the friends after work. Almost nobody seems to understand, why, they do what they do. Life in all of its glory and beauty rests on knowing our why. Why equates to the deeper question of our purpose of life. Take a look on any social media and see the thousands of people posting indicate a sense of purpose of life. Everything seems to reflect a reaction to other reactions to events that they have no real attachment to or that affects their lives in any way. That is not a real life. We

are all simply an echo. Why.. purpose for our lives…meaning… is drowned in pints of beer, sporting events, recreational substances and superficial relationships where people are impressing others in a desperate hope that the hollowness inside of them will be adequately filled or at least numbed out for a while.

People buy things, stuff to attempt to find a sense of personal satisfaction in vain. In a quote attributed to the late George Carlin, he says, “Trying to find personal satisfaction by accumulating more stuff is like taping sandwiches to your body to satisfy hunger.” In Zen philosophy it is an awareness that, “A man is not his stuff.”

Dave Ramsey made the now famous statement, “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.” I share this with you to circle back to the point that our “bad” things we see happening are actually only a perception and disappointment when we aim for goals and a life that is superficial and dull, ordinary and mediocre at best. The initial dopamine rush from buying whatever new and shiny thing we thought would make us happy quickly fades and we seek our next fix, the next shiny toy, the next smiling face. It is a little wonder that we cannot find our purpose in life, our ‘why’. The idea of not being able to obtain what we think will make us happy leads to anxiety, social embarrassment and depression. That in turn leads us to solve that issue with the prescribed drugs our doctors, puppets of the pharmaceutical companies, numb your symptoms that range from depression, anxiety, general lethargy and frustration.

By now you may have gathered that I have steered your thinking toward the concept that change is entirely up to you. I want you to accept that a beautiful life and one of purpose, meaning and fulfillment is available to you, regardless of your current dilemmas and circumstances as soon as you decide to open yourself to it. You won’t be able to stop the “bad” things from arriving at your doorstep and more than you can prevent Monday morning from arriving on your calendar. Instead of resisting the challenges of life, why not consider flowing with them and redirecting the outcomes by using a superior strategy?

If you allow me to share with you what has worked for me and countless thousands of enlightened people, then you also can have the life of your dreams. I live in total fulfillment and harmony even when life throws me a curveball. (If you happen not to

be an American, it is a baseball term) I am not religious by any stretch of the imagination and I am not going to offer a religious solution or try to sell you magic beads, idols, anointed cloths or dogmas. Ironically, many of the organized religions have created their own brand of incarceration by forming rules, regulations, guidelines, their own definitions of right and wrong, good and bad and systematically violated their own innate humanity in the process. That is another story for another time. I have already written two books about these issues called “Atheists Don’t Eat Their Children” and “Thumper’s Gospel -A cautionary tale of deceit, manipulation and destruction, in the name of Jesus.”

What I want to share with you is available to everyone on the planet. It is simple and easy to do and it only requires you to be consistent and determined so that you can achieve the results. It is free and if it’s free, it’s for me! Anything new will seem strange to you only because you are not yet accustomed to doing it. Trying new foods, dating a new partner, driving a car, singing, public speaking, going to court to explain your driving habits to a judge, the first day on a job or class, sex or even becoming a parent.

It is a matter of personal discipline to start and stay with a new program for personal development.

Many folks that I talk to say they get frustrated because they haven’t mastered a part of it yet. Mastery of anything will take time and patience. I recall my martial arts training. I was in a dojo with my shifu, one on one, hour after gruelling hour trying to get my body to do what my head demanded of it. I thought I was going to be a yellow belt forever. Ironically, I could see a competing Karate school from the window of my dojo. My shifu asked me if I would rather go to that “Karate mill” where black belts are passed out with minimal discipline for a monthly fee. “Are you here to be your best self in this art or would your ego prefer the status of a higher rank?” I invested the time, did the exhausting exercises, became laser focused and in a few years, my speed, accuracy, power and confidence was an exact skill that saved my life in violent attacks twice. The mental laser focus is something I used every day. Take the time you need to become what your heart craves in this life and do it right. You never know when you will need to use what you have learned to save your life, even if it is just once. It will serve you always.

Who Do You Think You Are?

Fair question? It is not an arms-on-hips scowling question but actually a very positive inquiry. So, who do you think you are? If you think of yourself as an oak tree then it wouldn’t much matter that you are currently just an acorn would it? If you envision yourself as a massively successful business owner then it would not much matter that you currently are sitting behind a desk somewhere, would it? I envisioned myself as a humanitarian, a writer that adds value to the human experience and an artist that would exhibit my work in museums. When I first envisioned this for myself, I had never created a non-profit volunteer organization before. My closest experience was volunteering with the Maryland Special Olympics a few times, a total of two weekends. I had never written anything that ever came close to a book before. I had never sketched anything more than stick figures prior to exhibiting in museums and other venues. Was I arrogant? Self-deluded? Conceited? Hell no! Why is it that we think of anyone that wants to better themselves as somehow hubristic? How would any of us become great at anything if we never believed that we would do it? How do CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, generals in the military commanding millions of soldiers, Olympic gold medal winning athletes, and entertainment superstars reach their levels of achievement if they don’t have a massive amount of self-confidence and determination to manifest it? In the face of everyone who calls them out as arrogant and self-important, they press on and do what is necessary, a key element separating the talkers and the do-ers. If you ever want to become that business owner, that rock star, that athlete or humanitarian you absolutely must put in the time, effort and relentless learning to reach that goal. Those who want results while watching hours of mindless television are dreamers, never to become anything more than couch potatoes, resentful that life had passed them by. This would include those who pray for good fortune to fall upon them as a celestial intervention. There are those who believe that “If it were meant to be, it will be”, which is utter bullshit. Life is what you make it and not a matter of happenstance. So, who do you think you are?

Just because you cannot see the result as soon as you crack open a book on the subject doesn’t make it any less real for your future. My first several months of Karate

was an embarrassment which was one reason why I insisted on one-on-one instruction with my sifu. My first art exhibition filled the main gallery of the Cultural Center in Huaraz Peru and as I watched people passing through admiring my work and taking photos, I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud. Some of those pieces I considered so amateurish that I was going to toss them out in the trash, but the director asked if I had enough to fill the gallery within the week and I said “Yes, of course.” Why did I doubt my own abilities and talent? I shifted my perception and remembered what Andy Warhol said. “Art is whatever you can get away with.” In time, with practice, I became much better and what was considered “abstract” became more recognizable as people, landscapes and objects. I am whatever I say that I am. The best that ever was? That would be a stretch and ego-ladened because there will always be greater and lesser people than myself or you in any field. Your challenge is to be better than you were yesterday. Your competition is only yourself.

Decide who you want to become from where you are right now. Whoever you think you are, not what you are currently, is the secret to becoming that new and improved version of yourself. If you want to become a successful sales professional, for example, your next step is to observe sales people. There are great professionals that are making a sizeable income rivalling other professions such as doctors and lawyers but without needing a decade of education and student debt. Coming from that field however, I can say with confidence that most are hacks. Few that I ever met were willing to put in the time and training to become the best in their field. Most go to a company training course lasting a few days, learn the product and the script and bingo, they are sales professionals. Sales managers, equally responsible for the mediocre performances of their teams, refuse to allow their people to enhance their skills with remedial and advanced training offered in seminars and workshops. “We need numbers on the board, we can’t spare you for three days to take some sales course,” is what I usually heard. I went anyway, I invested in myself and became one of the top sales professionals in every company I ever worked for. I was considered to be “very lucky” by other sales people who drank coffee and played video games while waiting for a customer to walk through the door.

Would you be willing to sacrifice some NetFlix time to read a book about the field you want to excel in? With the advent of the internet, there is no excuse for not learning

more every single day. YouTube is my mentor considering there are few if any human mentors who I can meet with personally in the Peruvian Andes. Remember, what you see and hear is what you become. Fill your head with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and rambling emails and you will become an expert on memes, witty comebacks and mindless drivel that currently engulfs those who are not going anywhere in their lives.

It requires a discipline every day. You don’t have to cancel everything else, just make learning something more about your goal and desired outcome each day. You need to make it a routine, just like brushing your teeth and making your bed. Dedicate an hour each day to it and focus, without distraction, consistently. I can’t get very many books here in Peru in English but I absorb dozens of books regularly on YouTube audio books for free. I have no excuse not to learn every day and neither do you, my friends. If you think this is a good idea, I promise that you won’t last beyond a month. You have to make it an absolute must, a life or death decision else when the novelty wears off you won’t have the tenacity to continue. If one of the “bad things” that happen to good people like you is a lack in your finances, this is a solution for it.

Who do you think you are as opposed to who do you want to be? Frame your question as a present tense actuality and not a “One day in the future” dream. I AM…. And so you are. When you say, “I want to be…” is insidiously denying your goal indicating that you are not yet what you desire. In a previous publication entitled, ”Living Large, Living Deliberately” I wrote about the life I wanted to live here in Peru. I made a list of what I wanted to accomplish and started acting like it was already a fact. I created my dream life internally which made it so much easier to simply step into it. You can do this because we have what other species on the earth lack, imagination. Call it fantasy if you want, it doesn’t matter. If you remember being a child tying a bath towel around your neck and wearing a mask you made out of cardboard, rubber banded to your face, you recall being a superhero and ran around your house saving your doggie from perils and your goldfish from drowning. It was real to you because no one told you that it was silly, stupid, ridiculous or foolish. You were a child doing what kids do, imagining the impossible. What happened to our ability to imagine great things for ourselves? When did the opinions of small minded people matter so much to us?

Whether they are spouses, bosses, co-workers, neighbors, family members or a friend, I would ask you, who the hell are they? What makes their opinion more

valuable than your own vision for your own future? The dream stealers, energy vampires, soul crushers of anything that they cannot relate to or envision themselves accomplishing, have no place in your head. When I ask the question, “Who do you think you are?” you do not have to check with someone else for their permission to see if it is acceptable to be who you imagine yourself to be. Poor people are experts how not to be wealthy. Sad people can give you a hundred examples of people who never became happy. Mediocre people are experts on how you will never become great in any field. The dangerous part is that most of these people are familiar to you and might mean well. They don’t want to see you lose your money investing in that idea. They think you will be so humiliated to audition for that summer theatre part because they just can’t imagine you as an actor, though it had been your dream since you were a child. My own friends scoffed at me when I was developing my own dreams of financial independence and later as a humanitarian in Peru helping destitute children. You have to jettison their minimalizing of your vision though you may have to tolerate their physical presence in your life if they happen to be coworkers or family members. Trust me, nobody will be laughing when you step into your dream as it manifests itself in reality. Another cool thing happens when you embrace a new lifestyle for yourself. Others who also dream big and desire better in life seem to show up all around you. Books land in your hands from people who will share what worked for them. Offers to go to seminars, workshops, discussion groups come out of nowhere and you realize that a whole world of success, previous obscured, now is all around you. It’s true that birds of a feather flock together.

Who do you think you are? Can you be more specific? The next step is to clarify what exactly you want to be which makes it your reality now. To be rich or famous or successful is not specific. I want to create an internet business marketing to mothers of young children with this specific product or service that will save them time and money. I can sell this product or service on Amazon, Ebay, and other online stores. My cost is $20 each and I will sell it at an affordable $49. I will use Wix to develop my website and use X as my supplier of the product. I anticipate 1000 customers each month with a return customer rate of 30%. That is a plan. You can easily envision success if you color in the lines even if it is just in the planning stages on paper. The more specific it is, the better. Detail each step without considering the “what ifs”.

Sure there are 100 things that can go wrong. So what? What are the consequences if something goes wrong? Can they kill you and eat you? No. Will you go to jail for life?

No. Will people laugh? If they don’t then your vision wasn’t big enough. Most of my plans, goals and endeavors are admittedly outrageous. As I mentioned earlier, I journal almost every single day. I reviewed my journals from time to time and I have to smile. As outrageous as my goals seemed to be a few years ago, most, but not all, became realities. The ones that didn’t happen were beyond my control or not feasible as I thought they would be. So what? How many baseball superstars hit homeruns every single time they are at bat? How many basketball superstars dunk one every time they get the ball? How many Hollywood superstars make Academy award winning movies every time the star in a movie? Everybody fails at something sometime and if they didn’t there would be no need for universities, books like this one to teach you how to become better, speakers in auditoriums giving sage wisdom and advice to overcome obstacles. We were born perfect, limitless, willing to try anything, fearless and relentless. We had to be dumbed down, scolded, humiliated, oppressed and demoralized into the adult that we became. We are now getting back to the little person we once were that believed we could fly, swim oceans, save damsels in castle towers and calm the earthquakes. Believe that.

Why do people never get where they wish they were in life? Why do people who somehow obtain a level of success somehow throw it all away and drift back to their loser selves? How can you be sure that you will never become one of them? Simply said, you cannot rise above the image that you have of yourself. You cannot become a greater person than what you believe that you are. A janitor will never become the CEO of the company unless he first starts thinking like a CEO of a company. What happens when the accidental good fortune lands in the hands of someone who will always see himself poor and mediocre? Take a look at mega lottery winners. A person earns a modest income, never had any big dreams or goals in life and suddenly he becomes uber-wealthy overnight. Statistics show that the average lottery winner will be dead broke, dead or in jail inside of three years. Why? It is because he has never learned to think that he deserved anything more than what he was already earning or how he was living, so subconsciously he felt he did not deserve the money and found a way to piss it all away. What if the person decided to slowly acclimate to his new

lifestyle and wisely invest it with the advice of professionals who knew how to manage his money for him? Did you know that there is a field of psychiatry for people who suddenly become wealthy beyond their previous lifestyle? This also happens when people who live modestly, suddenly inherit a fortune from family members who pass away. Their mind goes in directions that they cannot handle and suddenly trips to Las Vegas and Cancun become their new norm, until of course they resettle back into their previous lives and what could have secured their futures is now in the hands of casinos. More recently during the real estate boom in America values of houses went through the roof and poor people became instantly wealthy. People were taking maximum equity out of their homes in cash and splurging on giant purchases of SUVs, big screen televisions, vacation cruises and other depreciating assets. When the market crashed in 2008, they were back to who they were before but with a mountain of debt that they couldn’t pay and eventually lost their homes as well.

If you ask any successful person who ever acquired money, fame, status or prominence they will tell you that they were preparing themselves for it long before they ever had it and managed themselves in such a way that their mental capacity was equal to the material wealth that they had come into. Your mindset dictates your actions. A starving person will wolf down a meal donated to them so fast that they may choke. Somehow they believe it is too good to be true and want to consume it before it is taken away from them. The life you want to live begins with a belief that you fully deserve it, that you are the person that this life is developing for, custom made and what you believe about yourself, your heart and mind are equal to what is now before you. You are prepared and accustomed to the life that you are summoning and it will be no surprise or amazement when you drive the car, live in the house, eat the fine meals and associate with the likeminded people that you will come to know. Walk with confidence if you want to be confident. Express love if you want to live in love. Make gratitude part of your daily meditations to live a life of grace and enrichment. I am not a big fan of the “Fake it until you make it.� principle. I believe if you act as if, you actually are what you envision yourself to be and opportunities reveal themselves so that you can embrace in reality what you believed about yourself. Remember, your brain cannot differentiate between something real and something imagined. If you believe yourself rising above a mediocre life it is reality.

So, now I want you to make a dream page. Who do you think you are? Without fear, without anyone else’s input or inhibiting you, free from any sense of conceit or arrogance, write out your idea of your greatest self. If nothing could possibly stop you, unlimited resources and assets without any regard for how impossible it seems right now, write down your dream for yourself. Without limits it is possible to envision anything isn’t it? This is how the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musks, the Richard Bransons of the world changed the way we see the world and how we even live our lives. How are they any different than you or I? What did they have that we don’t? How is it that some will sit at a desk for forty years, take their week vacation every year, accept a 3% pay raise and drift into oblivion one day without ever leaving a footprint behind? Is that a life? Is that any kind of life for you? It may feel like some sense of security but is it really? Get a disease that limits your ability to perform for the company and see how fast they replace you. I have former friends, the ones who laughed at my plans then resented me for succeeding in making them into realities, who have retired from their jobs. They didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives at age eighteen when we all graduated from high school and guess what? They are sitting wherever they happen to be living right now, just as clueless as to what the rest of their lives will be like. Sadly, the time in between graduation and retirement they had placeholder jobs and lives that they coasted along in, waiting for the next distraction to entertain them. Their lives were no different than their parent’s lives before them. The idea of developing something significant, worthwhile and innovative seemed unusual and a waste of valuable football watching time. It was a life I broke away from and never looked back. I don’t want to live in the same footprint as my parents of their parents, not when a life today is full of opportunities, technologies and possibilities that did not exist fifty or even ten years ago. My intrinsic passions, joy and love has an outlet now.

Who do you think you are? That is exactly what you are developing into as you are reading. It is by your own design. People who think they can’t dance don’t dance.

People who believe they are the life of the party seem to always be the life of the party. People who dip their toe in the water of new experiences will always be dabblers but those who dive in will create something that will be life changing and will serve humanity in one way or another so we can all benefit from their courage. Let’s also remember, it is only courage the first time. Then it is experienced. Then it

becomes your everyday routine but everyone else considers it extraordinary. It is only a miracle if you don’t know how it happens.

As a magician (yes I really am a magician too) my tricks are amazing. If I decide to show the kids how I did it so they can do them for their friends, all the Wow goes out of it. Slight of hand replaces the idea that I can actually make a pencil disappear into my ear and then pull it out of my nose. Success is a lot like that. As a sales professional I was sweating bullets and shaking through my first few sales appointments. By the time I retired, I was mentoring new sales professionals and walking through appointments with ease. You will be the same kind of success. When you learn that your “Impossible dream” was always within your reach, if not your immediate grasp, you will begin reaching for the next “Impossible dream.” Elon Musk started by designing PayPal then moved onto green cars and later rockets aimed at Mars. The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics before they were pilots.

Whatever you happen to be right now is not what you will be in a year or two. Your dreams will not fall out of the sky, you actually have to put in the effort, the learning and try and fail again and again as part of the learning process. No one can take that away from you. Once you have succeeded, and you only have to succeed once to be a success, no one can ever doubt you again. Stay humble, but confident. Do you know why stage actors take a bow before an audience that fills a theatre, even though it may be their first time on stage? It is because they earned it. They said that they were actors, they went out on stage believing it and performed in accordance with that belief and everyone accepted it too. This is true no matter what field you aspire to excel in, you believe it, you act according to that solid belief and everyone else accepts it as fact and responds in kind. Be real, always remember that we are here to be of service to humanity and not take advantage or manipulate people. Those who are manipulators and dishonest eventually spent many years in prison or worse when they are caught. There is no substitute for integrity and character. You want to be remembered for your contribution to mankind and not for your notoriety as a felon.

As you are beginning to see, the “bad things” that happen to good people seem to fade away when solutions to issues, what we used to call problems and later challenges, are actually opportunities that everyone faces and it is those of us who

look for answers to questions instead of complaining about the uncertainties in life that actually find the life we have always dreamed of. To date, every “bad thing” that ever happened in my life has led to a new path, a different way to frame my life and guided me into a place that was beyond my imagination in its joy and sense of accomplishment. But I had to learn, grow, be tenacious and lose my sense of who I was to become who I envisioned myself to become. I am great today because I believed myself to be a great man and therefore I do great, seemingly impossible, things. I believe that you are equally as great and if you will allow me to persuade you of your own greatness, you can also do great things in your life that maybe right now you can’t even imagine. Few people ever realize their purpose in life though it was always within them. I never quite understood why people drift through life when they could fly.

Vitamin A supplements are given to hundreds of children in the Peruvian Andes for eyesight health

Gratitude Is A Magic Pill For A Great Life

How can “bad” things happen to good people like you if you are in control of your perceptions of the occurrences all around you? What you believe to be true, about yourself, your circumstances, those around you and everything else you will ever encounter is true, if only to you. Your actions follow naturally so if you think someone is chasing you, you will run. If you believe someone loves you, you will respond accordingly. If you believe the world is against you, you become unreasonably defensive. Of course people respond to you with their own beliefs about what you are putting out there for them to see and know about you too. It can become a cycle when, repeated daily, becomes a pattern and a habit that is your personality.

Just like putting oil in the engine of your car to keep it running smoothly and prevent expensive damage, gratitude is a tool, a power and I would venture to call it a super power that is the oil in your life that prevents unnecessary happenstances well in advance. Gratitude is more than saying thank you when the wait staff brings you coffee at the diner. Gratitude is a way to see the world. It is an attitude that collapses the negativity of life into a tightly crushed little ball as you toss it away from you like the trash that it is. Negativity in your life, whether it is imposed upon you or whether you invent it inside of your own thoughts, is a corrosive poison. Gratitude is the remedy and is available, for free, to every living person. As you already know, it is impossible for the brain to respond and react to two opposing thoughts or stimulations at the same time. No one is crying at Disneyland, the “Happiest place on Earth.” No one gripes and complains during the throes of sexual orgasmic pleasure. A “bad day” suddenly changes in the face of finding a hundred dollars on the ground.

Gratitude is that lubricant that takes away the friction of every seemingly bad issue that comes along. How does it work? First thing that you need to know is that you cannot whistle up gratitude only when you think you need it. The time to save for a rainy day is before the clouds form. When I wake up in the morning and my feet hit the floor, the first words out of my mouth are “Thank you.” Out loud so my brain hears me saying it. It could be raining, cold, damp and miserable outside for everyone else but it is a great day filled with opportunities for me. I may not have a dime to call

my own but I start my day with gratitude for what great things I will be expecting to unfold for me. There was a time when I was struggling along in Peru with no money, living in one small, dark, damp room that had black mold growing on everything. I ate one meal a day and my immediate future was as uncertain as at any time in my life.

My feet hit the floor with an enthusiastic “Thank you.” You may be thinking, “gratitude? You? For what? You were at rock bottom.” That would be a fair assumption but in my mind as seemingly challenging as it was, I decided that rock bottom was a great place to bounce up from. I always tell myself whenever I face seemingly insurmountable difficulties that, “I have endured worse. What did you do the last time you faced a tough patch?” Start looking for those solutions, hell, after all you are not in Auschwitz facing extermination. You are not being burned at the stake in colonial America as a witch. People no smarter or better equipped than you have made it out without a safety net or lifeline and you sure will too. But your day first must start with the mental focus and intention that it is a great day and this day is yours. The reasons to be grateful will begin to unfold around you because you are now perceiving them to be opportunities and learning experiences. Patience, lacking in most people, is a tool that allows you to calmly smile and wait your turn in a bank line while the people in front and behind you are grumbling. It is a bad day for them, for you it is just part of the adventure that you call life. Gratitude is easy when everything is going your way, even trolls under bridges can be happy under ideal circumstances.

When you have “One of those days” when nothing seems to go right, and when you get a long string of those together, you will find the golden value of starting every day with a sense of gratitude and look for solutions, learning experiences and a new way to perceive what is occurring all around you. Very few negative issues in your life are terminal. Things can and will pass but not if you cling to them and complain, whine, bitterly seek revenge and satisfaction as you think it “should” be represented. Let everyone else squawk and rage against the weather, the company policies, the government regulations, the cost of gasoline, the traffic and a dozen other things that you cannot control yourself. It is what it is, be grateful that you are in a car driving that uses gas and not walking in sub-freezing weather. Be grateful that you live under a government of laws and rules that guide everybody and not in a place where the wishes and whims of a ruthless despot disappears innocent people. Be grateful for the opportunity to have employment instead of ranting at the water cooler about the new

boss’s policies that inconvenience you a tad. So many issues people allow to steal what joy in life they could have could be resolved by simply saying “So what?” It isn’t apathy, or going along just to get along, but it is deciding what battles are worth your time and effort. Which ones are winnable and which ones serve the greater good for all or as many as possible. Conflicts occur in life because as humans we can’t get five people to agree on where to go for lunch, let alone deciding on who should run the state or country, whether taxes should be raised or lowered, where kids should go to school, or how much sugar to put in our coffee. I am grateful to be living in a world where I can make most of my life choices for myself and the ones I cannot make I can learn to no longer be affected by them as much as possible.

My morning meditation is drenched in gratitude regardless of how I might physically feel, what members of my family are going on about, any conditions around me that could be better or worse. I am grateful for my place on the planet to share what I am with everyone that I can touch and reach out to. Gratitude is easier for me than some of you perhaps because in Peru’s 3rd world environs, I see people who have nothing and I can share, or I can appreciate an apartment when others live in adobe houses sleeping on dirt floors.

With gratitude it is immensely easier to face a job termination as an opportunity to seek out a better opportunity for yourself. With gratitude it is easier to understand the weaknesses in people rather than rage at their “stupidity and inconsideration.”

Gratitude paints your canvas with a background of potential and not resentments. Are rich people happy because they are rich or are they rich because they are happy? Are successful people content in their lives because they are successful or because they are content first? Remember, you have to see it in your mind first and experience in your imagination before it can ever become your reality. You are in control of the responses to life around you if not in control of the situations. Gratitude is your tool always available at your disposal and it is an attitude that serves you well every single day.

You may think of me as foolish but gratitude has served me well in times of: violent confrontations, divorce, impoverishment, utter destitution, near death sickness and injuries, PTSD, depression, family problems, job terminations, unfaithfulness, armed

robberies, fake friends, sadistic managers, bullies, relationship heartbreaks, false accusations, corruption in the system and a few dog bites. When miserable people sit around and play “Can you top this” I would always win before I realized that those games were not serving me well.

When “bad” things happen to good people like you? The best armor you can put on is gratitude to shield you from the inevitable challenges that you will face. Gratitude turns them into opportunities. It will help you to see through all the disappointments and disenchantments and find the way out that is just on the other side though you may not be able to see it from your current position. So many people cross their fingers, pray, wish, rub a lamp or whatever they think works for them to avoid a bad situation or consequences. They “hope and pray” that everything will work out, become better, that they get that raise, that the co-worker is in a good mood, that traffic is flowing, that the spouse got over their tizzy from the night before, that the doctor’s report is good and that their ball team wins tonight. Really? Do you want to wish for a great life? That is like going to a casino and just throwing all your money on red and hope chance is in your favor. My friends, we make things happen. Gratitude sets the stage each day that we walk out onto. Intention is a powerful energy generating game changer that is within our power to use and create the life of our dreams. And beyond!

I want you to understand that starts with gratitude but does not end there. You still need to continue with your life but to do so without anxiety and fear of anything that might be lurking around the corner. It is your life and you deserve to live an incredible life.

I do not and cannot adhere to the notion that suffering is somehow part of the plan of a deity. In the words of Mother Theresa, ““There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Pardon me for saying so but this is an utter crock of shit. I did not come into this world to suffer, to live in abject impoverishment, hunger, destitution and despair and neither did you. Nor did the 785 million people that will go to bed hungry tonight, most of whom are little children with no way to change their situation right now. Once we have our feet under us, that gratitude provides, we can begin to look

outward to the suffering of others and alleviate their suffering too. This book is part of my opportunity to do exactly that. Most of my books have been published and available for free for years before putting them on the commercial market for sale. I did that intentionally, even though I sure would have liked to see a huge royalty check roll in each month, because I felt that what I have to offer my human family, all of you, that filled my heart, was much more important than the money it could generate and I did not want anyone to miss the opportunity because of a lack of money to buy it.

I also hope that you will consider reaching out to the suffering in the world, whether on the other side of the world or around the corner at a homeless shelter. Never pull the ladder up behind yourself. You don’t have to go broke serving the disadvantaged that you encounter but consider if each of us does a little and that becomes a viral act, more than just writing a check to some national organization, then the world is a better place because of you. It also reinforces your sense of gratitude. Every time I go into a village in the Andes here or out into a desert to meet with groups of children, I consider my time with them an opportunity not an obligation. So often we consider the enormity of the plight of those who have it tough and feel our contribution is meaningless because it may only be pocket change. It isn’t however because you made a difference if only for today in maybe just for just one life. No act of kindness is ever a waste of time or effort. If showing compassion can become an addiction then I am definitely a compassion junkie. In a previous publication A Gringo in Peru-A Story of Compassion in Action, I wrote that I did not expect the incredible power of compassion to develop in me the way that it did after helping children in their destitution every day. It was what inspired me to write the book. The next one that followed, Living Large Living Deliberately, was built upon the first one and shared the vision that became a reality and how a life of prosperity and American influence paled in comparison to the life I now live among those who I serve out of my compassion and gratitude. Finding purpose in life is rare. Most people are born, go to work for forty years, raise a family, retire and die. Tombstones mark graves of countless millions of unknown people that no one ever heard of because they did nothing significant besides keeping pace with the person in front of them. Gratitude is a dynamic power at your fingertips every day and I hope you will use it wisely, daily and create an environment around you as a result.

Changing Your Physiology By Breathing Exercises

Could be just this easy? Why not? If you don’t believe it then it is something that you must try right now. Do you remember being a child terrified in your bed during a lightning storm? Your parents would come into your room after hearing you screaming and reassure you that everything is all right, it is only a storm outside. It is because you trusted your parents and their words were comforting that your tense muscles relaxed, your crying stopped and your breathing went back to a slow normal “go back to sleep” rhythm. The contrast between hyper-excitement to calm caused you to relax back into tranquility. Your body let your mind know that you are fine and the brain ceased to trigger that “fight or flight” adrenaline and cortisol. Your brain’s whole function is to keep you alive. Lungs breathe, heart beats, eyes see and ears hear. Co-ordination of the muscles via memory of millions of steps lets us walk without conscious thought just as we tie our shoes without having to refer to an instruction book. Our programmed responses to our perceived traumas and dramas date back to early childhood in most cases. The brain remembers what we did the last time something like that happened. Our responses are almost involuntary and knee jerk reactions to issues that upset us and our default mode is either anger, withdraw or some other routine expression. However, what if those reactions no longer serve us? What if we want to fly higher than the frustrations of life can reach? What is we decide to respond differently instead of react out of our primal instinctive way?

To do this we need to rewire our brains for another kind of response as automatically as our original reaction that no longer serves us. This is change. Change is initially resisted by the brain because it is not our “normal” mode and the brain senses change as uncomfortable and possibly dangerous. We can override that feeling by realizing that feelings are not necessarily reality. Altering our state and literally tricking our brains to reprogram itself to serve us better is surprisingly simple. So simple in fact that if more people would do it there would be fewer people strung out on their medications, fewer people would be in jails and mental facilities. Fewer couples would be filing for divorce and police would be making fewer arrests for violent behavior.

You might be thinking that this is quite a claim and if you wonder how I can back it up, it is as simple as managing your emotional state by your breathing patterns. If you touch a hot stove, your brain senses ouch and orders your hand to back off. If you tripped over a ripple in the carpet once, the next time your brain reminds you to pick your feet up to avoid tripping again. The body and what happens to it carves memories into the brain and the patterns are formed and all future responses are created. The body tells the brain, not the other way around. The brain fires off the dopamine, serotonin and endorphins into the body to relax it and make the body feel at ease and at peace. What can we do to make the brain believe that everything is all right even if we happen to be facing a stressful situation? The same thing our parents did to assure us that the lightning won’t come into our bedroom windows and fry us in our beds. Calming and soothing us. I recommend the simple awareness of breathing.

Our breathing has three parts. If we are stressed, in fight or flight mode, our breathing is rapid and shallow, almost hyperventilating, like a rabbit ready to run from a hungry fox. Our normal breathing is mid-range in our chests, going through our day doing our everyday routines. The golden secret that few seem to be aware of is the value of a slow deep breathing exercise.

Deep breathing draws air down to a point that you can imagine at about three fingers below your navel. In martial arts this is called the tanden. In Eastern philosophy it is considered the place where your life energy emanates from. The life energy, called the “Chi” in Chinese and “Ki” in Japanese, is the base that we want to focus on for our breathing. The breathing that creates a new pattern in your brain starts through your nose very slowly. Why slowly? It is because when you are at peace and relaxed everything slows down. When you are asleep, your breathing and heart rate slows considerably. During waking hours, we breathe in various ways depending on the circumstances we are facing at any given moment.

We need to find a place to be alone preferably and if that isn’t possible, we need to get somewhere where we won’t be disturbed for a while. This is a meditative practice and it is hard to accomplish initially if you have a thousand things happening all around you. I can do these exercises almost anywhere now but only after years of daily practice and self-discipline. I was once in a medical facility where I was to get a

CAT scan. The technician told me that I would be lying on a slab and inserted into a long tube that would encase me. They said that I would be hearing vibration and noises while the scan was being done and many people freak out and scream because it is terrifying for some people to be encased so helplessly. So, in I went to get scanned. I used my deep breathing exercises to relax and within minutes, fell off to sleep, completely relaxed. Deep breathing is a powerful tool at your disposal to use any time and in any situation that you face. Suddenly “bad� things that happen no longer seem to have such a gripping control over your life.

So, when you are alone, you simply breathe through your nose as slowly as you are comfortable doing. There is no need to force yourself to deepen your breathing. It will be uncomfortable to force your diaphragm to expand in unnatural ways just yet. I recommend that people breathe a little deeper after three breaths. Gently reaching a point to where we want our breathing to find that place of our Chi. There is no rush, no race to a finish line or need to get it over with. This is all about you, self-care and for your total and full personal benefit. If you close your eyes you will reach a maximum effect easier. Exhaling through your mouth just as slowly as you inhale, again, there is no rush, just let everything be natural and comfortable for you. In my martial arts training this was a large part of the exercises that developed me. My sensei would clap two pieces of wood together as I knelt on the floor of the dojo and with my eyes closed, I began a slow deep penetrating breath. I continued to breathe until the wood would clap again beginning my exhalation. The key was not to hold my breath until the second clap of the wood. The free flow slowly through my nose in and just as slowing exhale through my mouth causes me to become centered and focused with no thought of anything other than the immediate situation around me. My brain was being trained to respond in a different way that served me much better than the reactive state most of us live in every day. You will experience this almost immediately if you allow it. A daily meditative state either in the morning, first thing, which is preferable, or in the evening before bed, is a good start. I use this so often now that my normal breathing pattern is deep and slow regardless of what is happening around me. If something triggers a fight or flight response, I go into that mode like anyone else, but return to my slower breathing mode and I stay in a calm that is my normal way of living. You will adopt this new way of breathing when you try

it a few times and see the immediate benefits for yourself. You are tricking your brain to believe everything is all right and basically you are instructing your brain to shut down the nervousness, stress hormones and excitability that had been a normal pattern for you and now adopt a gentle calm as your new normal. You will notice that your muscle tenseness also flows and your shoulders no longer hurt from being hunched upward toward your ears. You begin to walk a little slower and in a more relaxed state instead of walking as though you were made of wood. Everything begins to change around you from your perspective. You start to feel better hence you start to realize the lightning won’t strike you, the monsters under your bed won’t eat you and the raging of the world around you whether at your job, in your relationship, in rush hour traffic, in stagnant bank lines or as you address your children who will emulate your mood as children do, everything is all right and will continue to be.

It is no miracle that “bad” things happen less and less often until it takes quite a bit to upset you or “push your buttons” as it did just a few months earlier. Combine this new method of breathing with the benefit of journaling your thoughts and activities and adjusting your attitudes using you R.A.S., your reticular activating system, to choose things you want to see around you every day. You are now putting together a system of self-care and creating a new and better version of yourself. When I say that doctors would be prescribing less medications, there would be fewer jailed individuals, fewer divorces and mental hospital patients, I seriously believe it. I believe if people learned the power of a simple breathing exercise that reduces cortisol and adrenaline in the body, people’s reactions would be altered to more positive outcomes. Have you ever heard people talking about how they got upset during an enraging situation “saw red” and just “snapped”? Primal instincts lash out and people get hurt. Domestic violence, road rage, bar fights or workplace outbursts happen as a result. Add a firearm into the mix and the situation becomes deadly. A common phrase I used to hear while meeting with penitentiary inmates who had committed brutal murders was “If I could just have back those three minutes before I shot, I would have done things a lot differently and I wouldn’t be in here.” There are young people involved in mass school shootings as of this writing almost monthly now. Whatever their issues they perceived that they had with those that they senselessly and randomly shot, could therapy such as this, much earlier, have prevented such carnage? We will never know but going

forward, we can try to do more to reach out in ways that have been successful in our own lives.

Everything we do is motivated to either gain pleasure or avoid pain. Regardless if our actions are positive or negative, everything is to achieve one of those two goals. The pleasure we receive by altering our state using these methods rewires our brains to want to feel good again and as often as possible. Our brains cannot respond to two opposing stimulations so if we stay on track to feeling good, the nuisances that would cause us to get upset seem to blur in importance and relevance in our lives. We begin to understand that others suffer some sort of emotional pain and our compassion may well be the healing for them and our example can light a pathway to their own victory.

As we alter our own thinking and feeling, we begin to automatically alter our environment. Our energy attracts like people and circumstances to us and people who are our opposing energy seem to distance themselves. If they are toxic to you, it doesn’t much matter who they are, your own self care is your number one concern. It all begins peacefully and gently with the way you breathe and exhale which allows the best into your life. Did you ever imagine that it could be so simple? I didn’t either when I first heard it and now it is part of my meditation practice every day and the day that I face will be on my terms. I have created the environment that I want to live in and I stepped into it. Simplicity is a beautiful thing.

Survive or Thrive?

Now that you have hopefully come to the point where you can accept and believe that there is really no such thing as a bad day, that “bad” things that happen are just your own perceptions and that life is not a hit man out there that has a bullet with your name on it, you can start living the life you were born to live. Just like you can look at the tea leaves and read any message that you care to see, every morning can offer you brilliance and opportunity or misery beyond your worse imagination. It is your choice, your decision and your opportunity to develop and design your life regardless of the occurrences that seem to be present.

With that said, many people decide that they will not fall into the trap of negativity any longer but they are going to be a survivor. There are many songs about surviving.

There are movies cranked out of Hollywood every year about people in impossible situations that survive, they made it out alive and were brought back to their previous situations prior to the calamity that befell them. Personally, I hate those kinds of movies. Why? It is because they make heroes out of people who survived, just got by, climbed on top of the heap and yelled a victory cheer to those that survived too. If I wanted to just survive in this life, I would just stay in bed. That’s all it really takes doesn’t it? Eat your breakfast, read the morning paper, shuffle about the day… surviving. People lying in hospital beds hooked up to tubes and wires are surviving. I am not one of them. I am not one of those people content to just get by. I am not one of those people who never leave my home town because Europe is so far away and anything could happen there. I am not one of those people who will sit behind a desk checking the clock every half hour to see if it is quitting time yet. I can’t be one of those people who knows everything I will ever know by time I am thirty years old.

That is the mentality of a survivor. Life is seen by survivors as some larger than they are monster they are escaping daily and avoiding irritating at all costs. Our brains only are programmed to survive, to keep us alive. Adventure, excitement to become something different, better, happier and brilliant requires the reprogramming that I have shared with you in this book. I believe that mediocrity is death in a standing position. Ordinary is the coffin that we dive into if we never decide to thrive and

become what we were born to become and grow into. Good enough is the enemy of greatness. Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who decided to get along by going along. Following the back of the head in front of them to wherever they were going. Accepting whatever life tossed at them which was usually the scraps from the table of those who dared to dream, to live, to explore to tear apart ordinary to see what they could construct from the pieces. While we may think people from one hundred years ago as ignorant and uninformed regarding the inventions that came along in their time, we do the same thing today don’t we? Think about the “Goodenough” folks who wondered why a man named Henry Ford was developing an automobile. Weren’t horses “good enough”? Or Thomas Edison inventing an electric light bulb when there were candles, oil lanterns and gas piping running through houses providing the most modern of illumination available at that time were considered “good enough”. I was in the governor’s mansion in Maryland from the precivil war era and the tour guide told me about the wife of the then governor who refused to have electric lighting installed into the house because she considered it evil and dangerous. Edison had his work cut out for him as did Ford. Jobs and Wozniak had it no easier designing a product such as the home computer that had no market yet. The introduction of the microwave in the 1970s met with resistance as a device that would surely kill us all with the flow of poisonous radiation it emanated throughout our kitchens. Wasn’t our gas stoves “good enough”? The inventors and developers of, what we now take for granted as modern everyday devices, did not shrug and accept the opinions of small minded nay-sayers. They were determined to continue to do the impossible and the world is a better place as a result.

Your own life cannot be content in simply surviving when thriving, exploring into the wild unknown is at your fingertips. I am not suggesting that you take up extreme sports and start training for Iron Man competitions or AMA fighters. Most would get killed. I am saying that you need to consider getting away from ordinary and every day and try something new. Read a book perhaps. Learn, expand your mind, turn off the damn television, you are not missing anything. The producers of shows know what to splash on your screen to keep you hooked. They know and spent millions of dollars researching what will trigger a dopamine fix to keep you watching and to keep you coming back to tune in again and again. Fine if you like it that much but the

sacrifice is what you could be doing, experiencing and living by getting out and seeing the world around you. Fifty years ago people had something called hobbies. They rebuilt cars, they collected stamps, coins, or they built things in their yards. People went for bike rides with their families, found new ways to enjoy nature for example.

Today you can’t get people to look up from their phones long enough to see a truck running a red light coming at them. Who do you know that writes or paints and draws? Who do you know that plays music and shares their joy with others? These are the good folks that are living.

Do you want to thrive? Find your inner joy. Not the joy someone said you need to do, it has to be yours. What do you wish you could do? What would make you happy? I have found that helping people, being of service for the less fortunate and disadvantaged here in Peru is my purpose that gets me out of bed in the morning with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Maybe you could try it closer to home. Visit a nursing home, visit a neighbor that might be homebound or coach your children’s little league team. I have a friend in New York who suffered with anxiety and depression. He took me up on my suggestion and realized how simple his solutions were. He visits nursing homes, participates in charity marathons and cancer research drives. He told me that while helping others he doesn’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for himself and has found that life has meaning and purpose. He also follows the breathing and meditation exercises that I recommended. The power to become is within each of us. What inspires you? You are only limited by your imagination. Let your imagination go way beyond your incarceration of ordinary. Dreamers live happier, healthier and more complete lives than those that follow a dull routine. Light up your life, listen to music you have never listened to before, you might like it. Dance, if only alone in your living room.

Find something funny and laugh. When was the last time that you laughed? Seriously, really and out loud laughed at something. Here is something I want to share that nobody ever knew about me. When I want to laugh, because it triggers my feel good chemicals in my brain and alters my state when I need to, I think of something I have reserved for myself. I have a place in my head where I think of a one-trick-pony. I envision a circus where there are acrobats and clowns and elephants and the audience is cheering and applauding wildly. Then everything goes quiet and dark. The

ringmaster walks out to the center of the tent with this little white pony with wide eyes staring straight ahead. He holds up a big hoop in front of the pony, almost at ground level and the pony makes one small unimpressive hop through it with the slightest of effort. The crowd goes wild with applause and cheering. The ringmaster walks the pony off as casually as it came in. It cracks me up every time I think about it.

Silly as hell I know but it makes me happy. Sometimes being happy is good enough.

You want to also recognize that your happiness, your contented state of being at peace and your inner joy will not be externally sourced. If we are depending on someone or something to “make us happy” then we attach a leash around our necks and hand it to them. Our happiness is contingent upon their day, their inner sufferings and their experiences and reactions. We may love the person in our lives right now, be it a spouse, a partner, a co-worker or friend. Life altering situations and conditions may occur to take them away from us. If we have attached our own happiness to them and they are no longer with us, we drop into a deep hole of depression and despair. Again. I share with you that the joy of life must come from within you, that they joy in life is your life, not someone else’s that you live vicariously through.

When you decide to thrive in your life, it is not contingent on others’ approval, or their co-operation assisting you. It is a deeply embedded sense of self care, self-awareness and self-respect. You now realize that everything that you are reaching out for is in fact reaching back to you and you just as eagerly, absolutely, completely and without conditions….you deserve this. Thriving is not earning just enough money to pay the bills this month. Thriving is not quitting smoking, stopping drinking so much, stop being fat or quitting a bad habit. That is escaping, running away from something and thereby focusing on that instead of the alternatives. People who decide to thrive make a decision and commitment to be at a healthy weight by eating nutritious foods. Making a conscious decision to breathe fresh air and clean up their lungs once and for all and finding that fresh fruit juices are tasty and makes you feel better than any other drink. Focus on what you want to become and decide that, as of today, the thing that you most desire will automatically leave what you do not want behind you.

If I choose to turn left, there is no need to think about how I am not going right, it is a given. There is no need to clutter up your mind with opposing thoughts and decisions.

The person who wants to find love will always be alone if their thoughts are about

how they hope they never meet another narcissistic, egomaniacal jerk again. When I was dating out there before my last and hopefully final wife stepped into my life, I was amazed at how many women would quiz me on the first date. I would be asked questions about whether I am normal, whether I had any sexual diseases, whether I was an abuser, if I was a druggie or alcoholic, whether or not I could commit or was I just interested in a good time and do I like kids, cats and was I a professional with a good job. I passed everybody’s check list but I laughed at the fact that they still had no idea who I was, just who I wasn’t. As far as they knew I could have been a married, axe-murderer, liar that uses women for sex, money, and free cable. What do you want in a life partner? What do you want in the job that you interview for? What do you want in a friend, co-worker or manager at your job? You need to ask for what you want from people. You also need to be specific when asking of yourself what you want to become and what your vision of thriving means. What is a full and exciting life? Do not compare or pattern what you want after what someone else is doing. Their journey through this world will never be yours and what you see is only what they show you. We are all unique, all very special people, not drones and replicates of each other. It is your uniqueness that serves the world and your own well-being. It all must come from inside of you. Most people I talk to have no idea who or what they want to be. Most are afraid to even be that candid but of those that open up to me, that is what they share. If that is you as well, don’t feel bad, you are not alone. But being candid and honest is the first step to learning to be filled with a great experience called life. In the Tao’s ancient philosophy, it states that only an empty bowl can be filled. It seems to be full of ironies. To become full you must first empty yourself of everything else. To become great, you must first realize that you are nothing or no thing. The ocean holds the most water because it is lower than all the rivers and streams that flow into it. Leaders are servants to all. A company manager is under their workers supporting them and guiding them with encouragement and direction.

What do you want to be starting today? Begin with the simple statement I Am… Be shameless, be confident, be bold and expect the Universe to start lining things up to guide you into the path of that new you. Why not reach for greatness? It is there for anyone bold enough to reach out and take it. Like a magic genie in a lamp. I want to be a writer? Poof! You ARE a writer, so start writing. I want to be a singer? Poof! You

are a great singer. So start singing. I want a life partner who loves and supports my dreams? POOF! You are going to meet an equal partner as yourself. Remember, through the hole from which you give is through the same hole that you will receive.

Raise your standards for yourself and the partner of your own likeness will appear and be attracted to you. No one is coming to “fix you�. You are creating the club of like minded people to come around and join you. There are no Volkswagen owners in the BMW club. We are all receiving what we deserve and have attracted to ourselves by creating what we want to become in our own lives, first.

Thriving does not mean that you will trip over success. It is something that you will work toward and appreciate once you have it. Then you will strive for the next mountaintop because life is a dynamic and moving experience and we were never designed to just sit on a throne and look over a kingdom waving our hand. We learn that if we cannot see a way to get it done then we make a way to get something accomplished. We see greatness in every opportunity and we cherish the ability to learn how to embrace it.

I was speaking to a group of community leaders in a Peruvian village thanking them for the opportunity to bring vitamins and anti-parasite medicine, clothes and shoes into their community for their children. They were puzzled that I considered it an opportunity for myself, to the contrary they thanked me for my compassion in action.

They asked why I considered myself receiving an opportunity to be there. I explained that I came to their village, in fact came to Peru, to be a man of value to humanity. I came to see just how much I could accomplish with my limited knowledge of the language, the culture and customs, the resources that, while limited, seemed to keep arriving just as I needed them and to be part of something greater than myself was a joy that I could have never experienced sitting behind my sales office desk. I sought out a life to match the greatness I wanted to become. I reached out to accomplish the impossible and the impossible has manifested itself. I learned how to manage myself among the Quechua people in the outback regions of Peru as one of them. I am one hundred times the man I ever thought I was twenty years ago when I thought I had it all and I was the envy of my friends and associates. This was my dream, my vision and the only reason it ever unfolded for me was because I stepped into it and went deaf to the people who were quite sure I was absolutely insane to even attempt this life.

Rising Above the Criticism and Negativity of Others

Ok, here it is. I am a big believer in flying higher than others, who are toxic to you, can ever reach. Physically, you may be forced to be in contact with someone, a spouse, a co-worker, a family member or a neighbor, but you don’t have to “Be There” with them. Your consciousness can take you anywhere. Guided imagery teaches us that every thought in our minds is perceived as real. Recalling a memory of being at the beach playing in the blue surf will cause your body to react and your brain responds to the imagined thought. I once had a sadistic general manager in a sales position that would actually create issues that did not even exist, but as a newbie, I did not know otherwise. He went into a shouting rage because my paperwork was in the wrong order. He threw things around the office, threatened me, and insulted my intelligence and character. There was no particular order for the paperwork to go in as long as it was there in the stack. He couldn’t understand why I just sat there and smiled while he ranted on. I wasn’t there anymore. I was remembering my skydiving adventure some years earlier. I felt the wind blasting past my face, the falling effect, the relief as my parachute deployed and the beautiful floating sensation as the earth came up to meet my feet. It took patience and practice to get to that level of subconscious bliss. Did you know that your subconscious mind controls 97% of your conscious actions throughout your day? In time the sadist manager calmed down and eventually realized that his own internal pain taken out on his staff only hurt himself, he could no longer “share it.”

One way I share with others how to manage toxic people and situations is to reinterpret what you are seeing or hearing. Why do we allow, yes allow people to ill affect us? Why do we permit people’s negativity to become ours? If we can sidestep people who are downers then excuse yourself from the situation. I have met people who hate the world, everybody in it and campaign their attitude to anybody who would stand still long enough as though it was their mission in life. People with a perceived authority over us seem to utilize their position to control, manipulate or

take us down a path if for no other reason, because it makes them feel good about themselves or be perceived as important.

My first day on a new job , after jettisoning years of abuse in a bank job that neither paid me what I was promised nor treated me in a manner that I deserved, I decided that this would not happen again. I decided how I was going to be treated and if that had consequences, so what? One employee came up to me in front of a group of coworkers ready to flex his ego which was his own mission in life. “Never go through that door to come into the building, it is for customers only!” I explained that no one told me there were special doors for employees. “I don’t care! Never use that door!”

Ok, it was time to make sure this shit would not reoccur in this new job like I allowed it in the old one. Time to be clever. ”Excuse me, just a question. Are you a manager of the sales force here? No? Do you own a lion’s share of the company stock that somehow gives you authority over the employee staff here that I am not currently aware of? No? Then shut the fuck up!” And I walked away to a roaring applause as ego-boy stood there among those he was trying to impress by humiliating me, with egg on his face. To keep crows out of your cornfield, kill a crow and post it in your cornfield for all the other crows to see. You will no longer have problems with crows.

Remember that, except in rare instances, no one can kill you and eat you. The fear of consequences or retaliation almost never happens. People are so steeped in their own insecurities and personal dramas that getting in line for a second dose of your push back would be inconceivable. Remember as well, that every human being lives for only two purposes, to experience pleasure or avoid pain. If you represent pain whether physical or emotional, they will avoid you and likewise if you are a friend that they perceive is a pleasurable experience, you will attract those people around you. This is how you develop the environment that you chose to live in.

People can and do all too often, worry themselves sick. Your mind is a powerful tool for you to use as you train it to serve you as opposed to let it run wild with stressors, worry, fears, anxieties and dramas. When you decide what you will and will not accept in your inter-personal relationships, others must respect your boundaries and limits. I personally have a personal line that I do not allow anyone to cross. No one is permitted to shout at me. Naturally, I do not shout at anyone else either. The respect

is mutual. The only exception is an immediate danger that threatens someone’s life or safety, then my adrenaline takes over and I do what is necessary to neutralize the danger. I have insisted in business meetings that got heated, family discussions that got out of control and even a police officer that stopped me and though I was fully complying to his orders, insisted on shouting at me as he tried to escalate the situation. I calmly but firmly say, “You are not allowed to shout at me, I do not permit it.” I expect and usually get the person throwing back at me a question such as “Who do you think you are?” or “I can shout if I want to because I am angry.” It doesn’t matter. I will repeat myself until they calm down. Thereby, I avert a situation that, once out of control, could become irretrievably dangerous, or at the very least, hurtful and will be remembered until hell freezes over. It becomes part of a pattern that no one wants to step into. Once you have defined your boundaries, insist politely that those boundaries are respected. If someone crosses the line, they are ignoring your self esteem and self worth so gently but firmly moved them back. It is your right.

Your feelings matter too! You deserve the respect and dignity that any person deserves regardless if you make a mistake or error, who is perfect in life anyway? You are going around deliberately creating mistakes, then you have quite a different problem. When you do make a mistake, whether in a relationship, on the job or some other ut-oh, like in traffic, admit it, (which will go a long way.) How upset can someone get with you if you have already admitted your error? No one has a right to step on you and they won’t unless you bend over and believe that you deserve no better thereby allowing them to treat you like that. The greatest example I can share is the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Slavery was outlawed in the United States one hundred years earlier but people of color, blacks or Negroes as they were known in that generation, decided that enough was enough. Freed slaves were no longer owned by masters but they had no money, no opportunities for self-advancement, they were still considered second class citizens and racism was ubiquitous across the nation. They protested peacefully, marched on Washington D.C. to address their concerns, they had peaceful leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and in time, their non-violence, though met with violence too many times to mention, finally brought about new laws, new opportunities and a recognition in mainstream society and culture ever since. African Americans as they are now known (or people of color

because the civil rights extended to brown, yellow and mixed races as well) can vote, hold public offices including the presidency, eat anywhere, use any public facility, apply to any university and live wherever they can afford to live. Racism is now an intolerable ignorance that no longer gains the respect of a wide audience and those that embrace such views are seen as small minded minorities now. It all started with brave individuals saying, “No more.� You also will no longer tolerate being treated less than what you are, and you are your own form of greatness.

Recognizing that you cannot change others but you can change your response to their attitudes is imperative. If you go into situations expecting a fight you will probably engage in a fight. If you go into a situation as it being a step toward reconciliation and resolve, then ideas will flow to you that support that. Remember they cannot kill you and eat you. You have already endured worse and you will get through this as well.

Internally, you have tools to support a calm that you want. Deep breathing exercises, muscle tension relaxation, guided imagery and allowing yourself to see this situation as it is and not more than it is. The world is out there, full of many things and many people and the present situation is neither the end of the world nor the defining moment of your life forevermore. What is the worst that can happen? Or the best that can happen? What would you like to see happen?

People, by nature, are prone to be negative and critical. Avoiding pain is more powerful of a reaction in life than seeking pleasure. Most people feel that pain is deserved somehow and pleasure is a rare treat that few deserve. Ask around see if I am not right. In prehistoric times we remembered being chased by the lion a lot more vividly than the smell of the roses that we escaped to when the lion gave up the chase.

That negativity is oozing out of them and onto you in the form of criticism and with words that are insensitive and hurtful, sometimes deliberately. People live in their swirling environs of pain, painful memories, pain experiences and expect to continue in their pain for the rest of their lives because this is their normal. Then you come along. Your positivity and smile disrupts what they deem and normal. Your raised awareness and solution based outlook contrasts with their misery and creates confusion. Confusion is pain for them and they see you as the reason for their pain. If you begin to understand that, you begin to have a sense of compassion for their pain and while you are not responsible for it, at least you can empathize with them. People

react, not respond because this is all they know how to do. It has been their way of living for decades. Fly higher than they can reach. This means that their words, said out of their pain, have no effect on you because you have a deep sense of peace, selfesteem and resolve that words and actions from others cannot interrupt. You are content, confident and 100% whole, absolutely beautiful and dedicated to being part of a purpose in life that changes the dynamics of your environment. Yet someone called you a shithead? Smile. Are you a shithead? No? Then who cares that someone else thought so? Fly a little higher and you won’t hear a damn thing they have to say about you. What made them an expert on you anyway? Retaliate? Hell no, why? Then you are one of them, reacting out of a pain that you already know how to eradicate.

You did read all the chapters before this one right? You didn’t just power through it to get to the “good parts” right? Then use what you have learned else it is just a book of words and not a guide to get you to where you want to be in life. “Bad” things are only bad if you perceive them to be bad. I respond to someone’s face to face insulting or attacking me with simplicity, ”According to you, thank you for sharing your opinion.”

Done! Yes, there are lots of really cool come backs and things that would sound like it ought to be a movie script in its intensity but are you trying to engage in a fight and sacrifice your peace and joy or are you stepping into the life you have always wanted?

You can’t have both. I know, I tried. Fighting, whether by words, fists or legal manoeuvring is exhausting and after a while you forget what the battle was all about.

I only engaged in the battle because I allowed it to matter to me. Ten years later during my mediations it popped into my head and I began laughing. Where are they today? Old, decrepit, sick, lying in a pool of their own misery, of their own making, suffering with every happy moment overshadowed with more pain of their own design. Why in the hell did I ever think it was a good idea to get them to share their environment with me? I could have begun my wonderful life of purpose and higher awareness twenty years earlier. Ok, it happened and I cannot change the past but I will be absolutely sure I never allow myself to step into the pain again. I am no longer angry, I am disappointed. I am no longer facing problems, I am facing opportunities. I am no longer in pain, I am experiencing a learning experience and I will be better for it once the lesson is learned. In the Tao, we learn that our resistance is non-resistance.

That as a river flows around a rock to continue downstream into the ocean, so we flow

around obstacles without judgement, without rage or despair and be who we were born to become. The rock in time will be worn away and turn into sand, the water’s tenacity is just that powerful. Never allow yourself to be overwhelmed, No one has that power over your life anymore and ever again.

I want to recognize that certain situations can be life threatening. Having been in too many to enumerate here, I empathize with anyone facing horrific and dangerous situations. Domestic violence is one example. I was a victim of an abusive alcoholic, bi-polar spouse that also was diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder. Later the term psychotic was used. Alcoholic black outs immediately resulted in such actions as being doused with whatever she was drinking, whiskey or vodka usually, having whatever objects were within reach being thrown at me, once she ripped a medieval battle axe off of the fireplace mantle and came at me swinging it threatening to chop my head off, another time my son and I ran out of the house and blocked the back door because she chased us at a dead run with an upraised butcher knife threatening to kill us. When I heard her one night plotting my murder with a hit man on the phone when she thought I was out of the house, I made plans to leave permanently and no promise of getting help was ever going to cause me to allow such danger to my life and safety again. So, I get it. I also understand that all the meditation and positivity in the world will not protect you from a fireplace poker from crushing your skull. Just like taking action on the job, in traffic and becoming mindful of you’re here and now to raise above all negativity, you need to take action to prevent clear and present danger from injuring or even killing you. The best solution is to seek out help before it is a life and death emergency. Contacting sources such as domestic violence centers in advance, contacting the police in advance is useful. They can put your information in their system so that a 911 call with alert responders that a person on the scene is abusive, alcoholic or on drugs and to be so advised. It saved me on more than one occasion when my then-wife would trash the house, attack me, kick down a door of a room I secured myself into then call the police to report me for abusing her. They arrived already knowing I was a victim, knew her condition and her rants that I was trying to hurt her and she was defending herself fell on deaf ears as they led her away in handcuffs, again.

If you can escape, go! I was told by a psychiatrist nurse who came to my hospital room where I was being treated for injuries once, that her experience was that these kinds of people never just “get better” they will in fact continue to abuse others until the other person leaves or they go to jail or ultimately kill someone. I always believed that somehow it was going to get better, I was wrong and it almost cost me my life.

I empathize with women who are victims of sexual assault or manipulation whether on their jobs or in public by the sick, demented and violent people that have yet to be caught. Victims of violent robberies and racist attacks as well. These are situations that defy explanation and the police are never there when you need them of course.

Without being paranoid, it is important to prepare yourself against such instances where such attacks could happen. Common sense goes a long way. Avoiding areas where the probability is high for violence to occur is key. Being in a group reduces the probability of assault. Having self defense devices such as mace, a stun gun or other legal to carry weapons will neutralize a situation and give you time to escape. You cannot anticipate every situation and no one wants to be a walking arsenal. I do not want this book to be an exhaustive resource of self defense but I encourage everyone to read up, study, learn about practical safety methods and be aware of your surroundings regardless of where you are. In a situation where a senseless violent situation occurs, you don’t deserve what is happening, you are not stupid to be there and it won’t make sense because it is senseless. Do not diminish yourself if the situation arises. Get out and away as safely and quickly as possible. I wish you well.

Thriving in this life is a matter of seeing yourself as a success, as someone who deserves the best that life has to offer and many times that is even better than you thought possible. In my meditation and requests reaching into the Universe I ask for a solution being specific… or better. What if what you want to see unfold is a limitation of your own perceptions and better exists? Wouldn’t you accept the better options? In reality there is always better. Why not allow yourself to be open to it. The negativity of others cannot interfere with the best that can come into your life if your focus is on the goals that you have set for yourself. The fact that “everybody doesn’t think it is possible” simply means they haven’t seen it yet, whether in reality of they lack the power to envision the impossible like you have learned to do. Your development of the power to see what doesn’t yet exist is real. The energy that goes out from you to

“Bend Reality” and miraculously it shows up in your life is now based in science and not reserved for just religious, new age or eastern philosophy sages siting on high mountains of Tibet somewhere. The power to raise above all negativity is yours.

You can now begin to understand that “bad things” that happen to good people like you is actually a perception, a conditioning of your mind. It may be a conditioning from early childhood or young adulthood. Conditioning by people that we loved, admired, respected and had authority over us. This does not mean that they were necessarily correct. When we understand that they themselves have their own perceptions, limitations in their thinking and view of the world and enduring their own pain from the past, we realize their words have a limitation of influence. As we develop into the person we always dreamed of becoming, some of these people that once influenced us may embrace and cheer us on and perhaps learn from our examples or they may react with envy, resentment and bitterness. Remember that everyone is on their own journey and your inner self of awareness and peace overcomes anything that may try to drag you down. In a world of utter confusion, divisions and adversities, the person that can smile and still see the goodness in the world through eyes of gratitude and contentment is the most noble among us. Let that person be you.

Some Final Considerations

I want to leave you with some final thoughts that have served me well over the years anytime I was faced with what I perceived to be “bad” things. First, while I may not necessarily see the outcome, I now realize that I can lay the foundation leading up to whatever the outcome will be thereby influencing it as much in my favor as possible.

Secondly, with the elimination of ego in any circumstance, I can accept and work with the occurrences as they unfold in my life. I cannot control everything but I can flow with it and learn how to manage myself through whatever life happens comes at me with and do it with grace and compassion. Thirdly, I matter, I always matter and how I treat myself will usually determine how others treat me as well. Sharks smell blood from a mile away. Humans smell a vulnerable person as well. We determine that we will never be a victim of anyone’s pain that they are enduring that they want to impose on us. You are as worthy and as great as any human that has ever inhabited this planet. What you do not know right now can be learned. What you want in life is available to you. You will obtain it by your own efforts and whatever is lacking will come to you by the force of the Universe that is able to see around corners and influence situations which is lesson in quantum physics that will be part of another book. Never lose your attitude of gratitude. Always be your word. The world is only a beautiful place because you know it to be beautiful. Then it unfolds around you according to the gratitude that you express. There are no surprises. We get in life what we are, who we are and usually what we were expecting so expect the best because it is due to you. Never pull the ladder up behind yourself. There are others that will benefit from your wisdom, love, encouragement and compassion. As an enlightened energy it is your joyful obligation to bring as many people into a life of love, peace and joy as are willing to come. This is part of creating the environment that you want to live in. Leave many footprints along your journey in life to let people know you were here. Every step forward is progress and progress is success, cherish every step. Remember that enlightenment is not a once and done event. You need to practice everything you have learned daily, if only for ten minutes a day. Consistency will become habit and habit becomes the new you. Acknowledge your shortcomings to yourself then find a way to improve yourself. No one ever overcame an obstacle

that they didn’t think they had. If you want to see the impossible accomplished, attempt the impossible. Determine to spend one percent of your day in service to someone else. That represents a mere fourteen minutes. I have enjoyed writing this book tremendously and while I could have continued into a hundred more pages, I prefer to give you bite sized knowledge and wisdom so you will not be overwhelmed. I anticipate that I will be writing many more books for the rest of my life. I hope to also be making videos and appear at live speaking engagements as part of my service to those who want a life of their dreams. Let’s see how that unfolds. Finally, I want to thank you for reading this book to the end. I hope you will let every page of it mean something special to you and you will apply what you have learned and make the world a better place wherever you are.

Live large my friend, live deliberately. ~~~~ Jim Killon Huaraz Peru October, 2019 www.changesfornewhope.com

About The Author: Jim Killon is an American born humanitarian, author and exhibited artist currently living in the Peruvian Andes since 2009. He is a native of Baltimore Maryland before immigrating to Peru at age 52. He has received recognition for his humanitarian work from The David Chow Humanitarian Award board of trustees, Global Goodwill Ambassadors organization and the Books for Peace Special Award 2019. His NGO, Changes for New Hope was recognized by Living in Peru magazine as the NGO of the Month for May 2016.

He practices mindfulness, Reiki, mediation, is an avid student of the Tao philosophy, he speaks to groups and writes articles about being limitless.

He lives with his wife and their three children in Huaraz Peru.

Jim is available for interviews and speaking engagements, he can be contacted through the website at www.changesfornewhope.com