I feel as if there are tens of timelocked images of who I am and what I stand for, that are held by various groups of people throughout my past. For prior generations, this simply “was,” and that was the end of it. In today’s society, this is no longer the case. Everyone is almost eternally connected through social media, unless you go pretty far out of your way to remove yourself from specific people, or by removing yourself from social media altogether, the latter of which is what I have chosen to do over the course of the past year or two. I have a much better handle on who I am, what I want to create, and the things I want to experience now, therefore it no longer seems beneficial to have this form of separation in my life. Additionally, new perspectives allow me to embrace the idea that social media can become a net positive. So for all these reasons, it seems fitting to present my current self outwardly.

-The Physical World

I’ve been shining a bright light my whole life, but I was never really aware of it until recently. Ever since I was a child, people were magnetized to me. In college, for better or worse, I was the life of the party. After college……I was still the life of the party. It wasnt until after I was married and had a son when I began to see that it was time to change and grow up. To be someone worth looking up to. And it really didn’t happen overnight. But once I got the idea nested firmly into my thick skull, the transformation was pretty rapid. For the first time, I cut back on drinking and many other self serving habits, I put others’ needs ahead of my own, I planned my life WITH my wife instead of on my own, and we planned ahead for what we wanted for our future. It was a drastic change for me. One nobody expected. To the friends and family that stuck with me before, during, and after, it was pretty shocking, as they’ve all told me, many times. And it was a gigantic improvement. At the time, I thought it was all the work that really had to be done.

As time passed, I thought more and more about what I could do to improve my family’s financial standing. I got into Bitcoin. And I made some money. It helped a lot. And I found a lot of psychological principles in that community that were really supportive at the time. I learned what a house of cards modern financial markets are. I learned of Stoicism. I went strict carnivore diet for 6 months. All of these changes and intellectual shifts, whether or not they were meant to last, at least broadened my horizons enough to know there was more to life than a 9 to 5, a 401k, and a white picket fence.

Then I found conspiracy theories. I’ll pause here until your eyes stop rolling….

…Ok, welcome back. I’m not going to get too much into that part, but I did eventually have an important realization: Once you truly push into the realm where you see all the lies we accept, it’s hard to find your way back to truth. All you find is more lies, and they get uglier and uglier. So I was reading an article, I dont even remember the topic, and I decided that even if everything I’m reading is true, which I’m sure it isn’t, THIS DOESN’T MAKE ME FEEL GOOD, SO WHY AM I DOING IT?? And it was a quick transition out of that type of content. I’m thankful for having spent some time in this space, because it fully emboldened my nature of not simply accepthing anything as truth, and to find the distinction between having LEARNED something, as one would by performing an experiment or by being a first-hand witness to something, and being TOLD or TAUGHT something, by a school or some respected authority. But it was high time to spend more time on things that birthed positivity. Not yet in a very thoughtful and intentional way, but making a U-turn whenever I encountered things that were both unnecessary and uncomfortable.

Around this time my family was preparing to sell our house. So I kept quite busy working on it to squeeze out every penny. And we did. And we relocated to Florida, our longtime dream, in September 2022. Once we got settled, and I got a new job down here, I started to get a little bit more quiet inside, making room for more reflection. One day I received a link to a podcast from a close friend. It was the Danica Patrick podcast “Pretty Intense” featuring a guest named Elizabeth April. Oddly Enough, the one conspiracy I had always avoided….was aliens. And all this chick talked about on the podcast was aliens. And even though I did not believe a bit about aliens, I was hooked on her positivity. She spoke love in her every word, and I knew she couldnt be a liar. Wrong? Crazy? I didn’t know, but who was I to say or judge. All I knew was there had to be something worth hearing from this soul, because she spoke the vibration of love in every word and I knew it in my very bones. So this unlikely podcast, unlikely guest, and unlikely topic, opened me up to a new realm of possibility and a new area of research that I had to investigate as a high priority: WHAT IS VIBRATION?

It couldn’t matter less what topic you want to find information on. Whatever it is, there is a wealth of incorrect information out there. But when you are interested in a more mainstream topic, there’s plenty of “reputable” arbiters of wisdom out there, and you get to choose which one you choose to trust. When the topic is something lesser known, you really have your work cut out for you. Google is not a trustworthy ally in this instance. I did a lot of research. and the first worthwhile source I found to get me off of zero understanding was more podcasts. Enter: Spirit Speakers Podcast (highly recommend). After a few choice episodes, I had enough direction to at least find more good information. I’ll pause here on all the breadcrumbs of information that led me to where I am now, but the sequence of events mentioned above was what led me to a new lifestyle of unbiased exporation of unlimited posibilies.

-The Spiritual World

While my religious upbringing will not be integral to future posts, I feel it is deeply helpful to share this aspect of where I’ve been, and the lines of questioning that brought me here, to shed light on where I am going. From early childhood to adulthood, I always held a set of beliefs that was relatively standard christian beliefs. I was raised attending Lutheran, Wesleyan, and non-denominational family churches. In adulthood, I began to have a lot of questions. Questions that started to move to the forefront of my awareness after my wife and I had just had our first child.

When teaching christianity, we often speak on love and acceptance. Yet there are so many exclusionary terms to righteousness. I’ve been told that a person born of a small aboriginal tribe that dies never having heard the word of god, is somehow granted immunity and will get access to heaven. Or a child that was killed at the age of 6 who never understood or accepted salvation, would also get a pass. If these are true, then that’s great, because that would paint a picture of a fair god of love and mercy. If not, then I’m out, you’ve already lost me. I can’t believe in a god who certifies humans based on favorable circumstance.

But if this IS true, let’s consider some other circumstances. What if a kid grew up in the United States, in a non-religious household, or a jewish, muslim, or mormon household, and was never witnessed to, in order to receive the teachings of Christ? What if the first time, or the first ten times someone WAS witnessed to, it was by some high-horse-sitting, pretentious, condescending, demeaning, unrelatable “christian,” and there was never made an open door for that person to soften their heart to the possibility of a new belief structure? Then this person, who never accepted the word of God, or the salvation of Christ, would be cast into the pit of fire for all eternity, and all the aformentioned “witnesses” who tried but couldnt convert the damned to a life of righteousness, would be saved by grace. This again seems to create individuals who fall victim to fate based on favorable circumstance. I’ve known and felt the presence of “God” my entire life, and through definite inner knowing, this set of rules and regulations of how to reach a favorable afterlife had some logic that doesn’t align with the God I have always had with me in life. These were the contemplations I was deeply faced with as a first-time parent.

My wife and I decided to start casually attending a new and modern church that a friend of mine had recently started, who’s focus was on bringing christianity to the spiritually abused. It was called “Parable,” which is, a living story. It was fully “Christian” in nature, but taught from a perspective of finding your interpretation of the stories told and the lessons that were meant to be imparted, rather than taking every fact in the same way as a supreme court ruling that would set the rules of divinity for the rest of time. The messages helped me to develop the things that I was sure I knew about spirituality and separate them from the ones around which I needed to develop further understanding.

The only core tenet that I was sure of beyond doubt, was that “God is Love.” I do not mean this as a metaphor. I mean it quite literally. If ever you have experienced any kind of love, you have also experienced the presence of God. If ever you have experienced the presence of God, you have also felt the most pure, unadulterated form of love. So until late in 2022, I held a set of beliefs that was nearly entirely Christian, with few exceptions, as well as the openness to learn and explore all else that the universe had to offer, so long as it aligned and resonated with love. Because, to me, if it is of love, it is of God. It is of pure spirit.

This work is yet another primer for all content to come, both in my life and on this blog. It serves as a checkpoint of relateability, and a reminder of the journey to date, as there is no destination. There is only the jouney. There is only the now. So far I have only discussed things from the perspective of physical and spiritual, leaving out entirely the mental and emotional, as until recently I had not made the distinction that the mental and emotional were their own bodies, on plane with, as opposed to simply being supportive of, the physical and spiritual. I have a lot more stories to tell, but going forward they’ll likely be shorter and paired with the direction of how I worked through that energy, as well as the tools I gathered along the way.