Coming Down the Mountain
I quit my career to do what? My usual response has been 'meditate in a log cabin on top of a mountain'. The truth is a bit more interesting than that.
Let me start with where I was 14 months prior. In August of 2011 I was working full time as a security consultant and part time as a Life Coach and Holistic Health Counselor. I had been in the security industry for 13 years; ever since I dropped out of college. I started out crawling under houses running cable and ended up consulting for clients such as The Federal Reserve Bank and Fortune 100 companies. I made great money and had an immense amount of freedom. I had a large corner office across from the Empire State Building but chose to work from home in my underwear 9 days out of 10. My boss was 900 miles away. The company I worked for went to great lengths to keep me engaged moving me from Operations to Sales to Consulting. None the less, I remained bored and a bit restless. I knew that life was meant to be lived with a deep sense of purpose and that work was at the heart of this. I was living out of integrity.
Damn near everyone I knew was a bit envious of my work arrangement and yet I wanted out. In the evenings, when I wasn't playing music, I would work coaching clients. I would meet with people in person or on the phone to help them change their lives. People came to me wanting more energy, wanting to find love, lose weight, get over an eating disorder, find their calling at work, engage a spiritual practice....all people seeking growth and transformation. To be with them through these changes put me in awe. To be able to hand someone a few of the tools I had discovered over the past decade and then hold a space for them to transform their beliefs and actions provided the most inspiring moments of my life.
Before I dropped out of college I had been sliding into a suicidal depression for years. Leaving school was symbolic of owning the path I would take in life. I decided to self educate, to take control of the information that enters my awareness and the values that I assign to it. I spent the next 14 years studying growth and transformation using my own life as a laboratory. I started out very slowly with philosophy and breathing exercises. This past year was in many ways the culmination, the most extreme form of my experimentations in personal transformation.
In August of 2011 I knew I had to shift my entire life but wasn't sure how to do it. I quit my security job, sent a man I hadn't met a check for a years rent on a cabin I had never seen in person, shaved my head into a mohawk, cut the sleeves off some of my 'corporate shirts' and went to Burning Man for the first time ever. When I returned I said goodbye to NYC and moved to my cabin in nowhere North Carolina.
You have likely heard the quote attributed to Einstein:
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
All I knew was that something had to change. I had no idea where my year would lead, but I did have a well refined system of consciousness shifting that I wanted to engage full time. I needed to shift my consciousness and then decide. I took a leap.
I decided to break all of my patterns, no phone, no internet, no TV, no work. For the better part of the next year I lived in relative isolation on my mountain. My days were structured. I had a spreadsheet of over 30 activities that I tracked ranging from meditation to breathing exercises, yoga, strength training, spiritual study, journaling, dream yoga, chanting, running, time outdoors and monitoring my food intake and spending. I wrote hand written letters for the first time in a very long time. I woke with the sun. I spent hours a day in deep meditation. I had bears in my yard. I hung out naked on the front porch often. My backyard was a mountain top bald with 360° views of the surrounding Appalachian mountains.
I will dig into the details of my days at a later date, but the simple fact is that our consciousness shifts when we ask it to. What I did was extreme and is not what I would advise most to do. In 2005 I did a similar experiment while working 40-50 hours a week. Every other year has been drastically less extreme. What is important is that we learn to follow the still small voice inside our heart that is calling us to live a life of passion and purpose. What I have amassed is a wealth of techniques big and small to help remove the layers of noise that mask this voice.
And now I find myself back in New York. I have found love (UPDATE: we are married and now have 2 sons! UPDATE #2: SHE is now my partner in this business :). I know what my work in this world is meant to be. My spiritual life is rich. My health is better than ever. I feel full, overflowing, yet hungry with a desire to help others engage their lives in ever deepening ways. This can start as simply as eating a better breakfast or getting enough sleep every night. I will tell you a bit about how we all have Trim Tabs in my next post. Trim Tabs can be thought of as the small, easily shifted elements that can cause a ripple effect in our lives. My work now is about helping others find these lifestyle changes that will help to fill their life with more integrity, more excitement, more joy and an ever deepening sense of their own intuition.
If the thought of shifting your life seems both exciting and daunting, I would love to support you on your unique transformative path. Contact me to find out how my Life Coaching program can kickstart your journey.