The Premise Sitting alone in a six-seater private jet at forty thousand feet is a very peaceful place. I fell into meditation and my mind became very still. When I opened my eyes, I absorbed the tremendous difference in my environment from when I had first moved out to the woods to be alone and meditate. Though I still lived in those same woods, my place of solitude had grown into a thriving yoga community, and I had become CEO of the public corporation that life had somehow magically manifested around me. It was now perfectly clear to me that all of these life experiences, including running a business at this level, were doing as much to free me spiritually as my years of solitary meditation. Just as Hercules used the flow of rivers to clean out the Augean stables, so the powerful flow of life was cleaning out whatever was left of me. I just kept letting go and practicing nonresistance, whether I liked what was happening or not. It was in this frame of mind that I was flying off to Texas to discuss the billion-dollar merger offer for my company from a powerful CEO whom I had never even met. My Reflections, May 1999
Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the processes that determine the flow of life around us did not begin when we were born, nor will they end when we die.
Nonetheless, we walk around constantly trying to control and determine what will happen in our lives. No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.
Without realizing it, we do this with everything in our lives—it’s as though we actually believe that the world around us is supposed to manifest in accordance to our own likes and dislikes. If it doesn’t, surely something is very wrong. This is an extremely difficult way to live, and it is the reason we feel that we are always struggling with life. Nonetheless, it is also true that we are not powerless in the face of the events unfolding around us. We have been gifted with the power of will. From deep inside, we can determine how we want something to be and apply the power of our minds, hearts, and bodies in an attempt to make the outside world conform.
This battle between individual will and the reality of life unfolding around us ends up consuming our lives. When we win the battle, we are happy and relaxed; when we don’t, we are disturbed and stressed. Since most of us only feel good when things are going our way, we are constantly attempting to control everything in our lives.
If the natural unfolding of the process of life can create and take care of the entire universe, is it really reasonable for us to assume that nothing good will happen unless we force it to? It is to the exploration of this intriguing question that this book is devoted.
For example, what would happen if we respected the flow of life and used our free will to participate in what’s unfolding, instead of fighting it? What would be the quality of the life that unfolds? Would it just be random events with no order or meaning, or would the same perfection of order and meaning that manifests in the rest of the universe manifest in the everyday life around us?
At the heart of the experiment is a simple question: Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me? This experiment would not be about dropping out of life; it would be about leaping into life to live in a place where we are no longer controlled by our personal fears and desires. For lack of a better name, I have called this “the surrender experiment,” and to the best of my ability, I have devoted the last forty years of my life to seeing where the flow of life’s events would naturally take me. What happened over the course of these four decades is nothing short of phenomenal. Not only did things not fall apart, quite the opposite happened. As one thing naturally followed the other, the flow of life’s events led me on a journey that would have been beyond my comprehension. This book shares that journey with you so that you can experience what happened when someone dared to let go and trust the flow of life.
My personal experience is that aligning one’s will with the natural forces unfolding around us leads to some surprisingly powerful results.
You are literally not the same person on both sides of a truly life-changing event. Your interests change, your goals change, in fact, the underlying purpose of your life changes. It usually takes a very powerful event to turn your head around so far that you never look back.
But not my life. My life didn’t just “go on.” In my life, nothing would ever be the same again. I didn’t have to try to maintain this awareness. It was who I was now. I was the being who was watching the incessant flow of thoughts pass through the mind.
First, why is this voice talking all the time? If I see something, I’m instantly aware of seeing it. Why does the voice have to tell me that I see it and how I feel about it? Here comes Mary. I don’t feel like seeing her today. I hope she doesn’t see me. I know what I see and I know what I feel. After all, I’m the one in here seeing and feeling. Why does it have to get vocalized in my mind? Another question that arose was who am I who keeps noticing all this mental activity? Who am I who can just watch thoughts come up with a complete sense of detachment?
I didn’t care what he thought. I was on an exploration, a journey of learning beyond anything I could have imagined. Every day I was learning so much about myself. I couldn’t believe the amount of self-consciousness and fear being expressed through that voice. It was so obvious that the person I was watching inside cared a great deal about what people thought of him. This was especially true of people I knew well. The voice told me what to say and what not to say. It complained incessantly when something was not the way it wanted. If a conversation with a friend ended with the slightest discord or disagreement, the conversation would keep going on inside my head.
It was overwhelming at times, but I never lost the perspective of watching a voice talking inside. It was obvious it wasn’t me; it was something I was watching.
That is the effect the voice was having on me. One thing was perfectly clear: that voice had always talked before. But I had been so lost in it that I never noticed it as separate from me. It was like a fish not knowing it is in water until it gets out. One leap into the air and the fish instantly realizes, “There’s a body of water down there, and that is where I’ve always been. But now I see that I can get out.”
I knew there had to be others who had gained the perspective of watching that voice of the mind instead of identifying with it. Not only was there an entire legacy of knowledge spanning thousands of years that dealt with the voice, but this book clearly discussed “getting out.” It talked about freeing yourself from the hold of the mind. It talked about going beyond.
These were questions that I passionately wanted to know the answers to. Truth is, it was way beyond want. I needed to know these answers—that voice was driving me crazy! What Three Pillars of Zen had to say was very clear and unequivocal. It said to stop reading, talking, and thinking about your mind, and just do the work necessary to quiet it down. The required work was equally unambiguous—meditate.
No one objected, so I meandered down by the grassy lake and found a nice spot to sit. The whole notion of meditating was so meaningful to me that from the start it was like a sacred experience. I picked a tree to sit under, just like the Buddha. Then, very dramatically, I told myself, I’m not getting up until I’ve reached enlightenment. What happened under that tree that day was so powerful that even now my body shivers and my eyes begin to tear just to think about it.
Something very solid was resisting even the slightest movement of my head forward. I immediately realized that the sheer intensity of my concentration had created a well-defined force that flowed outward from my forehead and curved back to the point in my lower abdomen where I had been concentrating. I know this must sound strange, but it felt like a magnetic field that was so strong I simply could not move against it.
All I remember experiencing at that time was a powerful, unwavering sense of one pointed intention—I will never leave this state. No matter what, I will never allow anything to take me from this place. No voice of my mind had to say that to me; it was who I was. I was no longer Mickey Singer. I was the one who would never betray that peace or allow anything to disturb that transcendent stillness.
During those next few weeks, I felt like I had been born anew. I found myself yearning to go back beyond. In fact, every time I sat down to meditate I was drawn back into an elevated state. Some veil had been torn aside inside of me, and it was now totally natural to pass back through it. I started waking up at three in the morning to be able to do prolonged meditations. Throughout the day, I would sit whenever and wherever I had the opportunity. Only a small part of my life was about my outer existence. What I was really about was learning to stay deep inside while my outer life passed before me, leaving me at peace. I wasn’t able to stay that detached for long, however. After two to three weeks, the unassailable inner peace began to develop cracks. These cracks allowed the voice of my personal mind to leak back into my sanctuary of silence. I struggled to get it back. Oh, did I struggle. But the struggling itself was inconsistent with the absolute stillness. There was nothing I could do. I had to just sit in here helplessly watching as the Land Beyond My Dreams gave way to my noisy inner state. It never dawned on me that I could try leaving my outer existence in order to maintain the inner stillness. That effort would come a little bit later.
The personality expressing itself through that mental voice was no longer so sure of himself. In fact, he no longer knew which way was up. These outer changes had humbled him. He had thought he had it all figured out—well, he was wrong. It was definitely easier to let go of him when he was in pieces. During that stage of my growth, I watched very closely as the self-concept attempted to redefine itself. In place of a married man with a defined career path, my thoughts started to envision myself as a meditator who was seeking a deeper truth. But even in those early days I didn’t want to regain strength based on another mental concept of myself. Whenever I noticed thoughts being stitched together to create a new “me,” I knocked the chair out from under them. It was very painful, but I was willing to let it all go if it freed me to explore beyond. My friend came back to his house, so I moved out. I didn’t care where I lived; I just needed to be alone. My life was pretty simple. I was meditating, doing some yoga, and periodically I would go to class. I had no possessions except my schoolbooks, some clothes, and my VW van. I used to take long drives in the countryside surrounding Gainesville. I had once found a beautiful spot in the woods near a neighboring town where there was a small, abandoned lime pit. The pit was filled with crystal-clear, blue water and was surrounded by nothing but a vast area of scrub oaks and pines. I drove out there, and that is where I lived. I was becoming more and more of a hermit. It was not so much that I was running away from something—I was running into myself. My intention was very clear at all times: I wanted to go back deep inside myself.
About halfway through my routine, I began to hear some voices in the distance. I started to get uncomfortable, but I was not about to give in to that scared person inside. I just relaxed more deeply into my yoga posture, and the anxiety subsided.
food. I went to my van and pulled out the large supply of brown rice and dried beans I had stored under the backseat. I handed them all over to the women preparing the food. The women were so appreciative that it almost made me cry. This stuff meant nothing to me and so much to them. This was another one of life’s lessons I never forgot: the joy of helping people. Before I drove off, they all surrounded my van to say good-bye. I had lived in silence and solitude with no human contact for almost a month—now I was a celebrity. How did this happen? To me there was no doubt about how it happened—I had let go of myself and something very special had followed. I was willing to face loneliness and fear and not grab for relief. Yet something happened on its own, without my doing it or even asking for it. The seeds of a great experiment were being planted. Was it possible that life had more to give us than we could ever take for ourselves?
- Unexpected Inspiration I had grown a lot through my experiences in Mexico. Learning to embrace life as it unfolded around me was new to me, and the results had been very freeing. By the time I returned to Gainesville my heart and my mind were much more at peace.
All I needed in my life was solitude, the discipline of my ever-increasing practices, and a minimal amount of food. I realized that the probability of finishing my doctoral degree was rapidly decreasing. I only had a few courses left, but then there were the qualifying exams as well as the dissertation. Nothing was left in me that wanted to be an economics professor. I wanted to explore inside, deep inside. The depths of my meditations were all I cared about.
I would eventually learn that everything in life has something to teach you and that it is all for your growth. But I was not ready to see that yet. To me, there was my meditation, and then there was everything else. Though I definitely wasn’t seeing my schoolwork as relevant to my inner growth, I had a very illuminating experience associated with one of my courses.
I began to write and thoughts began to flow. I did not worry about what I was writing or second-guess my thoughts. It was very much like meditation. I kept my personal self out of it completely and just let unbridled inspiration flow. At some point in the process, a flash of inspiration welled up inside of me. I went from not knowing what I was going to do with the paper to knowing exactly what I was going to write.
These facts would need to be polished and footnoted later, so I simply left space for them and kept on writing what was created in my mind. I stopped for nothing. There was no worrying or judgment of good or bad; I just allowed the process to unfold. When artists create a work, they first get the inspiration, and then they bring it down to the physical plane. That process is exactly what happened to me that night alone in my van. The inspiration for the entire paper came all at once, and then my mind digested it and gave it form.
only knew that in the flash of a moment, I had all the material I needed to write a doctoral-level paper.
I had clearly seen the difference between creative inspiration and logical thought. I knew where thoughts came from, but where did inspiration come from? It came from a much deeper place than where I witnessed the thoughts. It came spontaneously, in total silence, with no effort or commotion. No matter how hard I might have tried, I could never have written that paper based solely on the efforts of my logical mind. I wondered if there was a way to tap into the brilliance of that inspiration on a regular basis. It would be years, but eventually I would learn that one can constantly live in that state of creative inspiration.
It had been months since my deep meditation experience in the Ocala National Forest. The remnants of that experience were a constant flow of energy to the point between my eyebrows and a burning in my heart to go even deeper within. Neither of these forces subsided over time. In fact, the yearning to go deeper kept increasing on a daily basis. It was like having fallen madly in love and not being able to see your beloved. I began to contemplate completely dropping out and entering a life of solitude. My coursework was done, and nothing was forcing me to take my qualifying exams right away. Plus, by that time I was pretty certain that I would never take those exams.
Very few lots had been sold, and I didn’t see a single person the entire time I toured. The place was so peaceful and natural that I drove around almost in a trance. It was just perfect.
As it turned out, that sense of detachment gave me the edge I needed to successfully negotiate for the lots. I succeeded in the purchase, but I didn’t feel a sense of joy. What I felt was a sense of resolute determination. What lay ahead of me was not going to be easy. I had already committed so much of myself to exploring what was beyond me—now I was going to commit everything.
His confidence in my ability to do the entire electrical system for the house rather astounded me. But if he thought I could do it, then I could—and I did. A great spiritual teacher once said, “Every day bite off more than you can chew, and chew it.” Life was teaching me some very important lessons.
Personally, I think they had come up to check on me to see if I was still halfway sane. I had been without a phone number for a long time, and I’m sure my family must have been concerned about me.
That’s what I called it back then—the invisible hand. From the beginning of my awakening, I had inwardly begged for help in knowing who I was, the one who was watching the voice of the mind. From that point forward, it was as though something had reached down and grabbed me by the ponytail and begun to pull me up. My whole outer life had been ripped away from me in the blink of an eye. In its place I had been shown the beauty and peace of an inner state that was beyond anything I had ever imagined. That touch of the beyond had lit my heart aflame.
I was very surprised to find that the monastic lifestyle came quite naturally to me. I awoke every morning at 3:00 a.m. and sat for a few hours of meditation. I would then do contemplative walking out on the fields. In those early days, I was still holding on to the concept that it was all about concentration and focus. When I walked, I would become acutely aware of every step I took and every movement of my body. This helped to prolong the peace I felt from my morning meditations. I would then do yoga postures outside until it was time for my noon meditation. I held the rope of self-discipline very tightly, every day. It was an extremely strict lifestyle, very different from anything I had ever experienced. But just as an athlete is willing to give everything, every day and night, to train for the Olympics, so I was willing to give everything, every moment, to drop the part of me that was holding me back from where I so desperately wanted to go. It didn’t take long before I noticed that food had a major effect on my practices. The less I ate, the easier it was to fall into a meditative state. So I tested the…
don’t know where I got the idea that if I held the rope tight enough, my lower self would go away and leave me alone. But that is how I lived for about a year and a half. The part of me that had dominated my entire previous way of life had no place in my new life. There were no perks for him, and every day he fought back less and less. The noisy, demanding personal part of me didn’t go away—he just began to resign…
12. When the Disciple Is Ready, the…
One day while I was still living in my van, Bob gave me the book called Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, a holy man from India. I remember trying to start this book the evening Bob had given it to me, but after a few pages I had to put it down. Not because I didn’t like it, but because each word I read kept drawing me into such a deep meditative state that I couldn’t continue reading. I tried again the next night. The same thing happened. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I was certainly intrigued by the experience. I decided to pack the book away until I…
could at least relate to the Indian saint’s life story. It became very clear to me—I had merely stuck my toe into the ocean Yogananda was swimming in. He was a master of the entire field of knowledge and experience I was seeking. I could feel it to the core of my being. Yogananda had gone far beyond my beyond and had never fully come back. He had learned to…
Yogananda’s passion showed most in the songs that he wrote: My heart’s aflame and my soul’s afire—Just…
spiritual self. Yogananda called it self-realization. What a perfect term for all I was about at that point of my life. I wanted to realize the nature of the one who watches—my true, innermost self.
what I had been experiencing in meditation. For example, there was the notion that you have to die to be reborn. That is exactly what I had been trying to do, die of the personal to be reborn in the spiritual. I put pictures of Christ and Yogananda on the altar where I meditated. Some very great beings had walked this path before me. I wanted to learn from them. I was just starting to realize that I couldn’t walk the path alone—I needed some help.
dawned on me that perhaps I’d been going about this in the wrong way. Instead of trying to free myself by constantly quieting the mind, perhaps I should be asking why the mind is so active. What is the motivation behind all the mental chatter? If that motivation were to be removed, the struggle would be over.
As I explored it inwardly, the first thing I noticed was that most of the mental activity revolved around my likes and dislikes. If my mind had a preference toward or against something, it actively talked about it. I could see that it was these mental preferences that were creating much of the ongoing dialogue about how to control everything in my life.
started this new practice with something very simple, the weather. Could it really be so hard to just let it rain when it rains and be sunny when it’s sunny without complaining about it? Apparently the mind can’t do it: Why did it have to rain today? It always rains when I don’t want it to. It had all week to rain; it’s just not fair. I simply replaced all that meaningless noise with: Look how beautiful; it’s raining.
I would learn to accept. I clearly remember deciding that from now on if life was unfolding in a certain way, and the only reason I was resisting it was because of a personal preference, I would let go of my preference and let life be in charge. Clearly, these were uncharted waters for me. Where would I end up? If my preferences were not leading me, what would happen to me? These questions did not scare me; they fascinated me. I didn’t want to be in charge of my life; I wanted to be free to soar far beyond myself. I began to see this as a great experiment. What would happen to me if I just inwardly surrendered my resistance and let the flow of life be in charge? The rules of the experiment were very simple: If life brought events in front of me, I would treat them as if they came to take me beyond myself. If my personal self complained, I would use each opportunity to simply let him go and surrender to what life was presenting me. This was the birth of what I came to call “the surrender experiment,” and I was totally prepared to see where it would take me.
resistance, none of them could have happened. I had gone through most of my life thinking I knew what was good for me, but life itself seemed to know better. I was now going to test that presumption of nonrandomness to the max. I was willing to roll the dice and let the flow of life be in charge.
Surrendering to the flow of life may have seemed like a bold move, but the truth is, I wasn’t all that exposed to life’s challenges.
Month after month went by while I was adhering to my strict meditation lifestyle. I was supposed to be using my time to prepare for my doctoral qualifying exams. Needless to say, I had not opened a single book, and I had no intention of doing so. I was done with that part of my life. Or so I thought. One day, after I finished teaching my economics class, Dr. Goffman met me in the hallway and said he wanted to talk to me. The voice in my head immediately told me that now I was in trouble. He was still chairman of the department, and for sure he had heard about the no-shirt incident. As usual, that voice was wrong.
The voice in my head went nuclear. I watched it screaming inside, No! I can’t do that. I’ve dropped out of all this. I need to devote my time to my practices. There is no way I’m going to start pulling down all my old economics textbooks—I’m done with that. In the midst of all that protest, I remembered my recent commitment to surrender to what life brought before me. That voice I was watching was not my spiritual adviser; it was my spiritual burden. This was the perfect opportunity to get it out of the driver’s seat.
In time, Alan accepted our relationship on nonbusiness terms, and we became good friends. Sometimes he would come out to my land to study, and we would take long walks together. He enjoyed learning about my unique way of life, and I enjoyed meeting the very special man behind the banker’s suit. A few times I even accepted his wife’s invitation to have dinner at their home. I began to see my entire relationship with Alan as another one of life’s magical gifts, despite my initial resistance.
That prospect of failure disturbed me and set the inner voice on a nonstop dialogue about how to avoid the exam. What an opportunity to get rid of that part of me. I no longer saw the administration’s mistake as a problem. I saw it as a challenge to further let go of myself. So I decided to take all three exams and willingly accept the experience of failing the third one.
How could this be? It had happened again. In the name of transcending myself, I had surrendered and willingly faced my personal fears. Then at the last moment, instead of certain hell, I was lifted up to heaven.
Surrender—what an amazingly powerful word. It often engenders the thought of weakness and cowardice. In my case, it required all the strength I had to be brave enough to follow the invisible into the unknown. And that is exactly what I was doing. It’s not that surrender gave me clarity about where I was going—I had no idea where it would lead me. But surrender did give me clarity in one essential area: my personal preferences of like and dislike were not going to guide my life. By surrendering the hold those powerful forces had on me, I was allowing my life to be guided by a much more powerful force, life itself. By that stage of my growth, I could see that the practice of surrender was actually done in two, very distinct steps: first, you let go of the personal reactions of like and dislike that form inside your mind and heart; and second, with the resultant sense of clarity, you simply look to see what is being asked of you by the situation unfolding in front of you. What would you be doing if you weren’t being influenced by the reactions of like or dislike?
My personal self began feeling insecure about the whole thing. To straighten him out, I laid down the ground rules: there would not be a single thought about the classes or what would be taught in them until it was time to enter the classroom. I intended to walk into the first class with a completely empty mind. I wanted it to be like the time I wrote that paper completely by inspiration. We’ll just go into the class and see what comes out.
I noticed that the air was getting thinner and thinner the deeper I went into the cave. There was an almost frighteningly strong sense of purpose: I was going to explore deep into this unknown cave until I found what I was looking for. Nothing was going to stop me.
I awoke from that dream a changed person. My way of thinking had been transformed at a very profound level. For the first time, I questioned whether more and more discipline was going to take me where I so desperately wanted to go. Sitting alone in my van that morning, I knew the answer was no. My path to true freedom was subtler than simply requiring a tighter grip. Something much wiser than me had reached into my psyche that night and rearranged my entire relationship with myself. I no longer saw the lower aspect of myself, with all his personal issues and melodramas, as the enemy that had to be destroyed. I looked at him now with a new understanding. I needed to use all these disturbed personal energies for my ascent. It was perfectly clear to me that since he was the problem, he was also the solution. I actually felt a tinge of compassion toward that struggling person within me. I would later come to learn that the Bhagavad Gita says that one should raise the self with Self, not trample down the self. I had been trampling down my personal self in the name of getting free from his humanness. I now needed to learn how to raise those energies up to assist me on the journey.
The person I had left sitting on the meditation seat immediately straightened himself up. As I approached him, he became more disciplined and focused. In drastic contrast to how strict I had been in the past, I reached my hand out to him in a kind and caring manner and said, “You can come out now.” What followed that utterance makes me ashamed to this day for thinking this practice was some sort of an innocent mind game. The moment I said those words, I experienced an emotional release the intensity of which I had never imagined possible. Tears poured from my eyes, and my legs completely buckled beneath me. My heart broke open as though some major event had taken place that allowed for a lifetime’s worth of relief. Once this cathartic release had run its course, I realized something I will never forget: that scared, troubled person in there whom I had been watching and judging was indeed a person. The psyche is a person with feelings and thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams. He is not to be locked in a room and constantly told to shut up. There are much more constructive ways to deal with these disturbed, self-centered energies. Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way—through experience.
I needed to learn to just relax inside instead of fighting with my mind so much. Just because the voice talks doesn’t mean I have to listen to it or let it affect the direction of my life. It has nothing to do with me—I can just relax regardless of what it’s saying. I was back to the basics: I am the one who notices the voice talking.
They were not the problem; I was the problem. I had built a mental concept of absolute discipline that was actually holding me back.
It took some time, but I eventually began to realize the true purpose of yoga. Done properly, yoga is the science of channeling all energies upward until they merge together at the highest point—Oneness.
Imagine what that voice in my head was saying: Oh my God! How dare she make a decision like that without even asking me? I don’t want another house on my land. I don’t want anyone else staying out here, so why would I want another house? How in the world does someone make a decision to build a house on someone else’s property without ever asking them? On and on it went, but by then I was well trained to just calmly observe all these thoughts being created by the preference-driven mind. After all, if I had wanted another house on the property that voice would be saying, What a miracle! God stepped in and started building me a second house without my having to do a single thing.
That was the essence of my experiment with life: if it’s down to a matter of preference—life wins. So I went back up the hill, strapped on an apron, and helped them build Sandy’s house.
a published author. Inwardly, I had grown as well. The sharp line I had drawn between spiritual and nonspiritual had begun to fade. The energy I experienced while teaching my classes at Santa Fe was the same energy I was dealing with in my yoga and meditations. In meditation, that energy would flow upward and lift me away from my everyday self. When I stood in front of a class, the very same energy would explode into a passionate, heartfelt lecture. Not only did I begin to see all this as the flow of spiritual energy, but I also began to see that there was no difference between coming to class to teach and driving home to do my meditative practices.
My whole being thought my path to self-realization was about meditation. Fortunately, life knew better, and she was starting to guide me away from myself through service to others.
stay at her place. Rama was very outgoing and vivacious. She was filled with excitement and immediately drew me into her world.
How could I be in a position to write to India and invite a highly respected yoga master to a small town in north-central Florida? There was no reasoning with her. She insisted that I write a letter to India, on Santa Fe Community College letterhead, and invite Baba to stop in Gainesville on his way from Atlanta to Miami.
Each week things grew until I was forced to build a small addition onto my house to fit more people. With the publication of my book, The Search for Truth, in spring of 1974, the energy was fanned even more.
Eventually, she just stopped going home. If I had known then that she was moving out of a nice condominium her parents had purchased for her, and into this tiny cabin in the woods with no plumbing or electricity, I might not have been so quick to let her move in. If I had known then that we were destined to fall in love, get married, and have a beautiful daughter together—given my mind-set at the time, I definitely would not have let her move in. It would take a few more years of learning to surrender before I would be capable of dropping my spiritual self-concept enough to accept the special relationships that life had in store for me.
For years I had thought that a spiritual life was about spending every day in silence and solitude. I was now running around getting all this work done. Yet somehow I felt more open and more connected to the energy flow than ever before. I kept my morning and evening meditations, but the hours in between were devoted to my classes and bringing Baba to Gainesville.
The moment the palm of his hand reached above the crown of my head, what felt like ten thousand volts of electricity jumped from the base of my spine to meet his hand. It happened as fast as a bolt of lightning. In an instant, I was no longer in my body. Me, the one who lives in here, the one who looks out through the eyes and hears through the ears, the center of conscious awareness that notices the thoughts and emotions—I was no longer sitting inside doing those things. I was in a state of absolute panic trying to hold on with all my might to my connection with the body. The upward rush of that much energy had dislodged me from where I normally sat within myself. I was experiencing tornado force winds trying to blow me out of my body, and I was struggling to hold on for dear life. No matter how hard I tried, I could not pull myself back into the body. It was one of those survival moments when pure fear opens you up to superhuman strength. It didn’t matter—I could not even begin to pull against that force. I have no idea how long the experience lasted, but when Baba felt I’d had enough, he simply rubbed his hand across my back. The moment his hand physically touched my midback—everything stopped. I immediately fell back into my body and began to get somewhat oriented. The first thing I noticed was my heart—it wasn’t beating; it was fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. My first thought was, This is not good. Hearts don’t last very long like this. The moment that thought formed in my mind, Baba reached in front of me and rubbed his hand over my heart. Instantly, my heart began beating normally. I was stunned by the experience and the power of this man. Who was he? How could he possibly have such control over my energy and my metabolic functions? I felt so humbled to be in his presence. I have never felt so completely unburdened in my life. What had I been doing—fasting, meditating, and struggling with myself for so many years? With a single touch, this man could bring about such transformation. At that moment I understood what was meant by a Siddha master. Baba did not belong in this world; he was from somewhere else altogether.
One of Baba’s people told me that the experience was called shaktipat, a special blessing by a Siddha master in which a very powerful spiritual energy is awakened within.
inwardly looked upward as if to say thank you, and suddenly the whole space above me opened up into a limitless expanse. It felt as if a veil had been lifted from between my consciousness and that which was beyond me. I immediately felt oneness with all that I had been looking for. It was the most powerful and revealing experience I ever had. It only lasted a few moments, but I came back with an echo in my being saying, Just exactly who do you think you are saying good-bye to? I felt Yogananda’s presence all around me and permeating me from within. From that moment forward, I never questioned my connection to him.
We got it set up, and one afternoon we accompanied Baba into the maximum-security facility. The inmates loved him, and when Baba left, he instructed his staff to continue visiting prisons. To this day, they trace all their worldwide prison work back to Baba’s visit to Union Correctional Institution outside of Gainesville.
How could we possibly have gone our separate ways and ended up at the same place? We were so different. I was living the simple life in Gainesville, and he was a big-time attorney in Chicago. I prided myself on having no belongings, and he had a Ferrari, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and a private plane. Ronnie lived in a top-floor penthouse at Chicago’s famous Twin Towers Marina, and he decorated the circular walls of his living room with pictures of Napoleon. What in the world was he doing here at this spiritual retreat hanging out with a holy man from India? Shelly had introduced Ronnie to Baba, and apparently it was love at first sight. I spent a lot of time with Ronnie at the retreat, and he even invited me to accompany him when he took Baba and a few of his staff to Disney World.
Baba was like a wind that blew into town and permanently changed the direction of my life from one of solitude to one of service.
Plus, more and more people were sitting in on my classes at Santa Fe, especially once my second book, Three Essays on Universal Law, was published. My answering machine was getting calls from all over the state praising the retreat and asking when the next one would be.
The number of tasks life was giving me was out of control, but I was surrendering to it. My morning and evening meditations were my refuge. Throughout the day I took every opportunity to quiet myself and center within. Every time I got into or out of my car, I would slow down my breath and visualize Earth spinning through outer space. Before opening a door, any door, I would remember that I was walking through a door on this tiny planet in the vast emptiness of space. Fortunately, the energy flowing up to the point between my eyebrows helped me keep the focus of my attention there. I slowly began to realize that this life of constant service was the “other way” referred to in the dream I had. On my new path to awakening, life was no longer an obstacle to my growth. Life was now the battlefield on which I was to remain conscious enough to willingly permit my old self to be stripped away. But let it be clear, I still had plenty of resistance left in me that had to be overcome.
25. Opening the Heart Chakra
The first night’s gathering completely filled the Temple. After the program, which was very powerful, I found myself intrigued by Amrit’s energy. I wanted to understand how so much energy could emanate from a person, especially since Amrit never even touched anyone. I then got pretty brazen. I figured he was a guest in our house, and a proper host would make sure that his guest was taken care of.
He placed his right hand over my forehead, and I immediately felt a gentle flow of warm energy passing into my body. The flow was overwhelmingly powerful, and I became completely transfixed by the beauty of the experience. I could feel the energy building up within me and rising toward my heart. It filled my heart fuller and fuller until it burst open. I have never felt so much love in my entire life. I was completely overcome by the flow of energy starting from his hand, coursing through me, and then pouring out of the burst-open heart area.
By now I was seeing a pattern. I was continuously being pushed headfirst into a life that centered on serving other people’s spiritual growth instead of my own. I never consciously would have decided to do this. I was not wise enough or selfless enough to make such a decision. It was simply the fact that I had resolved to surrender to life, and this is where life was taking me.
26. Get Thee to an Ashram
I was almost thirty years old, and my financial life was very simple. I was earning less than $5,000 a year, I had no assets or debt, and there was nothing I longed for that money could buy.
Sharing my place of solitude certainly wasn’t what I thought I wanted, but that’s because I didn’t understand that serving others is much higher than serving yourself. Nowadays, almost forty years later, people sometimes ask me how the Temple community got started. What am I to tell them? I know perfectly well that I didn’t do it. The best I can say is that I let go of myself and allowed what was meant to be—to be.
called out to me, “Are you in charge here?” The voice in my head was frantically trying to figure out what was going on. Why is a deputy here? Is something wrong? Did he look in the Temple and see all the strange religious icons? This is north-central Florida; am I in trouble? Despite all this internal noise, I managed to utter a fairly normal sounding, “Yes, sir, I am in charge. How may I help you?” Pointing to the Temple, Deputy Knowles asked me if I had built the building. When I told him that I had, he asked if I would consider building an addition onto his house. It seemed he loved the rustic cedar look of the Temple and was impressed with the quality of the carpentry. He had been looking for a builder to enclose and remodel his garage into living space.
But that was not what was happening. I was going to have to learn to deal with accepting money and running a business. Life was making me let go of my spiritual self-concept, and I was staying very conscious about not replacing it with yet another one. I simply put my whole heart into whatever I was doing.
All these tasks had one thing in common: they had all been given to me by surrendering to life’s incomprehensible flow.
Not long after the start of Built with Love, we were meeting on the field one Sunday after services.
That is one thing I had noticed: running the business was putting me into very different situations than I had experienced living alone in the woods. I found this very helpful to my spiritual growth. By watching different parts of my psyche get stimulated, I could learn to let them go. Without realizing it, I had become conscious enough to use sitting in a bank preparing for the inevitable loan rejection as an opportunity to fall behind whatever the voice was saying. If the whole purpose of my surrender to life was to get rid of myself, it was working out quite well.
He looked very surprised by the offer but eventually disclosed that he was looking for a loan of about $20,000 to cover cash flow while he upgraded the store. That was pretty much the exact amount he had provided for me ten years earlier when our roles were reversed. I couldn’t believe this was happening. What was the probability of these events, including my being in that store right after the bank had rejected his loan request and exactly at the time of that phone conversation? It was as though after ten years I was sent there to repay Jim’s act of kindness. Needless to say, I was honored to make him that loan.
30. The Ever-Expanding Temple of the Universe
It taught me how to keep regular spiritual practices while working in the world and how to support others to do the same. It taught me how to build and run a successful business that would support the ever-expanding spiritual work. It taught me how to serve others by sponsoring statewide retreats for leading spiritual figures and by providing a home for what grew to a dozen or so very special and sincere seekers. I saw this work as something that could continue to grow in a linear fashion. I would never have guessed that I had seen nothing yet.
Sometimes one of the men would relate an incident that had happened during the week where that voice had told him to do something stupid. He spoke about that brief moment of awareness wherein he got to choose whether to listen or just let it go. Invariably, while telling the story the inmate would start laughing about how in the past he would have just immediately expressed that destructive behavior.
How could I ever have imagined that I would end up running a $300-million-a-year computer software company, with twenty-three hundred people reporting to me, all without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting aside my spiritual pursuits? How could the flow of life’s events pull that off, especially since I had never even touched a computer in my life and was totally content with my finances? As I sit here today, if I were forced to answer that question, I would utter the word surrender. My experiment with surrender had taught me to always be present in the current moment and do my best to not allow my personal preferences to make decisions for me. Instead, I allowed the reality of life to determine where I was going. It had certainly led me on a fantastic journey up to that point, and it was about to do something phenomenal with the next thirty years of my life. If you would like to know how these phenomenal events unfolded in a perfectly choreographed sequence, I would be very honored to share the story with you.
When I got the computer home, I buried myself in learning the programming commands and seeing what they could do. For some reason, everything was so natural to me. It wasn’t like I was learning something new; it was like I was remembering something I had always known. My mind became very quiet the moment I sat down at the machine. It was very much like entering meditation. The energy would rise up and focus beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a peace would come over me. Apparently, I was meant to be working with this computer. I didn’t question it—I just continued to surrender to what was happening. Before the computer showed up, I already had two full-time jobs: Temple of the Universe and Built with Love. To find time for my new computer, I began to go back to work after evening services. I would often work into the wee hours of the morning, getting only three or four hours of sleep before rising for morning services. I was so passionately inspired while working with the computer that I didn’t get tired. It was clear to me even then that something very special was going on. I played around writing some programs just to get a feel for what the thing could do. Within a few weeks I decided that I was ready to write a real program. The first task I gave myself was to write a computerized accounting system for Built with Love. I had to teach myself everything. The salespeople at the Radio Shack store knew nothing about programming, and I didn’t know anyone else to talk to. I just used trial and error as my teacher. Once I had completed Built with Love’s accounting system, things progressed very rapidly with my programming.
As with everything else in my life since I decided to follow the flow, Personalized Programming just started itself. There were no meetings, business plans, or venture capitalists. Just as with the Temple of the Universe and Built with Love, I simply accepted the challenge of serving the energy that came my way. I never left the woods; all of this came to me unasked for and unwanted. Fortunately, I really loved helping people. I didn’t care if they were coming to me to learn how to still that voice in their head, to build them a house, or to write them a program—it was all the same to me. I passionately loved programming, and I loved getting to use that talent to help people. At first the jobs were small, and I had no idea what to charge for them. I wrote a grading program for a University of Florida professor for $300. I was such a perfectionist that I just kept making it better and better before I was willing to give it to him. From the very beginning of my programming career, my heart demanded that every line of code had to be the absolute best I could do. It didn’t matter what I was being paid; everything had to be perfect.
My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.
Now a boutique business in West Palm, one of the most affluent cities in the United States, had hired me to fly down and computerize the business. It was all beyond my comprehension. I was never even trained in any of this. I was just living in a fairy tale.
But though there was no definitive agreement with these clients, there was my agreement to honor life’s flow. My mind became still as I realized that I really had no choice but to surrender to the situation life had put me in. It was just like all the other times I let go when I didn’t want to. I took a deep breath and told both clients that I would try my best to write a billing system for their medical practices.
There were no meetings, or budgets, or project plans. There was just me. I immediately started to code the software that would come to be called The Medical Manager—a product that would end up revolutionizing the U.S. medical practice management industry. I know it is difficult for people to understand, but to me writing code was the same as having a conversation with another human being.
When I was writing a program, the voice in my head would speak in the computer language I was using. I didn’t think in English and then convert to the language; my primary thoughts were in the computer language to begin with. Because of this, I could just sit down at the computer and write perfectly structured code.
I wrote and wrote with a fervor and passion that was almost frightening, first the patient record, then the medical procedures that needed to be billed. Everything I did, I did to the absolute best of my ability. I was not only writing a program for these two clients; I was writing the best program I possibly could as my gift to the universe. The flow of inspiration was such that I was not allowed to cut a single corner. This commitment to detail would end up distinguishing The Medical Manager from almost all competitive medical billing systems on the market. In short, this thing wanted to be as close to perfect as possible regardless of how long it took or how unreasonable it appeared from a business perspective.
Personalized Programming had its existing clients. I hired a young man part-time to help me do some of the small custom programming jobs for those clients. I trained him on the old programs I had written, and I reviewed and tested his code. Without realizing it, while I thought I was training him, it was really me who was getting trained on how to manage programmers. That was a skill I would definitely need in the near future. Turns out, I was destined to manage hundreds of highly skilled software developers.
No person in their right mind would think that they were going to sit down and write an entire medical billing system on their own. I, however, was not in my right mind. I had accepted the project as the next task given to me by the flow of life. That was a very holy thing to me. My entire spiritual path was focused around my experiment with surrender. In order to keep my distance from the inner chatter, I still maintained my regular meditation schedule and continued my moment-to-moment practice of centering myself. Every time I sat down at the computer to work on the program, I took a breath and remembered that I was writing this as a gift to the universe. I was sitting on a tiny planet spinning through outer space, and this was the task that had been given to me. It never even occurred to me to ask for assistance.
told her that because I was used to working alone, I couldn’t make any promises. However, I was willing to give it a try. We set up for a meeting in a few days, and I told her that she should think about a reasonable starting salary because I wanted to compensate her. The level of talent and competence that was hidden inside this person who just happened to show up at the Temple is beyond my comprehension. Barbara was definitely very scared and shy in the beginning. Then for the next twenty years she kept stepping forward to accept and excel at whatever was asked of her.
For example, one of the most interesting and important modules we wrote was the one that printed the insurance claim forms. I remember the days I spent with my clients going over their insurance billing needs. You basically had to be a rocket scientist to understand all the minute differences between how these practices were filling out the supposedly standardized forms. But they insisted that each of these differences was essential in order to get properly paid by different insurance companies. Barb and I managed to develop a very sophisticated, template-driven system that would allow the practices themselves to specify how they wanted to fill out the forms for any particular insurance company.
I had never in my life been involved in anything that demanded the level of perfection of that program. It was like a polished diamond by the time it was done. To me it was a living entity, and I felt tremendous respect every time I touched it. Just look at the amazing flow of life’s events that created this program. I felt like it had a life of its own, and we were just here to serve it.
It took me a week or two to pull everything together and ship it off to Systems Plus headquarters. There was something very surreal as I stood there offering the finished package up to the universe. I had simply been following the flow. I hadn’t had any expectations, hopes, or dreams about anything. For many years now, I had just been putting one foot in front of the other serving whatever was put before me to the best of my ability. To me, I was not a computer programmer; I was a yogi living in the middle of the woods. I had bought a tiny toy computer for $600 some years earlier, and I had played around with it. I got tricked into spending two years of my life writing a medical billing package after my mind had already decided that writing software was too time-consuming. Now, without my making a single call, I was about to send something I had programmed off to the president of a successful software company out in California. How does such a thing happen—even in a fairy tale?
One thing I saw again and again on this ride with life was that the right person would show up at just the right time. I literally banked on that perfection, and it is amazing how it kept happening. Even our corporate attorney, Rick Karl, was into yoga and meditation. It seemed that life was surrounding me with spiritually oriented people, not only at the Temple, but also in my business.
Morning meditations took on a whole new meaning as the software company got larger and larger. Not only were meditation and yoga essential for continuing my inward journey, but they were essential for keeping the mind sane. So much is demanded of you when you’re running an organization on which so many people rely for their livelihood. The mind needs time to quiet down and keep everything in perspective.
Perhaps change only takes place when there is sufficient reason to overcome the inertia of everyday life. Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred-up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of the howling winds and wait to see what constructive action was being asked of me.
To understand the next wave of growth, it is important to understand what was going on inside of me at that time. All the events that had unfolded so far in my experiment with surrender had shown me that the more I was willing to let go of the inner noise created by my personal likes and dislikes, the more I could see subtle synchronicities in what was unfolding around me. These unexpected concurrences of events were like messages from life gently nudging me in the direction she was going. I listened to these subtle nudges instead of listening to the not-so-subtle mental and emotional reactions caused by my personal preferences. This is how I practiced surrender in everyday life, and the purpose of all these stories is to share with you the perfection of the journey that unfolded.
It was an amazing experience to be that close to such an evolved person going through such a life-changing experience. While he was here, Amrit simply allowed the situation to put him through whatever changes he needed to go through. Situations like this are like fire, and Amrit just wanted to use that fire for spiritual purification. He wasn’t sad, he wasn’t hurt, and he wasn’t scared—he was just completely surrendered to going through the experience. I constantly saw in Amrit what I always saw inside of me: when push comes to shove, I don’t care what it takes, just free me from myself. The only meaningful prayer is that this white-hot fire be so destructive to the personal self that it severs the cord that binds. Standing soul to soul, Amrit and I had that in common—liberation at any cost. I didn’t isolate myself from what Amrit was going through. I wanted to share the experience of exploring what it would be like inside if everything were taken away outside. I recalled King Solomon’s wisdom: For every thing there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven. I had been honored to know Amrit as a world-renowned teacher; I was now all the more honored to be close to him as he passed through a period of great darkness or, better put, as a period of great darkness passed through him.
As with all things, in time the energy began to shift. The noise of the past subsided and opportunities for the future began to open up. One day Amrit asked me to take a drive with him to see a place he had found in the Ocala National Forest.
I learned a lot about surrender by being with Amrit during this whole ordeal. What I saw was that no matter who we are, life is going to put us through the changes we need to go through. The question is: Are we willing to use this force for our transformation? I saw that even very intense situations don’t have to leave psychological scars, if we are willing to process our changes at a deeper level. My surrender experiment had already taught me to deeply honor the transformative power of life. Sharing that time with Amrit would prove to be all the more important since life as I knew it was once again about to go through a major, unexpected change.
Section VIII Embracing Explosive Expansion
was completely naive as to how much work I would be taking on as CEO. I quickly realized that it was going to require all the one-pointed focus I had developed through my years of meditation. I had surrendered, and this was the task life had given me. That made it part of my spiritual journey, and I was fully prepared to devote myself to it to the absolute best of my ability. The first thing I did was take the steps
If I was going to take responsibility for the company, a thorough flow of information needed to pass across my desk. This was going to require regular group conference calls and an enormous amount of reporting to keep up with what everyone was doing. When I announced that each executive
This was Karma yoga at its highest. I had given my life to the Universal Flow, and it had not only taken it—it had devoured me in the process. I didn’t care at all what happened to me. I cared about the company, the employees, the doctors, and, above all, the vision of perfection that drove the very beat of my heart.
Over the years, I had come to see that I really had no idea where life was going to put me on any given day. And, in truth, it was none of my business. My job was to simply continue surrendering and serving what was put in front of me.
That is not what happened. Marv spent a few minutes relaxing quietly, got up from his chair, and motioned me to walk with him. He left the meeting room and called together the entire development team right then and there in the open cubicle area. He explained that the top tier of their management had just resigned and anyone who wanted to go with them should make that decision at this time.
The only thing Marv ever said to me about the whole affair was that if you let people hold you hostage, they will force you to make terrible decisions, and you will lose. You might as well take your bumps up front and at least be in control of your destiny. Who would have believed that just a few months later, one of Marty’s senior executives would move the development of the website to New York and relaunch it with a team of less than forty developers. That new website became the foundation for WebMD’s entire future. Again and again I was seeing that each of these intensely challenging business experiences was very beneficial for my spiritual growth. I just kept letting go of whatever discomfort got stirred up within me, and inevitably, a stronger flow of spiritual energy took its place. This growing strength helped prepare me for life’s next growth experience: what happened when Marv’s reorganization team finally got around to taking aim at my division.
It certainly didn’t hurt when Sabrina was able to present the tremendous growth of Medical Manager Network Services from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to a fifty-million-dollar-a-year business in just over three years.
All this exposure to intensely powerful people and situations was having a profound effect on the psyche I watched so diligently. I had never been exposed to this powerful lifestyle. Nothing in me got off on it or wanted anything from it, but it did make me deal with parts of my being that I would not have faced otherwise. If I saw any weakness, fear, or anxiety come up, I just deeply relaxed back into where I was watching from. I simply kept letting go of whatever came up. This is where life had taken me, and I used all these situations as a way of letting go of myself. It was definitely working. I kept being pushed into strongly positive and negative situations, and I increasingly found myself in a very clear and undisturbed state. It seemed that the more challenges life put me through, the less my inner energy flow was affected by outer conditions. What years of willful meditation had not gotten rid of, life’s situations and challenges were rooting out of me. As long as I made getting rid of myself my only goal, every situation was a fruitful experience. If I’d had any other goal, I think the constant pressure would have been overwhelming. I found that I actually got more peaceful inside as I dealt with the ever-increasing magnitude of challenges. Life was molding me each day to become who I needed to be in order to handle tomorrow’s tasks. All I had to do was let go and not resist the process.
There was really no reason to be thinking about why this was happening or how it would turn out. Since I had absolutely no idea what was going on, thinking about it wasn’t going to help. Instead, I enjoyed spending my day letting go of whatever that voice in my head was trying to say and deeply relaxing whenever my heart began to feel anxious. In this situation, surrender was not an option; it was only sane thing to do.
It would be a journey back to the seat of Self that could be taken by anyone in the world. It was to be called The Untethered Soul. The second book would be the stories of the miraculous flow of events that happened over the years as I let go and let life unfold naturally. It would be called The Surrender Experiment.
I was floored when I first read the indictment. Randy was not. It was just about what he had expected based on his thirty years of experience.
It was like the early days when I had first started my experiment of letting go in the face of perceived danger.
This was the backdrop under which I wrote The Untethered Soul. To the core of my being, I wanted to communicate to others that they were deep inside listening to that voice’s incessant chatter, and there was a way they could be free. That was the work of my life—not this absurd legal mess. I didn’t care how threatening this nontruth had become—I wanted to share a deep truth that would brighten the lives of others.
The feedback from everywhere was overwhelming. The Untethered Soul was fulfilling its purpose—it was helping people. In the midst of phenomenal darkness, it was spreading light.
My mantra was: This Is Reality—Deal with It. I just took the attitude that on my journey through life, I was now part of this excellent legal team that had been pulled together to defend this poor sap, Singer, who had been framed by the evil villain. I took a breath, let go, and contributed positively to the topic being discussed.
One thing is for certain: he who left on this journey—never returned. The flow of life had served as sandpaper that, to a great extent, freed me of myself. Unable to unbind myself from the incessant pull of my psyche, in an act of sheer desperation, I had thrown myself into the arms of life. From that point forward, all I did was my very best to serve what was put in front of me and let go of what it stirred up within me. Joy and pain, success and failure, praise and blame—they all had pulled at what was so deeply rooted within me. The more I let go, the freer I became. It was not my responsibility to find what was binding me; that was life’s job. My responsibility was to willingly let go of whatever was brought up within me. After seeing all I’d seen over the years, surrender to the flow of life was all that was left of me. No longer busy making other plans, I settled into the quiet life of increased solitude in which I once again found myself. It soon became obvious that life had provided me the ideal environment in which to write this book. The moment I sat down, the inspiration flowed in like a tidal wave. I began writing what I always knew I would have to write—what happened when I let go. People often ask me how I look at things now that I’ve gone through the life-changing experiences of these past forty years. I tell them to read The Untethered Soul. How could I possibly explain the great freedom that comes from realizing to the depth of your being that life knows what it’s doing? Only direct experience can take you there. At some point there’s no more struggle, just the deep peace that comes from surrendering to a perfection that is beyond your comprehension. Eventually, even the mind stops resisting, and the heart loses the tendency to close. The joy, excitement, and freedom are simply too beautiful to give up. Once you are ready to let go of yourself, life becomes your friend, your teacher, your secret lover. When life’s way becomes your way, all the noise stops, and there is a great peace. In eternal gratitude for all the experiences we call Life…