Sunday May 18^th, 2008  (posted 1/2/2009)

Yesterday I was speaking to a new friend of mine, Joe, about my own personal journey of transformation. Now before I go on I need to fill you in on whom Joe is. I met Joe a week ago my local Starbucks, and we had an immediate connection. We spoke about Eckhart Tolle, Transformational Trainings and My Trip to Africa. Somehow time expanded and we had about twenty minutes of talking in a one minute moment while he was taking my order. So my first lesson from Joe was that “Time is relative and elastic” (now that is a whole other conversation for another time!).

So 5 days later, as I am getting ready to drive up to Melbourne to pick up my first ever set of Tokes from The Highland Mint (the manufacturer), Joe calls me. Part of my morning had consisted of planning for a yard sale for the following day as well as envisioning how my drive to Melbourne would be – I would be alone, listening to this specific music, reflecting on the last year of creating TOFA, relaxing, being quiet etc etc… Well, Joe calls and he has some questions about the transformational trainings I had introduced to him. I explained to him that I was out the door and that maybe we could get together for coffee the next day. He responded with a “Better yet, why don’t I drive with you to Melbourne”? (Melbourne is about 2 hours north of where I live). I immediately said yes. My second lesson was clear “We can never know what the next moment will hold until we are in it, so why waste time thinking about it before it arrives”. Now fortunately, because I was open, I was not “stuck” in how I had envisioned it. This is why I was able to say yes to Joe when he asked to come along for the drive. This is important to notice because if I was coming from the “I know” what it will look like, I would have said no to Joe to create the safety of what I know. So “as long as I think I know something, I close off possibilities and stop listening, creating a ‘no’ to the unknown”. Rather, I was coming from “I don’t know that I don’t know”, a place of infinite possibility, opening up a space for me to have an authentic ‘yes’ to life, and in this case a yes to Joe driving with me.

What I didn’t know yet, was that I had attracted Joe into my life to have my first Body-Mind-Spirit awakening. I was ready…

In the car, Joe asked me why I want to be a Transformational Trainer. I responded that I felt it is a calling and that somehow it is my responsibility in this world. He then asked me “What are you responsible for?” I was stumped, desperately grabbing onto thoughts and feelings in trying to produce the “right” answer. I started speaking “well, without coming across as being better than others, I see many people trying to ‘do’ this work and since the work of transformation is about ‘being’ and not about doing, I see that the people they are then training are not receiving the right coaching and direction and therefore it is my responsibility blah blah blah….”. Joe then interrupted me and said he was going to divert for a moment and ask me some other questions. The first question he asked was “What is ego?” I started giving an elaborate answer, again trying to give the “right” answer, and he asked me to simplify it. I said that the ego is thoughts, and he asked me if these thoughts are true or false and I answered that the ego is false, a false sense of identity. Joe then asked me “What is spirit?” and again I spun into a text book answer, being a parrot repeating what I thought would be the right answer. Again Joe asked me to simplify it and I said that spirit is truth. So now I was clear, ego is false and spirit is truth. He then asked me the initial question again “What are you responsible for?” and that is when it happened. I saw my ego aligning back into the oneness of me and it started to answer the question. Because I now saw that the ego was in fact separate from spirit and body, I was able to “see” the ego, answering the question and then able to quiet it and answer from a higher consciousness, “I am responsible for nothing and for everything”, again a simple answer.

By Joe asking the right questions, I was able to, if only for a moment, experience the separateness and oneness of the Body-Mind-Spirit; to see my ego as separate from who I am. Before this moment I knew intellectually that the ego was separate, however, I had never experienced it which to me meant that I didn’t really know. If I now say that I know that I am spirit, it is still my ego speaking because I still don’t know, I just am. I also don’t know that Body-Mind-Spirit are separate, they just are.

Joe then explained to me how he evoked this awakening in me. He intentionally asked a question that he knew my ego would grab onto like its life depended on it: “What are you responsible for?” Then as the ego focused most, if not all of its attention in coming up with the right answer, he diverted and asked me other questions. He was now speaking to my spirit, my truth; the ego was busy doing something different. He then brought the initial question back, the one the ego was so excited to get right, and in doing so drastically brought the ego back into the foreground and into the space of the spirit and the contrast of seeing something appear meant it is in fact separate. Like a light switch, you don’t know it is dark until you turn the light on. I didn’t really know the ego was false until it “came back”, which meant it was not present during part of our conversation, and separate from the truth.

After picking up the new tokens and getting back in the car, I gave Joe the first token and thanked him for making a difference in my day. We decided to stop at Starbucks on the way home for a coffee. The Melbourne Starbucks was packed! There was some community Friday afternoon gathering and we could hardly get in through the door. I would say there were over 60 people in there. I looked at Joe and said “Is this the line? Should we even bother?” He answered, “Let’s see” and before I knew it, we were up at the counter ordering our coffees. The place was loud and people were elbow to elbow in this somewhat small Starbucks. I ordered my coffee and walked over to the pick-up counter. This probably took me maximum 60 seconds. I was standing there with Joe and I turned around to face the room again and EVERYONE was gone! I looked at Joe and asked him: “Where did they go?” He just shook his shoulders as an answer. There it was, my fist lesson repeated itself again, “Time is relative and elastic.” There was no possibility in my old way of seeing the world that 60 people shuffled out of that Starbucks in 60 seconds. Even 5 minutes would have been a stretch! So now I was clear that time is in fact vertical and everything happens NOW. My common way of seeing time, as a horizontal time-line, was being challenged. And here in front of me was proof to the contrary.

From this day forward, my life would never be the same again…