It's the morning of the big day. A festival to celebrate the anniversary of the new Innovation Lab, the greatest achievement of my career at the global economic powerhouse, the IMF. I've been in the auditorium since 6.00 a.m. setting everything up with my team. We're about to open the doors for the opening ceremony. And when we do, a flood of gray/black suits are gonna come in. I'm so enjoying the contrast that I've created, with the bright pink and yellow and teal balloons throughout this space. My vision has come to fruition, and I can't wait to see how people react. As the suits begin to walk in, my excitement builds. The managing director, one of the most powerful women in the world, takes the microphone. She says, "I want to recognize the person that made this all happen." I stand up a little bit straighter, and I'm ready to step forward. And then she says the name Travis Wagner.
Now, just to be clear, that is not my name! As I graciously clap for Travis, my heart sinks. You see, two years ago, I had it made. I had the sexy red sports car with the sunroof and the Bose sound system, a walk-in closet overflowing with sheath dresses and heeled shoes, and other First World essentials, a UN-issued blue badge that whisked me past barricades and security guards and inside the headquarters of the global financial empire in Washington, D.C. A pretty much guaranteed paycheck for the rest of my life. Acquaintances, accessories, and assurances—I had it all.
I'd always loved the world of business in the marketplace. My dad taught me the value of working hard, and he clued me in that the point of life was to stay busy. Turns out I was amazing at both of those. I remember one of my first summer jobs. I'm sixteen years old, driving in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but I don't care because I have a job, and I'm in love with the glamor of the nine-to-five routine. I'm listening to the morning radio, the windows down, drinking my French Vanilla Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and I can't wait to arrive in the office. As I walk in, I smell coffee. I hear the clicking of keyboards and the chatter of gossip from the odd cast of characters around me, and this warm feeling of familiarity rushes over me. I'm part of a community. I have a place. I belong.
After that, I had a whole string of blue-collar jobs. I just loved the fact that I could walk in, get myself hired, and start getting a paycheck, whether it was at the gas station, fast-food restaurant, the clothing store at the mall. By the time I finished college, I had at least twenty jobs on my résumé.
Soon I found myself in the capital of the United States at a fancy new job building my career. I worked hard. I had a title. I had an office. I had a reputation. And yet, despite having more than I'd ever had before, more success, more security, more opportunity, I couldn't help but notice that as time went on, something was missing. I wasn't happy. Somewhere along the way, I'd lost that spark. I remember talking to my dad one day, and he said, "Do you think you'd ever be able to go back to waiting tables?" He knew how much I'd loved working at this trendy Italian restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara at the end of college. And then I thought about it for a minute. And I realized that no. I'd become jaded and entitled. And the higher I climbed, the more my ego was all up in it. I didn't recognize the woman that I'd become.
For more than a decade, I had been trading my time, my energy, and most importantly, my passion for someone else's idea of success. While I was playing this game of validation and acceptance and making money like everybody else around me, it was sapping my energy and suffocating my soul. Life was passing me by while I was languishing inside these polished concrete walls of compromise. I was living someone else's dream.
So that morning, when I heard Travis's name announced on the microphone, it was both heartbreaking and the permission I needed to walk away. Three months and two tantra events later, I'm standing on the curb at Dulles International Airport, waving goodbye to my brother and sister. I've sold my car, packed my life into a storage unit, and handed over my responsibilities at the Innovation Lab. You see, what not everyone knew about me was that I had a double life. Part of me was Sensible Susan, who loved structure, followed the rules, and knew how to get the job done. The other part of me was this woo-woo wild woman, the insatiably curious seeker who wanted to taste and experience life fully.
I'd been dipping my toe in that woo-woo river for many years, but now I had the freedom to jump in fully. And once I unlocked that door, there was no stopping me. Just like those jobs back in high school, college, I was taking it all in. I was traveling around the world, dancing at festivals, signing up for workshops, trying the latest tantra techniques, checking out all the spiritual hotspots. I was alive. You see, Sensible Susan had been delivering on someone else's dream and playing the game pretty well, but it wasn't until I gave myself to that wild woman fully that I started really living my own life.
I started discovering what abundance means to me. Who am I? And what do I value when the old identity and everything familiar has been stripped away? What's left? What is worthy of my time and my energy?
Earlier this year, I moved to Bali. I traded my high heels for flip-flops, those concrete walls for the jungle canopy, and the crush of bureaucracy for the cushion of heart-centered community. I found freedom. I found connection. I found incredible beauty and celebration and that magic I'd been craving. And most of all, I've been dreaming whole new dreams about what's possible for myself and the planet and starting to build that new paradigm from my own vision, weaving a new world into existence in every moment and living life on my own terms.
I'm part of a project team that's about to launch something epic. It's gonna change the world, and I'm supposed to be sitting down talking about strategy. And instead, I'm stirring this huge pot of cacao and making sure that it's just the right blend of sweet and spicy. And just like those balloons at the party back then, I'm putting my own special magic into this place. This is how I wanna show up right now. The difference between then and now is that I don't need validation for my cacao and for my wild woman. She's fully present, fully accepted, fully integrated. And at that moment, I realize that I've broken free. Free from that constraint of societal programming and free from living someone else's life because, let's face it, if I was listening to that programming, I should be married by now. I should have full-grown kids. I should have a car, and a mortgage, and a pile of debt that I'm working my way out of. And guess what? I'm not. I'm not even wearing a bra.
Can I ask everybody, put your hands on your heart for a second. I just want you to take a second and ask yourself, Who loves Julia Roberts? Yeah? Yeah? Guys, do you wanna hear a story about how Julia Robert saved my life? All right. We'll get to that in a second. First, we'll go back to twelve-year-old me.
Now, believe it or not, I didn't always look like a Bollywood villain. You see it, right? You could see it. I could be a fucking Bollywood villain, I promise. It's a dream of mine. Twelve-year-old me wasn't this guy. Twelve-year-old me was fat. He had braces. He had glasses. He had asthma. He had a gap in his teeth from the braces. Did any of you ever have the wrench that made your teeth gap? You know what I'm talking about here? It was bullshit. Twelve-year-old me had all that. I was the slowest runner in my entire grade. Everybody would be waiting for me on the other end, and I'd be jiggling along cos I had boy boobs, not man boobs—I was twelve. I'd be wheezing cos I had asthma, and I'd be whistling coz of the gap in my teeth. It's not like I needed any more attention, but I got it.
Now my dad. He was born in Vancouver, but he's brown. He's a coconut. He's brown on the outside, white on the inside. And his name's Paul. He was born named Paul. Paul was an angry dad. He'd be there yelling all the time. Mainly at any of my sporting events. I used to hate going to baseball. Baseball's a high-pressure sport. I could catch. I could hit. But the running part wasn't my jam. That was the hard part for me, you know? And Paul would be yelling from the sidelines. And every time I'd hit almost a fucking home run, he'd be going. "YEAH, run, Aren, RUN." And I'd be running as slow as possible or as fast as I possibly could like an underwater slow-motion hippo going, "Fuck you, Dad." And the coaches would be like, "Paul, can you wait in the car?" cos he was just too much.
Now I grew up in East Vancouver, the rough part of town. My school was known for gang violence, machete attacks, and recruitment into local drug dealing trafficking operations. It wasn't the best place for the kid with the whistle. It wasn't the best place for the kid with the boy boobs. I used to get called Bitch Tits Bahia. Don't you fucking repeat that. (That's my housemate.)
So my best friend at the time, his name was Ricardo. He was from El Salvador, and he had abs at eleven years old. It was fucking bullshit. I was the fat friend. He got all the girls, and I was sitting there whistling. Ricardo had an older cousin named Nelson, and Nelson was a gangster, and everybody loved Nelson. Everybody gave Nelson respect. And when I was with Nelson, people were nicer to me. I didn't get bullied when I was with Nelson. So me and Ricardo wanted to be just like Nelson.
It wasn't long before I started dealing drugs because that was the thing to do in my neighborhood. If you wanted girls, you wanted respect, and you didn't wanna get fucked with, sell some dope. So I started off selling weed, then MDMA, and then this and that and this and that. Before you knew it, I was running a nationwide drug dealing operation.
I thought it was like a rap music video. My life was cool at the time, you know, for a couple of years, and the distance between me and my father grew and grew and grew. I wasn't exactly making Pops proud, but it didn't matter to me. I had money. I had women. I had a white Mercedes with a tan-colored interior. Inside fish sticks, outside tartar sauce—it was the paint job. So I used to pull up that Benz next to my dad's old truck like Fuck you, Dad thinking I was all cool. And it wasn't until I came home, crying to my folks at twenty-three years old. And I was a drug addict. The stress and trauma of that life had gotten to me. Once the Mexican cartel started getting into the picture, things were just a little too scary for me. Once my friends started getting kidnapped, things were a little too scary for me, and I was popping pills just to stay okay with everything happening, but I wasn't okay.
It was the rock bottom part of my life. I needed to do something to change. The drugs really gotta hold of me, as Eminem would say. So I found this counselor, and he told me to do something called iboga. Anybody heard of iboga before? It's an African plant root from Gabon. I didn't know where Gabon was either, don't worry. It's like ayahuasca from Africa, except it's horrible. It's like your stern, angry dad telling you how much of a fuckup you are over and over and over. And if you move, you'll throw up. So you just gotta sit there and take it.
I did this for a week straight and, on the third day of an eight-hour journey, I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. I saw how did this guy become a drug dealer? How did little fat Aren whistling along go to becoming adult boy? I saw all the choices. I saw how I was that guy. But I also saw that I could make some changes. I saw that I could take responsibility for my future. And I saw that I needed to make a big leap. I needed to do something different.
Now the mornings after you take iboga, you sit there shivering in a blanket, contemplating your life. And they told me, "Yeah, you could watch Netflix." I was like, "Okay." So I'm sitting there, and they're like, "Don't watch anything violent. Don't watch anything scary. Positive, happy things only. It'll come up later in your journeys." I was like, "Okay." Already a strange situation. So I flip on Netflix, and that's when my world changed. That's when I saw a miracle. I was taken to a new scene. I was taken to somewhere completely different than anything I've ever witnessed before. I saw the magic of Bali. I saw an offering, devotional prayer. I saw beautiful Balinese people. It was different than anything I'd ever experienced. I knew whatever that was, I needed it in my life. That's when the movie Eat, Pray, Love changed my life. Who would've thought?
So I'm sitting there shivering, and I go, "I need to get there. Where is this movie?" Tap, tap, tap, Google, Google, Google. Bali. Dope. Book a ticket to Bali. "Where's Bali?" Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, Indonesia. Awesome. "Where's Indonesia?" Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. "Really? Fuck. It's there?" I swear I thought it was near Japan or some shit. So two days later, I land in Ubud, Bali. I mean, I get there, and I'm still adult boy. I rock up in a Louis Vuitton shirt and diamond earrings to Yoga Barn! Like, "What's up?" I'm just like, Whoa. It's a completely different world to me, but I know I need to get engaged in this community somehow, some way, and quick.
Now I used to teach kickboxing in Canada, and I thought, Well, there's a yoga teacher training starting next week. It's like the same thing, right? I could do this. It's like kickboxing teaching, just with better asses. Great. So I end up in this yoga teacher training with this teacher named Denise Payne. She's about that big. She's looking up at me, and she doesn't take any shit. And I still rock up with the same ego I had in Vancouver. I was still that same guy trying to make it in the world of green juice and quinoa. That yoga teacher training was tough. I didn't exactly do a good job. While I was trying to learn about chakras, I was partying on the weekends, going on Tinder dates, getting tattoos. I was still exhibiting the same patterns of East Van Aren in Ubud, Bali.
She didn't have any of it. She wasn't happy with how I showed up in that. And I didn't give a shit. I was still a drug dealer. The culmination of it was at the end at the graduation ceremony. And everyone's happy. It's a celebration. Except she comes to me, and she goes, "Hey, I can't pass you in this yoga teacher training. I can't put my name on your certificate." And I look at her. She's about that big to me, but I felt small. I think Am I the only person who's ever failed yoga teacher training? Shit. I give my best "I don't give a fuck" face. She goes, "Aren, when are you gonna give a shit about something? When are you actually gonna show up? You could be so great if you just got over your bullshit." No one ever talked to me like that, and it hurt. I tried not to cry. Tried to be tough. All the other yogis are happy, prancing around—fucking mala beads everywhere.
And I gotta go back to Vancouver. I failed the shanti shanti world, and I gotta go back to East Van, and I know it's waiting for me. I know I gotta get out of that life cos it's gonna swallow me up whole.
I'm flying back to Vancouver. My heart is in my stomach. I'm scared for my life. The next six months were the hardest six months of my entire life. I chose that I wanted to get out, but anytime you wanna make a leap to do something different, you're gonna meet resistance. It's like the universe asking you, "How bad do you want it?" And I had to go through it. I remember one moment that was a shift for me.
Now to get out, I needed an exit strategy, and to get out, I needed to make some cash, and I couldn't just leave like that. So I was still in the dope game, and I had to do this one drug deal. I was selling two kilos of coke to a couple of guys I didn't really know well. I was setting up for this drug deal, and I brought a big gun with me. It was a .40 cal. with a silencer on it. It was about that big. I was trying to figure out where to hide it just in case things went wrong so I could shoot these guys cos I wasn't trying to lose these two keys. I couldn't afford it. As I was trying to figure it out, I had a moment where I just stopped and collapsed. I was having a panic attack. I thought to myself, Is this what my world is right now? Am I trying to psych myself up to shoot a couple of guys over some blow? This is MY life?
It was a dangerous place to be on that ground. A broken boy with a loaded handgun and just then Denise Payne. "Aren, when you gonna give a shit about something? When are you actually gonna show up? When are you gonna get over your own bullshit?" And I sit there, and I'm like, Fuck Denise. She's right. She's right. I knew what I needed to do. I made a decision right there.
Six months later, I'm in prison. The prison's name is Hotel K—Kerobokan maximum security prison in Bali—an hour away from here. But I'm not a prisoner. I'm teaching yoga. Denise Payne had me finish my yoga teacher training by volunteering a hundred hours in prison to these prisoners. Being in jail was great because I could leave. It's like a low-pressure situation. Now, I wasn't a very good yoga teacher, but it's not like the students could go anywhere. It's not like they had anything better going on. I even made friends with the Balinese mafia. It's not like they took my classes or anything, but they'd crowd around watching me teach, smoking cigarettes, going, "Hey, bro, nice tattoos," and I'd be like, "Thanks, Maaray, cool."
That time in prison was important for me. I was clearing karma. I had to do my time. I had to go back and finish something that I fucked up and come back at it as a better man to show that I could change. I wasn't that guy that I showed up as. I could shift. I could make a decision. I could be a new man.
So I moved to Ubud, Bali and I chose that I wanted to be a good guy. I didn't wanna be a criminal anymore. I wanted to make my parents proud, but I knew I needed to do a lot of work right here. Cos, that guy that was buying everybody wheatgrass shots wasn't killing it. I was cheesy. For real. So I did a bunch of self-work. I did eight meditation retreats, three yoga teacher trainings, a bunch of tantra trainings, authentic relating. I saw psychiatrists, spiritual counselors. I saw shamans. I did ayahuasca. I did Kambo. I did cacao ceremonies. I danced ecstatically.
I did a bunch of shit that guys in my old neighborhood would question my sexuality for. Cos I was eye gazing with guys named Sheva, and I was crying with dudes named Lion. I would've gotten my ass kicked. These are important times for me. I had to do it. I had to shift. I had to put in the work, and I learned a lot during those years. It's been quite a journey. Since that time making those shifts, making those changes, and investing myself, I learned I could do anything I wanted.
In four years, I opened up four businesses, and all of them had a big impact on the island. I was done making money that didn't have something bigger than just me. I didn't wanna make another cent that didn't make my dad proud.
The first business still funds a school for mentally disabled Balinese children. And when I took Paul there, he was about to cry. He saw that I wasn't that gangster anymore. He saw that I was doing something better than who I was then. And I got to see my dad finally proud of me.
We're putting out online global vipassana, helping everybody meditate in the whole world, and I'm not selling coke anymore. I've been free of opiates for four years now. Completely clean. Thank you.
So my dad. He called me like a month ago, and he was, you know, catching up with me. We're cool now. And he goes, "Hey, I'm getting fat now." And I go, "Really? What's going on?" He's like, "Well, I just can't get motivated to run. I can't get motivated to do anything, you know. I'm just being lazy." And I'm like, "Well, Dad, I've been running every day." And he goes, "YOU'VE been running?" I'm like, "Yeah. All the time." He's like, "You used to hate running." And I'm like, "I know, but I'm not that kid anymore, you know. I revisited something that I wasn't good at back then. And I'm a different person now, and I love running." He's like, "Wow, that's inspiring. Do you have any advice for me?" And I was like, "YEAH, run, Paul, RUN."
Dressed in all white, sitting cross-legged on this mat, waiting for the shaman to call my name up for my fifth cup of ayahuasca - it's my fifth ayahuasca journey. Waiting. No nervousness. I did this four times already. I know what to expect.
He calls me up. I pop up off my mat with this arrogance, with this lack of humility, with this overly confident asshole kind of vibe that only a native New Yorker who has a penthouse in Manhattan, fancy clothes, all the trappings of a posh life that you could have. I approached the shaman and his facilitators. He hands me the cup with two hands with all this reverence, and I look down at him. I don't even sit. I kind of bend down a little bit. I take the cup with one hand and look at him in his eyes. And he's like, "Take a second, brother, bond with the cup, set your intentions, breathe."
I look at him in his eyes, and I'm like, "Cool, here we go. There you go, champ." I make my way back to my mat. Sit down. Ten minutes goes by. I feel the medicine snaking through my system. You guys know. You guys know what that feels like, right? I feel the beads of sweat. I'm like, All right, heating up a little bit. It's about to hit me. That fucking medicine hit me like Thor's hammer. Bonzai! I lay on the mat.
It takes me right back to the eighteen-year-old me standing in a courtroom looking at a judge. "What? What'd you say?" "Guilty." Wrongly imprisoned at eighteen years old. Sentenced to eight years in a New York state prison. I turn around. Look at my father. See the utter look of powerlessness on his face that he can't save his boy. I see my mother, and I can just feel her heart just contract. I look at myself, the eighteen-year-old and I see him just fall to pieces.
Another wave of the medicine hits me. It takes me to the nine-year-old me. Seeing my first murder and my father standing over the guy as I watched the life go out of his eyes. He said, "You see, son, that's a crackhead. Don't do drugs. Come on, let's get a hot dog."
Bang! Another wave of the medicine hits me. It takes me to the twenty-one-year-old me on my 87th day straight in solitary confinement, standing at my gate, waiting for the officer to give me my lunch. And he looks at me, at my eyes. He spits in my food, says "It looks like it could use a little seasoning." I smile back at him and slap the tray back on his pants and go lie down. I won't be eating for the rest of the day.
Bang! Another wave of the medicine hits me. It takes me to the twenty-seven-year-old version of myself standing over my father's lifeless body. He just died a few hours ago, and I wouldn't let the coroner come see. I wanted to see how he died. And as I looked down at him, I didn't even know what to feel. I couldn't even cry. I just looked at him. Then two days later, me walking my sister down the aisle to give her away at her own wedding.
As I laid down on that mat . . . well, actually I couldn't be lying down 'cause I was purging. Everything was coming up. Everything. When there was no more liquid in my body, it was just that deep, dark black, dry heaving. I was making sounds that I did not think that I was capable of making. Getting it all into this bucket, shaking and crying and screaming. I lost my shit. That ceremony lasted till about 4.00 p.m. the next day. Just an agony. And throughout that whole experience of me seeing all of these formative events, I just asked, "Why?" Not "Why me?" Because self-pity is a luxury that I could no longer afford. I was asking, "Why? Why are you showing me this?" The medicine told me, "I'm just showing you this to show you who you became."
Fast forward. I'm back in New York in my apartment. Living my life. You see, when I went to Peru, I weighed 185 pounds. I was jacked, jacked! All right? I left that retreat ten days later, weighing 165 pounds. And I realized that I lost 15 pounds of fury, not anger. Anger's too simple. Fury. Cold fury that I was ready to unleash at the drop of a dime. If you looked at me wrong, ooh! And I sat in that apartment with my expensive rugs, custom-made mirrors, sharp lights, all of that. I was like, No, you did all right for yourself, though. Fuck 'em. You're here now. None of that shit matters. Yeah. None of it matters.
Until I was smoking a spliff at 11.00 a.m. on a Wednesday. I'll never forget it. My penthouse overlooked the Empire State Building. So I was looking at the Empire State Building. Looked back into these big beautiful windows, saw my rugs, my tables, my chairs, my lights. And I was like, No, you did your damn thing. You're all right. You're good, man. So I said to myself, Well, what would the twenty-three-year-old prison version of Melvin think of who I've become? So I went to him, and I was like, "What do you think?" He's like, "Oh, you're doing your thing, man. Look at you. You're on top of the world. You have everything that we wanted."
Because when I was in prison, guys had pictures of women in bikinis and all of these things. Not me. I had rugs. I had flatware. I remember one of my guys walked by my cell, and he's like, "Yo, what? You gay?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he's like, "What's with all this shit on your wall? I was like, "No, this is all the stuff that I'm gonna have." The twenty-three-year-old version of me was very satisfied.
So then I went back. So, well, let me ask the thirteen-year-old version of me. And I looked at the boy who I was, and I said, "Hey, look, this is me. Got cool dreads. Got a little beard. Got some muscles. I got cool shit." And the little boy looked at me, and he said, "But who are you?" And I was like, "I'm you. Look, we have the same scars. We look exactly the same." He said, "You're not me. You're my betrayer. What happened to our dreams? What happened to being like Indiana Jones? What happened to adventures? What happened to all of that stuff? Look at this." And I looked at my apartment, and it took me all the way back to my fifth ceremony when I was purging up all of that armor that I had on, all this bravado, all of this kind of insecurity, lack of confidence, lack of self-worth. Because to that version of myself, that's what the world taught me I was, and I needed to have these things in order to become somebody of repute.
In that instance of me standing on my balcony, looking in my apartment, I shook my head, and I was like, Yeah, you did good, but we're done. This is done. Let's get outta here.
Three months later, I find myself back in Peru. Invited to come and live, to study the medicine, to become initiated under their mesa, but actually to go deeper into my own journey, to see who I really am because all of those external trappings that I accumulated actually blinded me to who I really was. Those were just another form of armor to keep me from getting to my own truth.
So I go into my initiation. Ten-day tobacco diet in isolation. I've done 270 days straight in isolation in prison. Ten days is nothing. I could do that on my head. What? I don't have any books either? That's fine. Don't worry about it. And I went from somebody who was the facilitator first, cleaning up your purge buckets, walking you to the bathroom, rubbing your back, holding your hair back when you were purging to holding my own retreats and operating my own mesa and pouring my own medicine.
And after three years of that, I realized I put myself in another cage because you had to come to the mountain to see me. And it was quite easy for me to throw thunderbolts down from Mount Pious. "Drink clean water. Yeah, no, you shouldn't eat junk food." I grew my own food there. Right? What I realized, though, is that there was a dissonance. It's all well and good to be at a retreat or hiding out somewhere, sequestering yourself and wielding your medicine. But how effective are you wielding that medicine in the "real world?"
So I found myself back in my old neighborhood in Chelsea, walking down 23rd Street, fresh off a flight, fresh from JFK, going to see a client. 'Cause, that's what I do. And there was a woman standing on the corner of 23rd and 6th Avenue, and she was asking for help. And everybody had their headphones in. People were looking at her. Thought she was homeless. Kind of ignored her. And I walked right over to her, and I said, "You need some help?" She said, "Yeah, I'm looking for Burlington Coat Factory." And I was like, "Yeah, it's right across the street. Look." And she was like, "Yeah, if I could see, I wouldn't be asking you for help. I'm blind." And I was like, "Oh, well here, come on. Let's go." So I walk her across the street. "Why are you going to Burlington Coat Factory?" "Oh, I got invited to a wedding. I want to get my niece a nice present."
So I take the time to go into the store with her. We buy a nice gift, and I ask her, "Well, do you live in Selis Manor?" And she was like, "Yeah. And I was like, "Oh." She said, "How did you know?" And I was like, "Oh, I used to live right across the street in 144." And she was like, "Oh." I walk her back home. We get in front of her apartment building. And she said, "Can I touch your face? Can I see what you look like?" "Sure." I lean down. She touches me. She feels my hair. "Oh, beautiful—inside and out." "Thank you."
I walked down the street. My phone goes off. It's my mom. "Hey, Mom, funniest thing just happened." "What, Mel?" So I tell her the story. And she said, "What's so funny about that?" And I was like, "That's so bizarre." And she was like, "Why, son? That's who you are."
I thought that this journey was this path of spirituality. This path of oneness, this path of shamanism, mysticism, all of that. Not for me. It's just a path to remind me to remember who I really am. I've been called a lot of things in my life. A shaman, a healer, a good therapist, Hartzog, 98A3345, an asshole, nigger, piece of shit, servant, useful. But what do I call myself? I'm just Melvin, the widow's son. Thank you.
I remember the day I came out to my mother. We were both sitting across from each other at the kitchen table where we normally ate. Gravely I mentioned there was something important that I needed to tell her while struggling to hide the nervous mix of misdirected anger and anticipation pumping through my veins. "Mother, I'm an atheist," I told her. And as the words rolled down my tongue, I could feel the liberating joy that every self-respecting teenager experiences when making a stance against anything their parents stand for. Mind you, this word 'atheist' I had just heard for the first time just a few weeks earlier.
And for long nights afterward, lying awake on my bed, staring at the ceiling, I kept pondering about its meaning and the implications of this word. Was there really no God? It's impossible. Especially when considering that I have never directly experienced anything remotely close to my preconceived ideas of what God looked like. And to make matters worse it wasn't the first time my parents had lied or been wrong about something. So after having survived the traumatizing truths of Santa Claus in childhood life, I didn't want to be taken for a fool anymore.
You see, in my head, those who professed their religion did it because 1, they needed to be told how to behave. Otherwise, they would act like pricks. And 2, they were so afraid of their own death that this was the only way they knew how to find solace. At thirteen, I knew better than that.
So I went through life thinking myself better than those around me, clutching to the identity I had crafted for myself. That of a hardened rationalist who pretended to be smart enough to understand Nietzsche's rhetoric without having picked up a single one of his books, let alone write the man's full name from memory. Now I never much believed in the Catholic view of an afterlife, but nobody ever told me about the sinking feeling in my chest that accompanied the anxiety-inducing thoughts of my own death. Scared as I was of my own questions, I kept burying them deep inside me because I was an atheist, dang it. And life is hard. Everything is meaningless. The cake is a lie, and I better man up, put a fake smile on my face, and pretend to be happy with it all. Sure, I was terrified of dying, but at least I didn't need no holy text to tell me that killing was wrong. That is obvious. Was there anybody who really needed a reminder of that?
To cope with the fact that this was going to be the only life that I would ever get to live, I got fixated with the idea that pleasure was a real way to really experience life. Flirting, drinking, inhaling, ingesting, and snorting my way through countless sleepless nights and increasingly disgusting hangovers.
After a while, once I got bored of this, a friend introduced me to yoga, and I was like, Huh, this is easy. I can do it. I got it. So I started practicing every now and then, and man, I started feeling so good about myself. So blessed and in touch with a universe that surrounded me while smoking the second joint of the day. Sometimes the third one, if it was a lucky day—just before midday so my girlfriend wouldn't see me high when she came back home from work. Man, how I wish somebody had told me earlier that spirituality would feel so great. And so easy. All I had to do was sit there for a while and relax. Then try not to fart too loud during downward dog. Why did I ever want to be an atheist in the first place? I even had a Buddha on my arm that I'm sure brought me this much closer to enlightenment. Until one night dancing with my girlfriend in one of her favorite bars.
To be honest, at that moment, I thought I was hypnotizing her with my sexy Latino movements, but I must have been doing something pretty wrong because instead, she grabbed my arm and asked, "What's wrong?" "What do you mean what's wrong? Nothing's wrong? I'm just dancing." But she just made a funny face. "What do you mean with the funny face? You're funny." But at the same time, inside my head, alarms were going off. Not just because she was giving me that witchy stare that women do every time they know something's up. But because right there, I knew that no matter how much I said I loved her, my words would be forever hollow if I didn't confess the secret I had been keeping from her. Still not believing what I was about to do, I turn around and look at her as I'm standing at the edge of a cliff with my foot ready to jump. "I slept with someone else," but the music was too loud, and she didn't hear. So she asked, "What?" "I said I slept with someone else."
Later that same night, sitting in the bed we shared listening to her sobbing, I kept searching inside me for something, anything that would help me figure it out, what the heck was wrong with me. I was supposed to have no need for a god that judged my actions, no need for an external law that condemned me to hell if I did wrong. I was supposed to be a good man for the simple fact that I knew what good looked like. And instead, here I was. Nothing but an asshole willing to trade yet another one of my values for a two-minute fuck. To say that I was ashamed says nothing about the repulsion I felt when thinking about who I had become because the whole time I knew, I knew what I had to do, but I always had a good excuse not to do so. Things were either too hard, too tasty, or too cheap for me not to indulge in them and, in the process of doing so, I churn myself into my own biggest lie.
Now I must say I was hopeful because, despite the fact that I was not proud of the things I had done, in knowing that I had stood up for something that at least for once I stood up for something that I believed to be holy, I could see a faint glimmer of the real being that couldn't wait to surface inside of me. Now, it wasn't easy. You see for a long time afterward, a terrible guilt and self-doubt kept creeping on me. I felt unsure that I would ever be able to trust myself again, but by keeping tiny promises, simple things that I knew, hopefully, that I wouldn't fail and be able to do every single day.
Slowly I regained my confidence, the confidence that I had lost. And thanks to this, I finally realized that I was not defined by the things that I had done in the past but by the actions that I was committing in the present moment. Along the way, I realized the importance of living in something bigger than my ego. You see, it's not easy to be truthful. It's not easy to be yourself. It takes an incredible amount of courage and an almost masochistic willingness to face your most painful fears.
I am hopeful, though. I mean, I'm happy actually because today I can say that my words are no longer hollow. Now, instead, thanks to everything I've done since that day, they're filled with love. And through that, I've regained my faith because now I am convinced that inside me lies everything I'll ever need to be my best self, the real self. If I'm only there being honest. Thank you.
Three-point-two billion dollars. That is the amount my friend's company was just acquired for. Now I, having worked there for a couple of years, stood to make a little fortune from it. Excitedly I took out my phone. I was gonna text him, but I paused. I hesitated. What would I even say? "Congratulations?" That's so cliché. "What happened? I thought we were gonna go public? Wink." Ugh. Who says that? It's gonna so backfire. You know what? You have to just schedule an email to send later. Come on. I mean, he's getting plenty of messages anyway. Doesn't need another one from me, but this is pretty big news. I mean, a couple of billion dollars is worth a text message. I don't even text him that often but wait a second.
Only friends text each other. Are we still friends anymore? I mean, after all, we started at the same place eight years ago. I used to sleep on their couches, and now they're practically at the top of the start of Mount Everest. And here I am, three failed companies later, still struggling in obscurity in the big game of entrepreneurship.
It was 11.00 p.m. I was standing alone in my room in a 7,000 square foot place with five bathrooms all to myself. Dripping wet from the shower, I had no towel. Where the fuck was the towel? So angry beyond anything I realized. "God damn it, it's in the other room." You see, this normally wouldn't be a problem. Except on that day, my left foot was swollen up like a basketball, and I could hardly move. That very morning I just beat my personal best record at the gym. But by evening, for reasons I didn't understand, every step felt like I was going to trip and crack my head open on the concrete floor. I sat down on the toilet seat, burying my head in my hands. I wished my girlfriend was there. She took care of me the last time I was sick. But we broke up. We were together for three years. I haven't cried about that yet. She used to tell me I was always working.
I remembered my mom. She used to help me. She told me I don't call her. And when she calls me, I'm either in a meeting or just about to leave the house. For some reason, I remember this kind lady who gave me a quarter to take the bus home when I ran away from home at ten years old. My grandparents—whose house I was running to on foot along the railroad track, a thousand miles away—they all passed away while I was in college. I didn't get to say goodbye to any of them. I was too busy. Too busy studying. Too busy to go back for their funerals. Is this my life?
Just before I turned sixteen, I moved to Vancouver, Canada from China with my parents. First day of school, I desperately wanted to fit in, but I couldn't understand a thing. Luckily, there was this Chinese kid. He was telling me how he'd been there for six years and how the school worked. Then the teacher called him to speak in front of the room. Even I could tell he was stumbling, not at all colloquial. In fact, in his mumbling words and heavy accent, he kind of sounded like a buffoon. He's been here for six years, I thought to myself. What a failure. I am never going to be like him. In that moment, I made the decision to not speak Chinese, only speak English, and disconnect myself from everything that I thought was a failure.
I'm going to master the English language by the time I graduate high school, I thought to myself. It served me well. I spent that entire summer reading To Kill a Mockingbird page to page, looking up the dictionary twenty times for every page. Within two years, I became the school's debate captain. People told me that I had no accent. Oh my God. That was my ... boy, was I proud. There's just one problem. It didn't really help me with girls. I still didn't know how to talk to them. You see, my way of confessing my crush—she played the trumpet—was to tell the band teacher to move me from trombone, which was on the opposite side of the school band, let me remind you, to playing trumpet just so I could sit next to her and tell her ... exactly nothing. She didn't notice me. Yeah, she didn't notice me. So I thought I just gotta be more successful.
You see, college mission was right around the corner. So I made it to Princeton. And in case you don't know what Princeton is, we beat out Harvard eighteen out of the last twenty years as the number one ranked school in America, which means the number one ranked school in the world, right?
That didn't work either. So what's next? Well, how about entrepreneurship? Oh, that's where I got really hooked. As a freshman, I won the entrepreneurship competition taking home a big check, beating out all the seniors. And before I graduated college, I was worth eight million dollars funded by the best investor in Silicon Valley Y Combinator behind legendary companies like Airbnb and Dropbox. "I'm gonna get you a Ferrari for your twenty-fifth birthday," I told my first girlfriend, bless her heart. And that is until I started failing company after company while everyone around me seemed to be having these multi-billion-dollar successes.
"You are not your company." I found myself at my first session in the Founders Support Group. The truth in their words echoed deep inside me. You see, on the days that the company was doing well, I was on top of the world. I could walk into any bar and to any sexy woman and say, "How you doing?" Until she turned me down anyway, and then I would kick myself in the foot, "I just gotta be more successful, right?" And on days the company wasn't doing well, I didn't wanna get outta bed. The truth is, no matter how it looked on the outside, I was living a permanent baseline experience of failure.
What I hate to admit is that being brought to my knees in the game of entrepreneurship is perhaps the greatest gift for me early in life. You see, life seems to have a habit of teaching me the same lesson over and over and over again until I really, really get it. In the moments that I felt like an utter and complete failure, I gathered just enough humility to discover what else is out there. I went to the Founders Support Group. I read the books, did the workshops and yoga, meditating on death, you know, spirituality, coaching, everything that people do when they're finding themselves unfulfilled and unhappy. I wish I could tell you it was an overnight transformation, but the truth is it took years and years and continues to be an ongoing process. But when I finally got it in my heart and my body, not just at the top of my head, that I am not my company, things started to shift.
I was able to move out of living with coworkers into my own place. I could tell my mom. I'd call her and tell her I love her. I gave myself the permission to be nurtured by Mother Bali just during this global pandemic rather than rush home to San Francisco cos that's where the successful people live! You know, a dear friend and teammate asked me, "Does this mean you're going to quit your company now and become a new musician acrobat?" 'Cause he saw me finding time for myself to learn to play the guitar and dangle women off my bare feet in the amazing practice of acro-yoga, of course. I chuckled at that. I hoped he was not worried about his job.
You see, I'm incredibly fortunate to have a genuine passion in entrepreneurship, that I'd discovered, and in moments that I'm not my company, the natural state of being is to create from a place of love and authenticity rather than strive from a place of fear of unacceptance. When I'm not my company, I get to come to work each day, being inspired by our mission of transforming people's relationship with money rather than burnt out by the anxiety that we may never succeed no matter how hard we try. You see, when I'm not my company, success changes from something that is always in the future permanently doomed to be out of reach to something that is available in the present.
Every moment I live my values of love, growth, authenticity, discipline, and contribution, I get to experience success. And when I'm not my company, I get to have the distinct pleasure of picking up the phone and telling my friends, my dear friends, "Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. I'm so grateful to be on your path."
Thank you very much.
I'm in an open-aired villa in Bali, standing in the garden with my feet on the grass, looking up at the full moon. My left ear is being penetrated by the sound of someone moaning. Almost like someone is about to orgasm. In my right ear, I hear this screaming, slapping sound. Someone is being spanked and REALLY enjoying it. Basically, around me is this sound of laughter, joy, and pleasure. In that moment, I put my hands on my ears, and I'm thinking, Just please make it stop—the sound. Just make it stop. What am I even doing here?
And so this moment marks the end of a two and a half, three-week phase in my life a few years ago back here in Bali that changed my life completely. A year prior to that, I finished my master in innovation management and left traveling because I was inspiring to become this tough-ass businesswoman and career lady. So I thought it was time for an adventure first. At the time, I was doing yin yoga teacher training with Tina Nance, and she kept asking this annoying question, "How much can you feel? How much can you feel? How much can you feel?" In those classes, I was thinking, Seriously, lady, shut up. I can't feel anymore.
Meanwhile, I kept on being invited to all these places I didn't know about. And so I ended up at my very first ecstatic dance where you dance barefoot, no alcohol, no talking. And within five minutes, I was going crazy. I was having the best time of my life. And I felt something just unlocking. And that led me to my very first contact dance, where I ended up rolling around on the floor with a bunch of strangers sweating all over them. And that led me to my very first sacred sexuality temple party. In other words, a sex party.
And so, in that moment, under the full moon, I found myself being triggered by the sound of other people's pleasure. It was in that moment that I realized Tina made an impact. "How much can you feel?" Well, in that moment, I was feeling a lot. I was feeling how deeply blocked I'd been. I didn't voice myself. I didn't moan during sex. I didn't communicate my desires. I was taught to stay quiet and to stay silent. And so that's why during my five-year relationship, I never had an orgasm with him, and he never knew. That's why I thought I was broken. Because I didn't speak up for myself, not only in the bedroom but basically also not anywhere else in my life.
And so, in that moment, I realized that could be different. There was a different world out there, but I was scared shitless because that meant that I had to feel. I had to feel how I've been lying to myself. How I've been pressing away and disregarding this part of me that had been screaming for attention for years. And so, in that moment, under the full moon, tears started rolling down my face in a seemingly endless stream.
Now, the next morning I woke up with what seemed like the biggest hangover I've ever had in my entire life, and not from alcohol but from all the lies I'd been telling myself. But stuff started shifting after that moment, after those few weeks. And I suddenly felt the pull to stop with the birth control pill I had been on for over a decade.
And then I ended up going to all these workshops, trainings, online courses around my menstruation cycle, my body, my intuition, contrast, sexuality. And during that time, I got the idea to teach and host naked yoga workshops. Yes, you heard that right. People without any clothes, bending forwards touching their toes. So how did I end up from studying innovation management to now suddenly wanting to teach naked yoga? What are people going to think? What are my parents going to say? And am I seriously gonna throw away everything that I worked for over the past years?
And so, I found myself back in the Netherlands talking to my mom about this decision that I was about to make. Am I just forgetting about these past three weeks and this past year and just go down the corporate career path? Or am I letting those three weeks in Bali take me onto a whole different path? And in that moment, my mom asked me a question, and it's probably a question you've heard before. "What would you do if money wasn't the issue?" And so that night, I booked my ticket back to Bali.
Two months later, I packed up all the courage I had into a suitcase with no plan, no certainty, no savings. I was feeling scared. I was feeling confused. My friends and family were confused, but I knew I had to go back. And so I got on that plane, and I moved to the other side of the world.
I ended up starting my own business. And from there, step by step, I got onto the path and doing the work and the mission that I'm on today. In those three weeks, what happened is that I got really curious on what made me ME, and it made me realize that I was taught to hide, to blame, and to shame basically everything that was at the core of who I was, that was at the core of being a woman—my menstruation cycle, my body's wisdom, my intuition, and my sexuality.
And so me going off traveling and exploring the world was actually me looking for an initiation into womanhood, for an initiation into being human. And so those three weeks basically blew apart every single structure and belief system that I was taught. Those weeks showed me that there is nothing wrong with me. Like there's nothing wrong with me! It's amazing. And they showed me that freedom exists. And so ever since that moment, I've been following my intuition, picking up breadcrumb after breadcrumb. Ended up from teaching naked yoga to guiding women closer to their bodies, into their intuition, helping them connect to their cycle, and now helping them unlock their sexuality, their core feminine, creative power—the power of their pussy.
So did everything suddenly become easy? Hell no. I still crumble. I've been falling down and getting back up more times than I can count. And still, sometimes I wonder, Wouldn't it just be so much easier to get a normal job? And in those moments, when that happens, I come back to my body, and I ask her, "What is it that you desire?" And every single time, she guides me back on the path that I'm meant to walk.
So world, watch out because I'm on a mission to help every woman ignite the power of her pussy. Because when I did that, I started to radiate and shine and follow my desires. I started to follow that which makes my soul go wild from excitement. I became my most juicy, sexy, authentic self. And I take actions from that place instead of a place of shame and blame. And so now I have the absolute honor to gift that to other women. So women remember this, the core of your power lies in between your legs. So will you meet me there?
What moves faster than the speed of a flying bullet? New Delhi, India. It was the end of January 1948. Gandhi saw his assassin. He saw the gun and, as the bullet veered straight towards his chest, he threw out his arms in a sign of sweet surrender and murmured the words, "I forgive you." Gandhi epitomizes the power of the human spirit to forgive instantly faster than a moving bullet. I did not tell my story during the Me Too movement because my story is not about my abuse. My story is that of forgiveness. Forgiveness came to me in such an unlikely time and place. It was last July, and I was in my kitchen after a long day of work. And I was scrolling on my phone. I got a message, an anonymous message, but I knew who it was from. He said, "I'm sorry for what happened.
And I think about you often and pray that you have a good life." And for the first time in eight years, I've realized that it wasn't me who was suffering. It wasn't me who was the victim. I understood the meaning of compassion. And I had this visceral feeling in my body like all my pain just welled up and burped out of me. And I let go. I forgave. And I understood what they mean when they say, "A miracle is a shift in perception." So I went about telling my story on forgiveness on stages. And I could see in the audience people who were yearning to forgive. One time, I shared my story quite spontaneously in a public speaking group. And it wasn't rehearsed. And I ended up sharing more of what happened. And as the time ran out, I had to rush through about forgiveness. It felt so raw. And I felt so embarrassed. That wasn't really what I wanted to share. But that night, a woman in the audience tracked me down in the parking lot. And she looked me deeply into my eyes. And she said, "I have a story too.
I can't even imagine sharing it, but how, how did you forgive?" And I told her, "Don't be so hard on yourself. More than anything, it's a willingness. It'll come to you." For me, it's like that quote. They say, "Falling in love is like falling asleep." You resist it. Then it happens very slowly and then all at once. But that's the funny, ironic thing about life. Here I am, this champion of forgiveness. I had no idea what was around the corner. The truth is, very recently in my life, I found out that someone very close to me betrayed me and that our connection was built on a mountain of lies and deception.
This is not one of those surface level betrayals. This is not, you know, taking a steak knife in a dark alley, threatening to steal my Kate bed purse. This is one of those professional greed, Japanese butcher knife stabbing me in the back, almost showing up in my life with a perfect smile. But by the time that I finally turned around and saw the truth what was happening, I was stunned. You? It can't be you of all people. I trusted you. You know all my stories, all of my pain. I don't even know who I am without you, which made me realize that's the problem.
It was really ME who betrayed ME because it was ME who was looking for validation from another person and for permission and for guidance. It was me who was hurting me all along. And as I looked at my life and how to pick up the pieces and how to move on after such a betrayal, I would like to say that I went and asked my spiritual teacher or looked at the bava hu kita, but like many of us, I found my New Age advice on Instagram. Someone who I admire, who is wealthy and successful and competent, shared someone very close to her betrayed her. And she shared about how she could carry on with elegance and with dignity, with her life. And she said to not hide, to hold your head up high, which I knew was a message for me because that's the name of one of my brands, Hold Your Head Up High, which is my neck choker brand. And maybe there is a reason why I named it that. Maybe it was time for me to find out. This time I don't have eight years to hide, and I might not be Gandhi, but I will do my best. What if this knife is one of the greatest gifts of my life?
Because this pain cut me to my core and cut through all the illusions and my codependency. And you know, I could take this knife, and I could throw it back to that person, and I could share what happened, but in the end, I'm only hurting me. So I'm gonna take this knife and this pain, I'm gonna put it down, and I'm gonna let that go. Because this time I learned, that forgiveness means nothing outside of me can hurt me. And that it's my time to hold my head up high. And be me. Thank you.
So I felt empty as I looked into my wife's eyes as we sat on the couch at our therapist's office, trying one last time to make this marriage work. And I asked myself, "Why? Why could I not accept her unconditional love?" I loved her. She unconditionally loved me. Isn't that what this whole life thing's about? Isn't this how the happily ever after story works? Why did I feel so empty? Why could I not go all in? What was this empty hollow feeling? It was shame. It was a shame that was fixed deep in me the moment I told her. The moment I looked into her eyes and told her that not only did I have an affair but that I had fallen in love with another woman. I watched her drop, collapse to the floor, crying and screaming. And all I could think about is how could I betray anybody, let alone this woman like this, someone who loved me, who I committed to being for the rest of our lives? How could I do that?
It was not the shame that makes you feel like you did a bad thing. It was the shame that makes you feel like you're a bad person, that you're no longer worthy of being loved. And that hollow feeling in this moment, like how could I feel nothing? Nothing at all, completely empty.
I was five, and I fell, and I banged my knee one time. And I remember my dad coming as I started to cry. He's like, "Chris, just relax. It's gonna be okay. Kathy, don't coddle him." Kathy's my mom. And I breathe. And I was like, you know, the tears went away, and I relaxed, and I was okay. And then I can remember the next time that I fell. And I remember falling. And I remember that pain started to come, and I squeezed, and I flexed so hard that I didn't feel any pain, and I didn't cry.
And that was the birth of the stoic boy cos I was an emotional little kid. But if I flexed and squeezed hard enough, I knew I could protect myself from ever being called a pussy again—a wuss, a little girl.
And that stoic boy turned into a stoic man. That stoic man entered the corporate world with no emotions cos emotion was weakness. Emotion was stress. If you were emotional or stressed, you didn't get the big account. They couldn't trust you to close the big deal. You couldn't get the big promotion. You couldn't be a success. Cos, of course, as a man, we all need to be a success.
So I sat in this meeting one time. My boss tells me, "We're cutting your territory in half." I sit there, of course, just listening like, Oh. Half the territory, half the accounts, half the forecast, half the revenue, and my little chance at winning the little top performer's trophy was like fading away. But, of course, I'm sitting in this meeting cool, collective.
I leave that meeting, and I feel something like in my heart. It just doesn't really feel great. So I walk to my car. I get in my car, and I start driving, and it goes like tick, tick, tick. And then boom. My tears are running down my face. I'm screaming in my car. I think I'm having a fucking heart attack. I literally be like, Get me to the hospital. I pull into the hospital. My wife comes and the doctor to tell me, "You're okay. You just had a panic attack." So I was okay. And only my wife, mom, therapist, and doctor knew that that had happened.
So the next day, you go right back to the office like nothing happened. That stoic man in the corporate world made his way right into my relationship with my wife because I had to be strong. I had to be the pillar. I couldn't do something that might make her emotional because I had to be strong for the two of us. And it didn't allow me to connect to her at all. Cos I was scared if, all of a sudden, like I wanted to have a simple conversation, like "Can we just maybe do these things? Cos I think it'd be fun." Did she think I'm gonna shame her by that? Is that gonna cause a reaction? Might as well ... nope, can't say that. Her job was killing her, and I just wanted to be like, "Can we talk about your job cos it's impacting me too, and I just feel like it's getting in between us?" But I couldn't do that cos I didn't want to create hysterics. I had to be strong for her. I felt like I was playing second fiddle to her family, but I couldn't say anything.
And then one night the phone rings at three o'clock in the morning. It's her mom hysterical, crying. And I can feel that she's about to have a breakdown. And in that moment, I'm like, Geez, I've done all this to avoid the breakdown. And here it comes. And then I felt the tick tick. And instead of the boom, it's that moment like in movies where they throw the bad guy on top of the grenade, except that was my heart. So it went like this . . . and I held the panic attack in, and it just like imploded me. This stoic man was killing me across the board.
And in a moment when I was about to go into standard Chris Walker Fix it Mode, shift the knobs, change the job, change the location, do whatever it is—it'll be fine for another six months, a year—I realized that I had no idea who I was. I didn't know who I was. And like how could I fix what I didn't know?
So I decided to move to Bali to become a yoga teacher. Yep. And backpacked a yoga mat, six books with me and why six books is important is cos I am not a reader. But if I was gonna prove to myself that I was gonna change, I was gonna start reading books. So I get to Bali. Yoga, eat, sleep, repeat. Yoga, eat, sleep, repeat. A little cacao dessert, a little ecstatic dance on the weekends, but leaving so much bullshit behind me.
I actually began to really feel. I began to focus. I began to feel what I could only describe in that moment—it was just like this little glimmer of what felt like somebody wrote in a book about this thing inner peace. Like it just kind of felt like a little peaceful. I began to feel. And dare I say it just a little bit of may I call it self-love? Just a little bit. Just like a little salt on top of the dish kind of amount of self-love. But like I was feeling, and this shit was fucking awesome.
But then I get a phone call. I get a phone call from my wife. She's been deported. She's in a holding cell in Gatwick Airport about to be forced to go back to France with absolutely nothing. And all I could think about is I need to be there for her. At the drop of a hat, I buy a ticket to Paris because I love her. I want to show her that I love her. I also wanna show her that like I've changed. I'm like a new fucking person right now. Like this is really, really real.
I'm on the way to the airport. And I've got a book in hand. I call it 'The book.' Brené Brown's Daring Greatly. Now this book is the book for me for a specific reason. It's maybe six years before my mom gave me this book. That book moved to three flats in San Francisco, moved to London, came to Bali, had never been cracked once. So I'm going. And I can even remember through the difficult times in life and only now looking back on it, I could call it depressed states that I was going through, that my mom would say, "You know, Chris, I think it'd be a good idea right now if you read that Daring Greatly book I got you." I can remember hearing my wife being like, "You know, this might be a really good time for you to read that book your mom got you." Of course, I don't listen to them at all, but I lay a gauntlet out for myself. I lay a gauntlet that says I'm gonna read this book cover to cover in one day because that'll really prove to me and to her that I've changed. Cos the old Chris Walker could not read a book in one day. I had read about twelve books in my entire life up to this point. So I got this pink highlighter, and I'm sitting on the plane. Two hundred pages. All right, twenty pages tick. I get to ten tick marks the book is done. Twenty pages tick. Fading into, okay, take a nap. Back. Tick, tick, tick. I get the 10th tick. I finish the book, mission accomplished. I sit there, tears running down my face, and I'm like, "You mean vulnerability is not weakness. It's a superpower. What?"
Ahh. I can laugh about it now, but in that moment, and I don't do anything half-ass, I knew there was only one thing to do from here. I was to repropose to my wife. So with vulnerability as my little superpower—on that, her Airbnb in Paris, I'm standing crying butt naked reading the vows that I had rewritten. This new commitment, this new love, this new me was there. And at the end, I asked her to be my wife, and she sat there crying and smiling at me. And she said, "I can't." It destroyed me. Like the feeling leading into it was so beautiful. It was so pure. It felt so good. It felt so amazing. I felt, I felt this whole time. I felt like I had never felt before. I was experiencing what it was like to go in, and regardless if she said yes or no, I knew that I had changed. I knew that I had feelings and a connection to this thing called vulnerability that I had never had before. But there was this deep sadness, like why couldn't this have happened two months ago? Like why couldn't I have found the whole sense of self two months ago, and I would've fixed everything. Right? How did I get dug into this hole? How did I believe vulnerability was a weakness for so long?
Seven-year-old Chris knew vulnerability was weakness. I played basketball. This kid, David Baird, couldn't dribble with his left hand. And I terrorized him. I stole the ball from him over and over and over again. I was an asshole. It's okay, though. I was just thinking, ding, ding, ding, I didn't need to score a single point. Every steal was a win. I was winning, and I lived the rest of my life with two things moving forward from that point; a belief that everybody else was me. They were gonna take advantage of my vulnerabilities just like I took advantage of David Baird's vulnerabilities. And so, I began to live life strategizing on how to win. Cos why wouldn't you want to be a winner? Why would you wanna be a loser if you could be a winner?
But obviously, with this story, it caught up to me. So now I stand committed to no longer seeing life as a game that's all about winning. I choose to see life as a game that's about experiencing. For life is not all about winning. Winning is this future-dated idea outcome. Focusing on winning kept me from fully feeling, from fully expressing, from fully connecting to who I was because I might put in jeopardy the win. It took me completely out of the present moment. And isn't life about this present moment? For when all we're doing is focusing on the outcome, we set ourselves up for disappointment. We set ourselves up for upset, suffering, depression. What if you create the company and the only reason is to make a bunch of money, and it goes bankrupt? If the only reason that you get into the relationship is so that it'll last forever, and it ends. If you build all the money so that you can be accepted as a success, and then you're still not. You focus so much on the result that you just let life go by, and you just miss experiencing all of it.
So we have an opportunity. We have an opportunity right now to drop the stories. To drop the stories that told you what you were supposed to look like, what you were supposed to do, what you were supposed to feel. You can drop all of that bullshit and connect to the present moment. You can connect to the most authentic truest version of yourselves. And maybe you can even share the present moment with somebody you love. But you can begin to feel and share along this beautiful yet not always easy journey that's life because if you don't, life will pass you by one moment at a time until you either die or you tell yourself that you have had enough. Thank you all for your time.
November 2018. I'm sitting in couples therapy with my boyfriend, and the therapist says, "Megan, look, he is afraid of you." And I get defensive. I'm like, "Why is HE afraid of ME? He's the one that won't be loyal. He's the one that's not committing. He's the one that's sleeping around." And she says, "Stop, Megan, you're punishing him." And I pause, and I look in his eyes, and I can see it's true. He is afraid of me cos I've been mean. And you know why I've been mean? Because I've been denying my desire in order to please him. In all these little spots, he said, "I want an open relationship." I said, "Okay, I'll try it." He wanted to live and work at the retreat center. And I said, "Okay, I'll leave LA." In all these little spots, I went with what he wanted to try to please him, keep our relationship.
But meanwhile, I was punishing him under the radar. Has anyone ever done that? Okay. I'm glad I'm not alone. In that moment, though, I realized it was a wake-up call for me. I was like, "Where else in my life am I doing this?" I started to see all these little places where I wasn't being honest with myself or others. For example, my job was to sell corporate training at the retreat center. I hadn't sold any because I didn't think that they were ready for it. My other job: I was there to give insights at the retreat center, but I just judged people cos I didn't want to risk my reputation by saying what I actually thought.
I felt stagnant and stuck cos I didn't want to admit that I really wanted to travel. Seeing the fear in my boyfriend's eyes was a wake-up call. I didn't like the woman I was becoming. I was being mean, so every day I sat, and I meditated, and I asked, "What do I really want? And what do I need to admit to myself?" For days nothing happened, and then a very clear vision began to form. A few weeks later, I was talking to my friend, Rev. Jo, who is probably the wisest woman I have ever met. She is a native American medicine woman, a shaman, a preacher to Agape, where thousands come to see her every week. Basically, there's no bs-ing in front of this woman. She's been a desire doula for thousands of people, and I was pregnant with a very big, very secret desire. I sat down with her, and I started going into my story as we do. I was saying, "Ugh, I just keep fighting with my partner, and I feel ineffective at the retreat center. Everything feels stuck. Oh, and every time I think about Bali, I cry. And as I said that, tears streamed down my face - my whole body covered in goosebumps.
She turned and looked at me, and in her Southern drawl, she said, "Baby, ain't nothing gonna feel right until you follow that. Bali is a calling on your life." It hit me with that thud of incontrovertible truth, something that was undeniable and really uncomfortable. Has anyone had a moment like that? Yeah. I knew she was right, but my mind had a lot of things to say about it. I said, "But Rev. Jo, what about my job and my partner and my community, and what are they gonna do without me?" And da da da. "Megan, do you teach about desire, or do you teach about obligation?"
Fair enough. Right? But still I was scared. I was really scared because if I left and went to Bali, it would mean giving up everything I had created - my friends, my spiritual community, my job, my relationship, my financial security, my family - for some vague vision I had seen in meditation. It felt insane. But with Rev. Jo next to me, I realized maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe this is not insane. So, that night with the little bit of courage I had, I went home, I opened my laptop, and I quickly bought a ticket to Bali. I knew if I sat and thought about it, I wouldn't do it. The fear voices would get far too loud, and I would lose all my courage, and I wouldn't do it. So I bought my ticket and then over the next few weeks, I sat with people as I told them my decision. My boss was angry because I was leaving my new job. I broke up with my boyfriend, and I held him as he cried.
I said goodbye to my friends and my family who questioned my decision, cos no one understood. "Why are you going to Bali? You don't know anyone there." And I didn't have a good reason. It was really hard to say goodbye. This is why people don't follow their desire because we can feel intuitively in the short term, people will be hurt. People will be upset. They will be ashamed. They will be angry at you. You'll feel disappointed. And so, it is far easier in the short term to pretend. But what's the alternative? I had seen in myself when I was pushing down my desire and denying it, I was eroding into a lesser version of myself. And then I was blaming people for my unhappiness.
So I said my goodbyes over the next few weeks. And then I found myself in Bali, and I felt this little tingling sense of aliveness all over my body. I felt hopeful. I didn't know what was coming. All I saw was 'Do Women's Retreats in Bali.' That was what I saw in my head. It's been magic since. I've had two amazing women's retreats exactly as I had seen in my meditation. I met my husband-to-be at an exotic dance - very Bali! I adopted two dogs. I grew my coaching business past six figures. It has been so beautiful. But beyond any of this external is how I feel inside. I feel more connected to myself, more aligned, more centered than I ever have. But it's not like a one-and-done decision. Following my desire is something I have to practice every single day because the fear voices are there.
And the fear voices are really tempting, and the desire is quiet. And it's still. Just this week, for example, we were buying our first home - it's a big desire of mine - and all of a sudden, my fear voices were so loud. It's like, "What are you doing? You're insane to commit to staying in Bali, and everything is uncertain, and there's coronavirus. Why would you do that?" So I called up one of the other wisest people I know, my mom, and she said, "Megan, I have never seen you so happy. You're thriving. You look like you."
And in that moment I realized, that's why I cried when I thought about Bali those two years ago. Cos I thought I was just going halfway around the world, but I was really just coming home to myself. There's a few things I know about desire that I wanna leave you with. The first one is there are a million reasons not to follow it. And there's a million voices. Your shoulds, your pros, your cons, your fears, other people's opinions, external influences. And there's only one quiet voice, and it's inside your body. The second thing is I have to admit that I heard it. This is actually the most important. When I'm working with women, I often hear, "I don't know what I want. I just don't know." But when we get down to it, most of the time, they really know what they want. They just know it has consequences.
The third one ask for help. I would not be here if it was not for that coach, for Rev. Jo, for my mom, for Colleen. It's like none of us can do this alone, nor are we meant to. We need each other to live into our desires. The fourth one is I have to be willing to feel all of the feelings because when I follow desire, like when I came to Bali, it didn't necessarily feel good. It felt scary and uncertain and nerve-racking, and oh my gosh. And like heartbreaking and difficult, but it felt honest. So my willingness to be with all of the feelings is important. And then the last one I know is my desire is my blueprint to living my soul. And your desire is a hundred percent unique to you. It's how you know what you're here to be and how you know what you're here to do. So, your desire will take you on a totally unique journey. I don't know where your desire is taking you, but I do know that she's a persistent mistress, and she will be knocking on that door asking, "Are you ready to wake up and trust me and in doing so trust yourself?" The question is, will you answer it? Thank you so much.
