So, today’s episode is bought to you by Universal Laws number 4. The law of Harmony. What you appreciate grows. And today we discuss “your body is doing all it can to lead you in the direction of your dreams.”
I broke my ankle (well smashed it) playing footy. That was the end of that career. I ripped my spine rowing. That was the end of that. I smashed my knees skiing, that was the end of that. I got a cyst in my spine ocean kayak racing, that was the end of that. I got concussion crashing during training on my triathlon bike, that was that. So, through all these and more, what, if anything, was my body trying to tell me?
Did you know that we sabotage anything we cannot link to our purpose?
And was my purpose a sport? No.
Was my purpose to play footy or ski or race the ocean? No.
Did you know that some people smash their ankle playing footy and repair it and get back in the game within 12 months? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I repair my knees and go back skiing? Answer. They are not my highest purpose. They are someone else’s who wishes to become a professional footy player or skier. Your body reveals this stuff.
So far, and I’m still counting I’ve had Pleurisy nearly 20 times while trekking the Himalayas. I’ve busted my ankle, got altitude sickness, fallen down cliff and held at gunpoint by terrorists. I still go back. Your body tells you – leads you – in the direction of your dreams.
I travelled ten years almost 300 bed nights in hotels. I was rarely sick. Non stop flying. Often living out of minibars. Eating on a tray in my hotel room from a mediocre menu. Rarely sick. Why? Because I was living on purpose. My body knew it.
When I’m fit healthy and happy, I’m in the right place. When I start to drink one glass of wine more than I need, or eat one more block of chocolate than I need or do less exercise than I need, I am not in a physical problem, I’m off purpose. And it hurts. Sometimes I blame the relationship or country or situation but non of those are accountable for my sense of living on purpose. It’s my ability to link it – whatever I am doing – to my purpose – what I want to be doing.
The classical argument against all the things I’ve written so far is that there are accidents and there are things just like Einstein said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
but I don’t believe that. I believe there is order in the chaos. That is the premise on which I work with everybody. There is in nature a reason for everything. Nothing happens in nature without a purpose. This purpose is not the wrath of God or some vindictive punishment that may cause us guilt. However, if there is a tsunami nature is completing its natural process and if there is death nature is completing another natural process. Nature destroys things that are not on purpose. In other words when the ego takes over and a person starts to live a self-contained reality then nature is having an argument.
my philosophy is not for everybody and I don’t apply it with hardheaded aggression. For example if there is a car accident and somebody gets hurt does it mean that they were not on purpose or were they working on low priorities and attracted calamities disasters and humbling circumstances? I don’t wish to be so cruel as to assume this. However, 20 years after the event and a person is still wallowing in fear or agitation about the event then it is really important to go back and find out exactly what was going on and why that event happened and what they learnt from it so that they can heal and move on.
in the study of healing there is a recognised connection between the psychology of a person and their body function. Anger and the liver are are connected, fear and kidneys are connected, frustration and lungs are connected, heart and grief are connected, headaches and blocked inspiration are connected. Our throat is our expression of purpose and our knees are expressions of our flexibility. Our feet are connected to the earth and when we are confused between our own values and somebody else’s values, in other words confused, ankle sprains are common. Hips are about the movement forward and vision and so it goes. I will attach a book at the end of this article for you to read and do some self diagnosis.
The classical principle of using the body mind for healing suggests that three things need to be found connecting the mind to a signal before we should respond.. For example, if your knees are hurting, and you find yourself struggling in your relationship, and getting resistant then you could say the three things add up to the conclusion you’re being a bit stubborn. Sore knees alone do not imply stubbornness on their own.
Certainly the right side of the body from the eye level down is considered to be associated with money, mind, work. And the left side of the body is considered to be associated with relationship, health, social. Above the eyes it is the opposite. This also translates in yoga to the seven chakras which correspond to the seven levels of consciousness and so if we have issues in the groin it would be classically associated with got to thinking. In the lower abdomen with should thinking. The solar plexus associated with need to, the heart with want to, the throat with desire to, the third eye between the eyebrows with what choose to end the crown of the head with love to. There are practitioners who are absolutely exact in this science. I have studied it and use it to support coaching but don’t claim to be a Guru in body mind.
I’ve inserted the book here and I think it’s worth printing and having in your library because it can help in red flag early intervention in anything that’s taking place in your ego that you are not aware of. Again I remind you that it is to be used in conjunction with other signals not as a standalone metric.
the theatre of life makes us want to strive for excitement. That means in someways we would like our lives to be a form of entertainment. Sitting at a dinner party and someone says how was your holiday the answer that it was good and bad will probably not entertain the table. On the other hand if you say it was good and explain why people will be engaged. If you say it was bad and explain that people will also be engaged especially if they like negative black humour.
but the truth is events are Events until we judge them otherwise. Every single day of our lives is good and bad, happy and sad, right and wrong, success and fail, health and disease. In an attempt to make our lives a more entertaining experience we tried to deny the existence of the negative. Somebody says how’s your health and you go it’s good. You lied. Your body is continually fighting against bacteria, virus, diseases, tiredness, and DNA driven inheritance. Therefore your health is always good and bad. How are you feel is not a measure of your health. But we want our lives to be entertaining to ourselves and others and therefore we bias our opinions in order to cause interest. The body is completely unaware of this bias. So in someways the body is more honest than we are.
there is a direct relation between the mind and the body. In yoga we ask where does the mind begin and the body finish? A great example is when in a yoga class a teacher with traditional experience, rather than qualifications received in a cornflakes packet, places a student in a yoga pose that is designed specifically for that student and their apparent physiological blockages. It is not uncommon in the presence of such a teacher to witness incredible emotional expression from the simplest of yoga poses. The body holds memory. And simply by placing a person in a particular position that memory surfaces and can be cleaned up. A stiff body that is all bound up in itself is bound up in memories to. But classical modern versions of yoga offer offer 45 minutes classes of a pre-scripted organised sequence of postures in order to satisfy the appetite for entertainment, looking good, feeling good, been all good and calling it spiritual.
I guess what I’m saying here is that the tradition of body mind awareness has been, in the most part, lost. Once, not so long ago, a yoga teacher would need to practice yoga for around 5 to 10 years under the tutelage of an advanced Guru before they would even be considered a candidate to be a teacher. But that was in the days when yoga teachers understood the psychology and the physiology of a yoga pose. And just like the medical practice where doctors have become specialists in elbows or knees or feet in order to do the most magnificent work in those areas of the body, those doctors have had to let go of the broader spectrum of body mind science. But traditionally they were inseparable.
the following is a story I don’t tell many people. But for entertainment purposes I will tell you now. Given that we are all addicted to turning events that are balanced into unbalanced stories, I will satisfy you that addiction now. I after returning from New York and my adventures in new Mexico and the United Nations, my consulting business was doing well and we were undertaking projects with small manufacturing companies in association with the Australian government that was paying half their bill. We were funded by the government to create world competitive manufacturing. Because of this incredible opportunity I had time to explore yoga and under the teachings of a Melbourne based owner of a yoga school I spent many hours in the most excruciating pain trying to perfect yoga postures. This form of yoga is called Iyengar. My body moved millimetres every week but my nervous system was taxed to the most extreme level and I started to develop a tremble. Know if ever you’ve worked with a management consultant who trembles they either have to have a very good reason for it such a a disease, or they come across looking as if they have been on cocaine the entire night. This conflict of my work and my intense investment in yoga came to 8 crisis point and I needed to do something desperately to get my nervous system back under control. The easiest solution was to stop doing the Iyengar yoga. But ironically I never thought of that. Addiction to entertainment 101.
so I went to this guy called the professor. The professor was from China, a chi gong master. He spoke not a word of English and snorted through his nose a lot as if he was going to spit a big boogie. I first met him in a small workshop environment for yoga teachers where we sat in meditation and he examined us internally sitting 5 m away. He diagnosed everybody with what was taking place internally in their organs. My treatment however was acupuncture with him. Most of what I’m about to tell you it’s hard to believe and most people will say it’s gone past entertainment into the world of fantasy but it’s not I have witnesses.
with my then partner and the yoga teacher I was working for and his wife we sat on the floor I lay down on my back with my undies on and he began to stick up to 100 acupuncture needles all over my body in the worst possible places you can’t imagine. In my feet that hurts, between my eyebrows that burns, and other places we don’t need to go there. He then struck a cord into the PowerPoint nearby and held it in one hand and touched all the needles with the other and so I felt a tingling of electricity in each of those acupuncture needles. I guess he was insulated from the floor and therefore the electricity was not full volume but it passed through him and his hand into me. I was jumping around on the floor pinned by these acupuncture needles rattling like a person having a seizure. He then pulled out something that looked similar to an a knitting needle that my grandma used to use except his was very very thin and very very long and he proceeded to inserted in my chest just below my sternum he ended by assume, toward my heart. 10 cm of this needle disappeared. I’m assuming it disappeared into my chest cavity and into my heart but goodness knows. My audience squirmed. My life flashed before my eyes. I couldn’t move for fear of sticking all those needles deeper into my body so I just lay there frozen like a dinosaur in the Arctic. After an unknown period of time during which I left this planet and floated somewhere, I returned, the needles were removed and I stood up a different person. My nervous system had been reset somehow. At this point it came painfully aware to me that continuing this form of yoga was not a short-term game and it would require at least another 10 years before I could call myself a qualified yoga teacher and so I quit. My body was teaching me all it could to say “Walker you’re not a fucking yoga teacher.”
but I also wasn’t a management consultant. My interest was purely human. The reason I had attended the MBA was to gain qualification in the field of human development, behavioural science so that I could influence the lives of humans not their businesses as a consultant. On a ski trip in Austria not long after this, stuck on a lift that had frozen, I came to realise that the business was an opportunity to do what I loved and I returned to Australia and resigned from my own company leaving my business partner to continue this really successful business. At this point I had decided that I would influence leaders as a professional speaker and impact the human side of business rather than the business side of business with my life. My body was teaching me the entire time to follow my passion and to do what I love.
the day I resigned from my business consultancy, I started a very long and expensive journey to become professionally qualified to speak on stage around the world about human consciousness. That day was the most remarkable experience of energy in my life I had had. I became younger, my body that was still stiff and and movable through those periods of yoghurt became softer, I became kinder to myself and others and more generous than I have ever been before in regard to those people who had, in my mind, done things to hurt me. I think if you put that in context, I grew to be a bigger human being not by wanting to be a bigger human being but by doing what I was born to do, rather than a job and an income and a business, I was following my dreams, living on purpose, following my vision, inspired. I haven’t looked back a single day since.
But because im human, or I think, I am, I, like you, am addicted to entertainment for my life. Having the perfect job, doing what I love and loving what I do, is one thing, but we adapt to everything. Even at Bondi I get used to the magnificent beach and ocean. I need to constantly go back and remind myself what a lucky fkr I am. And so, I wanted balance in other aspects of my life, as well. Goodness knows why. I had everything. So, with the speaking and coaching work on an all time high, I decided to start another business with my ex-partner and build a global franchise in consciousness. I put allot of hooch into it. We both did. And when the world trade centre came crashing down with the lives of many souls, our US$53 million investment and loans went with it. A week later our home burnt down in Sydney. A month after that, my entire work in Canada went up in smoke due to an error in paperwork. Then our relationship broke a few months later. Now, all this sounds like theatre, but truth is, it wasn’t. And I’m going to tell you why. Right now. Now. No now. Here it is.
I had a purpose, a job I loved and a dominant priority in my life. My core, my totem, my inspiration and my vision were not build around things that could be taken, bombed, burnt or destroyed. I simply shifted in my seat, recognised new opportunities and followed my star. You see, nothing is ever missing, and if I really walk that talk, or walker that talk, then what could upset me? Nothing. I just changed direction. For example: we did lose a huge opportunity in New York and had spent 3 years building what died in the WTC attack, but, I had a purpose for doing that greater than money. I wanted to impact the world of consciousness and so, I asked what’s the new form. And found it. I cashed my super and spent three years writing a huge volume of books. I was poorer financially but 100% on purpose with my life. Our relationship finished and one week later fell in love. My ex and I still loved each other and became mates. It too just changed form. Canada’s closure for me was a release of my work to those 200 people I’d certified in teaching Innerwealth. By the release, the work, my purpose grew. I felt blessed to let go and the new form was a more powerful form of fragmented stars rather than a come to daddy structure.
New relationship, new home, new books, new knowledge, new clients, new approach and, most importantly, a new world. Post WTC everything changed and had I held onto my dollars and tried to fight to be who I was before the WTC, before the house fire, before the relationship shift, before the Canada issues, I would have become irrelevant. Instead, because I had a purpose greater than my ego, me, and greater than the addiction to entertainment as a life definition, I adapted, and stayed relevant. I rebranded, rebirths, reengineered the future. Simply, I sat on a mountain in NEPAL and did a new vision. I know it sounds sort of all premeditated and intellectual, but truthfully, it’s not. I sat and asked the universe, and coaching, books and letting go Canada, and relationships were given to me. But I had to play an active rather than passive role in all this. I had to know how, without the benefit of 20 wasted years, how to let go.
The key to letting go was having a meaning for life greater than my emotional entertainment. My emotional entertainment wanted to feel happy, successful, excited, all very juvenile forms of life measure. Instead, I had a purpose and a mission greater than my entertainment, greater than my feelings. A human can endure incredible hardship without a single blip if they have a purpose greater than their ego. If not, a pin left on the coach and prick in the arse, will become a suicidal trigger. We’re amazing us humans but not so if our ego can’t see beyond the potato chips and coke of life.
When you get a blessing like I did with that WTC transformation, it’s sometimes even hard to believe your blessing. But if you have a purpose you are not working or living alone. You have a friendship with nature and nature has one with you. You need her, she needs you. And that is the key to transitions.
As I wrote these books back in Sydney in my magnificent harbour frontage Appartment, glowing in the sun through my huge windows to the world, naked on the floor with my lover, coaching people, speaking the truth at corporate events, I still hungered for more. My addiction to entertainment was insatiable. I took up sea kayaking to stay fit. But it went too far and started to become a competitor to my purpose in life. My work, my passion. And soon enough, a spine injury put me in the most expensive seminar on earth, a hospital bed. three surgeries later and seven years later, I got the message. Focus Walker Focus.
My suggestion. Find your purpose in life and link things to it. My kayak was important, it was my meditation, health and rejuvenation. But paddling 10km off shore in shark infested waters alone in a plastic boat might have been a search for something that doesn’t exist.
Or more importantly, if I’d been more humble, something that I already had.
When life become repetitive we get agitated, as if something is missing. I’m the perfect example of what that can do in terms of triggering the body to remind us that when we start focussing on low priorities to create entertainment in our lives, the body kicks us back on track. My spine, my surgeries, led me to recognise that, maintaining health doesn’t need to be a massive investment in life threatening adventures. But, my purpose, my work, my highest priorities should never ever be taken for granted and that when I become routine in my purpose, there is an opportunity to be more powerful in my gratitude.
Through this entire journey of business and marriages and sport and body breaks, I’ve had plenty of entertainment but for the most part, that has not been my primary objective. My purpose has dominated the horizon, my friendship with the universe and nature has been essential in sustaining that and every time I got distracted by seeking entertainment and emotional ego gratification, I’ve been bought crashing to the ground with a body struggle of rather uncomfortable proportion. In some way you can say, nature, the universe has guided me. Even though, for the most if it, I’ve resented those shunts nature gave me while they happened, by letting go of what I was distracted by, I’ve stayed on purpose and therefore, still young and fit at heart and still here sharing and guiding greatness in others.
That’s the end of today’s sermon on the mount. 100 Things I wish my Dad taught me. Episode 29. “your body is doing all it can to lead you in the direction of your dreams.”
With Love and Wisdom,
Chris.
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