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THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU. The thought comes to me whole, unfiltered, pure. This is the first of the cheat codes this incident creates for me. THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU.
Stress is an earthly ego experience, fear-fueled and useless.
We are all eternally connected, bound by love and the purest parts of our being, bound by shared history and our innate, unyielding, unchanging energy.
To make things better, to achieve the things you want to achieve, to push through and past obstacles, you have to do something. You cannot be inactive. You will die. Complacency is death; it is the opposite of life; it is what keeps us stuck in situations that make us unhappy.
Information is what squelches fear. We are only afraid of the unknown. Ignorance, or lack of experience, is simply a lack of data. Not all information takes away fear, but any amount of it can dampen the insecurities and the killing unknowns of fear.
Everything I was learning about facing fears came down to energy. I realized quickly that it takes immense energy to face a fear.
When you really know what you’re focused on, you can manifest what you truly want in your life.
The trick is to get out of our own damn way.
“Clarity of intention” is a phrase that’s now deeply ingrained in my brain.
What came to me on that ice was an exhilarating peace, the most profound adrenaline rush, yet an entirely tranquil one at the same time: electric serenity. I can still feel that space, silent, still, empty, but filled with every instant and all the forevers
All life was grand; all life just got better in death. Everything and everyone I love or ever loved in my life was with me.
I saw light strands, too, strands that connected me visually to everything, always, forever.
I knew then, as I know now to this day and will always know: Death is not something to be afraid of.
now I know that death is something to look forward to, a return to that electric serenity outside of time.
Love slowly, quietly, and patiently waits for hate to simply burn out. It requires so much more energy to hate than to love, and love has all the time in the world.
The only way love wins is across a span of time—it’s not an instant fix to anything, but it always wins.
No experience need be wasted. Everything that happens to us can be stored as information so that when disaster strikes, we don’t curl up and stop breathing. Instead, we find a position in which breathing is possible.
There is so much nonsense going on in the world right now, tremendous amounts of damaging white noise. We are all sucked into it,
The only death is the death of the body, and the “worst thing” that can happen in your life, which so many of us think is death, is actually the best thing that will happen to us because we are then freed, relieved of our earthly burdens of “gravity, time, and tooth decay.”
The continuance of the spirit is what is true, and things that are truthful are love. The only thing that matters in life is love. Love, here on earth, is our only currency; it is our energy and our existence, and we take that energy with us into perpetuity.
Live your life now. Do the best you can with what you have now, but don’t fear death,
In everything, we can always control our perspective. We’re all the authors of our own narrative. How we feel about things is down to us and how we perceive things—it’s our responsibility to control our perspective.
The energy of my sorrow would eventually drive my desire to heal faster than should have been possible, but that wasn’t about me, either—it would become the kinetic energy by which the more I healed, the better my friends and family would be so that I wouldn’t have to carry so much of this sorrow and I wouldn’t have to burden my family with my failure.
How many of us, when faced with an imminent end, could say that we have lived all we wanted to live, all we dreamed to live; loved all we wanted to love, loved more than we ever dreamed to love?
All I had left was an honest life filled with love, and where I could never again, ever, have a bad day. It just wasn’t possible anymore.
phrase—“I have the blessings of knowing what a bad day really is, and I’ll never get to have another one ever again”—was
The truth is, I had been perfectly happy to go; in fact, I had left this earth, and it had been so fine, so extraordinary, such a serene excitement. But I also knew that leaving the world bodily would have destroyed a lot of people’s lives—especially
I only came back for the people around me; otherwise? I’m outta here. Fuck this planet and fuck paying taxes and fuck this war-torn world! I had been genuinely happy to go,
now I’d been given an even greater gift than ever before. Now, I fully understand the depths of the love around me, the love we all share.
I now knew that love is eternal. There was nothing anyone had to do to earn it; there was nothing anyone could do to break it.
this: I would always be with her because my energy is part of the energy of everything, and don’t grieve forever. Move forward. Take the next step. Take action. And love with all your heart always.
“It’s not ‘poor me Alex,’” I slurred, “it’s ‘fuck yeah!’ I got to survive and now I get to heal. I’m not dead, I’m not gone. So why are we going to look at all this as some fucking terrible thing?
Hospitals are wonderful places for saving lives, but they’re less effective as places where people heal, physically and mentally.
I was just tired; never being left alone means it’s impossible to get a stretch of time where I could get into a deep, restorative sleep. It felt as though as soon as I drifted off, someone came into the room
If we truly believe that we have no control, that the major (and minor) things that happen to us are foisted on us by some exterior force, and that we have no say over the direction our lives take, then what’s the point of any of it?
hospitals are where you get your stuff fixed and then you get the hell out.
and as I lay in the bed at Cedars, when the thought crossed my mind that maybe I couldn’t work again, in the next breath I’d think, “Who cares? I’m just happy to be alive again. Time to take the next step.”
no one ever had to make me do a single extra element of my recovery. As I’ve said, I knew from the second I woke up (and perhaps even before that) that to get back to a life I recognized, a life where I could be a paradigm for those around me, a life where I was fully present physically and emotionally for Ava and for my family and friends, I would have to push myself every minute of every day to recover, and thrive. No one would ever have to tell me to work a little harder.
As an exercise in personal growth, I had made a list of my fears and faced them one by one,
So how could I hope to explain to the otherwise deeply committed staff of a rehab facility that when they thought I was done for the day I was probably just getting started because the fuel for my bones and for my muscles was something both intangible and as real as the new blood that flowed through me?
“Milestones over tombstones” became an inner mantra in my recovery.
Be stronger. Receive love. Find joy. Push to be tougher, faster, better than before.
“Motion is lotion,” one doctor told me. Scar tissue sets in very quickly and can be forever damaging to the body’s mobility.
Like time itself, physical pain is solely an earthly experience, not of the soul or spirit. So starting from this perspective, I discovered possibilities for pain management from what had previously seemed impossible. I had to be bold, consistent, and absolutely crazy ridiculous to redefine what pain was to me, so I started having serious, pointed conversations and drag-out arguments … with my leg.
“Stop telling me that you’re broken, that you’re hurt, and that I should be more careful!” I’d shout, like my leg was a scorned lover. “You, sir, have been replaced with something better and stronger than the bone, okay? So, pipe down, you son of a bitch!”
So when I put my foot onto the ground and applied a little pressure, my pain nerves would light up like Christmas, and I would say out loud, biting my lip, “It’s just nerves, they don’t know any different. We’re better than this, right?”
it,” I’d rant, on and on. My body was now a separate entity, a roommate if you will. And like a freeloading roommate, wanted or not, however hard I tried my body was nevertheless around, wasn’t going anywhere, and was eating all my food and certainly not paying any rent.
I would practice this ridiculous perspective all through every day until my leg would actually listen. “I’m trying to help us all out here,” I’d regularly tell my leg,
Through the practice of removing my body and leg from my consciousness and making them characters on the same team, working toward the same goal (moving, walking, exercise), I was able to identify
different nerve pains, and found new ways to interpret nerve pain signals in my brain. Often I was able to simply reduce them to being like an iPhone notification, which I could then just swipe away.
