It was in May that we committed to Tony Robbins.
September, and the next opportunity to learn from this Guru [‘don’t become a follower become a student’ -Jim Rohn] seemed a long way away; mountains of days when I would be not reaching my potential because I had not experienced the magic of the full message. I felt a frustration and impatience to grow with the knowledge I knew he could share.
In this time I finally began to mediate.
Just 5 minutes a day in the morning. Clearing dreams from my mind like cobwebs, distilling thoughts, gently letting go of those that no longer served me and reinforcing those that did, breathing deeply down through my spine flexing it gently with the breath. I began to keep a daily gratitude journal. I had practised this sporadically in the past, but I stuck to it now with a little more rigour. I recaptured in my mind with some simple words the swelling of my heart at Isabellas giggles when she rubs my nose with hers, her fat little starfish fingers planted on my cheeks. Stephen’s big warm arms encircling us both as we three lay on the bed in the morning slowly coming to the day. I captured in grateful words the circles in which I travel: the learning that is a perpetual part of my life thanks to Wealth Mentor, thanks to new friends, thanks to Stephen. I dwelt in gratitude on the fresh food we eat here in Raglan, a mindful conscious town where produce is fresh and delightful, every day bringing with it culinary hedonistic joys. I have so much abundance, so much to be grateful for everyday but to know this logically is not the same as to live it daily.
I began to live it daily.
The events leading up to my last blog, “Breaking Through”: the yoga class of shame, the challenge by my mentor, the difficult conversation with my potential business partner all played out though early September. The realisation of the limits I placed on myself and the storm of cleansing sunshine-tears all culminating just days before the big September Event.
I will give Event a capital letter because the experience did not disappoint.
As I put the finishing touches on my words scripted here it is December and I am sitting in a jungle pavilion in Bali on a mediation retreat - (I will eventually get around to explaining how this came about.) For now I will lay down here blow by blow as my barriers and limits were smashed apart by the Voice and the presence of a man with a message to serve all humanity.
But I am excited and my words are becoming tangled in my finger tips as I leap ahead of myself in Time; that linear limitation that enforces chronological order on each soul that is tied to a body. These are the last lines I wrote in the blog “Breaking through”;
The stage was set. Everything had happened exactly as it ought. I was washed out, clean, fully prepared to be reprogrammed to dissolve the limits which to this point had dictated only a certain ‘acceptable’ level of success and love and joy. I was ready.
This is the precipice on which I was poised as we dived in to the immersion of Tony Robbins - Unleash the Power Within. I say ‘We’ but I know the experience will be difference for Stephen than for myself. He might even laugh at the earnest intensity in my words: after all, it is just a man speaking a message that we could choose to embrace or not. But I am grateful that he is open to this adventure, willing to grow together or share a common experience for better or worse.
We were all there together, the whole tribe of us: Tom, John, Dom, Mike, Amanda, Kim, Harry, Issy, Stephen and I. How fortunate I thought, the I have so many people in my life who are actively, consciously growing. There were seven and a half thousand people cramming into the stadium that Thursday morning, lines like snakes curling around corners in the Sydney sunshine. It was a melee of high fiving, jacked up, jumping staff in coloured shirts, huge smiles and slapping hands. A part of me observed the spectacle, separately curious and slightly aloof -what artifice!, but the remainder became willingly immersed in the electric energy of the moment.
The smoke and mirrors team did their thing for the first hour or so - video screens of colour and sound, smoke and voices from the surrounds - hug your neighbour, high five a stranger. The more animated the music and fluffers became the closer the time was coming to Tony’s arrival. The dance troupe took the stage and the whole stadium did some kind of morning wake-up hype routine, jumping and clapping and punching the air, the crowd responded in kind, roaring their caged energy like a pacing tiger.
I jumped gently - if such a thing can be done- the increasing weight on my pelvic floor reminding me of the new life sitting heavily now inside me, jostled by my constant motion and stretching down down deep into my pelvis, deeper with every bout of jumping. Better not stir the kid up too much. I did not yet wear my pregnancy like an inevitable badge. I had just enough of a protrusion around my belly to look a little carelessly overweight, not yet the tell tale round ball of an expectant mother. I felt I needed a visible excuse for my lack of jumping.
But there you have it….I am vain.
The whole stadium was leaping and roaring as the light danced and smoke billowed, working to a crescendo from which the man himself, small against the enormity of lights burst into the smoke haze his huge white teeth and American smile broadcast on video screens the size of houses. Seven and a half thousand caged tigers roared and the rock music peaked in vibration. The man himself had arrived.
Over the next few hours Tony manipulated the crowd like the master puppeteer he has become. He is humble in his prowess, he speaks of his effectiveness as the result of 40 years of coaching experience and then he mercilessly employs all of his neurolinguistic programming skills against you. Your attendance is all the consent he needs. He teaches and you take notes in short batches, then he has everyone leap to their feet and jump to the music. That classroom lesson [ what is the story am I telling myself? - Tony Robbins] is then deployed on your personal circumstances and you dig deeply inside to find the thought pattern that no longer serves you and then you let it go accompanied by the pain of seven and a half thousand other souls doing the same and then celebrating wildly with the whole tribe.
My own breakthrough came on Day two. In the course of the process Stephen and I had replanned our business goals for 2020, aiming far higher than we could ever have imagined possible when we began our property journey two years ago, or even when we set our annual goals just less than one year ago. We had brainstormed individually and in pairs the beliefs that were holding us back [Get clear, get really clear - Tony Robbins], and the limits we had placed on ourselves. We had watched Tony tear apart participants who dared suggest that they were the ones whose baggage could not be released because their victimhood stood above curing. He destroyed them almost savagely and I cringed as I feared him sued and imprisoned for his complete disregards for the politically correct or social niceties in the form of blindnesses we have all developed to avoid challenging the messiness in others or ourselves that we would rather not see. He waded right in. He challenged the victims on their every assertion of victimhood. Abused? You were not abused! You just hold the baggage as an excuse to continue to fail..…your mother was doing the best her broken alcohol fuelled self knew how, but she loved you. Rape? So what. You don’t need to carry that anymore. [Every moment you live in the past is a moment you waste in the present - Tony Robbins]
It was almost too much to witness as he explained the broken psyche of his examples to the crowd and dissected a broken persons broken claims. You are the reason you do not have more. You are the reason you can not move forward. No one else. No circumstance. No excuse. Just you. [It is in the moments of decision that your destiny is shaped - Tony Robbins.] Amanda and Kim were visibly deeply moved.
But with Tony you don’t get any theory with out practise and it was time to shed with finality the upper limits I had spent a lifetime placing upon myself. I had realised that I was afraid to be too different, and that with this I had carefully calculated a path to success, but not too much success. Beyond conscious thought I had calculated in every situation how successful I should be to engage admiration, but not hostility, to be looked up to, but not become separated from my herd. My life was an example of allowing myself exactly as much success as I felt was acceptable to the people around me. And so I graduated pilots course with my Wings- but I did not distinguish myself. I was in the top three or four of most academic classes, but rarely the top, and if I did claim the number one spot I became very average in sport or another discipline. I had experienced enough success in my childhood and teen years that it never stood to reason that I should or could become more.
I had realised over the two days with the voice and the smoke and mirrors and music that I felt I did my parents a dishonour by separating myself too much from their lifestyle choices and definition of success. I felt that I should not outshine my little sister in case she become despondent at the unfairness of life. I felt I should not collect too much wealth because it was somehow rude to be so wealthy and that my greater family would spurn me as though my success was an offence to their sensibilities and lifestyle choices. I did not want to be separated from my people and my people did not make a lifestyle of wealth. I had calculated how successful might still be acceptable conversation around Christmas dinners without challenging too much their own beliefs and values and I had been content to limit myself with just enough. Just enough controversy. Just enough wealth. Just enough success. Just enough joy.
And never an abundance.
Tony then held every ones hand in the room. His voice reached into every ones ear, ‘are you ready to let all that go’? The room became serious and dark, pinpoints of light reminding me of stars in the Australian desert sky, the silence amongst seven thousand bodies was the silence of the desert. Then there was just a God voice, talking me through releasing those limits I had unconsciously acted within my whole life. Those little thoughts, embedded by time were lifted on threads from my mind stretching up up above my head straining against their tethers within my brain. The music swelled and the melodic voice calmed, the tethers began snapping and they drifted away, not all at once, over the minutes of mediation I felt the limits snap and break away, no longer weight upon me, no longer mine, no longer limiting. I realised there was a vast spaciousness around and above me. I felt that I could rise without limit as high as I wanted as much wealth as I wanted. I felt I deserved great abundance, that I could reach out and claim as much wealth as I wanted. Not because it was important to do so, but exactly because it wasn’t important. It was only money. I could have as much as I wanted without it meaning anything. Without it creating distance from my family or separation from my herd, it was not important enough to do all those things and so in that moment I chose to have wealth, more than the careful socially acceptable limits I had placed on myself. I chose limitless. Limitless love, limitless abundance, limitless success and I realised not only could I have it, but I would have it, everyday that I continued choosing it. I marvelled at the spaciousness above and around me, I stretched gloriously into it and felt no resistance where resistance had once been. I knew that the visions and images above me of spaciousness were permanent. I had space to grow and rise, there would be no resistance. That something had permanently changed.
We celebrated each of our unique personal discoveries of self. All seven and a half thousand of us celebrated on cue when the voice told us it was time. The stadium roared and stamped and danced and turned into a mass of hugging bodies and flooding tears. The puppet master smiled his enormous white smile and lifted his arms, every minute the conductor of human emotion.
Again, Tony took the crown through a second experience of similar releases, perhaps with other detrimental habits or other thoughts, but I had done what I came to do and I knew something had irreversibly changed within me. Even as the puppet master calmed the crowds in preparation for round two the spaciousness and absence of resistance remained around me and above me. As the lights dimmed and the stars came out for a second time I climbed over the back of my chair and lay down on the floor in the aisle. I heard the voice for a minute or two, a guided mediation, but the words washed over me and I fell into a deep sleep in the desert. I had done what I came here to do and now I needed sleep. The voice guided and enticed and freed the masses for another hour, demanding celebration in retribution and in the midst of the raving stamping crowds of feet, the pulsing rock music, and orchestrated emotional dance I slept on the floor like a baby.
I recall further lessons that day, on health and wellness, on business mastery. Sage advice from a sage man who has done it all and whose results are second to none, personally and professionally. I took notes and new ideas budded within me, flowering over into goal setting and intent for the next year or so. We jumped and shouted and celebrated many more times over.
I though I would be devastated when it was time to leave, but I was at peace. We had double booked ourselves and were due to be in Melbourne at a property development event, missing the second two days of Unleash the Power Within. Amanda and Kim were immersed in the content as we left. Stephen wisely said he thought their needs would be better served without us - their older siblings, bearing silent witness. We had put their feet on this path but now we were better to leave them to find it without us and own their own journeys.
I had come here to break through the upper limits I had grown an awareness of in the preceding months. I had come here specifically with this intent in mind, and it had come about in a very real way. The results were already written into our business goal setting for the next 12 months and the spaciousness surrounding me replaced the heaviness of limits I did not even know I had been carrying. [Never leave the site of a decision without taking action - Tony Robbins]
The Tony Robbins journey, for me at least, had begun as a curiosity to witness the pop sensation guru with the con-man-sized smile and I departed the experience a humble convert to his logic and articulation and undeniable human results. He is a modern day guru indeed.
If you have not experienced this phenomenon I urge you to give the experience a try before the man himself is no longer and the relentless media machine picks up his mantle and the Tony Robbins circus becomes just the smoke and mirrors and house-sized video screens of an amazing self help brand. I defy anyone to walk away from an experience with Tony himself without being profoundly and personally touched by his insight into the human condition, his articulation and experience, understanding deeply and challenging individually every person with whom he shares his message.
The results achieved within our business over the three months following the September event are nothing short of joining the big league. I can't wait to share the stories of the deals that have became our reality in the last twelve weeks or so.
Who would seriously think that such an existential and emotional experience would manifest directly in business and financial breakthroughs? But it already has.
