Contents
An Important Note for Doubters and Skimmers
Preface : An Unusual Phone Call to My Father
Part I : How to Become Who You Know You Really Are
Chapter 1 : What Life Do You Envision for Yourself?
Chapter 2 : A Crucial Question for You
Chapter 3 : You’ve Already Had Intense Experiences But . . .
Chapter 4 : Which of These Two Types Are You?
Turn off the Poison Valves
Before Each Exercise, Prime Your Hippocampus
Write in Your Journal Afterward
Part II : The 9 Intense Experiences
Chapter 5 : Intense Experience #1: Journey Back to Neverland
A Flamingo with Lagoons Flying over It
Reagan Whittles, Eisenhower Putts, and Kennedy Canters
The Journey Back to Neverland Exercises
Chapter 6 : Intense Experience #2: Dive Deeper into Your Blood
How to Ruin Your Sleep, Worry More, and Feel Old
The Dive Deeper into Your Blood Exercises
Chapter 7 : Intense Experience #3: Wander into the Forest, but Don’t Bump into the Trees
Bland Colors and Dull Light
Please Be Quiet
City Mouse, Country Mouse
Wander into the Forest Exercises
Chapter 8 : Intense Experience #4: Ignite Yourself with Genius
Mediocrity in, Mediocrity Out
Mozart Fuel or Muzak Fuel?
The Ignite Yourself with Genius Exercises
Chapter 9 : Intense Experience #5: Laugh It Off
Drop DeGeneres Bombs
Laugh It Off Exercises
Chapter 10 : Intense Experience #6: Reveal Yourself
Grab All of the Toys You Want
Reveal Yourself Exercises
Chapter 11 : Intense Experience #7: Give to Really Live
“What’s in It for Me?”
Thank You for Reading This
Give to Really Live Exercises
Chapter 12 : Intense Experience #8: Embrace Death and Dance the Night Away
Wait, This Is Not Bad News!
Everyone Lives Forever in America
So, Do the Tango Already
Embrace Death and Dance the Night Away Exercises
Chapter 13 : Intense Experience #9: Be Like Water
Infinite Metaphors to Gain Access to Spirit
Before and After
Always Flowing
Be Like Water Exercises
Thank You
Additional Resources
Index
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Vaszily. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Vaszily, Brian, date.
The 9 intense experiences : an action plan to change your life forever / Brian Vaszily.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-59635-7 (hardback : acid-free paper))
1. Self-actualization (Psychology) 2. Change (Psychology) I. Title. II. Title: Nine intense experiences.
BF637.S4V38 2011
158—dc22
2010045248
Dedicated to my mother, Maryann Vaszily. Scholars, authors, doctors, artists, and sages have guided me and I am grateful, but they don’t hold a candle to you. You live the knowledge, you live love, and that has been by far the greatest lesson. Thank you.
This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
An Important Note for Doubters and Skimmers
This book will have you laughing out loud, crying to yourself, getting lost, dreaming vividly, giving stuff you love away, and running around in your underwear. It is unlike any other book you’ve ever experienced, but don’t let that stop you. It will change the course of your life in powerful and positive ways. And it will do so rapidly. You will soon see why the profound changes I am promising that you will discover with The 9 Intense Experiences are natural and inevitable.
If you are seeking to overcome barriers to your happiness and success, such as fear, guilt, anger, depression, heartbreak, low self-esteem, apathy, feeling overwhelmed, and not knowing the direction to take in life, this book will inevitably help you. If you want to achieve greater success in your career, love life and other relationships, health, weight, finances, or all of these, this book will guide you in powerful ways you can’t yet imagine.
In today’s go-go, faster-faster, feel-as-if-you-are-getting-nowhere world, many people tend to believe they have visited and know a lake, when in reality their eyes have only skimmed the surface of that lake. We’re in an age of skimming life when we were born to dive deep, and that causes a painful disconnection from the success, happiness, and inner peace we are meant to have. That is precisely the disease that this book cures.
A term I often use for this problem is the “Muddy Slope Syndrome”—when you have it, you feel as if life is an uphill climb in the pouring rain, and you’re moving faster and faster and digging in deeper and deeper, trying to get up that hill. The faster you move and the deeper you dig in, the muddier that slope gets, and you slip farther and farther backward. You feel increasingly weighed down and blinded by the mud splattering all over you.
Please do yourself a giant favor: take a few deep breaths and slow down long enough to read just a bit more of this book. Slow down the way you slow down to kiss your lover, the way you slow down to eat really good chocolate, or the way you slow down to savor whatever you already know gives your life vibrancy.
After reading just a few more sections, you will understand why this book will inevitably change the course of your life in powerful and positive ways. It will make perfect sense. You’ll also have more than a few big “aha!” moments that will immediately provide you with greater energy, clarity, and focus, and there’s nothing wrong with a little instant gratification!
“We are constantly invited to be who we are,” Thoreau wrote. Deep inside, you already know who you are. If you can see yourself achieving greater happiness and success in your relationships, finances, health and weight, career, and elsewhere in your life—that is who you already are. You cannot see something that is not there.
The challenge comes from clearing through the “rust and crust”—another phrase I often use to describe the years and decades of self-sabotaging habits, thoughts, and emotions that paralyze your ability to be, and sometimes even see, who you are.
As you will shortly discover, intense experiences are precisely how to clear through all of that rust and crust. So dive deeper. Accept the invitation to finally be who you know you really are. Life is way too short not to. Now is the time. You absolutely deserve it. And by the way, you’re going to love it.
Preface: An Unusual Phone Call to My Father
I’ve pulled into a strip mall parking lot. The rain beats on my car windows, and the steam from my breath makes them hazier still.
“Hey, Dad, it’s Brian,” I say into my cell phone. There’s no need for a phone, but it helps with this connection. I swallow hard. “It’s been a long time.”
It is 2002. A decade ago my first wife, Mireya, was twenty-three, I was twenty-two, and we were raising our one-and-a-half-year-old son. We were both full-time college students and working minimum-wage jobs. We were deep in debt, on food stamps and welfare, and living in an apartment smaller than some closets. When Mireya got pregnant in 1990, we had been dating for only four months. At age twenty, when I discovered that I was going to be a father, my own father had already been on his deathbed for three months in a hospital. Prior to that, he’d been dying for more a decade at home from emphysema, alcoholism, depression, and bitterness.
Dad lived what his World War II buddies would have called one hell of a life—high highs and very low lows. He was born in Brooklyn but raised on a sugar beet farm in Hungary by an aunt who often beat him. He moved back to Brooklyn, where he boxed, played handball, and indulged his passion for learning languages. He spoke several by the time he enlisted in the U.S. Army. By the end of his life, he spoke at least seven fluently. He served in intelligence during World War II, doing secret work throughout Europe. During the war, he fell in love with a Russian spy. One day she disappeared, and he never heard anything about her again. He eventually fell in love again and married. During an argument with this first wife early in their marriage, she was hit and killed by a vehicle. Over the years, he launched several businesses, including a restaurant, import/export companies, and other ventures. He married again; his second marriage ended in divorce. Several years later, when I was three, his thirteen-year-old son from this second marriage was also hit and killed by a vehicle.
My mother was his third wife; she was married to him for the final twenty-five years of his life. She primarily supported us on her secretary’s salary for the last ten or so years. She tells me he was a very good man when he was healthy—kind, funny, and brilliant. I remember the humor and the brilliance, which often surfaced during his final years. I recall his kindness, too, but these memories are far fewer, because I grew up while the unresolved tragedies of his life ground down his mind, body, and spirit. He largely turned into somebody he was not. When I was around age nine, he became a severe alcoholic. He was often cruel to my mom, my sister, and me. Our paranoid nights of not knowing when he’d come home and what he would do this time finally abated when he eventually quit drinking; it was quit or die, and to his credit, he did stop. Yet his severe and unresolved self-bitterness, and using us as his outlet for it, did not abate. Mine is a story that many others have told before, one that far too many people have experienced: routine belittlement, vile names, being told countless times that his pain and emotional abuse of my mom and sister were my fault.
In 1990, my father was in the hospital for months, dying a horrible death. My mother worked at her secretarial job during the day, fought the inept medical system in the evenings, and at night tended to my father at his bedside. My sister and I spent many nights in the waiting room. I recall a pastor at the hospital pulling me aside and whispering, “You’d better take care of your mom, or she’s going to end up in the bed next to your dad.” That was shortly after I learned that my girlfriend of four months was pregnant. I was a twenty-year-old child who was going to be a father, my own father was dying, and I hadn’t confronted any of the years of issues with him. It was a perfect storm of guilt and blame. I felt responsible for his suffering and dying. I felt responsible for the shattered relationship between us and for my mom’s and sister’s suffering as he died. Because my girlfriend came from a Mexican family and she believed that some of the stricter members would ostracize her for bearing our child out of wedlock, and because I didn’t want to cause anyone in this world any more pain, I asked her to marry me. I didn’t even believe in marriage then. I barely even knew her.
After six months in the hospital, on August 9, 1990, my father died. On December 1, 1990, I got married. On January 30, 1991, I turned twenty-one. On February 28, 1991, my son was born. We lived for several months in a small studio apartment in Chicago, sleeping on two twin mattresses on the floor, where I’d awaken at night to the sensation of mice whiskers tickling my face. We spent several other months living with my mom—my wife, the baby, and I all crammed into my childhood bedroom, where the same moon and star stickers I had pasted to the ceiling as a boy still glowed at night. By September 1991, we were both working and were full-time college students living with our baby on campus at Northern Illinois University.
By the middle of 1992, with a couple of years to go before graduation, we owed tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and thousands more in credit card bills. We were on food stamps and briefly on welfare. Each month we struggled to pay our bills; on multiple occasions, I sold music CDs I had collected over the years to secondhand stores to keep our lights on, until I had depleted my entire treasured music collection. I vowed that after we graduated in 1994, I would never be in that position again.
Back now to 2002. I am in tears, parked in the car in the rain and making this cell phone call. My first wife and I had divorced, and I remarried. My son lives with us half of the time and my stepdaughter lives with us full-time. A couple of years earlier, I worked hard to land a good-paying job in a dot-com startup. I bought my first home and started to dig myself out of the debt I’d acquired over the years. Then the dot-com folded. I was laid off. While I searched for jobs, my severance package dried up. I started to receive unemployment benefits. I had a well-reviewed novel published, but it didn’t pay the bills. I went bankrupt. Then September 11, 2001, occurred, and it changed me in profound ways (more about that later).
The economy crashed after 9/11. After sending out hundreds of résumés, I still had no job. My unemployment compensation ran out. I had also drained my meager retirement fund. We were living on my wife’s small income from her private school job. It didn’t cover the mortgage, much less our other bills. I had accepted a part-time job as a waiter. It still wouldn’t come close to paying our bills, and I had to swallow my pride after the critical success of my novel and working hard for years after college to get somewhere in the business world. Just prior to accepting that part-time waiter job, I had sold most of my music CD collection to a secondhand store—CDs I had acquired since selling off my first collection ten years earlier—to keep our lights on.
I am back where I vowed ten years ago I’d never be again. I have no idea how we’re going to keep the house and eat, much less pay other bills. But that’s not why I have broken down, driven into the strip-mall parking lot, and pulled out my phone. I am in tears because I realize that I yearn for an older, wiser man to turn to for some guidance, calm reassurance, or get-tougher-damn-it advice. The only person I can think to call is my dead father.
“Hey, Dad, it’s Brian.” I swallow hard. “It’s been a long time.” I imagine his voice, the voice I recall from his kind periods: deep, confident, sober.
“Brian, just please know I became someone I was not,” I hear him say. “Something I was not. There are many reasons, but I have no excuses.”
Sobs explode from my chest until I can barely breathe. I force it out: “What the hell am I supposed to do? You’re my father, you were supposed to be there for me, not fuck me over, you bastard! And you’re supposed to be here for me now! What the hell am I supposed to do?”
The phone against my ear is now silent. I am shouting to myself. This is all just made up. Stupid. The rain has softened to a pattering against the car windows. My eyes follow a single droplet that starts at the top of the windshield and winds its way down until it becomes part of the pool at the base of the window.
“You’re doing what you are supposed to be doing.” Though my father’s voice in the phone is calm, it still surprises me. “Brian, you are confronting me.” And there in my car in the strip-mall lot in the rain, I finally hear my father. I finally get to listen to the real Dad. Not the mean drunk, not the asshole, but my dad. I hear him tell me many things. He says I have done quite well, considering. He tells me to forgive myself for mistakes I’ve made, such as cheating on my first wife when I was younger, angry, and more ignorant. He tells me I will make many more mistakes during my life, but the key is to let the mistakes teach me, not swallow me. I hear him tell me there is nothing wrong with being afraid, that I will fear things for the rest of my life, but there is a world of difference between feeling fear and letting it control me. “You cannot outrun or hide from fear, Brian,” he says. “It will always catch you from behind, eager to consume you. Keep confronting your fear, just as you are doing right now by finally talking to me.”
I ask him questions about his life, but he tells me that is only secondary to what matters now. What matters now is that I have something important to give the world, something that can really help people. He says I shouldn’t think for a moment about giving up what I am building. “There never comes a point, Brian, when any life is clear of challenges, so don’t fall into the trap of waiting for that impossible point to pursue your dreams. Stop at nothing to give the world what you have to give. Starting now,” I hear him say, “always starting now.” I hear him tell me I was just a child when he was so cruel, that his alcoholism and cruelty and my mother’s and sister’s pain were not my fault. I hear him tell me that he knows I will help make the world a better place. I hear him tell me, for the first time, that he believes in me. “Brian,” he says, “I am sorry. I am so very sorry.”
I know he is. “It’s okay, Dad.” And that is the truth, the start of okay.
“I love you, Son,” I hear his voice say. I realize that I believe him. I tell him I love him, too. Then I close the phone and pocket it.
Things are clearer. Things are going to be okay. I start the car and drive away.
Part I
How to Become Who You Know You Really Are
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.
—Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain (960 C.E.)
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
—Annie Dillard
What Life Do You Envision for Yourself?
Intense Experiences are not limited to scaling Mount Everest or taking a year off to wander the globe. Those certainly can be transformative experiences, but they are not what this book will provide. You may want monumental experiences like those, and if so, I hope you get to do them, but you don’t need them to rapidly and extensively change your life.
Intense Experiences are captivating, energizing, and revealing journeys inside yourself that will clear through your barriers and positively transform you as nothing else can. These journeys engage your mind, body, heart, and spirit. In varying senses of the words, you’ll also find that Intense Experiences are both enjoyable and deeply satisfying.
They’re also easy, in the sense that you don’t have to spend excessive amounts of time, energy, money, or willpower to pursue them. You don’t have to take time off from your job. You don’t have to invest in special gadgets. You don’t have to push your brain or body or struggle in any way to engage in these Intense Experiences and achieve their inevitable benefits.
Those who have already gone through Intense Experiences via my training say that the experiences feel “natural,” “real,” “right,” and “in tune with my being” because, as you will shortly discover, they absolutely are.
As for their inevitable ability to transform you, they won’t change you into something you are not. Nothing can do that, and there’s no need for you to become something you are not, anyway. Instead, Intense Experiences will transform you into who you really are—into who, deep inside, you already know or will soon discover you are meant to be.
This will happen whatever your age or circumstance; for example, perhaps you already know in your core that you were meant to be wealthy or healthier. Or to successfully run a certain business, soar to far greater heights in your career, or make people’s lives better with your music, writing, healing therapies, or whatever passions and gifts reside within you. Perhaps you know in your core that you are meant to be more satisfied in a love relationship or have a better relationship with your children, parents, work mates, or friends.
Judging from the thousands of people I have guided and corresponded with—and from many studies such as the American Psychological Association’s annual study on stress, which shows increasing and alarmingly high numbers of people who claim that they are stressed out, exhausted, depressed, and irritated—it is likely that you already know in your core that you were meant to feel considerably more energy, inner peace, clarity, and overall life satisfaction than you currently do.
A big caution: in today’s sprint-paced and negativity-saturated world, it is way too easy to get jaded and assume that you’re fooling yourself about ever achieving these states of being and your goals and dreams. Maybe you sometimes think, I don’t have enough time, and that you should “get real” and “settle for” your current lot in life; perhaps certain other people tend to provoke you into these self-sabotaging thoughts.
Here’s what that is: nonsense. Worse than that—it is deadly.
When you give up the pursuit of your dreams and happiness and settle for mediocre or worse, you join the walking dead. You are here to live deeply and richly, not to get caught in a rut and rot away.
Whatever you envision for yourself, it not only can be, but in the most important sense it already is. As grandiose or flighty as some jaded folks may say it sounds, you cannot see and feel what is not already there. And despite what our society’s overworked mentality may have everyone believe, the most crucial step in becoming who you know you are meant to be is not in working harder and longer hours to get there. If you are like most adults today, you already work too much, certainly more than many people who have achieved great life satisfaction and their biggest goals and dreams—those who live the Intense Experiences that you are about to live, too.
Instead, the first step is clearing away the years of rust and crust that have accrued inside you and paralyzed you, as a result of all of your self-doubt, fear, anger, guilt, sadness, distrust, fatigue, and more. Notice that I am not saying you should avoid these negative feelings; they are a part of life, and they can even have their benefits. The key is learning to recognize, embrace, and then ultimately let those emotions go, versus allowing them to build up self-paralyzing rust and crust inside you.
This is one of the most important things that the 9 Intense Experiences do. These unique journeys transform you into who you know you really are by enabling you to both recognize and clear through all of the rust and the crust that’s holding you down. As nothing else can, they cure your paralysis.
In my “Unusual Phone Call to My Father” from the preface, I didn’t suddenly become something that I was not. Instead, this experience helped make me aware of, and start to clear through, some barriers that were holding me back from being who I really am.
As you will discover, both well-known and little-known people who have achieved happiness, inner peace, and their greatest goals all share this in common: they routinely engage in positive Intense Experiences, specifically in nine crucial areas of experience.
Meanwhile, most people suffering from Muddy Slope Syndrome have forgotten or never discovered the unparalleled transformative power of engaging in Intense Experiences in the first place.
Congratulations, you are about to discover it.
A Crucial Question for You
I’m about to ask you an important question. But to frame it properly, you should know that in my past I’ve worked extensively with several of today’s most respected dietary health and wellness experts, from coauthoring, editing, and agenting their books to managing their newsletters, Web sites, and more. Here, in convenient capsule form, is what they primarily teach: you are what you eat.
Eat primarily organic vegetables, probiotic-rich foods, and naturally raised meats, and drink clean water and green tea, and you’ll get a healthy body out of it. Exercise regularly and things are even better.
Or, instead, eat lots of Twinkies, and you’ll get a body that looks and feels like a Twinkie. Don’t exercise and things will be even worse: you’ll look and feel like a deep-fried Twinkie dipped in sugar.
Yet although this makes perfect sense—a healthy diet and exercise are certainly important—it is only part of the equation you need to follow to achieve peak energy, creativity, clarity, peace, and happiness and, for that matter, physical health and longevity. And it is not even the most crucial part.
Many people with some type of disease have still lived rich and satisfying lives, achieving their greatest goals and happiness, by addressing the most elemental part of the equation. (In fact, by addressing it, they often find far greater success at permanently maintaining a healthy diet and exercise!)
On the flip side, many people who are fiercely dedicated to a proper diet and exercise still feel overwhelmed, fatigued, stressed out, depressed, or as if they just aren’t achieving the success and satisfaction they know they are meant to. That is because they have not addressed the most important part of the health and happiness equation.
That crucial part is emotional health. Mental clarity. Being true to your spirit. It goes by many names, but it is the deep and steady awareness that you are firmly centered in who you really are. You know that you are on the right path to be and achieve what you are meant to in life. You have the clarity and the humbleness to embrace less-than-enjoyable emotions while also recognizing the barriers in your way and the desire and the resolve to keep dissolving those barriers.
Some of the most common barriers include feeling fatigued, stressed out, short on time, confused, angry, hurt, afraid, depressed, lonely, misunderstood, and ignored, and letting these emotions control you. Some challenging emotions are of course inevitable in life. As the Emmy Award–winning talk show host Montel Williams, who has battled multiple sclerosis for years, noted in his wonderful book Living Well Emotionally, such challenges “can help us grow, and become stronger, and change ourselves for the better.” It is not about trying to eliminate such emotional challenges from life altogether; that notion is a dangerous mirage. It is when you don’t properly manage them and try to ignore them, defeat them through willpower or quick fixes like so many self-help fads, or mask them with excessive work, alcohol, drugs, or shopping, that they become major barriers.
They block you from the happiness, inner peace, and success you envision for yourself and therefore are meant to have, in your career, health, finances, relationships, and every area of your life.
So it’s time to ask you the crucial question: What are you putting into your being?
Because you are not just what you eat. You are what you spend your time and energy doing. You are the experiences you take part in. What you invite into your being—into your mind, heart, body, and spirit—through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin on a routine basis, is who you will be.
If you keep doing whatever it is you spend your time and energy doing in life, if you keep inviting the same experiences in that you always do, you will keep getting what you’ve got. You will naturally stay exactly where you are in life, unless some outside force—winning the lottery or, far more likely, some tragedy like a serious disease—finally shoves your life elsewhere for you.
Over the years I’ve worked with many people one on one, and I’ve corresponded with participants in my seminars, thousands of readers of my IntenseExperiences.com newsletter, and many more people in my consulting and coaching work. I have often asked these people for a breakdown on what they usually spend their waking hours doing, and here is the typical answer:
Working a lot. Listening to the radio in the car if they drive to and from work—typically, the news, talk shows, or Top 40 music. Getting some exercise if they’re one of the fitness-focused ones. And, in whatever “spare time” they have, including evenings and weekends, watching prime-time shows and quite a bit of other TV. Making food or eating out. Running errands. Shopping, shopping, and more shopping. Surfing the Internet, primarily for more news, for information on how to fix their health and lives—and for more shopping. Maybe, if they can squeeze it in occasionally, going to the movies or the beach, indulging in a hobby like gardening, or even reading magazines and books a little. And did I mention working, TV, and shopping?
The Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman recently led a major project in which four thousand Americans were interviewed about how they typically spend their day. The findings succinctly reflect my own informal findings noted earlier: people usually spend only about 17 percent of their day engaged in highly enjoyable and meaningful activities such as spiritual practices, listening to music, and exercising. They spend an additional 11.5 percent of the day engaged in moderately enjoyable activities like walking and talking on the phone to friends and loved ones.
I wouldn’t even call all of the activities the researchers grouped into these categories Intense Experiences; some are, whereas others are not necessarily transformative but are at least enjoyable. That said, it should be obvious that when the average American spends only about 28.5 percent of his or her day on enjoyable and/or meaningful experiences, something is drastically wrong.
If your diet consists of only 28.5 percent healthy foods, obviously you are in for some serious health issues. If you contribute only 28.5 percent of positive and meaningful work to your job, you will soon be fired.
Yet there is this false but prevalent sense in the Western world today that life has to be hard or you’re doing something wrong. There’s this sense that you have to feel fatigued and beaten down every day to get brownie points from God, Dad, your boss, or some authority figure lording it over you. People are largely ignoring the fact that they are starving to death for positive and transformative experiences.
It really is the most sinister and deadly epidemic of our time, because it kills individual and collective energy, creativity, clarity, focus, hope, passion, and drive to do things that make your life and our world a happier place. Therefore, it also kills the ability to resolve other issues— on a personal scale, the emotional barriers I spoke of earlier, and on a grand scale, societal issues such as wars, the economy, the environment, racism, poverty, and disease epidemics—that stand in the way of making your life and our world a much happier place.
What are you putting into your being? What experiences are you engaging in that are good for you? That are not good for you? Which ones should you be engaging in that you are not, much to the detriment of your health and happiness?
If you eat lots of Twinkies, you are going to look and feel like a Twinkie. Likewise, if you engage in lots of empty and toxic experiences, you will look and feel empty and toxic. Feeling that way certainly won’t enable you to dissolve the barriers to your happiness and success.
If you instead engage in captivating, enjoyable, deeply satisfying, and transformative experiences, also known as Intense Experiences, you will feel far more energy, clarity, creativity, focus, passion, and drive to do what you know deep inside you are meant to do. To be who you really are.
I started researching and developing the Intense Experiences program well before I heard of the now-booming field of positive psychology. When I did discover everything that researchers such as Martin Seligman, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Barbara Fredrickson, and Todd Kashdan were doing, I was positively blown away.
For most of their history, traditional psychological research and application have focused on finding and fixing problems. Positive psychology instead focuses on “the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” Enabling you to thrive, not merely survive, is what the 9 Intense Experiences is all about. While thousands of people have already been transformed through the experiences you will encounter here in my training, the extensive research in the exciting field of positive psychology—and also in the booming and equally groundbreaking field of neuroscience—has helped lay a strong scientific foundation for the transformations you will experience with this book.
Meanwhile, the recent widespread popularity of The Law of Attraction and related books such as The Secret has certainly opened mainstream minds about the importance of taking control of your own life if you want to experience positive change. The Law of Attraction essentially states that it’s all about where you focus your mind. And that “if you really want something and truly believe it’s possible, you’ll get it,” but putting a lot of attention and thought into something you don’t want means you’ll probably get that, too.
Many in the scientific community have fiercely disputed this “law,” noting that empirical studies show no proof of this (and when those in the movement do cite “evidence,” they do so anecdotally and very self-selectively). Furthermore, scientists state that electrical signals put out by the brain and by thinking are negligible at best. Even some of the leading figures in The Law of Attraction movement (and Oprah) have now acknowledged the limits of The Law of Attraction.
Although not necessarily in the physical sense of altering events outside of your own being, I do believe that where your thoughts are focused has an impact on your own reality. Yet to rely on driving your life in the direction you want it to go by focusing your thoughts on it would take impossible amounts of your time and energy and leave you with little time for anything else. In our order-it-now-and-it-appears culture, it is tempting to believe that some focused thinking here and there within our sixteen to seventeen hours per day of being awake will change our lives. It can certainly help, but if you reflect on your own day-to-day life, you will realize that you spend most of your time doing.
Whether you are working, playing on the beach, watching news, talking on the phone, gardening, or reading this book, the experiences you are engaged in drive your thoughts, emotions, and general sense of well-being or lack thereof.
You cannot possibly, nor do you have to, struggle to focus your mind throughout your daily life to become who you know you really are. The experiences you invite into your being—into your mind, heart, body, and spirit—through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin on a routine basis are who you will be.
What are you putting into your being?
The amazing field of positive psychology has established the scientific foundation for this concept. The success of The Law of Attraction has opened the door wider for people to take control of their own lives. Intense Experiences will inevitably take you where you know you are meant to go.
In the next part of this book, you will discover why you already know this is true at your core, although you may have consciously forgotten or never learned it in the first place.
You’ve Already Had Intense Experiences But . . .
In the years I’ve spent researching Intense Experiences, I discovered that there are nine key areas of experience that remarkably happy and successful people focus their time and energy on that other individuals do not.
By remarkably happy and successful, I don’t just mean in the sense of being wealthy, although often that is a by-product of their success. What I mean is that they’ve accomplished many of their greatest goals, they’re always actively reaching for more, challenges may sidetrack them but never break who they are, they’re quite content with—but never stagnant in—their lives, and they radiate positive energy and tend to smile a lot.
Some of these people are alive today. Some of them you may know of, others you don’t. Many others are successful “people for all time.” That’s a nice way of saying that you have likely heard their names before, they left some kind of positive impression on the world, while proclaiming a deep satisfaction with their lives, but they are now dead.
An essential point worth repeating is this: what primarily separates these successful and deeply satisfied people from everyone else is not that they work harder. Many people work hard their whole lives and never achieve their biggest goals and dreams. Many remarkably successful people, meanwhile, don’t work nearly as hard as you do.
These people may not have been born wealthy or had any type of advantage in life that others don’t have. Many successful people were in fact born dirt poor and met with great tragedies, while others who have been given all of the advantages in the world are nonetheless miserable.
What separates these happy, successful people from others is that they dedicate time, energy, and intention to doing things within these nine areas that everyone else has become too distracted to know, understand, and experience. They don’t remain focused on all of these areas of experience, but they do focus on many of these areas. After you read this book, you, too, will likely discover a preference for channeling your time and energy into certain experience areas more than into others.
Which leads to one of the most important points of all:
The problem, however, is that nearly everyone except for the aforementioned happy and successful people has forgotten or never consciously learned the extreme importance of intentionally engaging in such experiences.
As I mentioned earlier, most adults today are—to varying degrees of severity, and only you can assess your own degree—seemingly caught in ruts of mind-, heart-, spirit- and happiness-numbing routine. The rust and crust developed from years and decades of going faster, working harder, avoiding deep human interactions, and seeking but never really finding solace in shopping, drinking, and other mirages of coping barricade them from realizing the inevitably transformative power of such experiences.
Every single day, many positive and potentially transformative experiences present themselves to us. Things as simple as initiating a more-than-just-small-talk discussion with that stranger sitting next to you at lunch, who may end up changing your life, or delving into a book like this versus watching another reality TV show. Most people don’t even recognize these experiences, however, much less embrace them. (And kudos to you for seeking out this book; you obviously get it!)
Toward the end of 2008, I asked readers of my Intense Experiences newsletter to post in one of my blogs a positive Intense Experience that, in their adult lives, changed them in ways small or large. Nearly a thousand people posted their experiences (you can read their responses at IntenseExperiences.com), and many of them added that they were surprised to realize that these Intense Experiences, these unparalleled opportunities for growth, really do exist so abundantly in their lives.
Intense Experiences are constantly presenting themselves, but people are so focused on their ruts that they don’t even see them. As a result, there are only two types of Intense Experiences that people typically allow to affect their lives:
1. Those from their childhood
2. The tragic Intense Experiences
Childhood is full of Intense Experiences. Our youthful years are not primarily composed of our intending or willing things to be so. We don’t intend to discover how to make our way in the world by playing, for example. We simply play, we do, we are curious, we dive right in, and we discover many revelations we never previously knew about the world and especially about ourselves by doing so.
Our childhood and teenage years consist of immersing ourselves in new experiences and learning and growing from them. Virtually everyone does this with relative abandon when he or she is young, not overanalyzing all of the potential repercussions of that first kiss or of taking a new way home.
Right now, for example, I am writing this in a Starbucks coffee shop. There is a five-year-old boy here, and he has been periodically peeking over my laptop to see what I am doing. And hiding behind a pole in front of me, at which point I act like I don’t see him. And placing his sunglasses on that same pole and talking to them as if they are a person. And coloring a placemat. Creating designs on the table with napkins. Building things with the sugar packets. He’s curious, he’s allowing his creativity to flow, he’s not struggling to manifest some desire or force his will on things. At his own five-year-old level, he’s simply engaged in Intense Experiences. He’s delving into the new, enjoying it, and most certainly growing from it right before my eyes. It’s a beautiful thing.
This is the same trait you’ll see in remarkably successful and happy people: they don’t allow themselves to get trapped in too much routine, in ruts, in too many “have-to-do-its” at the expense of living their lives and becoming who they really are. Within all or some of the nine areas of experience, they keep trying and doing new things, pushing their own boundaries, to discover and achieve.
I have had the privilege of talking to the eighty-something-year-old Louise Hay, the successful author and founder of Hay House Publishing, and she emphatically noted that the key to her success and happiness (and her vibrancy, which still blows away the energy levels of many people half her age) is her commitment to learning and doing new things. Rock on to 120 years of age please, Louise!
Although we all had youthful years loaded with Intense Experiences, most people “grow up”—I’d argue that many more of them get ground down—and they stop having virtually any other form of Intense Experience, save one: the tragic kind.
Which leads me to a question I’ve often been asked in interviews: How did you come up with the Intense Experiences concept?
Years before I gave them the name Intense Experiences, I started to get glimpses and then longer peeks at the underlying principles that would become the program. My uncle Rod, who writes song lyrics, wrote one called “I’m Not Livin’ My Own Life” when I was a child, and I realized even in my later teens that his sentiment seemed to apply to most adults.
enjoy
You are no less deserving than those who, by staying committed to Intense Experiences, achieved the success and happiness they knew they were meant to. With the book you hold in your hands, you will achieve what you know deep inside you are meant to—in your finances, career, relationships, health, and other key areas of life. You will discover what a beautiful thing it is, this becoming who you already know you are.