Great News...I Have a Heart Condition!

That may not sound like great news but hopefully by the end of this post, you will understand why I am so enthusiastic about this diagnosis.

In April of 2009, I saw an iridologist for a checkup. Everything checked out fine except she noticed that my heart was not right.  I mostly blew it off but did start rebounding and taking some baby aspirin daily but that stopped after a few months.

On August 6, 2013, I was playing morning tennis with my men's tennis group on a very hot day and I noticed shortness of breath after the 2nd set. The men, who are older than I, said to get it checked out. I blew it off and went about my business. 

On September 18, I attended a powerful sweat lodge in Arlington, TX. During the lodge I felt the same shortness of breath which subsided during each outdoor break. I went home feeling fantastic, had a wonderful performance in Dallas the next night and then another in San Marcos the following night. At around 11pm, I started feeling really weird in my chest as if 100 lbs. were sitting on me (don't go there) and it felt like I needed to burp but couldn't. It just felt like really bad heartburn. This lasted about 2-3 hours and finally went away when Angelina got me to drink some soda. At one point I was crouched on the floor with difficulty breathing.  Now my body had my attention.

I shared my experience with a few close friends and my friend Lynn and my bride Angelina became very adamant about having this checked out.  I typically trust that my body and mind can heal all ailments so I was my typical reluctant self, but I decided to listen to two of my favorite ladies and see an internal medicine doctor in Crowley, LA who is a dear friend of my uncle, who is also a surgeon. I also got another friend of his to become my temporary cardiologist.

On Sept. 26th I got an EKG and chest X ray and passed them both.

On the 30th I got full heart monitoring blood work and passed that too. Because my dad had a heart condition, as well as a heart attack at 43 and then a pacemaker and fatal heart attack at 59, the medical staff wanted further testing. 

On October 1st I took a Stress EKG and when my heart rate hit 140bpm, I began to fail the test. Something was not working correctly in my heart. At that point I began being very careful with how exerted I got, whether playing tennis, rebounding or how hot I kept my hot tub.  I also began taking a baby aspirin a day and also took some Turmeric.  I was also prescribed Nitro Glycerin pills to take if I ever had severe chest pressure again.  I have not had to take them at all.

On October 24th, after we got home to Orlando, I got another Cardiologist at Orlando Heart Center.  My new doctor said my blood pressure was a bit high, looked at the Stress test results and set me up for a Coronary CT Angiogram. She also noticed a heart murmur so she ordered a carotid neck ultrasound to see if I had a blockage there.

On November 1st I took the Angiogram which was a blast since they filled my veins with iodine and it was like being in the most wonderful warm womb. They did blood work, etc. and the test went very well.

Today, November 7th, I spent the morning with my cardiologist and she went over all the results with me.  Here's the great news.....my ultrasound was negative. All is right with my neck carotid arteries. My resting heart rate is wonderfully athletic at 54bpm. My blood pressure is generally great AND it goes a bit high when stressed which can be solved with less fats, more cardio and a supplement called Red Rice Yeast. My LDL is also high for my condition so that also can be solved with above regimen. The CT Angiogram showed that I have a 50% blockage of plaque in one of my coronary arteries. If it were 70% or higher, they would recommend surgery. Hallelujah!  Thanks to my amazing bride, friends, family and medical staff, this was caught early enough to make it very doable to heal without invasive shit. 

These last 6 weeks have been emotionally and physically challenging since I didn't know what was up with me. I was able to put my new Mindfulness Practice and Sobriety from Unhappiness to the test and with only a few moments of losing presence, have stayed wonderfully peaceful and happy through it all.  I even bought an annuity for my bride as well as helping her understand all the finances, passwords, accounts, etc. in the remote case that I wouldn't be here for her.

New lifestyle....more cardio, 30 minutes a day for at least 5 days a week. Drop Coconut Oil, high fat yogurt, eggs, fatty dressings, barbecue, and reduce animal protein even more. Envision my LDL, blood pressure and artery plaque reducing greatly over the next 3 months before I am re-evaluated with blood work by my cardiologist. (man, it feels weird to actually have a cardiologist.)

I am so excited to use this information to get healthier. I have a new passion for heart-health and Life in general. I have spent 40 years of my life dealing with anxiety, sadness, addiction, etc. I am now ready to have at least 20 years enjoying my new life of peace and freedom with all of you dear souls in it. We have lots of fun to have, lots of love to share and lots of performances ahead so I am gonna stay strong and healthy for us all. Thank you for being such a valuable, important part of The New Earth with me.

I AM Committed to Getting Sober From Unhappiness

Today I make a commitment to a new form of Sobriety.  I've conquered most of my physical addictions and have made great strides in healing my co-dependency.  Now it's time to go even deeper.  I have been addicted to some form of unhappiness since my parents split up 49 years ago.  I feel that 50 years of that addiction is more than enough so today I take a "white chip" which represents my commitment to staying happy no matter what.  This is not pretending to be happy like I did when I was a "bliss bunny", hiding from the painful thoughts and emotions through a façade of positive thinking.  This is a decision to choose unconditional happiness no matter what.  I don't expect perfection and I know it's just "one day at a time". Still, this is the next right thing to do for me and as I keep my focus and discipline on Sobriety, I am sure that I can conquer this dis-ease just as I did with the many others.

This unhappiness I speak of is not the circumstantial unhappiness that most of us think of but the unwillingness to feel peaceful, accepting and content with whatever shows up in any situation.  I know that one of the keys to unhappiness sobriety is to allow all feelings, thoughts and emotions that I have, to run their course without allowing myself to believe that they are me.  I may have a sad thought or emotion but just like I have a body, they are not me. I may be involved in a relationship that has issues but it's not me. I may have a car that needs repair but it's not me. I may have character flaws in my personality but my personality is not me.

I realize now that the real ME has never been depressed.  I only thought that the depressing thoughts, emotions and feelings were me.  They were no more me than an actor's role is them.  Still, I got so caught up in the movie that I forgot I was acting.  As Michael Singer says, "it all comes down to choice.  You either choose to be happy or not."   The same is true of any addiction.  You either choose sobriety or you choose to act out. Whether the thoughts are conscious or unconscious that are driving the addiction,  we still have the choice to say NO! 

Will anyone else join me in this choice to be Sober From Unhappiness?

Today I Got Seduced by an Amazing Goddess

I was doing my yoga on the beach, minding my own business.  She was calling out to me and seduced me to join her.  In that one hour we were together she enveloped me in sweet love and beat me up a lot too.  She was a lot bigger than I.  It reminded me a lot of my surrogate mother throughout my life.  Constant roller coaster of approval and abuse. Each time I tried to leave, I felt the pull of her beauty and power and I went right back in.  Today, I realized that neither of them did anything TO me.  They each were just doing what they do and I chose to ride the waves.  I got some amazing rides today and had absolutely no judgment when I got beat up.  Once I had enough, I left. I sure love riding waves on my boogie board. That ocean is one powerful Goddess.

How I Cured My Addiction

My main purpose for sharing this is to inspire hope and strength through my experience. A life free of addiction is way different from just being sober from behavior. 

As someone on the other side, I know that I was never an addict, it was just that the empty and afraid part of my EGO convinced the real me that I needed these thoughts and emotions in order to fill myself up.  Ironically, the more clear and sober I got from the dis-ease, the more my EGO tried to shame me which was evident in many posts I made a few years ago, early in my recovery.  This was a form of self-sabotage so I could somehow punish myself for being such a weak/bad person.  We temporarily lost work and some credibility in our career but that seems to be over now.

As with most things, the first step is to recognize that there is an issue. There are 12-step groups for just about every possible addiction and devoting myself deeply for 18 months really clarified things for me and had miraculous results.  Finding sobriety from any behavior that fed the dis-ease was crucial and miraculously replaced the emptiness and fear with power and self-worth.  From this place I was able to go deeper into what was triggering the addiction which is always a feeling of separateness, emptiness, fear and/or shame.  As I devoted myself more and more to healing the root cause of the addiction, the compulsive thoughts and behavior subsided.  Within a year, the thought of giving in to the addiction was completely out of the question.

Here's the way it became for me.....imagine that there is wonderful place called "happiness" and you really want to go there. There are many roadblocks to you getting there but you know that it will be worth whatever you have to do to get there.  At one of the roadblocks, you see a path that takes you even farther away from "happiness" but promises you that while you are on that path, you will forget about the place called "happiness" so even though you won't ever get there, at least you won't know what you are missing.  Oh, and by the way, you will have to spend more and more time on the other path because it will become harder and harder to forget "happiness".   No one in their right mind would ever agree to this but this is how addiction works and until you get really clear how far away it takes you from what you really want/Are, you will succumb to it's lies.

Once all of this became clear to me, and I was able to see and experience all the emotions and thoughts that were painfully within me that led to the addiction,  I began to get a clearer picture of the real me beneath all the lies.  It was only through a discipline of daily meditation and yoga that I was able to quiet the false self (aka shitty committee) long enough to replace those voices with the truth of my innocence, beauty, godliness, etc.  I am not saying that the addiction or false self are completely gone, I'm just saying that when they speak, I am clear where they are coming from and I know that they are not me so I don't listen to them.  Would you eat something that you knew was poison if you had the experience of eating it in the past with devastating results?  Then why would we listen to these voices once we recognize what they really are? 

This next part is a bit controversial so let me preface by saying this is my experience and not recommended for everyone.  Once I felt completely secure in my sobriety and awareness of what was really going on, I started to feel less of a vibrational match to 12-step meetings.  It's not that I thought I was better than the folks there, it's just that I no longer felt like the addiction had power over me so I found other groups like Real Love and went deeper into books and meditation.  If there is any chance of acting out in whatever addiction you may have, I encourage going to meetings and doing whatever it takes to stay sober.

About a month ago, I came across a book called "The Untethered Soul" by Michael Singer.  As I devoured the words, I realize that this is what my soul has known all along.  Every book I read, master I studied, and meditation I sat were all leading me to this simple truth......"that I am an individualized spark of God and anything else is just make-believe."  So what's there to feel empty and afraid about?  What is the need to be or stay addicted to anything?     The Answer is.......ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

I am here to help you on your journey as I help myself to open to the most important 3 words we can ever embrace.......I AM GOD!    "We will all be Christed when we say, we are that to which we pray"...Jewel

"Neither you nor I ever did anything wrong!"....yogi armandananda

I have found that idea really hard to swallow.  Eckhart Tolle said it in The New Earth a different way when he said…"You are not responsible for your negative actions. It wasn't you. It was your pain body".   As I have recently released much of my past story, it's become clear that although I am accountable for what my words, thoughts and actions do in this life, the real me did not do them.  Much of what made my "dark night of the soul" journey in 2011 so long and painful was not recognizing that I was innocent, perfect and Godly even when my thoughts, words and actions were not.  Kind of like if you owned a dog and he went around biting people, pooping in their yards and barking all the time.  You would be accountable but you wouldn’t confuse those actions with your own.  You may still feel bad about what the dog did but the real pain would be about your own negligence which again, wasn’t the real you.  Or what if you were a movie actor and your part required you to be horrible.  I don’t believe you’d go home and get depressed about the role you played.  This is what the human body and mind is; a movie actor in a made up world.

We have never been addicted. We have never been cruel. We have never been depressed. We have never been sick. We have never been poor.  We have never been bad.  Our character/actor/personality may have experienced all these things but they are not us.  We are innocent, divine beings.  Our full realization of that will set us free and enlighten us.  As a bonus….our characters will stop doing, thinking and acting in the ways we so harshly judged ourselves for in the past and Planet Disney will become more fun.

Show me someone who truly knows that we are all God/Goddess and I’ll show you a master.  I’m not talking about someone who says they are a master because they think they know they/you are God.  There are tons of those pseudo masters.  I’m talking about someone who truly has gone beyond forgiveness to know the inherent beauty of themselves and everyone.  I want to hang out more with those kinds of beings.  Actually, we are already Self/God-Realized.  We just need to drop the blocks that we created to forget it. 

What a crazy, delightful, game we are all playing.

Today I Admit I Abused My Childhood Caretaker

For over 40 years, I have been working on understanding, healing and forgiving a female caretaker for what I have perceived as emotional, mental and physical abuse.  I have written songs about it, seen counselors and therapists, gone to retreats, attended intensives, meditated, prayed, written letters, gone to groups, talked to friends and family members, and have even given talks and sermons about it.  You name it, I have done it. Throughout the process, my understanding, healing and forgiveness have continually improved.  In December of 2012, I wrote my version of a Ho’oponopono letter to her and have since felt a karmic completion of that relationship.  She moved to Bali and we have not spoken since.  Before leaving, she wrote me a letter stating that she too feels complete with us.

Today while listening to Byron Katie lead a woman through a painful memory of childhood sexual abuse from her father, I realized for the first time how I had abused my caretaker.  This brought me to a deeper level of forgiveness for it allowed me to forgive myself more deeply for something that I knew intuitively but was never able to consciously admit.

Here’s my awareness.  Throughout all the abuse from this woman for over 40 years, there was one common denominator……my tolerance disguised as love.  No wonder I have had so much trouble letting this go, since a part of me needed to acknowledge my part in the whole dysfunctional relationship so I could fully forgive it all.  Each time I allowed the abuse and didn’t take care of myself, I enabled her to do and say things that were painful to us both.  This is not about blame, just acknowledging what really went on.  I am not responsible for, nor can I change anything about her.  What I am responsible for is how I view her, myself and the situation, and what my part was.   

Byron asked the woman, “Who do you believe hurt more, your father who was abusing you or you?”   The woman said that she believed that her father was in the most pain. This allowed her to have a compassion for him that she had never had.  I too believe that my caretaker had to feel great pain in order to do and say the things she said and did. 

Today I feel freer, lighter, more compassionate and more alive than I have ever felt around this story.  Thank you Byron Katie for creating The Work.  Thank you dear friends and supporters for helping me navigate these waters.  Most of all, thank you Life for continuing to show up perfectly and divinely in every moment.

Yes, I abused my childhood caretaker and I deeply apologize to myself, her and everyone ever involved in this painful story.

 

Santa Claus Died! God Lives!

I found out there was no Santa Claus when I was about 7 and instead of freaking out, I found new Santa Clauses. Mostly it began with never knowing when my mom would be available to spend time with us. It was always a real treat when she'd show up and take us away for the weekend. She'd get away from her alcoholic husband and we'd stay at a hotel and eat room service and watch Beatles movies etc. Then we moved with my dad to FL and I found a new Santa.....kissing girls. From then on, my life was driven by some Fantasy: a new romance, a new band, a dream of a record deal, a dream of a manager or agent, a dream of winning a Posi Award, and of course there's.....America's Got Talent!

 

All of these dreams died when I got sober from Fantasyholia last year. Fortunately, God came into my life more profoundly than ever last February and I slowly, painfully, sometime reluctantly, have been replacing all those temporary gratifications with God Realization through meditation, fitness, 12 Step and Real Love Recovery work. It's not always fun. I don't always feel great. The drugs I get from these healthy activities are not as intense as the drugs from fantasy were, but the side effects are all positive and lasting. God is revealed constantly now in my breath, Angelina, nature, humanity, and LIFE itself.
In closing...."I will give up Santa Claus' presents for the presence of God any day!"