MidLifeRescue.com Blog

It’s 2010 and I’ve just turned 50 and recently gotten laid off from my job. Usually when this happens, and trust me it’s happened quite often in the past 30 years, my usual MO is to call a trucking company and get back into a truck and haul ass across the USA. Then I get pissed off and quit and look for another job and the process starts all over again. The only 2 exceptions to this rule(when I stayed at a job for more than a year) was when I was in the military from 1978 until 1985 and when I bought my own truck from 2000 until 2006. In between these times I’ve worked in two factories, one which I got fired from after three weeks and the other I quit after five days. I was also a 911 and Police dispatcher in Cheyenne, WY for two years, a job which I truly enjoyed and loved the people I worked with. I’ve tried opening a business with my brother selling tools, which I failed at and started two web sites, one which was quite successful but I quit because I got bored and the other one I haven’t touched for over a year and hasn’t been recognized at all.

I’ve been married three times and divorced twice. I’ve traveled all across the United States and Canada, did a quick trip into Mexico and got the hell out and had a life changing experience by visiting the Philippines. I’ve seen more than most people will ever seen yet still want to see more of the world.

I’ve heard that people my age tend to do a bit of thinking about where they are, where they have come from and where do they plan on going. I know some people that get down right depressed and wonder if this is all there is to life. I would probably be in the same book if it hadn’t been for a movie I saw 3 years ago and what I have done since to keep me from considering myself a “loser” . After all, I’m in the 4th quarter of this game of life and don’t have any savings, no retirement, not even a speck of life insurance. My credit is trashed and I’ve been bankrupt twice. Yes, two times I’ve thrown in the towel. I’ve tried to quit tobacco so many times I’ve given up counting. I put on too much weight and my hair is gray with a little hole on the top of my head where it quit growing. Throw in the economy that we’re in, I’m 1000 miles from my family and the town I live in is dying a slow death. I’m sick of driving truck and I don’t have a clue what I want to do with my life. What a perfect time to feel sorry for myself. I could gather with those who are in the same predicament that I am and what a pity party we could have.

There’s only one problem. And it’s not really a problem, it’s a blessing. All this mess that is in my life, I have created. It’s not Bush’s fault, it’s not Obama’s fault, it’s not my parents or friends or wife’s or ex-wives fault. The mess I am in is my own creation. Everything on my plate is there due to the choices that I’ve made throughout my lifetime. You may be saying, “What are you saying all this for? For us to feel sorry for you?” The answer to that is NO!
Let me take you back to the part where I saw this “movie” that changed my way of life and thinking. I was a member of Netflix and one of the specials was a movie called “The Secret” I didn’t have a clue what it was about and even forgot all about ordering it. When it came, my wife and I sat down and started watching it. I was mesmerized and my wife was bored to death, so she went to the other room to watch TV. I know there are lot’s of critics out there that don’t even want to hear about “The Secret” but that’s fine because what it did to me has set me on a different course of my life.

I am not a stranger to self help products. Back in the 80’s I was introduced to a program called TPN- The People’s Network which my good friend Frank G introduced me to. It was a satellite program that only showed self help programs on TV. It’s where I got introduced to Jim Rohn, Brian Tracey and Les Brown to name a few. I watched these programs religiously everyday and learned a lot but put none of what I learned into practice. Yet the seed was planted. I’ve also been a regular subscriber to Nightingale-Conant and spent hundreds of dollars on their programs over the years and still do to this day. Yet none of this stuff stuck. I was (and still am to some extent) a stubborn son of a bitch and would do things my way. When the going got tough, I got going. Run run run away! But something about this movie changed everything.

The first thing I learned was that I was responsible for everything that has happened in my life to this point. I was always broke and not a good businessman due to my own thinking. I was always moving to different places to keep problems behind me. If things got uncomfortable, I left. I didn’t want to deal with being uncomfortable or my problems. I kept everything inside until I blew a gasket and went off on people I cared about. I was wondering why some people were so lucky and I wasn’t. I was a pity party on wheels. Yet throughout all of this, I made some friendships that will never be broken. My family and I are very close and I love them more than I can say. But I was only looking at the negative stuff in my life, not the positive. With all the negative thinking I had, it’s no wonder all I got was negative stuff in my life. I didn’t know the correlation between what I was thinking and what was happening in my life. Now I do.

I owe a lot of my changes to my wife Mai Mai. She would constantly tell me, “Honey, if you think negative, you get negative. If you think positive then you get positive”, to which I’d reply to her, “Bullshit”. Fortunately for me, I do listen to her now and what she says is 100% true.

Those of you wondering if watching The Secret has made me a millionaire and I know you’re snickering while you ask this. The answer is not yet. Do I think I will become abundant, the answer is, of course. But the movie was only a start of my changing. When I watch it now I see where it is more of a feel good movie but it got me on this road that I’m on now and I’m grateful for it.

After watching The Secret my hopes and spirits were high, like the high I felt when I first quit drinking more than 20 years ago. But like when I quit drinking, both highs had to come down. I landed back on earth with a smooth landing but the big difference is that I want to change my thinking and change my life! I don’t want to go back to the Negative Nick I had become. Now don’t think that I’m as happy as a door to door religious preacher, because I do have some bad days. But nothing like before when I could take a bad mood and sit in my own shit for weeks at a time feeling sorry for myself and blaming everything and everybody for all my problems. Now I know that everything, and I mean everything that happens in my life is my own doing. Sometimes that sucks and means I’d better pull my head out of my ass because it’s only going to make things worse with my thinking and behaving that way.

For me, learning to change my thinking meant that I also had to open my mind to things that I would have laughed at before. One of the strangest ways of changing my life that took me a long time to accept, was this source called Abraham. I learned of Abraham-Hicks a couple of years ago. When I first got involved in changing myself I did a lot of research on the Law of Attraction. As you know, there are so many people trying to make money off of The Secret that if you Google the movies name you will find hundreds of thousands of sites that so called “experts” are there to help you out and take your money. I found out, the hard way, that there’s more bullshit than there is legitimate stuff on the topic of Law of Attraction. It seems after the movie came out, everybody was a specialist, which as I said, is nonsense, although I think I called it bullshit. Funny thing is, in the back of my mind, I knew that it wasn’t nonsense and that I was on the right path and I wasn’t going to give up.

One name that kept appearing in my searches was Abraham-Hicks. Apparently Esther Hicks was channeling ( a term they don’t like to use at all) source energy through her. She would go into a meditative trance and Abraham would speak through Esther by vibrating thought that was translated into words that the audience would understand. Those of you that know me can probably see the look on my face when I first read this. And you would be right. I thought to myself, “Talk about bullshit! Where did these freaks come from? They must have thought this gimmick up to get on The Secret bandwagon!”

After doing some research, I found out that Abraham-Hicks were in the movie but were cut out after the second release and had been talking about the Law of Attraction before the movie came out and were one of the main people wanted in The Secret because of their wisdom. Well imagine my surprise. So I decided to look into them further. I went to their web site and found out they had a free CD they would send to me explaining all about them. All I had to pay was shipping and handling. After all the cash I had blown on nonsense, I figured what the heck. What’s another $9?

I was excited! Maybe I was onto something hot! I was going to figure out this LOA stuff after all. I popped in the CD and as I was driving down the Interstate I heard a woman’s voice with a really weird accent, almost robot sounding. Man was I pissed! What the hell was this crap? She/He was saying how they vibrate through Esther and that in a nutshell, they know everything. That everything anyone asks for, it is given and that all you have to do is think good thoughts and be happy. Well that’s the abridged version of what I heard. I took the CD out and threw it into the back of my sleeper. But I didn’t throw it away. I was pretty disappointed, to be honest with you. If this is what the Law of Attraction was then I didn’t really want anything to do with it.

So I told myself that all that movie and all the scalpers trying to teach me everything about Law of Attraction was four pounds of shit in a two pound bag. I felt that I had gotten screwed again and what a waste of time and money. I kept reading that there were lots of people like myself who had seen the movie and tried to change their lives but nothing was happening!

So I purchased a CD from Nightingale-Conant from one of the “teachers” of The Secret who promised he had the answer that wasn’t in the movie and that if I purchased his CD then I would have the final piece of the puzzle. Man was I psyched about this. Finally, this “teacher” was going to tell me what was missing! I got the CD and sat in my living room with a pencil (it came with a work book, of course) and put this CD on. There he was, his voice, the “teacher”, going to fill me in on why things weren’t working. I could hardly sit still. It was a 6 CD course with workbook. I sat and listened to the whole program in 1 sitting. I had my computer on and whenever he told me to go to a website, I did. After I had listened to the program and visited the website, I packed it up and sent it back to Nightingale- Conant. The guy was plugging all of his stuff and I didn’t learn the secret that The Secret didn’t teach me. But if I wanted, I could go to his state and pay $5000 to ride in the back of his fancy car and get even more help. It seemed that no matter what I wanted to learn from this guy, I was going to have to dig deep to get it. More bullshit.

In the back of my mind, however, I knew that there was more to life than what was happening now. I quit believing in the church years ago and religion was not something I could relate to. My wife is a devout Catholic and so is my Mom (of course she is, Irish Catholic old school) but it wasn’t for me. I won’t go on my spiel about religion because I know it’s a sore subject but it’s not for me. I do believe in God or a Higher Power if you will. My good friend is an atheist and I respect his beliefs as well. But I knew that there were very successful people out there who followed and believed in the Law of Attraction and I knew that it worked and that it was up to me to find out what the heck I was doing wrong or not doing at all.

As I was cleaning out my semi, I found my Abraham- Hicks CD and decided to give it another try. Again as I listened to this voice and what it was saying, I was having a hard time believing what was being said. How simple it was yet humans had a way of making it harder that it really was. I threw it in the back again but kept it in the back of my mind. I was becoming more open minded a little bit at a time. But I still wasn’t ready to accept A-H.

When I purchased the free CD from Abraham Hicks, I also signed up for their emails. This is where I learned that they had some videos on YouTube.com. When I say some, I mean hundreds. I figured this is where I would do some more research and listen closely to find out that this chick is faking it! I really didn’t believe in their spiel and I was going to call their bluff. I am a pretty smart guy after all. Or so I thought.

I began listening to their videos and the first thing I noticed is that “Abraham” didn’t have that silly accent any longer~ AH HA! SEE!!! I couldn’t wait to pull the rug out from under her…or them….or whatever! I can’t remember the first video I listened to and watched. Here was this woman on stage, barefoot, speaking to an audience on a cruise. She didn’t seem the type to be pulling some stunt like I believed her to be doing, but you never know. After seeing the teacher and his stuff, I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I listened to the question and I studied her responses. She never hesitated or stuttered. She was fluent with her answers and seemed to know what she was talking about. I replayed it again to see if I might have missed something. And again. And again. Nothing. There were more videos and I found another one with a topic that interested me and listened again….and again. Still no sign of acting. I wasn’t 100% convinced, but I was listening and what they were saying was making sense to me. But what they were saying was too simple. All I had to do was think good thoughts, visualize and believe. Then they said something that made me put my guard back up again. They said, don’t believe in the reality that you see in your life now. Believe in the life that you want. Well that sounded kind of hokey pokey to me. So I listened to another video and another. I came to the conclusion that she really wasn’t faking it. But how could source energy (whatever the hell that was) speak through her? And what was all the talk about vibrations? I heard in The Secret that all things vibrate and to get everything a person wanted they had to vibrate in the same way. Weird? Very!

Soon enough I became a huge fan of Abraham-Hicks and still am to this day. I am a believer. I have seen Esther before Abraham took over and she’s a totally different person. Since then I have purchased a few more videos from their web site and they help me immensely. I have also found that there are some huge A-H fans out there and have connected with lots of them through FaceBook. My thinking on life and death have changed. Everything they say makes sense and is much easier for me to swallow than that of the religious sector.

Abraham-Hicks are not my only source of information either. I have become a big fan of Dr. Wayne Dyer as well. There are many others whom I am interested in listening to and learning from in the near future as well. I have since learned that all my older heroes like Jim Rohn (God rest his soul! What a man!), Brian Tracey, Wayne Dyer, Les Brown, Bob Proctor and others all believe and know that the Law of Attraction works…..whether you believe in it or not. And if they believe and they are so successful, then why wouldn’t I? One of the best books I have read is from a man named David Cameron Gikandi titled A Happy Pocket Full of Money. In my opinion, this is the newer and better version of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I highly recommend this book.

Why am I writing this blog? I don’t know. I’ve had a gnawing in the back of my mind for the past few days to write this, so I have done it. There is so much shit on the news and all around us how bad things are today. Worse than the Great Depression, some say. But I don’t believe it. I think people are being mind f***ed by the media which is bringing so much negativity not only here in the USA, but world wide. I quit watching the news so I don’t have to feed my mind with that garbage. There are many people that are making millions of dollars in these “hard times” because they aren’t listening to the nonsense either. If I hadn’t learned what I have over the past couple of years, then the situation I am in now would make me crazy! No job! Bills! The economy! What the hell am I going to do? I would be in a panic. But I’m not. I know that things will work out the way I want them to as long as I believe and take action to make my manifestations come through.

I want you to take a look at your life. If you’ve lost your job, like I have, then look for an opportunity to change what you have been doing. The hardest thing to do, in my opinion, is to do something that takes us out of our comfort zone. I have faith in myself that I can do whatever I want to. My old thinking tells me to get back behind the wheel and make some money. But I know what the end result of that will be and I don’t want it. So I’m listening to Abraham, taking it easy, chilling out. I know what I like to do but my mind says, “You can’t make money doing that. Yet Bob Proctor says that if I do what I love, then the money will come. He’s a multi-millionaire so I think I’ll listen to him rather than someone who is broke and says that it’s not true, go get a real job.

The bottom line is this, and my wife has told me this ever since I’ve met her: Never ever ever give up! You may not believe in the Law of Attraction and you may think that The Secret is a cult and nonsense and you may think that Abraham-Hicks is a fraud. That’s fine, but if you’re not where you want to be in your life now, maybe you should open your mind a bit and invest in yourself. Educate yourself via the Internet, Community Colleges, YouTube.com if you want. But you can’t make a better investment than investing in yourself!

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to leave me your comments. Because even though I am tchanging my life, those that know me know that you ain’t gonna hurt my feelings! Best of luck (you make your own luck, btw) and I hope you prosper and have an abundant life. Because that’s what your supposed to have! It’s why you’re on this earth! Believe it! And achieve it!