Thailand or South America?
I value my privacy, and yet as I’ve been returning to the life of a Wealth Warrior over the past week, I felt it could be quite beneficial to share my journey. I’ve returned to using my Wealth Warrior System, a system for self-guidance designed to keep one continually ‘awake’ to one’s values. As those who may have heard my speech in Vegas in 2001, read my ebook based on the speech or participated in subsequent courses, by ‘awake’ I mean so integrated with one’s values that one naturally feels like living in line with those values from moment to moment–no ‘self-discipline’ or ‘forcing oneself’ to follow through necessary–yet one’s life can come to look extraordinarily disciplined, and mine was. I’m sure I’ll be sharing lots more about that soon.
So, I’ve recently been weighing the decision of where to be for the next few months to write and work. There are good reasons to write from South America as that’s where I naturally feel more self-expressed, appreciated as a man, and alive. I’ll be leading adventures there similar to how I led the VisionForce Safari in Africa in 2010, except this time the adventures will be exclusively for men aiming for wild and transformative experience outside of their native homeland. I’ve noticed that when I’m living there, especially in Brazil, writing comes easy.
But I’ve decided on Thailand for at least another month.
In 2010 my back was not doing so well after years of running and working from a laptop. Later that fall after I had left the US I hurt my back in Belgium and then the next month in Kuwait. To accommodate my back issue I stopped running, and as a partial result put on weight. However I think a lot of the weight I put on started in 2009 when I did intensive work with women and mothers facing divorce and family crisis (a far cry from the Wealth Warrior work I’d begun in 1997 working with young men). During that time I feel I took on a lot of stress as I stood for them, honored them and supported them in standing for their families, while honoring themselves and their man. And this too contributed to weight gain. ‘Weight gain’ – what I mean is blubber. I was perhaps a little chubby in my early high school years, but at no other time in my life. I’ve always been very physically fit, but now in early 2013 the fat remains.
So, my back has challenges, I’m carrying about 30 extra pounds and I do not have the systems and rituals in place that I had in my Wealth Warrior days. The last few years I’ve intentionally not been applying the work I’ve developed over the last 15 years, instead following the advice of an elder brother I respect, who advised me to slow down, let go and allow myself to feel a lot of the deeper shame, the grief and the anger that no doubt is related to my teenage years. So, I’ve been doing that, and intentionally not driving myself, not allowing exciting visions to overtake me and launch me back into a passionate creation work mode and intense exercise mode. It’s been quite healing, insightful, enlivening and relieving in many ways, but the spare tire remains. And it has me looking a lot older than I feel I am.
Well, one thing that is working for me really well here in Thailand is that I can go and get a 2-hour high quality Thai massage at any time for $9-$10. The same treatment in the US would cost me 10 times as much! So, I go nearly daily, and rather than paying $600 per week, I pay maybe $60. What this means is that I can run again AND work for hours on the laptop while recovering and maintaining the integrity of my body, and getting fit.
So, that’s what I’m doing–staying here for at least another month. I love the food here, the place feels safe, the people are kind and it’s inexpensive. I can get a simple, clean efficiency apartment with balcony, internet and electricity for $60 per month. It would be so easy to just retire early here, if one wanted to. Me, I’m getting back to finishing what I started so many years ago.
One of the challenges is that I have practically zero cash inflows now as I’ve purposely cut off all previous forms of income, and over the past few years on ‘sabbatical’ I’ve been purposely working as little as possible, and experimenting with some radical (and powerful) gift-economy models (more on that another time). I’ve got a little cash on hand, and that cash translates to a certain amount of time to get back into business and start things up again. As I’ve mentioned, I’m bringing Wealth Warrior back–this time exclusively for men. And the more money I save, the more time I have to get everything started.
I’m writing this blog post inside of my first Wealth Warrior Ritual of the day, my Wealth Warrior Writing Ritual. I’m stunned at how quickly and how powerfully these technologies I developed so long ago are transforming my life. I’ve often heard it said that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit. With this system it takes far less time, and far less effort, and one can establish far more habits in the same amount of time. And better than just a collection of habits, they are consciously designed to work and flow together to have one living the life they desire. More on all of that soon enough.