A number of my friends, impressed by the transformation they had witnessed in me, have encouraged me to share my story of personal growth and my understanding of the processes that I went through. These friends especially believed that others could learn from the experience of my tumultuous divorce and its aftermath and from the lessons derived from other personal crises. They were acknowledging the fact that in order to move forward on life’s journey toward a new and different destiny of my own choosing that I was obliged to learn and apply an effective spiritual technology that would lead to a greater mastery of self and consequently greater personal power. Without this knowledge, I was destined to repeat the same old patterns of thought and behavior that got me caught up in a crisis in the first place. I listened to my friends and slowly, over time, began to realize that mine just might be a worthwhile story to tell – worthwhile in the sense that if I could help another move beyond a moment of anxiety to experience a state of peace, I myself would feel blessed. Indeed, we all have such worthwhile stories to tell, and the world is enriched by the telling of such stories that come truly from the heart. With the encouragement of these friends, I have written this book to share some of the self-awakening lessons that have enhanced my personal power and made my life an exceedingly more enriched one.

Crisis seems to be an inevitable part of the human condition, and as human beings, we all possess the potential to turn life crises into incredible adventures. Yet, personal crisis is more than something that we just have to get through to survive; I believe we can use it to thrive. Certainly for me, crisis has proven to be an important pathway to personal liberation. I used to think that the best that I could expect was to just get through a difficult time and hope that better times somehow would happen again on their own, that is, if I were lucky. I believed that I just had to bear the suffering of crisis, but since then I’ve learned a time of trouble can truly be an opportunity to get to a much better place in life. Here I’m not talking about a utopia, free from the vagaries of our emotions, but rather a place of personal power where our perceptions of the world change so that we are no longer buffeted about by fear and other negative emotions but rather we are linked to and motivated by sources of strength beyond our individual selves. Thus, situations that seem so burdensome and trying today are turned into opportunities to create the type of life that we all deserve and may desire, but which previously may have seemed so elusive.

When I arrived at that spot where I no longer needed the love of my daughters because the love that I came to feel for myself told me that everything would always be alright for me, I began to disengage in struggles with their mother and my relationship with my daughters began to flourish as never before. When I was in my needy state, I couldn’t really focus on what was around me. My needs so cluttered my perceptions that I couldn’t clearly see the situation of my daughters... 

Once I got to this place where I was no longer needed, where I no longer felt excruciating pain at being deprived access to my girls, this placed my daughters in the position of having to confront and deal with the realities of being denied access to their father. In no longer seeking to rescue and protect them from their reality, I created an opportunity for them to see with new eyes, to change their perception of their reality and to mature. In this regard, I believe that my growth has been an incredible gift to them, and I can credit the painful losses of the custody battles for giving me an incredible gift, for it created an opportunity for me to learn not to love out of a sense of neediness and to trust in the power of love. Sometimes our lessons in life are just very tough ones. This was certainly one of them, but I am thankful for the learning.