Tag Archive for: freedom

Just a quick message today before I go fire up the grill with my brother-in-law and jump in the pool with my son:

242 years ago, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the sovereignty of the thirteen united States of America from the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, listed colonial grievances against King George III and asserted an individual’s natural rights:

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Today, I believe that no matter where you come from, you and I are entitled to the same natural rights now more than ever.

Though (some) governments certainly serve a few useful purposes (sometimes), bloated bureaucracies tend to prioritize their own survival above your individual freedoms, no matter what the cost.

When it really comes down to brass tacks, it’s up to you to protect yourself, your family, your empire, and your freedom from those who would try to take them away from you. As history has shown many times, nobody else will hold them sacred for you.

There may come times when you will have to FIGHT for your life, FIGHT for your liberty, and certainly you will have to FIGHT for your own happiness.

Freedom is a paradox, because it comes with RESPONSIBILITY. You are responsible for defending your own life when the rubber hits the road, and you are responsible for the consequences of your chosen pursuits.

So while true freedom is the opportunity to make your own choices, living a truly free life REQUIRES taking full responsibility for your choices, your behaviors, and your results.

And if you don’t like your current results — your current reality — there is nobody to blame but yourself.

This can be a hard pill to swallow. Believe me, I understand.

When my business collapsed and my world came crumbling down, I wanted to blame ISIS. I wanted to blame repugnant sex traffickers and martial law in my wife’s home country. I wanted to blame Homeland Security for insisting that we uproot our family and relocate internationally in order to get travel documents. I wanted to blame the partner who betrayed me and cooked the books.

I wanted to blame my mother for getting cancer. I wanted to blame my wife for giving me a child. I almost wanted to blame my son for scratching my cornea during roughhousing and landing me with an eye infection that took me out of commission for a month.

Hell, I even wanted to blame the flesh eating parasites burrowing intolerably slow and painfully through my feet.

I was laying in the fetal position on the tile floor of my 4-bedroom condo in Chiang Mai, Thailand one night cursing God Himself.

But the Truth was that too much avoiding responsibility caught up with me.

It was me — I had made every choice that got me there on that cold hard floor, pulling my hair out, crying and throwing a tantrum like my toddler.

Declare Your Individual Freedom

I used to think that chasing “freedom” meant running away from responsibility.

For 10 years I wanted nothing but more time freedom, more financial independence, and more freedom of location.

And I got it. For almost a decade, I lived in 8 countries across four continents.

I built and experimented with five small companies. We sold two of them.

I dated women from around the globe, and enjoyed all kinds of travel misadventures across at least 35 countries. But I allowed myself to get too comfortable, I let myself become a “victim” of my own success, and bought into the lie of the “four hour work week”, pleasure seeking, fleeing from commitments, and basically drank and smoked away a literal fortune.

In the pursuit of riches, I wrecked my health, and then I carried on abusing my body probably out of sheer self-hatred.

But it was when I realized my real RESPONSIBILITY to show my son a good example, to do my damnedest to be a good role model, to teach him everything the world will neglect to teach him, to be involved in his life and guide him any way I can, that was when my own results began ever so slowly to turn around.

In order to achieve true freedom, YES, you must cultivate an ability to control your money, control your time, and eliminate the mindset that you are subject to any higher authority (at least not here on earth).

But avoiding responsibility, perhaps counterintuitively, will ensure your failure. It will ensure that your health and vitality go down the drain. It will ensure that you create strained, stressed, and broken relationships. It will ensure you create chaos all around you.

You must take RESPONSIBILITY for your Mindset, your Health, your Wealth, and your Relationships.

This Fourth of July, take stock of where you’re at, appreciate what you have, and accept radical responsibility for your current situation. Some things will be great. Others may be a trainwreck.

This is not about guilt or shame. We are all screwups.

For my fellow Americans, be grateful that you ARE the privileged 1% of the world. The USA is an imperfect mess, but it’s one of the safest, most functional places in the world. For my Canadian friends to the north, happy belated Canada Day to you!

Wherever you are, I invite you to accept the challenge to take responsibility for cleaning up whatever areas of your life that are lacking, to realize the necessity for balance in your life, and how your mental health, your fitness, your finances, your spirituality and your connections with people around you are all interconnected.

If you go through life on autopilot, chances are you are going to let at least one of these dimensions of your life completely deteriorate.

So take responsibility to give each of these areas of your life attention, to go through your life consciously, to craft a plan for how you can maintain balance in your life, and always be vigilant looking for opportunities where you can seize MORE responsibility for things around you.

Declare YOUR personal freedom from the mistakes you have made in the past, from your baggage, from your stories, and FIGHT for your life like the men who built America had to.

Declare your freedom from the TYRANNY of victimhood. Choose not to accept the role of “victim” in this life. There is nobody holding you down. Choose to rewrite those negative stories. Trust me.

It is Time for You to Choose FREEDOM, Sovereignty, and Personal Responsibility.

If you are ready to commit yourself to a higher purpose, to double down on yourself, and have accountability, systems, and structure to help you find balance across your Mindset, Health, Wealth, and Relationships, join us as we embark upon a 12-week Dragon-slaying challenge inside the Foundry accelerator this month to turboboost your progress toward your dream goals in Q3.

Normally $333, you can register for one of our remaining 12 lifetime seats in the program today for just $76! Nearly 80% off, in honor of the Founding Fathers (1776).

America homecoming

Luang Prabang

As I sit looking out the window at the mountain, bathed in heavenly rays of light as the sun begins its journey downward to slowly disappear over the summit, I face a situation I have put myself in what feels like a million times before.

Do I join the friend who has been making promises for weeks up in the beautiful mountainous countryside? Or do I endure the long and painful journey back to the big bustling city?

Robert Frost’s words come to my mind:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

At 33, I’ve finally learned about myself that I’m not a city slicker.

But Bangkok, in all its sweaty, greasy, seedy glory, is one step closer to Home. One step closer to my beloved family, who are are on a terrorist-infested tropical island far away.

Freedom means accepting responsibility, and the necessity for making painful decisions.

God only knows what I’m missing. What I may have learned, or who I could have become. I will never know.

But it’s time to stop chasing, and take one step closer to where my heart is, rather than one step further away.

What has been happening recently in North Dakota is despicable:

Since at least March, local Native American populations have been protesting against the new Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens to potentially poison their clean water supply, and disturb the local natural resources and sacred tribal lands.

And over the weekend, militarized law enforcement were joined by US armed forces deployed on Native land, and State oppression of those brave individuals defending their own sovereign land has turned brutally inhumane.

Thursday, the “North Dakota Tactical Operations Center” rolled out the Humvees, armored cars, riot police and snipers, and violently attacked the Native Water Protectors with Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) directional sound cannons, rubber bullets, tasers, beanbag shotgun rounds, flash grenades, and batons to force their way onto tribal land and allow the oil pipeline construction to proceed.

Alarmists in the media have been doomsaying that, if elected, Donald Trump threatens to bring tyranny and outright fascism to the United States. But, just watch these videos and witness how, our country has already become a tyrannical power over recent decades, with no meddling from Trump yet whatsoever.

Morton County, ND – Over two hundred multi-state law enforcement and National Guard personnel attacked water protectors gathered on unceded 1851 Oceti Sakowin treaty land just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the late morning of Thursday, October 27th. [Unicorn Riot]

Please click here for the full report, and Unicorn Riot’s ongoing coverage of the story.

Watching these images should make the stomach turn.

Who do these “peace officers” work for? Certainly not for the American people anymore.

When Big Oil corporations essentially pressure the government to use law enforcement and military as their own private security forces, something is very wrong.

This is the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of in 1961, hard at work administering injustice on behalf of the oil companies and the corporatocracy.

From a certain perspective, it could almost be said that the next civil war has already begun, as the United States government has decidedly turned against the American people and is attacking its own citizens on many fronts recently — not just against the Sioux tribes, but against all of us who value our sovereignty, our clean air and water, and who revere the land as sacred.

“Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed.” -Charles Hugh Smith

In my research about the Dakota Access Pipeline and other very disparate topics, I serendipitously came across the following, years-old wisdom, attributed as a “Message from the Hopi Elders” of Oraibi, Arizona — strangely enough as far back as the very early 2000s.

The message’s real origin is disputed, and may very well be misattributed. But whatever its true origins, I believe there is still great value to be drawn from this message at this moment in history:

A Message from the Hopi Elders

You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour.

Here are the things that must be considered:

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!

There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel like they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off toward the middle of
the river,
keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

See who is there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all
ourselves!
For the moment we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lonely wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

The Elders,
Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation

Again, this is of dubious origin and you can read here for more discussion about it’s validity. But it led me to something even more important in my search for the original source of this passage: a very real message from Sioux Elder Red Crow about the sacredness of the land.

Floyd Red Crow Westerman was known for years as a renaissance man, for his many talents, dedication and passion. A member of the Dakota (Sioux) nation, he was an accomplished actor on the big and small screen for over 20 years, a political advocate for Indian and environmental causes worldwide and a popular singer/songwriter, performing with such stars as Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley and Kris Kristofferson to name just a few.

Living Spiritually-Connected

This from the Swedish documentary Jakten på Undergångsmyten, about Hopi prophecy, a decade old:

Perhaps we should be reminded to listen to our elders here, who often may have important perspective and wisdom that the younger generations lack.

I recommend you learn more from Red Crow.

Back in Morton County, North Dakota, it is being reported that the “Great Herd” of the Buffalo Nation and even the eagle and falcon spirits have recently visited the Sioux water protectors:

There are those who say that the Sacred is watching what’s unfolding in the Dakotas, and even the animal spirits are showing their support for the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors.

Meanwhile, President Obama is tweeting about baseball.

“…how apathetic and casually accepting most of us are of the most silent war ever waged, not on climate, but on people and on the planet.” Chelsea Rustrum

Nobody is going to fix the world for us. You must be the Hero of your own story, be a champion for your own community, and have the courage to do what is best for your loved ones and those around you. This also means you must live more spiritually-connected, and preserve the land, the clean air and water that sustains you. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

That is why I applaud the bravery of the Water Protectors, and I pray for the Sioux Nation and others in the Dakotas fighting to protect the land. Talk about Real-Life Heroes! In the face of overwhelming threat of force, they are standing their ground at Standing Rock reservation.

The rest of us cannot allow this kind of behavior from our government. They’ll be coming for YOU soon enough if we let them treat our Native American brothers and sisters this way.

Click here to support the indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Click here to learn more about the Dakota Access Pipeline background and rising tensions.

There have been many many attempts to polarize us in recent years. Black versus white. Red versus blue. Men versus women. Rich versus poor. Police versus civilian. But when we stand united in what is universally right, we can become an unstoppable force for good, for truth, for love.

united-movement

My sincere gratitude to all the indigenous peoples of the world, who help serve as valued and responsible stewards of the Earth, important spiritual guides and shamanic conduits to the transcendent.

The buffalo run free again! #NoDAPL

This discussion has been months in the making. Clay Collins caught my attention long ago with his writing, and his vision for a world where every person can be their own boss and secure a healthy income while offering their greatest gift to the world. Today he’s dedicating his attention to teaching people how to build purpose-driven freedom businesses.

Clay is an expert marketer, with solid knowledge of market research, testing, keyword research and SEO. But he’s also someone who uses this stuff for good. Clay Collins is someone who has built his life and his business around helping others find their purpose.

His writing has always been really compelling, but I feel like I’ve watched him find his true passion over the last year or so and the quality of his message has become truly captivating. Finance Your Freedom evolved into Project Mojave, where Clay and a faculty of awesome folks like Jonathan Mead, Laura Roeder, Johnny Truant, Michael Martine, and Dave Navarro have helped tons of people turn their passion into profitable businesses that can take them out of the 9-to-5.

Update: You can now find Clay providing his incredible marketing strategies at LeadPages and with The Marketing Show podcast.