Our device didn’t work.

We had so many returns, we lost our merchant account. 

I had all my money in the company and my attempt to raise the $2 million we needed, got us a mere $100k from ten amazing people who believed in me.

I’m forever grateful for those investors and I’m finally over the guilt I felt for letting them down.

So it was over. 

Now, I just had to get over myself and the deep depression I was in.

My Personal Journey

I’m going to get personal and vulnerable here because I know:

1. 1. This is the life I chose, but this is not who I am, and
   2. I’m not the only one who has gone through this and I’m hoping this will help.

After scrambling to fix everything and realizing I couldn’t, I sunk into a deep depression and self-doubt began to rule my emotions.

Every day I reviewed what happened and thought about what I could have done differently. 

I kept telling myself that I wanted to make a difference in the world, but the truth was I needed to make a difference in myself. 

My depression was selfish and I didn’t have the strength to admit it. 

Then I discovered the meaning of a miracle and the embodiment of angels.

The angels were Greg and Mary Writer.

The first miracle was that they still loved me, despite the fact I had lost their money and our shared vision.

The second miracle was that they were willing to help me as much as they could despite the fact that even I didn’t want to help me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Greg Writer’s generosity with me was not easy for him. He was building a business of his own and could have easily wished me luck to focus on his own projects.

Greg was sent to me from a place I really didn’t believe in at the time.  

I mean I said I believed, but I didn’t really.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood why.  

A Spiritual Understanding of Self

Greg has what I now know is Self Love. 

That’s capital S and capital L.

Self is the realization that you are not a body and a brain but Consciousness connected to everything in the Universe. You can know this with faith, meditation, a mystical experience, or a layman’s understanding of Quantum Physics. 

Self Love is not the same as narcissistic self-love. It’s a universal and unconditional love for all things. An understanding that when you take care of yourself, you’re taking care of others and when you take care of others, you take care of yourself. 

Self Love knows that we are all connected. We are all one thing.

The great mystics have all understood this. 

Jesus said, “what you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you do unto me.”  

Buddha said, “When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.”

Greg, on some level, embodied this in those moments. 

His Love for me changed the world that day. The ripple effect continues through everyone who is touched by what we all create together.

MasteryTV and I kept going, and through it all, we survived to get us to this day.

20 Years Later

Twenty years later, I’m not a kid anymore. 

I’m still the all-out, have fun, big thinking, go for it human I’ve always been. 

But I no longer have any worry or regret and I can find bliss in the moments where I used to find only pain. 

I’ve come to understand why there is evil, fear, and violence in the world.  I understand who I am, where I came from, and where I’m going. 

I practice what I call Radical Acceptance and I’ve had experiences that have changed the fundamental worldview we are all taught to be truth.

Greg and Mary, and later many more Soul Doctors who entered my life prepared me for a mystical experience that gave me solid evidence of who I really am. 

I’d like to say it was a Spiritual Awakening, but it felt more like a Spiritual Remembering.

It’s a long story, which I will tell sometime, but these people and these events inspired me to spread Love even more than I have tried to spread positive psychology.

Before the Mystical Experience, I faced another struggle. 

This one taught me more than I knew existed about health and wellness and the crisis we face today.

Cancer for Healthy People

“You have cancer.”

The words went through me like he was talking to someone else. 

I stared into the abyss and tried to process this.

I’ve been pretty healthy for most of my life.  There have been patches of resistance and laziness, but they don’t last long because I end up feeling horrible. 

I just couldn’t understand how this could happen to me. 

There’s no cancer in my family. 

I work out.

I eat well.

Stress could be the only factor. 

Yup. I had stress. Definitely too much stress. 

And now I’m stressing about the stress. 

“I’m betting this is stress cancer”, I thought. “Cancer for healthy people.”

Of course I wasn’t healthy. Stress management is as important as diet and exercise, but I failed to include it in my daily routine. 

I don’t think we’ve had one video on MasteryTV in 20 years that talked about how unhealthy stress is. You know that’s going to change.

Cancer taught me a lot about myself and even more about alternative medicine and the challenges faced by those who practice and those who search for solutions. 

The Alternative Health Problem

After my diagnosis, I started looking for alternative cancer cures, but I didn’t know who to trust or how much time I had to ‘experiment’ with meditation, herbs, and techniques I had never heard of. 

I had aggressive prostate cancer and according to three doctors, if I didn’t have surgery soon it would, with 100% certainty, spread throughout my body.

Now I had fear on top of the stress.

It was too much.

I decided to put my life in the hands of the best cancer doctors in Boston. 

These medical doctors, nurses, and staff saved my life. I am eternally grateful for them. 

But the treatment and the cure cost me. 

In a big way.

I lost what I thought at the time defined me as a man: the ability to have an erection and produce semen. 

It felt like it was too big of a price to pay.  I was single and childless. 

“Will I be alone for the rest of my life?”

The fear sent me into a deep depression where I was once again saved by a Soul Doctor. This time it was Karl Krummenacher.  

It was one phone call where he listened, offered authentic compassion, and made it clear I could ask him for anything. 

That call was probably a normal call for him. But for me, it was sent from a place I still wasn’t sure existed at the time. 

The depression and the cure are in the past now. 

But the pain inspired me to create a resource of alternative thinkers in medicine, fitness, and wellness so the next person like me has more options. 

The Next Phase

We started a new company called Awetomatic, Inc – Awesome, Automated, Digital Experiences. 

This is the company that built the new platform for MasteryTV. 

Awetomatic built it in a way that we can build a video-based community for any niche, association, company, or community in hours, not months. 

After we launch the next three web communities, we’ll be offering the service to the general public.

The trifecta of human development has always been, Body, Mind, and Spirit. We won’t give everything away but this is what to expect to see from us in the next 90 days.

• • MasteryTV is for the Mind
  • Website 2 is for the Spirit
  • Website 3 is for the Body

The Spirit site is already built and we’ll be launching it very soon. The Body site in preparations, but development will start after we learn from the first two sites.

We’re committed to keeping these sites free communities that have no ads.

We know it takes money to create and maintain world-class sites so we’ve created a unique way for members to support the content providers by purchasing points to donate to them. They can also earn points to donate or convert into cash once they’ve reached $100. 

We’ll recognize and surprise members and content producers at random times to keep everything exciting. 

We don’t know if it will work, but we’re optimistic. 

We’re also going to do something we haven’t done in 19 years, earn money by promoting the courses, conferences, masterminds, and products of the elite experts who produce the best content. 

We have a set of standards we use for deciding what to promote and “do we earn money?” is not in the equation. 

We’ve promoted the best for 19 years and never took an affiliate fee, so you can trust that we value quality and results over any commission we might earn. 

Launching three world-class sites with thousands of videos and dozens of experts across three communities is a monumental challenge, but we’re up for the task. 

This is, by far, the biggest thing we’ve ever done technically and it’s matched by what we believe we can do to help individuals from around the world improve their situation, their psychology, their wellness, and their spirit.

Here’s why we know it will be done.

Love is the Central Force

Once you realize, and experience, that everything is made from love, you have to either pretend it isn’t true, or go with it.

We’re going with it. In fact, 

Love is the central force from which all our decisions are made. 

It’s not money, power, ego, fame, or acquisitions that matter to us. 

It is people.  It’s you.

You are more important to us than anything we own or anything we create. 

We don’t care what you’ve done or who people think you are.

You don’t have to prove yourself to us or to anyone. 

You’re worthy of infinite, unconditional love. You always have been and you always will be.

There is nothing you can say or do that will change that.  

We don’t have to prove this to you because you already know it, you just need to remember it. 

We have all forgotten this truth about ourselves because we’re conditioned by the beliefs of the cult we’re… I mean culture we’re all in.  

When you sit quietly with yourself and go deep enough to forget what the village has taught you to believe, you will find your own beliefs… 

…and they will set you free.

Kindred Spirits, Volunteers, Doers

If you’ve read this far and you feel something, I’d like to think we are kindred spirits.

You may have been with me since 2003 or you may be discovering us now. 

Thank you for your attention. 

If you feel like you’d like to help us out, we’d love to have you.

In fact, we can’t do this without you. 

We need volunteers who can offer 10-20 hours per week for any and all of these sites. 

We need everyone from Loving Service Counselors to Managers to Finance and Tech to Designers to Content Managers to Content Creators and more. 

If you’re great at planning, organizing, and attention to detail… well, you complete me.  I could really use your help.

We’ve accepted no funding for this venture so TBH, the “we” I talk about is mostly me when it comes to execution. The others are my mentors and guides. 

I am lucky to have the wisdom of these mentors and guides.  I’m grateful for their support, but now we need doers. 

Doers who know that love is all there is and are open to learning how to live and work, in balance, with this as our guiding force. 

If any of this excites you and you’d like to help out, please fill out the form below to apply to be a volunteer and I’ll personally get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for your love, attention and kindness.

Tom

P.S. Let’s do this big!  There is magic in thinking big when your driving force is Love. When you discover that you are as big as the universe and that everything is connected you’ll know that together we will change the world.