My story starts way before my finding this program and starts way before where I am picking it up now. I really feel compelled to share it all, but I want to keep this short so I will bypass my childhood, reckless and violent early adulthood lifestyle, alcohol and drug abuse, skip over my trip to prison and pick up with a series of losses and pain.
I will start with this; after my maternal grandmother, My Lil' Ma, passed away in 2010, my grandfather, My Lil' Pa, committed suicide in 2011. My father, after years of battling depression and years of medication and treatment, committed suicide in 2012. After my father's suicide, I spun out, got divorced, and blew up my life and my only sister developed a prescription drug addiction that grew into a brutally painful heroin addiction that she struggled with for years. I lost my mother (technically my stepmother but she raised me my whole life, as my biological mother went to prison when I was 4 years old) to brain cancer in 2019 and my sister committed suicide a month later via an intentional overdose in a bathtub full of water.
Having lost my paternal grandmother, My Big Ma, in 2005 and My Big Pa, in 2015, all of this left me as the only survivor of my nuclear family. I have struggled to pull myself all the way up and out of all those things that happened "TO ME" (a victim mindset that I no longer possess). I have done a lot of consciously intentional work on myself since then and through all of that.
Before I entered the CLC program I had gotten back to a miserable place in my life. Stuck, living in a seemingly senseless cycle and not feeling fulfillment or a sense of purpose. I understand all too well how incredibly fragile, precious, and miraculous our Gift Of Existence really is and I felt like I was wasting it by not being of service and not giving back to the world around me. All we really leave behind of ourselves are the parts of our Self we share by teaching, guiding, loving, nurturing, healing, and growing other Souls.
I started this program with merely a vague image of a future fueled by my desire to learn how to help people who were stuck like I used to be. I didn't know how or what it would look like but it was a start, I guess. Throughout the course of this program I have grown myself, gotten myself Unstuck, learned how to, and successfully have, created new habits for health and productivity, and most importantly to me, I have a clearer vision of how to help people, my purpose, my future, my business, my niche and the next steps I need to take to make it all a reality.
I have learned powerful skills in presence, listening, and empathy and have learned the skill of understanding how to help people find their own solutions, without giving my advice, projecting, or leading with my cognitive biases. There really is so much that I learned that there is no way to convey it all here. I just want to express that I have learned to not let the things that happened "to me" dictate my Identity and that I know that I can now go confidently into my future and be fully capable of helping other people grow and move forward in their life.
With Gratitude,
Eternal Student, Forever Learning
Jeremiah