On my journey and in my practice, I have discovered many superpowers. Some fantastical and others seemingly quite mundane. One of these superpowers is "choice". You have free will and choice. You can choose to believe what you have been told about life and the universe or you can start asking yourself questions. Now, be careful, because once you start asking questions you cannot "unknow" the answers. Also, once you realise you have a choice in life you have to recognise you part in all the experiences you've had and hold yourself compassionately accountable for all the choices you've made and will ever make in your life.

I hold myself accountable for my choices every moment of every day. I question everything and am grateful for the answers I get, however ambiguous they may be because I know in time I will have the full picture.

I spent some 25 years in various entrepreneurial positions connecting and interacting with stakeholders. In 2016 I started asking those fundamental questions and started realising my own role in my life, I turned my attention inwards. I started diving deeper into the human experience, establishing a serious daily meditation practice and devouring books and educational material on philosophy and the human condition. I was seeking answers and exploring my own role in the greater picture.

Inevitable, when doing this, one evolves spiritually and after 2 years of intensive "training" I was deep into it. However, there were pieces missing. I knew a lot, but it was still only in my conscious mind, I hadn't incorporated it, I hadn't grown personally. The revelation at that time was that each and everyone of us have two paths in life, we evolve spiritually, whatever that means to the individual, and we mature as people.

This lead me to a eureka moment in understanding the meaning of life, or one of them anyway; we are to bring the pure essence of ourselves into physical manifestation. The pure essence being what it means to you; your soul, higher self, Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, or simply the new born purity that you once had. Spirituality (as I define it) is worth nothing if I don't embody the purity of my soul essence, then I am bypassing life through spirituality. Once I bring my soul into alignment with my physical experience, I have completed the mission for my personal growth and evolution and can now go out in the world as a role model as to what is possible. Those that are then ready to make that same journey will, others won't and that is fine.

My coaching practice is based on the premise of "pursuing one's passion". In these workshops I've comet to realise that when we try to find the needle in the haystack, the haystack being all the elements of all your experiences in life, there is no point in picking through each straw to determine if it is a needle or lesson to bring forward in life. My practice has been to not try and solve the chaos and determine the purpose of chaos, but to boil everything down to their bare essentials and evaluate the experience from some simple tenants; compassion, acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude. I basically burned down my stack of hay and was left with all the needles that I could just scoop up and move on, leaving the ashes behind.

Life in it self is simple; at some point consciousness enters, or is formed in, the collection of cells that is to become the human in the mother's tummy. Everything beyond that, until the time that consciousness departs the physical body, time of death, is a linked sequence of experiences. Even your "birth" is an experience, not the actual time of your coming to life. Our life is very much a collection of choices, choices as to how we perceive our experiences. For any past, present or future experiences you may change your mind on how your perceive those experiences, i.e. you can time travel to change your life. How is that for a superpower? It is your choice though.

The Alchemy Experience Podcast show will be a deep dive in to life's challenges and see how we might dissect it to find the bare essence of it. We will present, at this time, three different formats:

• Group discussions
• Guest interviews
• Bridging conversations

Group discussions will be recordings with a live interactive audience. I will present a theme and my premise of the theme. Then I will throw it out to the audience to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences. We will deal with differing stances and questions from the audience. Everybody will walk away with some nugget, whether that being a new one or a validation of an existing one. The energies, intelligence and wisdom that come out of these discussions are amazing.

Guest interviews will be your more familiar format of podcasting; I will interview someone with an inspiring story to tell and we will prod it from a variety of angles to find one that fits your model.

The "Bridging Conversations" are very exciting! These are the episodes where I bring on guests of opposing views on a topic. The goal then is to allow these guests to find a common platform of understanding, not to agree with each other or to convince the other person that another is right. This is a practice in civil and compassionate discord, without any judgement or self-centred goal setting. It is a show case for all of us how to become more compassionate in our attitudes towards those that are of differing opinion to ours. It is a lost skill that we all need to relearn.

In closing for this episode, I would like to state; Be the change you want to see happen. No organisations nor institutions, whether they are government, religious, community civic or otherwise, will enact the changes that humanity needs for the betterment of itself. It is not in their interest to do so, because that would mean their destruction. It is up to each and every one of us to work on becoming the best versions of ourselves. This is a grass roots, bottom up, movement. At some point we will reach critical mass, or a tipping point, where the collective becomes a force upon itself, creating peace, balance and harmony for all living things on this planet. If you are listening to my podcast you are experiencing my modest contribution to it.

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