Purpose Lab

"The biggest challenge in following my passion was listening to myself because the environment of teachers in which I found myself and society sees success in the amount of learning of boys and girls. It was always something that I felt inside myself but could not justify or find a way to explain. I always felt like my work was correct for my environment, but it only addressed one part of the child, which was the intellectual part. It was very difficult to listen to myself and say, well for me this is not right, and I'm going to look for someone, somewhere, who must have thought like me before. Steiner says that freedom and the need to belong are sometimes opposites. So I can't be free if I want to be valued. What was valid in my environment was not what I freely felt inside, so that contradiction, I think, was the biggest challenge."

There's a certain spirit where you just say, 'This may not work, but I'm going to do it anyway.' There's a sense when you're doing something that it may not work, but you do it anyway. Whatever I was really into, I would just go do it, and I didn't care what anyone else thought, because often people would just say, 'You're crazy.' When I started doing What the Bleep, I talked to people in the movie industry, and they all just rolled their eyes. Before that, I had written software and had computer companies, which is where I got the money to make the movie, and they were like, 'Oh yeah, another Silicon Valley nerd who thinks he can make movies,' and they just rolled their eyes. I was like, 'Okay, whatever,' and I just went on. I didn't care what other people thought. We got What the Bleep done, and of course, we showed it to distributors, but no one would distribute the film, so we did it ourselves. No distributor would touch it. At that point, it was like, 'Well, I guess we're going to distribute it ourselves.'

"This was the win. But for me, it was a personal challenge because of how things are. It was living day to day during the economic crisis, having to reinvent myself somehow, to keep going creatively, to keep believing in my dreams, to show myself in a competition where people were also doing the same. It was a challenge for myself to remember that this is what I want to do, that I want to make a living dancing. I remembered why I wanted to pursue this and it activated me to work harder for it. It was a wake up call to go all in at that moment."

I think we need to be brave, be courageous. We have to be brave to serve love. So yeah, right now I'm on the path of my journey where I'm working on being brave, to live my life courageously and to fully trust my path. But imagine if we all courageously were on our path and we all served our purpose and we all struggled together but we kept going and we just reminded one another that it's possible. You're going to do this. It's okay. Keep going, keep going.

And so I made a decision and I jumped ship with the intention that I was going to give myself one year to dabble in three potential careers that called to me. After five years there, I jumped ship again, but this time I didn't have a plan. For those who are still searching, I would recommend number one, have courage to take a leap. If you are still holding on to the safety of other things, it doesn't leave a lot of space for you to really be in discovery. You have to have enough faith to let go a little and make the space for the leap, even if you don't even know what you're leaping to.

"For those who feel stuck or stagnant in their life's journey, who are looking for their purpose, I would say firstly, do your very, very best to let go of that voice that says, oh, it's going to take a long time to find it, oh, I may never. The fear voice, just find the courage, even for one hour, to let go of that fear voice and then dream into something. Trust that it can happen instantaneously. You can be re-sparked instantaneously, so be listening, give yourself creative gifts to put yourself in a space where you might just be."

Oh, there were endless roadblocks along the way in this. Professors in my psych department, many of them were rat runners. They were behaviorists. They didn't believe in experience. They didn't believe in consciousness. So they didn't like me. They hated my guts. I wanted to do brainwave training there. Permission to use the electrophysiologic equipment denied. Nobody who's interested in consciousness, he wrote, could possibly be serious about pursuing a degree in physiological psychology. However, if you will abandon this nonsense and submit to me, I will design a program of research which will lead to a PhD. And I looked at it, I almost laughed. My thesis advisor scheduled my public defense for a time when the two most hostile professors were leading seminars and were not able to attend, and so they sent hostile questions, but you answer the question and then there's no hostile follow-up.

When you've lost your entire identity, you've lost every solid structure in your life, and you're figuring out what's next. There was no fear of taking risks because I thought I was not good at drawing people. I decided to go to a coffee shop in Bainbridge Island outside of Seattle and draw people at a coffee shop in public. It's important to push ourselves beyond our comfort zone. I took something challenging and decided to do it in front of people just for fun and just to feel that push for myself. The biggest fear that I had when living my purpose was being alone. But that wasn't true. I have found the love of my life. By not settling in the past for something or someone that I thought was going to be the end for me, I took a risk of being alone to find love. I took a risk of turning down a safety net of a job to become an entrepreneur. I've turned down all of these safety nets, options that were easy but didn't feel right in my soul. I knew there was more, so I pushed myself to the unknown, to the beyond.

Many people don't have the opportunity to think about what they actually want to do. They pick a college major for money and security. Fear is embedded in that conversation: fear of instability, fear of what society will think, fear of embarrassment. Many parents would think, 'My son is a yoga DJ or a yoga musician? Is that real?' But my parents are proud. They see me showing up and pursuing this path. Most people don't have that support and are confined by the expectations and fears instilled in them. The financial abundance and other rewards are byproducts. You do not have to strive for them. They naturally occur from showing up and serving the community, from being the purpose. You are the purpose. That is fulfilling to me. That is the feeling that fills my heart, knowing that impact is occurring regularly.

As a musician, I would say the largest struggle is where to focus. When you start off, you're kind of by yourself, and you don't really have a clear north star or plan laid out. The struggle is time, like how to invest it. I struggled with that at the beginning, but then I discovered the human design system through Greenheart, Laura, and Emanuel. I learned that I'm a projector, and my opportunity is to be open to invitations rather than push my agenda into situations. I learned this about myself in 2013. The stress of trying to make something work went away, and I became receptive. I put my energy into what I was invited into and went full force into that rather than looking elsewhere. It's like dating someone, just date them really well rather than looking for the next person or what else is out there. If that evolves, that's okay. You just go full into the relationships or opportunities that are present, and other opportunities notice, hear about, or get referred to you.

In astrology, we see through people's charts that their purpose, their destiny, is 95% of the time something that most people resist. Your life won't happen. It won't work. You won't find satisfaction if you're not following your north node, your north star, your purpose. The reason people resist that for the most part is because it's uncharted territory. It's that fear of the unknown. There is no familiar sense of that path. So deep inside there is a deep knowing. We're all born with that sense of inner knowing, but then we deny it because it's uncharted territory. My greatest challenge in following my purpose, I would say, is the fact that it was my purpose. Because I'm so familiar with how this works, and I see this, it repeats in everybody's life. Because it's your purpose, it's also your greatest challenge and it is about getting outside your comfort zone. When we step into the unknown, this is where evolution happens. So my greatest challenge was to step into the unknown and say this is non-negotiable. Either I keep denying it, putting it off, and continue being sad, with all this repressed goodness inside of me that knows it's there and needs to come out, but I'm not allowing it to. Or I face my fears and I do it. That's what I chose to do.

When I was deciding whether or not to become a psychologist, I was offered a semester long internship at Sydney Children's Hospital in Australia, working with kids with cancer. The hospital was located right on Bondi Beach, which is one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. I did not know if I was cut out for the role of helping kids with cancer. I had never met a child with cancer. It felt really overwhelming. It felt really scary. When I got to my internship and I was looking down the road at the beach, I thought to myself, I can either go to the most beautiful beach in the world or confront all of the horrors that come with working in a hospital. That was a decision point for me. I could have made the decision to skip out, not face my fears, not be of service, and not be honest by not honoring my commitment, and just skip out. That was a pivotal moment for me, where I made the choice to walk into that hospital and see what was in store. I thought to myself, whether or not I personally face this, these kids are going to be in this hospital, and they are either going to have someone there to help them through it or not. That was a very sobering moment for me. I think that it essentially changed my life, because that was the first really hard decision I made up until that point that felt cogent and aligned. It felt loving. It felt truthful. It felt like it was being of service. AI is the wild west. There are currently no consistent regulations about what we can do with AI. A million things could go wrong. But I got quiet and listened to what was coming to me intuitively, which was that this is going to work.

I feel envy, and for that you need to have real guts and courage and say, yes, I feel envy. What can I do to change this? I take care of myself. I need to love myself. I need to take care of myself with food, exercise. I need whatever your temple needs for you to feel complete, but for you, not for others, for approval, because that is an emotional void, simply so that you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, 'Wow, today I feel great.' At that very moment, you automatically step into your own darkness. The darkness truly hurts. You cry, you scream, you vomit, etc. Once you expel all of that, your organ begins to heal.

It took a hard and challenging experience for me to book a one way flight to Alaska. The new dream only revealed itself after I had accomplished my current dream. I vividly remember telling my dear friend Cameron about my dream. I was excited and nervous. I shared with him that I wanted to go to space, that I felt it strongly even though I did not fully understand it. He told me that we were going to co host an inner and outer space themed dinner in Los Angeles. Cameron put me on the spot. He stopped everyone, made a toast, and in the middle of it said, 'Well, the reason why we're here today is because my friend Yasmine, who's also my co-host for this dinner, has an important announcement and dream she wants to share with all of you.' My heart stopped. I could not believe he was doing that. I thought, 'Oh my god.' But at the same time, as the fear came up, I realized this is the moment, this is the moment when we reveal our dreams, when we let the world know our dream and maybe they can help us. And I did. I courageously shared about my upbringing from Morocco to the 50 states, being in Alaska, and how we got here. I shared my dream, and it was a life-changing moment.

Living my purpose has had other effects. I've learned as a commanding officer in the Navy and got a lot of great leadership training from the military the importance of walking the talk and taking my own medicine. I'm constantly in the process of honing, evaluating, and updating my purpose over time and trying to find bigger, more effective, more challenging, more impactful ways of living that purpose. Which means I make myself nervous a lot. The sources where I get my information about my purpose make me very nervous with the demands they place on me, which is why I'm going after country purposes. Part of me wishes I were just working with companies all the time, finding their purpose. That would be so much easier than going out to try to find countries that want to find their purpose. No one's doing that. That's a completely new market. I have to go create the idea in people's minds before they would even want to hire me to do it. Huge project. But really interesting, super purposeful. For me, modeling the courage to keep leaning into bigger and more challenging versions of my purpose has been really inspiring to the people in my community.

News and features about alternative health therapies proven to work by science

"If you're creating and talking about a new paradigm, the scientific community, the standard scientific community, is not going to hug you back. They are going to say critical things without really understanding. My field has been said to be nothing more than Star Wars. It's got 400 plus scientific references, it's just in a paradigm that the old paradigm doesn't yet understand but is coming into understanding now. I wrote that book 25 years ago. We have a magazine called What Doctors Don't Tell You, and we write about what works and what doesn't work in conventional and alternative medicine. Occasionally we get skeptic organizations trying to shut us down and try to take us out of newsstands and all sorts of things like that. We've learned these people are not going to hug back, and you have to stand up and fight for yourself sometimes, which we have, and we've prevailed."

"People say, why are you not just doing money, why do you not focus on having a house and enough money for your retirement, you are careless. You are careless because you are not focusing on making money and you are doing so many things. I will tell you, money is not the most important thing. I am meta weaving a movement, so I have to work on weaving many disciplines. A friend once told me, your problem is that you are in the believing edge. You are too ahead, nobody sees what you are doing, nobody understands what you are doing. He gave me good advice, take some steps back, move to the living edge, that is when you become famous and wealthy. But for me, that is still being in the comfort zone, and we do not have time."

"One of the things that the person who led this purpose method said is, if your purpose doesn't scare you a little bit, it's not your purpose. You definitely want to have a little bit of, oh gosh, I don't even know if I could do that, and then you're on the right track. While one person may have a download that their purpose is to start a multinational NGO that feeds and clothes millions of people, or to stop wars from happening, another person's purpose might be to replace the tiles that have worn away from their child's school. The scale is not relevant in purpose territory."

"I think it's really scary to try to find your soul's purpose. Everything around us, even if you do a lot of work on yourself, is telling you to be something, to buy something, if you have all of this, if you have these people in your life, you're going to be someone, and then you're going to feel better about yourself. When you're doing a lot of work on yourself, you're constantly dipping in and out of, it's not important, it's important, it's not important, it's important. It's really hard. It's a hard journey. I had a shaman tell me once, look, you could do the work, everybody does the work, but the thing is, it's not to get rid of all of it. I think if you have thoughts like these, they don't go away, even when you try to fit in."

"That is when I started having these downloads. When I started to move and lean in instead of feeling sorry for myself and shutting down, but courageously leaning in and saying, yes, doors are slamming, and I am going to sit here, I am going to sit in this, and I am just going to see. We held up a flag and we said, let's shift the company's purpose. We have to make films that awaken the human spirit. We declared it. We started speaking on panels at Illuminate, then we were invited to other panels, and we went to India. We started collecting people from around the world that were part of this movement. Owning it instead of denying it, owning it instead of running away from it because it was scary."

"I don't know if you know or not, but I was part of 9/11. My department was the owner of the World Trade Center. The psychological effects of that were tremendous. For 18 months, nobody had even one day off at all, except if you had to go to a doctor and show a note. Everybody had to work, and there were no exceptions. The psychological aspects of being a police officer, plus my job wasn't the conventional neighborhood officer. As a police officer in New York at the airport, you're working at the gateway to the United States, where people from around the world come, so you have to have the mindset of being able to work with all nationalities, all different beliefs."

"What advice would I have for people looking for their purpose? When you want to run from it, it's calling you. Answer the phone. It's like, I'm trying to get a hold of you. Come on, you've got to make an effort. Wake up, grow up, clean up, show up. To show up, to open up, to lift up."

What's the secret? Maybe the producers of this should go to Nike because I'm going to say, just do it. Why at 23 did I call and virtually embarrass myself with another man saying, hey, do you like me, is there a problem? You just do it.

"I also had an internship with a film producer, and of course producing, you think of money, you think of working your way up in a studio, so my parents were kind of swaying me to take that path. But it just didn't feel good, it didn't feel creative enough, it didn't feel like it was nurturing my soul. It felt a little thankless and like it just wasn't quite my place."

"It's super scary to have the courage to always follow it. There were a couple of times when I was making really decent money, great benefits, and things like that, but it no longer felt like the right thing to do. Even when I was going to quit to go to cooking school, I had just been promoted, and everybody thought this was amazing, but it wasn't part of what I really wanted to do. When I left Williams Sonoma, people thought I was crazy because I had just been promoted to VP, had all the amazing benefits, and here I've got two young children to support. But I was like, this is, I can't be all things to all people, and I'm going to figure this out. It's so crazy that the universe kind of shows up for you if you believe enough in yourself."

Despite the fact that I was helping the community in Uganda, or Nakivale, still I was not secure because Nakivale is a small place whereby when you help people, it's not like here when you do good people want to uplift you, people want to see you going to the next level. But there, when you are trying to do good things, there are those who will appreciate you and there are those who will try to deny your rights. There are those who will try to terminate you. So with all those, you saw how insecure I was and my family, and they decided to say, let's take this family to another place where they can be safe.

The formula starts with courage, and that is the courage to face whatever difficulty you are having in your life, to pause, to get curious, and ask how is this going to help me grow, what am I going to learn from this, how am I going to be strengthened by this situation. Of course, Jesse showed us a tremendous example of courage when he stood up to the shooter who had just murdered his principal and guidance counselor right outside of his classroom door and then turned to come into Jesse's classroom. He killed his teacher, who was standing right behind him, and then his gun ran out of bullets. During the short delay, Jesse directed his friends to run, and he is credited with saving many of their lives. So we talk about that courage, that example of courage, that is the capacity for courage that every single one of us has. He was a six year old little boy. Think about that. We all have that capacity, and that is the capacity to stand up and face difficulty, uncertainty, doubt, and feeling like we are not worthy.

"I just kind of stepped out on a limb, dove off that cliff, and it worked out. That is part of love coming out of you too. It's your creativity, it's God's creativity, it's coming through you as well. It's your inspiration, something inspiring you, and you're able to then inspire outward."

The biggest challenge to living my purpose was allowing myself to believe it wholeheartedly so that it could stand up against what other people might shoot down. It is one thing to have these experiences with these kids, to hear telepathically and see multidimensionally. It is another thing to put that information out into the world and have naysayers suggest that it could not quite be possible, when in your heart of hearts you know that it is.

"I think people can just start to live who they want to be, and a lot of that takes a lot of fearlessness and just committing to it. I'm never sure we're going to pay the rent. I know if that time is coming soon, but I'll get to the end of a month and just be like, we don't have rent, but it'll come. I never feel the anxiety. Tomorrow isn't promised, and you have to live with that as a mantra. What's the worst that can happen? I still have the same level of health. I'd still have the same friends, my family would still be there. All the things that matter would still be there. Failure is awesome. Every time we fail, we build ourselves into the person we're supposed to be."

"In my difficult times, back in my childhood, I had hard times when I had to become independent really quickly. At the age of 16, I had to provide for myself, live in a different place, and then that city became a different country. It was challenging, and with that, I had to discover myself. I didn't know who I was, so it was an interesting journey. It was very challenging but interesting, and only later I could conclude this was a great, great time for me, so my travels are actually my teachers. Whatever happens in life, good or bad, it's all needed, it's all important, it shapes us, it helps us to determine who we are."

There was great fear at times. Some of my colleagues in my business and real estate referred to me by saying, well, what happened to you, you are one of those now, Adam. There was the breakdown in my own family unit, my belief systems, to adopting myself into the human family as being part of that and not being separate from that. So it was quite a journey. And of course, I am still living in it. And the more I am in it, the more I recognize that I really do not know much at all.

"I had a five-year-old. I was a single parent, and it was at that moment I had to decide, do I go after my dreams, or do I continue to just hold a job and take care of my child. Every day I kept thinking, if I don't take this opportunity, will it ever come around again? I tapped into my village, my support system. I asked my family, my mother, and my great-grandmother at that time, are you all willing to assist me by helping to see after my daughter while I go away for four months on tour in Europe? It went well, and I never looked back. I have been touring my daughter's entire life. My daughter just turned thirty-three."

To give context in terms of obstacles, I think finding purpose was about getting out of my own way. I had really self-destructive thoughts for most of my childhood and adolescence, paralyzing thoughts like, who am I to do this? I had real impostor syndrome. I had to get that cracked open through a project. I did a film, and I was literally shaking the night it came out because I had never put myself out there like that. Thankfully, it was received really well, and I had this moment of going, I know people like what I make. Get out of your own way. I sat up at 2 in the morning and I wrote myself a letter as though I was 85, and it made me think about whether I was brave enough to tell the stories I wanted. Did I actually keep hiding behind my own insecurities and my thoughts, or did I seize this beautiful, precious life that we get in all the space and time? Come on, get over yourself, say what you want to say. That stayed with me, and I'm still doing that, still battling that sometimes.

"Human selves are always two steps forward, one step sideways, one step backward, up and down and around, but that whole process, when you're in it, can be incredibly confrontational: the call, the fall, the rise, the grace. When you're in the middle of it, it can be incredibly lonely and incredibly challenging at the deepest soul level. I've experienced that in different ways, and yet when you zoom out and look at it at a larger picture, you can just see grace, beauty, and destiny. That's all you see on the other side of the tapestry. It's messy with all the strings, but you turn it around and you see this extraordinary, beautiful picture."

"It was the elected official from the government agency, and he said, look, a particular political party is having a lot of problems with the fact that I have a psychic on staff, and somebody who talks to dead people. Suddenly I felt an inspiration, and I said to him, I will make this easy for you, consider this my resignation. He said okay. I hung up my cell phone and looked at Rocky, and I said, I just quit the practice of law. She said, Mark, look around, where are you. I said, Harvard. She said, and what are you doing in an hour. I said, giving a talk on the afterlife and signing copies of my new book. She said, do not you think you are exactly where you are supposed to be."

"The most challenging moments I have had in my career was when my research revealed the new science that my colleagues did not understand. Everybody was into genes, genes this, genes that, all the money was going to genes, and I am the only guy standing there going, I do not think that is true. My colleagues looked at me like I was a crazy person. I actually felt for a while that I might be crazy because everyone else was against my whole belief system. I even went back to my graduate school and asked one of the world's top cell biologists, tell me what is wrong with my idea. He said, it is too simple. I actually laughed out loud in his face. I said, Lenny, let me tell you, the first week in graduate school I was taught Occam's Razor, the simplest hypothesis is the best hypothesis. I said, if you think it is too simple, I want to thank you for that. 23 years later, finally science caught on and I was vindicated. So I went from crazy person to jubilant person."

Do we have the courage, because there are so many inner obstacles, we all have them. I mean, I still have fear, doubt, all of them, but you have to persevere. Just take the next step. Just take one step. Everyone has the voice of doubt and I still have the voice of doubt, you know. I just meet it very quickly. I'm like, oh, there's that doubt. Yep. Okay, I'm still writing a sentence. Sorry, doubt. Okay. Yeah, it's a terrible sentence. It's a sucky sentence, but I'm still writing it. And maybe the next sentence will be a little better. Heed the call. Heed the call. Have the courage to heed the call.

"My kids were in permanent guardianship, and they told me I would never get them back. I was my own attorney, and I got them back. It took me three years, but I got my kids back. I wanted to start this program for free. One of the things I learned going through this process was communication and my own relationship with money. I had this whole idea that in order to get any kind of good recovery, you had to pay $30,000 a month or so, which I didn't agree with. I think I have confidence. I think I really can make a difference in people's lives. I don't want to seem arrogant at all. I always think I should be doing more."

"The biggest struggle I faced in living my own purpose was coming up against the programming of my family and society about, you know, you're not really that, or you're not meant to do that. People from our family do these sorts of things, or you're a girl or a woman, so you should follow this track. Primarily in my spirituality, it was a big place where that would show up. Those can be some of the most difficult days to overcome. But they can be, and I like to tell everybody, I have done my share of personal growth work by necessity, but it's possible, and if I can do it, anyone can do it. I would love to encourage anybody who's listening to this to do it because it's powerful work."

"When I left Silicon Valley, sold everything, and moved to Boulder, people really thought I had lost my mind. I lost most of the friends I had because this notion of non separation, oneness, diversity, and unity seemed very far out for people in the early 2000s. It requires real discipline. I have had lots of friends all of my life. It was always easy for me to make friends. I went through more than ten years where I did not have many friends because of the spiritual calling I was following. In that same time frame, we did not have a business model that was working. We had people who needed income, and I was the executive director and co-founder. I needed to find a way to get income to these people, so it was very challenging in many ways in the early years of Humanity's Team."

"After numerous disputes and failures, and trying to be a warrior and losing so many things, I had to make a choice. Which door did I want to live in? Do I want to live in the door of fear, suffering, and pain, or do I want to live in this world where I feel more vital? I had to learn that it didn't matter if I wanted or not. I could still be in this place. I could choose to be in this place as much as I wanted to. That's what I'm working on now."