Turn It To Gold

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers.

Today I want to talk about turning things to gold. A kind of alchemy.

When our experiences come to us sometimes they’re quite raw and we don’t know how to interpret them in exactly the right way.

With work we can start to see how these experiences are golden.

I will always remember my wing man Adam Bunch who I used to go with to night clubs in Melbourne.

Something I had always appreciated about Bunch was his positive attitude and one night it was very close to the end of the night and I went to talk to this beautiful woman and what happened was I was standing there and I opened my arms.

I guess my energy felt open and approachable enough because she came like running up to me and jumping into my arms.

Running up on me, giving me a huge hug and actually wrapping her legs around me in a very friendly way and then she said, “I’m sorry, I have to go, my friends are leaving”.

And she left and I turned to Bunch and said “that was a bit disappointing”.

And he was like “No you probably made her night, a moment to feel excited enough to hug a stranger. You must have lit her up inside or she wouldn’t have done that.”

I was like “Thanks man”

That was the thing about Bunchy, he always had that way of seeing things in a very positive way. And I guess Bunchy is a person who’s had this practice maybe for 20 or 30 years of trying to see things in the positive and offer words of positive encouragement.

One time I told the story, someone stole my scarf. My friend Maria Paz saw my scar on my forehead I got in a bus crash.

I had to get 16 stitches. I was traveling from Acapulco to Mexico City on bus route to Guadalajara at 3am. Just smashed into the monitor. The bus stopped.

The bus driver had fallen asleep. These guys have long shifts going back and forth twice in a day. A full round trip in a day. Maybe there is two, I forget. The point is they have long shifts.

I told the story to Maria Paz and she said “Oh, Kurt, I am so sorry that happened to you!”

No, don’t be sorry, these are the beautiful things. That’s why I have the scar because I want to remember the experience.

These are things which show life from a different perspective.

Because of that night I am more grateful about every day. I try to be, I try to remember that, look in the mirror and see that scar.

I think life is fragile and I have the opportunity today no matter how small it may be.

And so I turned that experience into gold. We all have that potential.

Many know the work of Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.

And he says every adversity contains the seed of an equal or greater opportunity. Or an equal or greater advantage is what he says.

Hill describes this story about his deaf son. The mother is scared and shocked, thinking how is my son going to get on in the world?

Almost from the beginning Hill thought this was a blessing, albeit a blessing in disguise.

He’s going to have this different perspective of the world and it’s not going to be a disability, it’s going to be an extra ability. In some way, this is going to make things better for my son.

And he tells some stories, I forget the details. Like where his son would clamp his teeth on the edge of the dental drill to listen to records because there’s a certain resonance and sometimes people can hear through their teeth.

Also tells a story about his son leaving late at night to sell newspaper to return home in the early morning, just being so proud. Those aren’t closely related to deafness.

My friend Kari is deaf and I met him at a card table playing poker. He’d do these things to communicate before I could do sign language or we’d write to each other.

This fellow, I like this fellow. A good friend and a positive in my life and it would fascinate me how he got through the world and later went to travel to his home country of Cambodia. Or Japan or other places where he didn’t know how to write the language or even speak it, finding his way around.

Also at the poker table, so many people say so many things to try to lead us off the path, to try and deceive us. He didn’t have the problem, he could see them more directly and in many ways that was an advantage for him

Its funny of course people would come up to him and say I’m so sorry your deaf. We don’t always realize sometimes people like being like that. We might perceive something as a limitation but these limitations properly understood are perfections.

If we can just see, if we can just see things in a certain light.

This came to me in meditation, I was trying to think of things to talk about on the podcast.

And this phrase came to mind, golden receivers. As if our minds are bowls and whenever experiences enter them, they turn to gold. When always and when we can understand them and interpret them appropriately.

Take the time to distill them, to mediate on them. Perhaps inside always the seed of something beautiful.

I’ve never found it to fail.

When I meditate on an experience which at first seems ugly, later I discover it is something wonderful, a blessing.

Thank you so much for listening, thank you for investigating and being conscious about your own adversity or perceived adversity.

Thank you for performing that alchemy, have a wonderful day.