Mind-Body Health: Why I Stay Well and How I Heal

Here is my short answer. I have not had a single sick day since the end of October 2022, and I believe the main reason is what goes on in my mind and in my daily habits, not luck and not the genes I was born with. Here is what I believe, how I got there, and how my view has changed.

The newest piece here comes from a live stream and is about money as much as health. In I Spent $10,000 on Massages This Year and Nothing on Health Insurance I explain why, even while in debt, I keep paying around $200 a week for a 90-minute massage and about $700 a year for a tennis club, while spending nothing on health insurance for myself and almost nothing on restaurants. I eat robotically at home and only eat out on a date. I have not needed health insurance once in a decade, and I treat massage and tennis as prevention: my body stays loose, minor injuries never become major ones, and a massage was the first thing that calmed me down when I was wound tight. I would cut my rent and crash on a friend's couch before I cut either one, because rent dwarfs both.

What I believe now is more careful than what I wrote in 2024, when I argued that the mind drives most of what happens in the body and that you can create your own disease. I still think thoughts and daily choices matter a great deal, but my stories are my experience, not proof for anyone else.

The story I return to most is in my post about not being sick since October 2022. I had booked a flight to help my mother move from Mississippi. The night before, I felt a heavy drain on my energy with no other symptoms, and the next morning I was stuck in bed. Part of me did not want to give up a week of my normal life, so my body gave me the excuse I was looking for. When I admitted I really did want to help her, my energy came back within a couple of days, and I moved about 15,000 pounds of her things over the next week, mostly by myself.

The mind-body thread goes back further. In 2019 I had a cough, and I read in Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life that a cough can be tied to resisting change. I started saying, I am willing to change, and the cough stopped. In a June 2024 post I took that line of thinking furthest, arguing that you create your disease and on some level love it. I would now write that post with much more caution.

The daily practices matter just as much to me. In my 2021 post on physical health practices I wrote that no amount of positive thinking makes up for neglecting the body. My routine included a 90-minute massage once a week, a walk of at least 30 minutes most days, and yoga most mornings. Most nights I am in bed for eight to nine and a half hours. I eat mostly whole plant foods and take only a minimal B12 supplement. For more on yoga, see my yoga page.

None of this would have been possible while I was drinking. At my worst I was drinking a gallon or more of vodka a week, and stopping that damage came first. My recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous is part of that foundation. In my April 2024 post on health challenges I list what changed after I got sober. I went from 250 pounds to 173 and kept the weight off since 2016. My eyesight, diagnosed as nearsighted in 1999, was the one challenge I was still working on.

My thinking took a different turn in 2025. I started massage school that September, and in my September 16, 2025 journal entry I describe questioning my instructor about germ theory and asking an optometrist to lower my prescription to minus 0.75. In a post from the same weeks I describe asking a student to stop stretching me, because I would rather spend the time receiving touch.

In Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart, from July 2026, I am most measured. I still believe the words we use shape how we feel, but I also said plainly that I have hurt my wrist, elbow, shoulder and both knees playing tennis, that minor injuries heal, and that I would go to a doctor or an emergency room for anything severe. That is the balance I hope you take from my work: listen to your body, do not catastrophize, and get real help when you need it.

Below you will find every post on this subject, newest first, in full. None of this is medical advice; I am not a doctor, and what has worked for me may not work for you. If you want to talk through a health question of your own, you can get a personal video review from me at jerrybanfield.com/review/.

On this page

Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.

1. I Spent $10,000 on Massages This Year and Nothing on Health Insurance (October 18, 2026)
2. Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart (July 10, 2026)
3. What Sleep Gave Back (March 10, 2026)
4. Awake Enough to Question the Experts (September 16, 2025)
5. Knowing My Body Well Enough to Say Stop (September 12, 2025)
6. Why I Believe Honesty Can Keep Disease Away (September 11, 2025)
7. You Created Your Disease, and on Some Level You Love It (June 2, 2024)
8. Here Is Hope for Your Health Challenges (April 29, 2024)
9. What If You Never Got Sick Again (April 11, 2024)
10. Mind-Body Health: Why I Stay Well and How I Heal (April 10, 2024)
11. The Physical Health Practices That Have Saved and Lengthed My Life (April 9, 2021)

I Spent $10,000 on Massages This Year and Nothing on Health Insurance

From my live stream on October 18, 2026.

On my live stream, somebody pointed out that I spend money on massages while I am asking for help with my debt. Yes, I am a member of a tennis club. Yes, I have spent around $200 a week on a 90-minute massage, and I spend about $700 a year on the tennis club membership. Some people look at that and say I am throwing my money away. But look at the things I do not spend money on.

I do not spend money on health insurance. I do not spend money on eating out unless it is on a date with somebody. At home I eat robotically, the same simple food on repeat, which is a big part of how I lost 80 pounds and kept it off. A lot of people pour money into things I personally think are wasteful, like paying somebody else to make your food when you could make it at home and eat much healthier, or paying for health insurance, which for me is extremely wasteful. If I have an emergency, I will self-pay with the hospital and we will work that out.

I have had absolutely no need for health insurance at any point in the last decade, personally. My wife at the time did need it for having a baby, but I personally have not needed it one single time in ten years, for anything. I have saved so much money by not needing health insurance, by taking care of myself.

Why the massage is prevention, not a luxury

People think my massages and my tennis club membership are extravagant. My tennis membership is exercise and meeting people. My massages help my body stay relaxed, help me clear mental blocks, and give me time to connect with a friend. The massages are preventative. When I was wound up so tight I could not settle down, a massage was the first thing that helped me calm down. That is a very valuable expense.

How much did I spend on massages in one year? It came out to around $10,000. If you look at the total, there is not a huge difference between spending $20,000 or $30,000 in a year. But there is a huge difference between getting a massage every week and not getting one all year, because without them my body would have been much tighter and I might have injured something. In my experience, when my body is relaxed and I am getting a massage every week, I do not injure anything significantly, because my body is not so wrapped up and so tight. I do yoga, I get massages, I play tennis, and I have had a bunch of minor injuries. I would bet at least one of those would have been a major injury if my body had not been so relaxed from massage.

Obviously I cannot prove that. But I am almost certain I would have relapsed in alcoholism if I had not been getting massages. They help me relax and be in my body, which is very important for thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is what lets me create videos. It is also simply something I enjoy spending money on.

What I would cut first

My finances got to the point where either I cut everything to an absolute minimum, or there is really not a big difference in cutting $800 a month. My rent and the rest of my bills cost so much compared to massages that I would probably cut my rent and crash on somebody's couch before I would cut my massage or my tennis membership. If I crashed on somebody's couch or moved into a guest bedroom, I could easily make enough to cover my debt payments from YouTube alone. What I would love is to keep the house and keep the massage by putting out as many videos that help as many people as I can.

If what I share here has helped you stay well, you can leave me a tip at jerrybanfield.com/tip/.

Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart

From my video published July 10, 2026.

I was at the yoga studio recently, and this woman was describing how her body's just falling apart — that now she's in her late 40s, everything just doesn't work right anymore, and how broken it is. Even though she's at a hot power yoga class, everything looks like it's working pretty well to me. And then this woman who's in her late 20s starts agreeing with her, talking about how things just don't work the same for her either, and she's getting injured, and it's taking longer to heal.

So I interrupted the two of them after listening to this for a few minutes. I said, stop saying you're falling apart. You're applying the nocebo effect to yourself — the opposite of the placebo effect.

The Nocebo Effect: Hexing Your Own Body

If you're not familiar with that, the placebo effect is where you convince yourself that something that is inert, or doesn't really do anything, has some magical powers. And because you believe it, it produces that real positive effect. Nocebo is the opposite, where you're essentially hexing or cursing yourself — where something that perhaps doesn't have any real meaning or impact, you start believing that it does, and because of that, you manifest it.

I interrupted them to say, look, I'm 42 — just a handful of years younger than the woman saying everything's falling apart, and more than a decade older than the other woman. And I'm saying my body works better than it's ever worked before.

For example, over the last two years I started playing tennis, and I've injured my wrist, injured my elbow, injured my shoulder multiple times, and both of my knees. Now, these are minor injuries. I certainly am open to going to the doctor or the emergency room if there was a severe, debilitating, massively painful injury. But for minor things — and I'm obviously not a doctor — what I do for myself is I trust my body to heal up minor injuries. In fact, I don't want more examination of them, because I trust my body will fix it just like it always has. What I've noticed is that I have this positive belief, I live on it, and my body just feels fantastic — anything that goes wrong, generally I only experience minor little injuries. And I'm not going to do anything that I don't want to do.

The brilliant thing about me now is I'm much more sensitive to listen when my body is giving me a gentle signal. For example, three weeks ago my friend got me out to this run club — which apparently some people on YouTube say is just for hookups. I can kind of see that, but I went once and haven't been back, and it didn't seem 100% like that to me. But I did get a minor injury in my shoulder when I tried to do about 30 push-ups at once. Now, I've been doing yoga for years, but I don't think I've done more than 20 push-ups at once, without stopping, in years. One of the guys there encouraged a whole bunch of us — yeah, let's get down on the pavement and do 30 push-ups. Well, I had just run, and I guess my shoulder was a little tight. So some little thing aggravated in my shoulder, kind of right around my collarbone.

Now, I'm sure some doctor could tell me what that is and why that happened. But do I need to know that? No. Maybe it's some placebo, maybe it's just reality, but I know my body will fix that. And yet, when I go to yoga, I am not doing push-ups until that sensation stops. I do everything else I can do. But when I go to do a push-up, I feel this extra tension right there, so I just back off. When I had a couple of little minor knee injuries playing tennis, I just went out there and ran slower — I'd run at like 50% speed instead of all-out sprinting. And I'm super grateful now.

One time a few years ago, I was walking around the house, and my calf muscle suddenly — I thought I got shot or something for a minute. I heard this gigantic loud pop, I felt like I got shot in the back of the calf, and I fell on the floor immediately. I'm not sure what happened with that, but that fixed itself. I've also sprained ankles. My body is still fixing itself just the same as it used to, and I pay attention to it better than I used to.

Pain Is Information, Not an Identity

So I understand that pain is information. But if I can help anybody stop these negative stories — making pain an identity and hexing the body with all kinds of this negative self-talk — please stop that.

Now, I will validate that perhaps the woman who's in her late 40s has some experience that's valid — that maybe her body is not healing as rapidly as it did 20 years ago. There may be some validity to that. But here's an idea worth sitting with: how much capacity is your body operating at right now versus what it used to? What potential does it have now? And what are you doing with it now to help it succeed?

To boil that down: maybe this woman has a legitimate point that her body is running at a limited capacity compared to what it used to do. Let's say maybe 80% capacity — that perhaps she has lost 20% of her edge. But you've got to still think about that 80%: most things are functioning correctly the vast majority of the time. Realistically, it's probably more like 95%. Now, this is just a metaphor — it's not an objective measurement.

If you look at the Army PT test — at least the last time I took it, which was a long time ago — you would basically peak in your mid-20s or so on what was expected of you in the fitness test, and then the standards would progressively drop off. Now, is that because it wasn't possible to maintain that level of fitness? Or was it because people who were in their 30s and 40s in the Army often just weren't needing to exercise as hard? Or maybe their bodies couldn't quite perform at that same level, and the bar was set down so that people on average could meet it more often?

My Body Responds to What I Do With It

What I found is that what I do with my body is a big part of how it functions. For example, when I first went to hot yoga, maybe two or three years ago, I felt like I was dying after a fairly easy, not-that-hot hot yoga class. I do much more intense hot yoga classes now. I just go in and knock out a hard, hot power flow class where it's 95-plus degrees in the room with infrared heat on, sweat an incredible amount, and go about my day. No more feeling like I'm dying. Why? Because my body adjusted to that.

Now, if you took me nine or ten years ago — back when I had been doing personal training and cardio, but then I moved, stopped personal training, and started just walking my dog — and dropped me into the hot yoga class I do today, I don't think I could do it. My body ten years ago was not in as good a shape to do a hot power yoga class as it is today. I've done probably 100 hot yoga classes by now, and I've worked up to that.

So the idea that age primarily determines our body's health — and then pouring our stories into talking bad about our body — is just insane. I am so grateful for how well my body works today.

This conversation goes for lots of different parts of the body and all different things. My friend, who's in his late 70s, just called me and said his testosterone tested at the same level most men in their 40s test at. And I'd be willing to bet that if I were to get a test, mine would be at the same level most men in their 20s or 30s are at. Because I take care of my body. If you look at me, I don't look old. If anything, if I showed you pictures from 15 years ago, back when I drank and I was overweight, you'd probably think I was about the same age then as I am now. The powerful thing about weight loss is that it's not just about the weight — it's about the body.

Lifestyle Choices Changed Everything for Me

The powerful idea I have to share with you here is this: think about how amazing your body normally works, and think about how many choices you make that impact how it works. Because this woman who was complaining about her body and putting it down with her words — she may have some additional valid points, but some of those may be her lifestyle choices and her beliefs.

I found that when I changed my lifestyle choices, my body responded dramatically. For example, I switched to whole plant, away from eating a practically carnivore diet before that was even a thing — carnivore diet plus junk food and an occasional fruit or vegetable. When I switched from that, my blood pressure dropped 20 points. My weight, along with quitting drinking and switching to whole plant, dropped 80 pounds — and I got more mindful about what I ate. In the times when I drank and disrupted my sleep, my mental health took a serious dive. Today, the way I take care of my body, it functions as well as — if not better than — I was used to it functioning in my 20s.

Now, is it possible that maybe some of the injuries I had before might have healed somewhat faster? Is it probable that if I had a hangover today, after being sober for 12 years, it would completely debilitate me compared to the hangovers I used to have, where I'd go through the whole day miserable? Is there some validity to the idea that the longer you've been here, the more your body has been through? Yes, there's some limited validity. But what I see is mostly people sabotaging themselves and making exaggerated conclusions. You can't really control your age, but you can control what you put in your body and how you take care of it. Therefore, you can have a huge influence on how your body functions at any age.

The more you put your focus on things you can't control and set yourself up as a victim, the more it pulls your attention away from the things you can control — like your diet and your exercise and your beliefs and your words and your sleep. So I hope you will never use language like "my body doesn't work anymore." I would hope you would say, "my body needs a different approach today." Because yes, maybe some of these bodies, the longer they've been here, might get a little more delicate.

And yes, some days I think, would I have had this shoulder injury doing the same thing 20 years ago? I don't know. And that's what you should lean into. I remember I got all kinds of injuries throughout my teens and my twenties, and they all healed up. I remember one time, from drinking, I had sprained both ankles — that was nice, trying to walk, especially being overweight and getting drunk.

Respecting My Body Without Calling It Old

So I don't use terms like "I'm too old for this." I do try to be a little more gentle and respect my body, and I generally avoid doing things I don't see a need to do today. The woman in her twenties was talking about being injured doing some kind of very advanced move right next to her boyfriend — they collided, and she got injured. I used to go snowboarding, and I hurt my back snowboarding and just kept snowboarding straight through it. I looked like I'd been beaten head to toe from all the falling bruises. I don't see the need to go snowboarding today. Maybe my body could handle it, but I don't see the point of putting myself in a position where a more serious injury is probable — like Owen getting his leg destroyed going skiing. Now, he went skiing a lot of times before he got his leg destroyed. But at the point I'm at, I try to put my body in positions where it's less likely to get injured.

I played tennis today, and I've played through a lot of injuries and done yoga through lots of minor injuries — but I limit doing things where injuries are more probable. I used to practice to level up my yoga skills — getting into handstands and all these more advanced things. But I talked to a guy who's 10 years older than me, and he said, "I did all that stuff and I kept hurting things." I probably would have hurt things doing that in my twenties too. The difference is that now I don't see why I'd try to do handstands in yoga, at least until the rest of my body is strengthened. I can always work on that later. I share more stories like this in my Life playlist.

Thus I encourage you to think about how grateful you are for your body. I don't panic over every minor sensation. I just observe and give my body a chance to heal when it's injured. I try to proactively take care of it. I am very willing to seek medical attention if I'm not confident something will fix itself or if I could get some help. That said, I don't have any health insurance, because I don't like paying for it and I'm borrowing money anyway. So I try to take care of myself. And I invite you to take care of yourself.

Let's Build a Life You Love Together

If this sounded good to you — if you're looking in the mirror and your life looks fine but it doesn't feel good — I'm here to support you in building a life that feels good and creating a life that you love. I'll work with you to see what's keeping you stuck. You can post in the group, direct message me, or bring it to your weekly one-on-one call with me in the Jerry Banfield Family, and we can work on rebuilding your mind and body together.

I don't provide medical advice. I have lost lots of weight, I take great care of myself, and I show you what I do. If there's something I don't know about, I'll suggest you go get help, see somebody who does know about it, or read a book. I'm here to help you build a life that you love living every day. And I have a community that's all about that. It's holistic — we talk about making money, dating, AI, crypto, and YouTube. We're here for you every day. Thank you very much for reading all of this.

What Sleep Gave Back

Originally published March 10, 2026.

This is my journal entry from March 10, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.

After a night of sleep, I feel restored to sanity and have a nice morning waking up with the kids. Everybody gets off to school at a leisurely pace. Then I come back home and I've got a fire under my ass to deliver these envelopes. I grab 50 envelopes out of my house and I walk for 50 minutes delivering these envelopes to neighbors. I get back home. And I'm feeling kind of paranoid, you know, I'm thinking, let me see if there's anything legally I need to look up. I thought I looked up stuff before, but I ask in more detail now. And it turns out one of the suggestions that ChatGPT and Google's AI have to provide is that if somebody has a no trespassing or no soliciting sign on their house, then it's certainly safer and smarter to avoid leaving anything at that house. It is possible that if I left something in a house like that, I could get fined $93 for that, which is because of a local ordinance. Not a huge deal, but also something, if somebody doesn't want any soliciting, you know, they're probably thinking door to door, but I don't want to leave an envelope at their door either. They're more closed off than usual, and I'd rather skip that house.

My mind starts to get paranoid because I'm like, shit, I think I put, you know, a couple of them down. But most people don't have signs like that. And I wasn't sure what to do with just dropping a letter compared to door to door. What I'm doing apparently is called canvassing, where I'm not actually knocking on any doors. So the rules and regulations are pretty wide open for that. Although it is recommended to stay between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. I think technically I started at 8.45. And that's, I that's all right. I get a couple of my books, get a new book letter printed and get those into the little library near my house as well.

Then I'm out to play tennis with a friend. I arrive and I set up my camera on my phone with the swing vision app on top of the fence. I'm trying this out and seeing if it's fun to record the matches or not. I get the match recorded going and my friend and I have a nice warm up. We have a very competitive first set that ends up going to a tiebreaker and he eats out the tiebreaker. Then he steamrolls me in the second set. I was playing so little and relaxed and I realized I was getting gripped by insanity at the end of the second set. Like, so what? You know, we're just playing tennis. Like, it's insane to be getting so upset about it. We wrap this long game of tennis we played today, which took two hours in the full sun, no clouds. Had a good conversation. I told him about the girl yesterday, and he said that's why he doesn't mess with women. I mean, he has dated and been married to women in the past, but now he's just taking his own time and his own space and is pretty closed off to dealing with any of that. And I'm like, you know, today, more than usual, I can see the virtues of living that way. I know that's not for me, though. I'm a guy that I like. I'll deal with the downsides because it's so much fun having something really nice with a girl, you know, from the sex to the companionship, the, you know, depth of the spiritual connection, the relationship, you know, the inspiration. I just love being with someone and having it good. And I am seeing today that it's up to me to use my discretion to cut off things and stay away from, especially women that don't leave me feeling good, but that I have bad feeling interactions with. I need to stay away from them. If you keep getting pulled back toward relationships that leave you feeling worse and you want help learning where to draw that line, book a one-on-one call with me and we'll work through your pattern together.

I come home from tennis with my friend and I take a cold shower to try and cool off after I was out in the sun for almost an hour this morning, although there's lots of shade walking different houses in my neighborhood. Still, I had almost three hours out in the sun this morning and early afternoon, so I cool off with a cold shower. I start to get a bit upset as my mind starts to spiral into how bad things could be if I can't pay my bills, and I just sit with how real and uncomfortable that financial fear is. And I think about how much I love my kids, and I think, well, I better get my ass to work on my business. Like, I better, you know, I'm figuring like, what should I prioritize? And it's clear based on this, like I need to prioritize getting clients. I found a business model that all everything is validated, that helping people write books seems to be the best thing for me to do. So get clients like that's what needs to be done. So I get more letters printed out. I stuff more letters, stamp more letters and get prepared when I get my hat with my neck covering. Then I can do, you know, long stretches, maybe two, three hours out in the sun, as long as I can do without burning my arms, which should be two or three hours at least, because even today, my arms aren't burnt. I don't wear sunscreen either. So the neck and the head burn faster than anything else. I feel like a chicken roasting up in this business.

I picked the kids up from school. And I take them to a local market on the way home, get them each a smoothie. We grab some fruits and vegetables, come home. Then my ex-wife arrives at the dog right after that. I give her a hug, tell her about the girl from yesterday. And some of the things I point out for the conversation, my ex-wife's like, yeah, that is pretty crazy for someone to struggle having a conversation that much. And I try and turn things over to empathy for this girl. You know, I'd feel bad if if I struggled to talk about my life that much. I know if I was in a place that I had that hard of a time opening up to somebody, you know, I would be frustrated with that. And, you know, maybe she was a bit excited to be talking to me and it made it maybe she is normally much better at communicating with other people. And I just triggered her. And, you know, I I put her in a situation where she maybe felt like she couldn't be her best either. And maybe she's regretting how the conversation went, wishing she hadn't been so defensive. Or maybe she's just totally judging me and thinking about how awful I am or whatever for asking regular ass questions.

Also, I did get a new match from the matchmaking service today, which is really exciting because I read this girl's profile. We're going to meet up for a coffee and walk date downtown St. Pete. She lives in St. Pete, which I really appreciate not driving to Sarasota. Her profile sounds like she's looking exactly for me. Like, this match is nuts. She has, you know, 38 no kids and a non-drinker, which is perfect. She focuses on healing people and their bodies. And listen to her. She lives a very health-conscious lifestyle, eats clean, and is looking for a partner who values healthy living as well. Now check this out. In a partner, she's drawn to someone healthy, intelligent, ambitious, and family-oriented. Someone with an out-of-the-box mindset, a strong growth mentality, and a desire to build a meaningful life together, including having children of her own in the future. I mean, could you match me any more clearly with your description? Like, out-of-the-box thinking? That's not something people are asking for that I've seen very frequently in swiping a whole bunch of dating profiles. And I am an out-of-the-box thinker. Our date's scheduled for Saturday, which seems like a ways off already at five days compared to how fast the last one came up.

Then after I get the kids home from school, I tell them about the match. I talk to my ex-wife about it. She says that sounds good for me. And my ex-wife, as much as anybody, wants me to find a woman. So, you know, she's not divorcing me and then still being territorial. Like, we're just friends now, and it's really nice that she supports me having a good future because that's good for her too. My ex-wife reveals that she's been doing a sauna and cold plunge. I'm just like, what the hell? Like, where did that come from? I was doing stuff like that before, and I'm really enjoying seeing my ex-wife having the space to explore and try some new things. She also tried playing Mahjong with her friends, which, again, is awesome. I'm so happy to see her growing and trying these new things. She's got some plans for the house in the backyard, which sound nice. My ex-wife and I don't end up taking the kids and the dog to the dog park, but we go out to Crescent Lake for a bit and come back.

Then my ex-wife heads out and the kids go over to play with their friends for a few hours. Meanwhile, I'm just hammering out work stuff. I'm stamping envelopes, printing more, cleaning up around the house. And I do want to still keep up with these daily autobiographies and not get so far behind. But maybe I could do just like try and do an average of edit two of these a day because it'd take a few months, but then I'd get caught up. And the same time, I want to get that money, Jerry. After the kids are over at their friend's house for a few hours, my mother comes over and my mother plays Exploding Kittens with the kids while I'm doing things like helping the kids you know get food you know changing sheets and i even sit at the table and do more envelopes while my daughter and my mother are playing a second game of exploding kittens i would have played with them but i didn't have time to learn how to play while they're all playing but learning how to play because they're watching a video and i was cleaning and getting food ready. I made my daughter some kale chips and my mother ends up wrapping things up with the kids about 9.45.

We all get ready for bed. I have some nice snuggles. My son does his reading activity. I played a bit rough with my son today too, which was fun. I'm grateful that the more space I have to be with my son myself without my ex-wife around, I'm getting much more comfortable playing with him. And I think that's really good for both of us. Like I was doing some kicks, you know, gentle kicks, but like, you know, to take his feet out from under him and he just loved it. And it helps him also not play with my daughter in that way so much, which he really appreciates. I'm grateful as I go to bed, I feel restored to sanity and myself. And I'm having a lot of empathy for the girl I talked with yesterday. As sometimes people say in recovery, if you have a resentment, pray about it two weeks. To me, the best way to pray about it is to thank the girl yesterday for the conversation and to, you know, think loving thoughts. I love her. I'm glad she helped me reveal changes I need to make within myself and reveal where, you know, my overenthusiasm and lack of boundaries is, you know, leading me into places that I get hurt. And I go to bed feeling very grateful, very grateful to have the kids there. Very grateful for this new match. Very grateful for the conversation I had yesterday and that, you know, I'm so resilient that after feeling just wrecked yesterday emotionally, you know, I made it through and I didn't resort to any coping mechanisms. I didn't dump my emotions on the kids. And, you know, I even reached out and asked for help in a way to, you know, to try and get some perspective and not just bitch. If you're carrying a resentment or coming through a rough emotional stretch and want to talk it through with someone who's stayed sober through plenty of them, schedule a private call with me and bring it to our call.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Awake Enough to Question the Experts

Originally published September 16, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 16, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

After massage school today, I found myself questioning everything—my decision to enroll, the direction of my life, and whether any of this makes sense for me. I’m so effective when I work with my mind that it feels almost absurd to dedicate this much time to training my hands. I keep wondering if I’ll ever be an effective massage therapist, or if this path is just a detour that doesn’t fit who I really am. Seven more months of school feels like a long commitment when I’m unsure whether it’s truly worth it.

The day itself was fine. We started by going to the park for a walk to get some movement in before class. Then we returned to learning the basics of massage and focused on draping. That part was more challenging than I expected, especially given how many massages I’ve received and how quickly some of my classmates picked it up. It was humbling. Still, I reminded myself that while they might have an easier time with physical technique, I excel at memorizing anatomy and understanding the body’s systems. Everyone brings different strengths.

After class, I drove to the tire shop to get one of my tires balanced. It had started vibrating after being repaired a week ago, but thankfully they fixed it for free. While I waited, I began reading a book I’d bought months ago called Can You Catch a Cold? The timing felt perfect, since just yesterday my instructor dismissed any questioning of germ theory during lecture, insisting that “the science doesn’t support it.” He wasn’t open to debate, which only made me more curious. This book, on the other hand, challenges that entire framework. It’s packed with scientific arguments suggesting germ theory might be deeply flawed or even irrelevant in explaining illness.

The author points out that many diseases once thought to be contagious—like scurvy and beriberi—turned out to be caused by nutritional deficiencies. For centuries, people believed scurvy spread from sailor to sailor, when in reality it was nothing more than a lack of vitamin C. Because they clung to the contagion theory, they failed to solve it for hundreds of years, and countless sailors died of something that could have been prevented with a few oranges or a splash of lime juice. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that anyone could have believed such a thing, yet I wonder what ideas we cling to today that future generations will laugh at.

In the book’s introduction, the author also describes people who live in complete filth—never bathing, rarely washing their hands, eating whatever food they find—and yet they remain perfectly healthy. If germs alone caused disease, their survival would be impossible. It’s fascinating to read something that so directly challenges mainstream science, and it’s opening my mind to possibilities I hadn’t considered. If you love thinking this way too, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we’ll dig into these kinds of questions together.

Part of me wants to hand the book to my instructor and ask him to read it, though I doubt he’d be open to it. Still, I’m grateful for the curiosity it’s awakened in me. Whether I stay in massage school or not, at least I’m expanding my understanding of how the human body—and perhaps life itself—really works.

After getting the tire balanced, I stopped by VisionWorks to finally buy a new pair of glasses—something I hadn’t done in sixteen years. I’ve been wearing the same pair since 2009, and with all the driving I do these days, it seemed time for an upgrade. My current prescription is minus one, which has always felt a bit too strong, so I went in hoping to get something with a little less correction. What amazed me was that, after all this time, my eyesight seems to have held steady. The optometrist confirmed that my vision hasn’t really changed in sixteen years, which I found encouraging.

What has changed, though, is me. Sixteen years ago, I would have walked in, followed directions, and accepted whatever they told me without question. This time, I couldn’t help but examine the entire process more critically. When they asked me to cover one eye and then the other, I noticed right away that my vision was dramatically better when both eyes were open together than when tested individually. I could read the 20/40 line with both eyes, but only about 20/60 with one eye at a time. To me, that means my true vision is 20/40, not 20/60, since I almost never use just one eye in real life.

I also questioned the testing environment itself. The room was dimly lit, with only a single fluorescent light and no windows, and I couldn’t help but think that measuring eyesight in a dark, artificial setting doesn’t reflect how people actually see in the real world. I see much better in sunlight, where my eyes feel alive and relaxed, compared to the dull glow of that exam room.

When the doctor came in, I asked how long it took to become an ophthalmologist. He said four years of post-bachelor’s schooling, and when I commented that it didn’t sound too bad, he didn’t seem thrilled by my tone. I told him about Can You Catch a Cold and used it as a bridge to question the assumptions in his own field. I asked him why alternative approaches like eye exercises weren’t taken seriously and whether he’d ever seen peer-reviewed studies on them. He said that if such studies existed, maybe he’d consider them valid.

That’s when I countered: who would pay for a study like that when there’s so much money to be made selling glasses? And who would publish research that undermines an entire industry built around corrective lenses? The question seemed to make him think, though it also made him visibly uncomfortable.

He tried to prescribe me a slightly stronger correction than I had before, but I pushed back and asked him to lower it to –0.75. I explained that too much correction doesn’t feel good to me—that while the world looks sharper, it also feels forced, unnatural. The lenses that made things crystal clear actually strained my eyes, as if they were overcompensating. What felt best was a nearly imperceptible blur, just enough clarity without overdoing it, allowing my eyes to relax instead of constantly adjusting to an artificial level of precision.

I left feeling proud of myself for questioning the process and advocating for what felt right in my body. Sixteen years ago, I would have blindly trusted the experts. Today, I’m awake enough to observe, ask questions, and challenge what doesn’t make sense. It ties perfectly into what I’ve been reading—that the most powerful thing we can do is stay curious, pay attention, and never stop questioning how the world works. If you’re at a crossroads like I was that day and want to think your own direction through out loud with someone, you can book a private call with me and think it through with me there.

After getting the prescription, I bought some glasses with the total coming to $530—which, thankfully, I can pay from my health savings account. The store was running a buy-one-get-one-free promotion, so I walked out with two pairs. Still, what a racket. The frames probably cost five dollars to make, and the lenses maybe twenty or fifty at most. The markup in that industry is absurd. Yet I’m still grateful for the gift of sight—that something as simple as a pair of lenses can make the world so sharp and vivid again.

Not long after, I got a text from a friend asking if I wanted to play tennis. I dropped the kids off with my mom—they love spending time with her—and headed to the tennis club. The guy I played with, a friend, absolutely crushed me a year ago when I first started learning. Back then, I could barely return a ball, and his level of control and precision felt worlds ahead of mine. This time, things were different. Over the past year, I’ve practiced relentlessly, while he’s been traveling and hasn’t played as much. Our styles have diverged, too. He focuses on form, always trying to hit the perfect shot. I focus on results. I’ll swing wildly, improvise, hit whatever it takes to win the point—even if it looks ridiculous. Sometimes those unexpected, chaotic shots are the most satisfying.

We ended up tied at 6–6, then played a tiebreaker that I won. The victory felt incredible, not just because I’d improved enough to compete with someone who used to destroy me, but because I played freely and joyfully. I could sense his frustration that his timing was off, and I had empathy for that, but not so much that I held back. I’ve learned to balance compassion with competitiveness—to honor my own growth without dimming it to make someone else comfortable.

That night, after I put the kids to bed, I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me. I actually cried for a few minutes, just thinking about how lucky I am to have them, how much I love them, how perfect our little life together feels when I really stop to notice it. I made sure to tell them that, too—to let them know how deeply they’re loved.

Later, I spent some time editing I Was Famous on the Internet and realized I might need to split it into two books. I already have about 90,000 words of raw transcripts, and instead of cutting too much, it might make more sense to publish two shorter volumes. I also got some positive feedback on Author in St. Petersburg, which meant a lot. I’ve given away about ten copies now, and I had a bit of a vulnerability hangover earlier this week—doubting whether I’d shared too much, whether it was too raw. But hearing from a reader who said they were enjoying it lifted me up. It reminded me why I write—to connect, to tell the truth, and to let my real life be seen.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Knowing My Body Well Enough to Say Stop

Originally published September 12, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 12, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

The fifth day of massage school began with our second anatomy and physiology lesson, where we explored the shoulder girdle, learned directional terms like superior and inferior, and studied how the humerus connects into the shoulder joint. Lunch was again with some classmates, and I enjoyed the conversation. I noticed a classmate sitting alone at a distant table and wondered whether my company would be appreciated there instead. A classmate suggested it looked like she wanted some solitude, so I sat where I had the day before. We all talked about who might eventually drop out of the program. I hope no one does because I genuinely like everyone. At the same time, I can see how it might be difficult for one classmate. He is here in Florida away from his wife and child, and he misses them deeply. He said he may not see them until Christmas, and I could understand how hard that would be. In fourteen and a half years with my ex-wife, I have never been away from her longer than eleven days. I could not imagine choosing to miss that much time with my family, even for school. A classmate also missed class today, and I said she seemed at risk of dropping out after already being late or missing a day twice in the first week. I hope she makes it because she brings a gentle loving mom presence to her touch that will be great for massage.

After lunch came one of the most exciting parts of the week: receiving our rookie massages from the juniors and seniors. These students had anywhere from two to six months more experience than us. We picked our tables without knowing who would be assigned to work on us. I chose one covered with a floral blanket. Many of my classmates giggled nervously while trying to undress under the sheets, which had us all laughing. Soon, the juniors and seniors entered, and I was paired with a woman named a student ahead of me in massage school.

A student ahead of me in massage school faced a challenge from the start, knowing I have received between five and six hundred massages. I made a conscious decision to communicate clearly with her while also being careful not to hurt her feelings. At one point, during the face massage, she worked too close to my eyes, and I asked her to stop that. Later she began incorporating stretches. After she rotated my arms and started stretching my legs, I requested that she stop those as well. I practice enough yoga that I prefer to manage all stretching myself. Stretching on the massage table feels like wasted time when I could be receiving touch, and I’ve had therapists take stretches too far in the past, causing minor injuries. I felt grateful to be confident enough to voice my preferences, even at the risk of her being offended.

In the group debrief afterward, I complimented a student ahead of me in massage school for using several strokes I had never experienced before, which is rare given how many therapists I’ve worked with. It was especially impressive considering she has only been in school a few months. I also encouraged my classmates to advocate for themselves during massages. Most classmates had enjoyed the stretches, and I explained why I hadn’t. The point, I told them, is not whether a client wants stretching or not, but that every client feels empowered to communicate their needs. It isn’t personal—it’s simply about knowing your own body.

On the drive to and from school today, I dictated the sixth and seventh parts of my dating book, totaling two and a half more hours of material. That brings me past sixty thousand words of raw dictation, which should cut down to around forty or fifty thousand once I refine it in ChatGPT. By the time I finished, I felt confident I had enough material for the book.

Later in the day I talked briefly with my sponsor, picked up the kids, and spent a little time at home before heading out to hot yoga. I hadn’t done a hot class in a while, and the intensity caught up with me quickly. My heart rate rose close to its maximum just moving through a standard sequence of poses in the heat. The sweat combined with massage oil made an interesting and messy mix on my towel covering my yoga mat. Fortunately, the girl next to me was so pretty that I got euphoric just being next to her. Afterward, I went home, showered, and went to my AA meeting.

These days, nearly every time I share in a meeting, I talk about how central massage has been to my sobriety. Early on, my nervous system was so agitated and locked in fight-or-flight that I couldn’t relax enough to take in new information. I couldn’t truly hear the message of AA or engage in the steps in that state of body and mind. Getting massages gave me my first taste of real relaxation, which cleared my mind enough to see the value in getting a sponsor, reading the Big Book, and attending more meetings. That combination was what allowed me to work the steps and make profound changes in my life. Without massage, I may not have had the clarity to start. If the way relaxation and bodywork became the ground under my sobriety resonates with you, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll talk through building a calmer life you don't need to escape from.

Because of that, I’m considering a requirement for my future sponsees: if someone wants me as their sponsor, they need to commit to getting massages. That may sound unusual, but AA is flexible enough for each sponsor to work in their own way. If a person isn’t willing to try massage to help themselves relax and become more receptive, then they can choose another sponsor. For me, it’s that important.

Doctor

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Why I Believe Honesty Can Keep Disease Away

Originally published September 11, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 11, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

Our fourth day of massage school was another great one. My morning routine has become efficient—I can get out of bed and be on the road in just fifteen or twenty minutes. At school, we began learning the foundations of Swedish massage, starting with something as simple as resting our hands on another person to connect, followed by light compressions. Our teacher filled the day with personal stories about her career, which not only taught us techniques but also helped us bond as a group. I arrived with more confidence than yesterday and felt far less awkward putting my hands on the two people I practiced with. I’ve come to see that almost anything I do, even something as basic as gentle compressions, can make another person feel better. With more learning, my ability to help will only deepen, but the foundation itself is already therapeutic.

Lunch was another highlight. I sat with some classmates, and the simple act of eating with people outside my family felt refreshing. For so many years I either ate alone at home or went out for solitary lunches. Now I feel like I’m back in a work environment, sharing meals and conversations, and it surprises me how good that feels.

On my drive back, I had a long conversation with an old college friend—an hour and a half that went by quickly. The most powerful part of our talk came when I shared a theory I’ve been piecing together. It draws from several sources: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, which argues that disease often originates in the mind and emotions, and Mind Over Medicine, written by a doctor who frames similar ideas in research-based medical language. Both suggest that our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can drive the creation of illness.

I connected these ideas to something a life coach once shared with me about her own past—how unprocessed pain from her younger years had shaped her choices and behavior for a long time afterward. It struck me as another example of how what we carry inside can ripple outward into our actions and, I believe, into our bodies.

That conversation resurfaced when I thought of a close friend from college, who died of cancer almost two years ago. He was close to me in age and married shortly before I did. As I reflected, I sat with my own belief that unprocessed shame, guilt, and remorse can weigh on a person over time, and I wondered what private burdens any of us might carry silently.

When I presented this theory to my friend on the phone, I expected skepticism. Instead, he received it openly. He said he could believe it and even found comfort in the idea. I asked why, and he explained that if cancer is truly random—striking by genetics or chance—then living in fear makes sense. But if behavior and unprocessed experiences play a role, then he felt reassured, because he has been faithful to his wife and avoids that kind of destructive secrecy. It left him feeling more secure in his own health, and I was grateful to have given him a new perspective. For me, it reinforced my own belief that as I live now—honestly, without destructive secrets—it feels impossible for cancer to take root in my body. If I ever carried something like that, I wouldn’t doubt that it could manifest. But since I don’t, I feel no fear of disease appearing out of nowhere. That conversation was one of the most meaningful I’ve had recently, and I’m grateful for my friend’s open mind. If exploring how honesty and what we carry inside might shape our health speaks to you, this is exactly the kind of conversation I'd love to have with you, so you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll think it through together.

Later, I went to the tennis clinic at the tennis club. My friend a friend was there, and whenever we play together, laughter follows. Our humor clicks effortlessly, though I’ve only ever seen him on the court. Today we had a new coach, a tennis coach, who was friendly and helped us have fun. We all joked, showed off, hit some incredible shots, and missed plenty of others. After the clinic, a friend and I stayed to play with a couple of other guys, continuing the fun.

What I value about a friend is that I can speak honestly with him, the same way I write honestly in my books. That said, in my books I sometimes generalize or soften the edges so the material is consumable by a broad audience. In private conversations, though, I strip that away by being more graphic or dark. What you read here is still the real me, just considerately adjusted so the book doesn’t provoke the kind of extreme reactions my past writings once did—like the time I was swatted because my raw honesty triggered someone into making up an insane story and calling the police. With a friend, I don’t have to hold back. By the end of the day, I felt content and ready for rest. I made it into bed by 10:45, grateful for another day that was both meaningful and fun.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

You Created Your Disease, and on Some Level You Love It

From my video published June 2, 2024.

You created your disease, and so did everyone else, and on some level you actually love it. I know how that sounds. Stick with me, because this is a crazy idea you've probably never heard before. It's built on personal responsibility, and on the understanding that you are the creator of your entire reality. For me, seeing it this way has unlocked a lot of power and a lot of ideas, and I think you're going to love where it goes.

Let's look at the opposite first, because the opposite of saying you created your disease and you love it is saying you didn't create your disease and you hate it. That seems to be what's normal in our society, and to me it sounds a lot like a victim mindset: I didn't do this, I hate it, I didn't do anything to deserve it. I'd rather take the responsibility, because responsibility is where the power is.

The year I manifested my own crisis

Let me give you an example from my own life. In 2020 and 2021, like a lot of people, I was upset with the state of the world. I was very annoyed with everything that was going on. I was in the best health I'd ever been in, and I thought everybody else was being insane and that nothing was being presented honestly.

The one idea that helped me stop being upset was remembering: I am God, and this is my universe. So why did I create this? When I sat with that, I realized I had manifested it. Back in 2019, I was in the worst financial position of my life, and I was manifesting really hard. There were two things I wanted more than anything. One, I wanted to get out of the financial situation I was in, so I wanted some really low-interest-rate loans, which at the time seemed about impossible. The idea that I could get a 3% loan on $100,000 with my crappy credit seemed absurd. And two, I really wanted to be successful as a content creator online.

Think about those manifestation goals at the end of 2019. There seemed to be no possible way that anything would come along to address them. And then 2020 came along. As someone who had been live streaming since 2013, back when most people were just trying it for the first time, I had seven years of experience and millions of followers. Then the government gave me disaster loans at 3% on $120,000, with my crappy credit. And in 2021, I made over a hundred thousand dollars of profit in a single year playing video games on Facebook, after blowing up my business and watching everything go downhill in 2019, struggling, and then finding my way again in 2020.

In 2021, after being absolutely miserable and making videos complaining about the state of the world, I realized I had literally manifested all of this. This was exactly what I asked for. I just hadn't been specific. I said, get me out of this financial situation, I want low interest rate loans, I want to be able to just stream and be a full-time content creator. And life said, here you go, this is what you wanted. And I said, no, wait. I guess this is what I wanted. I'd better be more specific next time. That one shift, just changing my interpretation of the world, brought me right back to being completely happy.

My dad's disease, and the exit he chose

Let me give you this in a few other forms. My dad passed away ten years ago. At the time he had some kind of bone disease, something like leukemia, along with heart disease and other problems. I was miserable over it. If you had told me back then that my dad created his own disease and loved it, I'd probably have punched you in the face.

But ten years later, a depth of understanding has come to me. Once you start to look at reincarnation and immortality the way I do, you see that yes, this body may pass, but the body dying is kind of like falling asleep. You go to sleep, you go off on some other adventures, and whenever you're ready you can wake up in a nice new baby body and start the whole experience over again.

When I look at my dad's life, he didn't seem happy in his marriage to my mother from around the year 2000 on. By 2014 he was stuck in a rut, and he didn't see any honorable exit. If he left, he couldn't leave my mom without everyone in his life being disgusted with him, from her to my brother and me to the rest of his family. He'd been married more than thirty years. I think he wanted out. But he was born in 1950. What was he going to do at 64 years old, leaving his wife? He could have done a lot of things. But I don't think he saw a way out, except getting sick and dying.

I realized this the other day, and it hit me hard: I think my dad, on the deepest level, intentionally got sick and died because he wanted out. He wanted to make an honorable exit. On the surface he never would have said that. But deep down, his spirit was bored and apathetic about his life. All he did was sit on the couch, watch the news and TV, smoke cigarettes, and go to the doctor. Who would want to keep living in that scenario? The way I see it, his disease was self-manifested to give him a chance to move on to something new, and to make an exit where everyone would say, what a shame, he was such a good father and husband. If he had simply left my mother, everyone would have called him a jerk. In many ways it was easier for him to die, let go of everything from this life, and start over fresh in a new body, or go off and do anything else his soul wanted to do.

People who seem to choose when they go

When you look at it that way, you start to notice how many people very intentionally seem to pass away. There was a lady in her 80s at the AA meeting I used to go to. Outwardly she appeared healthy, and nothing seemed wrong. But one day at a meeting she said that her husband and her son, who had both passed away, were building her a house in heaven that would soon be ready for her. At the time I didn't think much of it. She died a few days later, and we all realized she knew exactly what she was doing. She went intentionally. She decided it was time to move on.

To me it seems clear that you're either in the middle of this life loving it, growing and expanding, with nowhere you'd rather be, which is exactly where I am right now, or you've lost that. There's nowhere I'd rather be. There's no other body I'd like to inhabit. I'm not interested in being a baby again, because I love being a grownup. I love my life. I'm thriving, I'm growing, I have a passion and a joy for living. But if you lose that passion and joy, getting sick and dying could actually be the best path to a new body, an honorable exit, and a new adventure.

My sponsor in AA, who I'd been with since 2015, I believe recently passed. I don't have proof, but the last time we talked he said he was at the doctor and wasn't doing well. He'd talked a lot about dying over the last few years, and I told him, don't be scared, Bob. It's a whole new adventure. You can get another body and go do whatever you want. If you're not happy in this reality, you don't have to suffer before you move on. It's okay to go whenever you want to.

The woman who was terrified of one disease

There's a book called Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani. It's her story, so I'll stay general and let you read the details from her, but here's the overview. She spent her whole life terrified of getting one specific disease. She did everything she could think of to avoid it, but the entire time she obsessed over it, feared it, and thought about it constantly. And she got it. All the things she did to prevent it didn't work, because, as she put it, she was thinking about it and afraid of it all the time, and then she got it.

When she went into the hospital, very nearly dead from the disease, she had a near-death experience. She could see that she had manifested the disease through her choice to focus on it and fear it, and she saw that her situation could even be a great opportunity to help free others who were struggling the same way. She made a full recovery that the doctors had never seen anyone make. Her story got shared by Wayne Dyer and inspired countless people. She chose to come back rather than go down with the disease, so she could show people there's another way.

So much of what happens in your life, you are self-creating. Even when you lean on a doctor, or a healer, you're giving away a power that is actually yours. There are real opportunities to work together, but the power is still yours. There's another book I love on this, Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin, and I've shared my full thoughts on whether you can heal yourself if you want to go deeper on the science side of this.

I'll reference one more. There's a doctor named Gladys who lived into her hundreds and wrote a book. She got one fatal disease and treated it two completely different ways. The first time, she treated it with a holistic solution that most doctors don't even know about and that existing science calls unproven. You're not really allowed to be specific about it, which is why I'm not, but she actually treated her disease successfully with that exact solution.

Diseases have many ways to be treated

The second time the same disease showed up, she chose to treat it with regular Western medicine, because she thought it would be a different experience from the first time. So diseases have a lot of ways to be treated.

For me, the biggest disease that's manifested in my life is alcoholism, and that was obviously self-created. Some people will die as alcoholics and never stop drinking. They'll go to their grave that way. Many people look at it and say, well, it's just a disease, I got it genetically, and there's nothing I can do about it. I don't see it that way. Yes, I may have different genetics than most people when it comes to alcohol. When I take one drink, it sets off a physical craving that perhaps 90% of people never experience. But what kind of person, finding out that a single drink starts a ruthless physical obsession, would keep drinking anyway, except someone who on some level wants to be an alcoholic?

There's so much research showing that our genetic foundation is generally secondary. It's our epigenetics, the way our genes express themselves based on our lifestyle, that's primary. You have the potential to be a small body or a big body, to be lean or to carry a lot of muscle, to be high energy and joyful or low energy and miserable. Your basic genetic code is more like a realm of possibilities. Almost all of us are genetically capable of manifesting almost any of the basic diseases we go through. The real question is why some people manifest them and so many others don't. Why do some people seem to do everything to live healthy and still die young, while others have a real joy for living, barely pay attention to preventing anything, and live into their 90s?

The only common factor that makes sense to me is that you are the one who creates everything in your life. You create the ease, the comfort, the love, and the joy. And you create the dis-ease, the downsides, the problems, and the disasters. What I've noticed is that people who reach the highest ages keep a passion for life, a will to live, a flexibility, a willingness to change, and strong relationships with other people. Those strong relationships are worth building, and if you want help doing that you can schedule a one-on-one call with me, where we talk through staying willing to change and growing toward a life you don't need to escape from.

Isolation, and why my dad's death freed me

By the end of his life, my dad was very isolated. Almost the only person he spent time with was my mother, and almost everything he really lived for was gone. I was married and living with my wife and didn't really need my dad anymore. My brother was off living his own life. My mom certainly needed him and was devastated by his death. But honestly, my dad's death was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it freed me to have other father figures and to see more possibilities in my life.

I wouldn't be surprised if my father had the idea that dying was the best thing he could do for everyone, and that the way to do it was to get sick and go through the routine at the doctor so that everyone would feel it was inevitable, that it just had to happen. His death gave me the experience of awakening and wanting to be different. Often, especially as kids, we think love means wanting to be exactly like someone else. When my dad died, it unlocked all this desire in me to be different from him.

Now I look at my father-in-law. My own father quit drinking and quit drugs, and it's amazing he even lived into his 60s, given how hard he struggled with addiction in his 30s and 40s. By 40 he'd given up all his addictions except smoking, and he chose to keep smoking. He chose to ignore his doctor's advice. The doctor said, Mr. Banfield, you need to get out and walk and exercise and be active, and my father chose to ignore that and keep smoking. To me, those were his decisions, and on some level I think he was at peace with how much longer he'd live. I feel similarly about myself. I don't care that much about an extended life. I'm fine if I die in my 60s.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law is in his 70s and just switched to a whole plant-based diet. If you read the book How Not to Die, written by a medical doctor, there's a huge amount of evidence and research that has convinced me, beyond a reasonable doubt for my own life, that eating a whole-food plant-based diet can help prevent, halt the progression of, and even reverse the top 15 causes of death. So why don't you hear that research all the time? My belief is that it's cheap and quick to give you, and there's far more money in selling you disease, making you a victim, and keeping you sick and easier to control. Healthy people are harder to control and manipulate. Sick people, unfortunately, are much easier.

The healthiest I've ever been

I'm the healthiest I've ever been in this entire life. I haven't had a single sick day since 2022, which is more than a year and a half ago now, and I can tell you exactly why I got sick that last time. It was because I didn't want to help my mother move. I've shared the longer version of how I haven't been sick since October 2022 separately, but this is the heart of it.

This is what's tricky about saying you love your disease and you created it. Your disease is often trying to fulfill some unacknowledged desire. On the surface, under no circumstances would my dad have said he wanted to die, unless you could get deep, deep down and ask: are you really fulfilled? Is your life full of joy? If you could have anything, would you choose to sit at home in your 60s on the couch watching the news? Is this your idea of the best life you could be living in any reality? If those questions land hard and you'd like to talk through what your own body and your own life might be pointing to, you can book a private call with me — not as medical advice, just honest conversation on our call.

What I've noticed is that our diseases are sometimes the deep desires we consciously suppress. They come up to give us something we want but won't consciously acknowledge. My dad's diseases, I think, came up because he wanted more action. His life had been action-packed: he went to Vietnam, he had all those addictions, and it stayed intense until he settled down and raised us. He was fine with that for a while, but after my brother and I left, he never really picked his passion back up. I imagine he wanted more action, more learning, more growth, and couldn't consciously dig his way to it.

The last time I got sick

The last time I got sick, I was due to fly to Mississippi and spend a week or more helping my mother move. Consciously, I would have told you I wanted to help my mother move. Deep down, though, there was a big part of me, maybe 49%, that really did not want to go. There was a deep part of me that did not want to stop live streaming, playing Gods Unchained, making love to my wife every other night, seeing my kids, and going to all my yoga people and my AA meetings. But there was a conscious 51% that said, we're doing this, I'm not listening to any objections. So the 49% got very vocal.

Often your mind thinks about it backwards. The night before, I remember thinking, I can't get sick, I'm supposed to go help my mother move, I don't want to do this. I felt betrayed by my body. Why are you doing this to me, body? Notice the words: not "I want to go help my mother move," but "I planned on it." I was dreading having to call my mother and tell her I couldn't come. And often the very thing you're afraid of is something a part of you actually wants to happen.

I was also paranoid about uploading a video, even though it wasn't in the least bit violating any policies. And I realized part of me would love it if I couldn't upload videos anymore, because then, and only then, would I be free to do something else. As long as I can upload videos, I don't see anything better to do professionally. But part of me would honestly love to just get banned, sell all my office stuff, and be free to go do whatever else I want with my life. When you dig into that, you start to see that parts of you will manifest things because, on some level, you want the experience.

Once I got sick, on the last day, in October 2022, I literally had no symptoms except fatigue. No sniffles, no cough, just fatigue. My whole body felt drained of energy, and I could hardly get out of bed. What's nice is that the more personal responsibility you take, and the more you love your body and take care of it, the more your body gives you exact, specific symptoms. I just had fatigue, and I couldn't get out of bed, until I called my mother and told her I couldn't make it. Then I managed to get up and play Gods Unchained right afterward. Interesting how I had energy for what I wanted to do, but none for what I didn't want to do.

What happened when I honored the real reason

Then I started consciously setting the intention: I really do want to go help my mother move. I'm okay if it's uncomfortable, I'll deal with it. I started to think of it as an adventure, the biggest and most challenging thing I'd done in a while, and I told myself I wanted that challenge.

My body revved the energy back up over the next couple of days. I'm not saying that in most cases a disease you've manifested will instantly go away. But once you get clear and honor the reason it's there, you may find it goes away rapidly. Just a few days later, I moved 15,000 pounds of stuff, mostly by myself, into a truck and out to the landfill and the thrift shop. It was amazing how much energy my body had for that, because deep down I genuinely wanted to do it.

Peaches, and a dog who came back

It gets even better, so I'll wrap up with one last story. A few years ago we had a dog we absolutely loved. She was found in a peach orchard, so we called her Peaches. She'd lived out in the wild, had to kill for food and defend herself against wild animals, so she wasn't a purely domesticated dog.

One day our daughter put her arm around the dog's neck and sort of rode her, and Peaches bit my daughter in the face. It wasn't catastrophic, but it certainly seemed bad at the time. My daughter had a spot on her face from a tooth mark and a gash on the side of her head, and we took her to the hospital to get it sewn up. Now, right before that, the dog had had some kind of disease the vet said was fatal, telling us to just go home and help her die. Instead, the dog decided to live and cured the disease entirely on her own. We gave her extra love and attention, but no medical treatment, and whatever the vet said was fatal, she cured herself. I've told the full story of how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease if you want the details.

After she bit my daughter, we kept both dogs separated from the children at all times so a bite could never happen again. But the dog wasn't living her best life that way, and she died about a year and a half later. What kind of life was she living at that point? And now there's a dog on my bed right now that looks almost exactly like the dog we used to have. She was adopted by my wife's parents. To me, it looks like the dog intentionally got sick, died, reincarnated, and came right back to our family in a fresh new body.

Things make so much sense sometimes if you can see beyond one lifetime and take absolute personal responsibility. If somebody gets sick and dies, on some level you can respect it, because on some level they must have wanted to. There was something else they'd rather do. That's what I hope to communicate: a bigger vision of life and possibility, one that helps you enjoy life, find your passion, and stop suffering in areas where, to me, the suffering is optional.

I appreciate you taking this idea in. These are the kinds of conversations I keep going in my Life playlist, where I share more about reincarnation, recovery, health, and taking radical responsibility for everything in your reality.

Here Is Hope for Your Health Challenges

From my video published April 29, 2024.

If You or Someone You Love Is Having Health Challenges, This Is for You

If you or someone you love is having health challenges, this is for you. By the end of this, not only do I hope you feel better, but you just might be saying thank you for these exact health challenges. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I personally have seen the elimination of an incredible amount of health challenges in my life. I'm in the best health I have ever been in today. And I'm sharing this because one of my friends recently shared about her health challenges, and I asked her, I said, are you open to some alternative ideas that, in my own experience, might be extremely effective and make your life so much easier and allow you to completely eliminate the health challenges you're facing? And she said yes, and I said, great, this is for you. So this is for her and for all of you in similar situations, and I will at all times share my exact experience with you. I have 11 books, some of which are written by medical doctors, that I've found fantastically helpful.

So the very first thing is to start feeling right now how you would feel if whatever health challenge is currently in front of you were gone. How would you feel when that's gone? If you can start closing your eyes and picturing that right now, in my experience you will start to bring all the solutions towards you rapidly and speed up the process and make it so much easier.

The Health Challenges I've Overcome

To give you a bit of my experience, what health challenges have I overcome? Because if you look at me, you might just purely see health, that this guy's in great health. My worst health challenge I've experienced is alcoholism, which came with both a mental and a physical illness, tremendous mental and physical suffering. And 10 years ago, it looked impossible that I could get a solution to that. I could not imagine a way or see a way that either I could stop drinking at all, or to be sober and actually like it. And out of desperation, I prayed, God, please, I'll do anything to get sober. And that's key if you really, truly want to be free of whatever health challenge it is, at least that's what I found in my own journey.

Honesty, identifying this is here, this is what I'm experiencing now, not denying it and pretending like it's not there, but honesty and sharing that with others. Like my friend did, she courageously shared in a room full of people the exact health challenges she was having. Sharing with other people gives us the chance to help you. Open-mindedness, after you're honest, having an open mind to take in the help, to take in this message, and then willingness to actually take some of the suggestions and to put into practice many of the things I'll tell you, which I'll tell you I'm putting into practice myself.

So that's exactly what I did. I finally, after 11 years of drinking and dishonesty and denial and all these attempts to not have it and to make it work, I finally got honest and said, I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking even if I want to. Now, in my experience that's a serious mental and physical illness, a serious health challenge. And I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and the people there helped me not only learn how to stay sober, but how to love staying sober and so much more than that.

I've had many other health challenges like being overweight, getting sick and having every flu and cold that would come along. I've had back pain that I dealt with for years. I had these what are like pockets of yeast all over my chest and back for many years. In my own experience, all of it has been eliminated. I'm sober 10 years. The spots on my back and chest are gone. I do not experience neck pain or back pain on any kind of a regular or even not regular basis. Rarely, I may have a little bit here and there and it goes away quickly.

I today have one single remaining health challenge. Oh, I also lost weight. I was 250 pounds 10 years ago. I am 173 pounds today and I've kept the weight off since 2016, which is eight years ago now. And from 2014 to 2016, I steadily lost the weight in a very joyous, healthy way.

My Last Remaining Health Challenge: My Eyesight

The last health challenge I currently am facing is that in 1999, I went to the doctor after focusing on that which I could not see and got a prescription for glasses and was diagnosed with myopia, which is nearsightedness, which most of Western medicine considers uncurable and irreversible outside of surgeries that can be dangerous and sometimes cause harm to your eyes, which I'm not willing to take on. However, I am personally going through a process of natural eyesight readjustment. It turns out there's books from people who have, in their own accounts, gotten their myopia reduced through eye exercises, through changing beliefs, and through other practices like palming — some so drastically that where they were once nearly blind, now they could drive, and others to at least make huge improvements. So, in my own experience, I'm currently experiencing my eyesight improving. And this is something much of medical science says is impossible, while there are books out there, that they're not reading, that say exactly how the authors believe it can be done.

So that is my personal track record. And from that point of view, I've also seen a lot of things other people have dealt with. I've learned so many things that have helped me be healthy, that I'm going to just give all of that to you here. For example, in my own experience I have not been sick one single day since October 2022. And I know exactly why I got sick that particular time, and I had been very healthy before that. That is a year and a half, not one single day of sickness — that is the healthiest I've ever been in my entire life, healthier than I ever was as a kid or a young adult. And if that's possible for me, what I've come to believe is that you too can experience a higher level of health than you've had before.

Let the Sick Man Say I Am Healthy

And the starting point, for me, is this. Let the weak man say I am strong, as is said in the Bible. Or to put that in health terms, let the sick man say I am healthy. What I've observed in every person who is self-labeled as sick, they identify as I am sick. I am a sick person. I have chronic health issues. And every single person like me who is healthy identifies that I am healthy, and I am free from any chronic health issues. That might sound like it doesn't matter that much. But from the deepest level of the world, what I've come to believe is that what you manifest is often based on your identity, who you think you are. And from there is where, in my experience, you can make instant change.

So I encourage you, if you are thinking of yourself as sick, to consider, from my own journey, stopping thinking that way right now, and to say I am healthy. I am healthy. I am healthy. And I know if you've identified as sick, and if you've been talking about how you have these health problems, and I'm going through this, that this will often feel like a lie in the moment. It will start some conflict within you, you'll be standing there saying I'm healthy, or laying there saying I am healthy, and your brain will be like, no, you're not. This is the same thing that's been going on with you.

Mind Over Medicine and Becoming My Own Doctor

And I'm going to lay out a bunch of examples of books, and stories of my own. The first book I'm going to share with you talks exactly about this point. And this is written by a medical doctor. I am not a medical doctor, I don't practice medicine. In my mind, I am my own doctor. So I've learned enough to educate myself to be my own doctor. And this was one of the key books I read. It's named Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin, who is an MD who's practiced quite a while. And the subtext is scientific proof you can heal yourself.

If you really want to be free from your health challenges, I'm going to give you 11 books here. And to demonstrate your willingness, I suggest you read every single one of them start to finish as I have. Because what I've found is that the number one issue with health challenges, in my own experience, is the way our minds are programmed — that if you'll change your mind's programming, the physical structure of your body can change too. I've seen the physical structure of my body change in response to changing my thinking. But often, you have to change your actions to change your thinking, and that will then change your identification and your body.

So this book is written by a medical doctor who became very frustrated with the traditional Western practice of medicine, where it's basically an industrial assembly line, or a process of making as much money for the doctors and the hospitals and the health insurance companies in the shortest amount of time. And it's a hard time for everyone involved, where you're just showing up, and as a doctor, you don't even really get to usually know your patients. All you're often doing is telling them what's wrong with them, giving them drugs or surgeries or similar treatments that, in her view, often actually harm the body. And the body is so resilient and so amazing in healing itself that, as she argues, despite many Western medicine treatments actually harming the body, the body gets well despite the treatments given by Western medicine.

So this book has so many incredible stories in it from a medical doctor who got so frustrated with the practice of medicine, she quit being a doctor and started an online business instead. And after years, she felt called to come back and be a doctor, but this time to be what in her mind was the kind of doctor she'd imagined being, the reason she got into medical practice — to really help people from a holistic point of view, and to really get to know her patients. What she describes as the biggest failing of Western medicine is just looking at things one way and being a for-profit system.

Why So Much of This Information Isn't Shared

A lot of health challenges in our current system, in my belief, exist because they're profitable. And this is why information like I'm sharing is something that, in my opinion, really everyone should know, but a lot of people don't know. Why? Because this is information that, in my own experience, has eliminated all kinds of needs to go to the doctor and have surgeries. From the way I see it, it's profitable to have people who are sick, who have to go to the doctor all the time, that have to go to the hospital all the time, that have to take drugs all the time, because every step of the way, it's not profitable for the collective, for all of us, but there are certain parts — like hospitals, doctors, the companies that are health insurance — there's a certain part of the system that, in my view, makes a huge profit off of sick people, and that part of the system is thriving.

So one of the biggest challenges is if you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you the most powerful information possible to stay healthy, such as reading a book like this — or as my uncle did. My uncle is a general practitioner who's practiced over 40 years. One of the big turning points in my health is when he gave me the book How Not to Die.

The Book My Doctor Friend Gives Every Patient

He said he gives every one of his patients that visits his walk-in clinic this book, every time, on their first time into his clinic. The subtitle of this book is Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease. It's written by Dr. Michael Greger. In his book, he gives a ton of evidence that if you eat a whole plant based diet, whole plants are fruits, as he defines them: fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans that have been minimally or not processed at all. For example, buying a fruit or beans straight off the vegetable or fruit aisle out of the grocery store, that have not been turned into something like tofu. For example, tofu is a processed soybean, which means much of the nutrition has been stripped out of it.

His book says that, based on huge amounts of research and his personal experience, if you eat a whole plant based diet, you can do some combination of slow, stop, prevent, and or reverse all 15 top causes of death. I want to be clear that this is the claim Dr. Greger makes in his book, drawing on his research and his own experience. I'll repeat it because it's really important to me. According to his book and his research, if you eat a whole plant based diet, a diet which primarily consists of minimally or not processed at all fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, along with perhaps a B12 supplement, which I take an occasional B12 supplement maybe every other day or so, if you eat like that, his book says it will prevent, stop the progression of, and or reverse all 15 of the top causes of death. All 15 top causes of death with one single affordable, natural treatment that, in his telling, you don't need to go see anybody about.

Now, this is uncommon for doctors to give their patients a book like this on the first visit. Why? Because, in my experience, when you really practice this book, you don't hardly need to go to the doctor anymore. I have not been at a doctor in years. I have no need to go to the doctor because I feel healthy. Do you see how that is a conflict of interest for our existing healthcare system, which makes a profit when people go to the doctor, when people take drugs, when people go to the hospital, when people are sick? Our entire, quote, healthcare system would almost completely collapse if there were more people like me who feel healthy and do not use the system. It would almost completely collapse. As I see it, it is funded on sick people.

And this means your doctor, if they give you the best information, that's counterproductive in terms of their business. Now that's a problem because, the way I see it, that's often subconscious, and that dictates how medical schools are taught. Now you might be wondering, well, how does this relate to my health challenges? My belief is that your health challenges are profitable, and for that reason, the entire system is set up to help you have and find and feed health challenges. And what I've come to believe is that if you will change how you think about health challenges, you will find an abundance of books and stories and resources that, in my experience, will help you eliminate almost every health challenge you can imagine. And that's what I've experienced firsthand. And that's what I'm going to continue sharing with you here, some of my experience with doing that. For me, there's no substitute for reading these books. I'm going to go through the rest of the books here, and then I'm going to share a bunch of my own stories.

Louise Hay and You Can Heal Your Life

This book by Louise Hay. Now, the first two books I gave you, those are both written by medical doctors with a bunch of research backing them up. Now, keep in mind, in my view, most research in terms of healthcare is funded by those in a position to make a profit, which means most research in terms of human health is funded by drug companies and companies that are looking for ways to make a profit, which means much of the medical research you hear about that's published is, as I understand it, driven by profit motives, not actually by keeping people healthy. But there is research you probably haven't seen that Dr. Greger goes through in detail, that Lissa Rankin goes through in detail, that, in my opinion, shows things your doctor should know but might never have heard of before, that I find incredibly powerful and that have worked for me.

Now this book by Louise Hay is called You Can Heal Your Life. This is an incredible book where she describes healing what she calls a terminal disease with alternative treatments. And even with the YouTube terms and conditions, the system is set up so much that I have to be careful, even in what I say, because the YouTube terms and conditions are even set in favor of promoting one-way thinking about certain diseases, and alternative treatments, you can't even talk about them. So this book talks about what, for many people, was a terminal disease and involved a painful end of life treatment plan. She describes healing it through alternative means that, in her account, were not only very effective for her, but they allowed her to then share what she had done in her life with so many others.

So this is how, right now, you can start saying, thank you for this health challenge. I am very grateful for my journey with my eyesight, because this is more and more material for my future videos. This is more and more material I can help other people with. And this allows me to be in this with you. So I'm not just standing here saying I have cleared every single last health challenge out of my life. I'm always working on my own. And yet I only have one, and it's incredibly minor. What I believe is that if you'll focus on the biggest health challenges you have first, you can clear those out and then continue to go through the smaller and smaller ones until you don't have any painfully acute, difficult health challenges left. In fact, this journey with my eyesight has been fun. It's been thought provoking. It's been surprising.

The Mind-Body Connection

So this book by Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, reading this book was so powerful, and she said one little thing in it. Basically, this book elaborates further on the mind body connection and starts to talk about it. It promotes a belief that symptoms in the body are connected with the way you're thinking. And this is something that Lissa Rankin, in her book Mind Over Medicine, goes into with details and research. But this book dives deeper into the practice of that.

Here's an example that was instantly effective for me. She talks about how, once she realized that the symptoms and the disease she manifested in her body had a specific lesson for her and a specific path that she could treat it, that was all natural, alternative treatments, not painful or awful to go through, and that this was a gift to her. In her account these things tended to be predictable, and the exact thing that manifested in her would often manifest in other people and have very similar reasons for that person. And she started to find that, in her belief, all kinds of different symptoms in the body have a way of thinking that is connected with that symptom, and that if you modify your thinking, the symptoms will often stop almost immediately.

The first powerful experience I had with this was with coughing. For me, one indication: if I'm coughing, I take it as an indication of an opportunity to change, to open my thinking, to stop doing often whatever it was, or whatever I was thinking about right before I started coughing. Let me give you a very clear example of the first time this happened.

2019: Willing to Change

In 2019, I had got myself in the worst financial situation of my life because of thinking, I am broke, I don't have enough. In 2018, despite external circumstances, I had more money than ever externally. Internally, it wasn't enough for me, and I started thinking broke. A year later, my finances matched that. At this time, I was heavily resisting taking the changes I needed to get out of that. Number one, getting fully transparent and telling my wife how much money I'd spent and how bad of a position I'd gotten myself in, that I was borrowing money on credit cards to make minimum payments at ridiculous interest rates.

And I kept thinking, you need to ask your wife for money, or you're going to go bankrupt, or you're literally going to default on everything. Like, you need to ask for help. You need to talk about this. And I'm like, no, no, it's not manly. I can't do that. I'm the income provider for my family. And I was coughing, coughing and coughing. And I was thinking about the money and coughing, and thinking about my finances and coughing.

And I remembered this book, and I said out loud in the car by myself on the way to pick my daughter up: I am willing to change. I am changing. I am willing to change. And I started crying, and I realized, you need to ask your wife for money. And you're going to ask your wife for money. And you're going to stop spending all this money. You're going to ask your wife for money. You're going to ask everybody for your help. And you're going to change your financial situation. And I cried. I felt like I was such a failure as a man to be asking my wife for money. And I mean, I had to ask my wife for all of her money, all of her investments, all of her cash. It took everything just to get through without declaring bankruptcy, so that we could keep paying the bills. My wife had been relying on me to pay the bills for years, since our daughter was born. And I felt like an utter failure, with sobbing.

My cough instantaneously stopped. And then I realized what had happened. My willingness to change. What I came to believe is that my cough was a little encouragement from my body to change, to open my mind, to allow a new creative expression to come through. My cough, in my experience, was a signal that I was resisting that which I wanted, that which I needed. My cough was a signal to stop thinking how I was thinking, to open up to change. And as soon as I said, I'm willing to change, I opened up, and my cough immediately stopped.

I have never had a consistent cough again in five years. No matter what else has happened in my life, at the first or the second cough: I'm willing to change. I'm changing. I'm willing to change. Come on, I'm open. Let's go. Let's not resist. Let's just let the change happen. I have never consistently had a cough since I realized, for me, the coughing and the willing to change are mentally and physically linked. I'm telling you what I believe: there are symptoms you are struggling with today that, in my experience, if you will understand the mental signal, the connection, you can instantaneously eliminate certain symptoms like coughing. And sometimes things like coughing will reveal exactly what you're feeling, exactly what you need to change.

My friend was talking about coughing for hours. And to me, the obvious cause of the coughing for hours was what she did right before it. And to her it wasn't obvious. Sometimes these things are super obvious. And this is why, in my experience, we need to ask other people for help.

Ask, and You Will Hear Amazing Stories

I promise you, if you ask, the more you share about your health challenges and ask for advice, you will hear some amazing stories from people that they don't often tell. This is one of the reasons I love it when people join Jerry Banfield Family and actually ask and share openly. And I've found, there's so many more of these out there. There's a book called You Can Heal Your Body that Louise Hay wrote, which has exact symptoms, exact problems and causes, and exact affirmations that you can do. In my experience, some things will take more time than others. Other things, if you'll do the affirmation, the symptom will stop almost instantaneously. I don't very often have symptoms in any part of my body for any length of time, because what I do is I go to the book, I look at the symptom, and I start doing the affirmation right away. And in my experience, I know it works for me. This is an example of the level of information that's out there that I believe can completely change your life.

Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me

Let's look at some more of these books. Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me. This is a book where the author describes a near death experience where she went to a stage of cancer that, as she tells it, nobody had ever survived. And she had a near death experience. As she describes it, she chose to come back here and her body healed, rapidly. And she could see that all the way she had thought, she had set herself up. She had been afraid of cancer. No matter how well she ate, she had been dreading it, she had been afraid of it. According to her book, it's like she created this experience for herself, through her fear, her expectations, her attention to it. She created this experience. And then, as she tells it, simply changing her identity and letting go, the cancer almost very rapidly went away. And the doctors were blown away. They'd never seen that happen before.

There's a lot of stories like this out there. I've even watched it in my own home, with a story I tell about how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease. So Dying to Be Me, this was a really good book, in my experience, if you feel like you're hopeless. I mean, she was about as hopeless as you could get. And since this book came out, she's spoken with Wayne Dyer and traveled all over the world to share her message, and written additional books. What I've come to believe is that there is very powerful information in here that defies a lot of the things we've been taught and we've been told.

Breath, and the Last Time I Had a Cold

Here's another book called Breath. Let me tell you about the last time I had a cold. It has been years since I've had a cold. What I've come to believe is that once you get a hold of this information I'm sharing and you start to realize how much control you have over what goes on in your body, if there's a symptom, a health challenge you don't like, you start to realize there's a book for that. There's a way to change my thinking and my behavior that, in my experience, will eliminate that.

The last time I got a cold and I was sniffling and I was coughing, I said, this is stupid. I believe that there's some change I could make. There's some information I could get a hold of that would eliminate this. I never want to have a cold or a flu again. I'm done with it. Never ever again. That's what I was thinking. Literally as I'm having the last symptoms of it, I'm thinking I want information right now. Never again. Cold, sniffles, flu, I'm done with this crap. Not coughing, but congested. Never again.

I walk into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I shake the hand of one of my friends there. I tell him what I was just thinking about. And he gives me this book, Breath. Almost immediately. And for me, it was completely effective. I said, and this is why I believe you need to get honest and ask other people, you would not believe what information people are holding on to that, if you will just share your struggle, they've got an answer. And it's often not logical. Like how is it that I'm having this sniffles and this cold and I walk in and I go to the exact guy in an AA meeting who's read the exact book that would be extremely effective for me? I mean, to me, life is magical. What I've come to believe is that once you realize life is magical and you are creating it, as soon as you realize it, as soon as you think of something, you start bringing it to you. And as long as you don't repeatedly push it away and bring it in, push it away, like as long as you just open up and let it come, in my experience it can come almost immediately.

So he immediately told me about this book. I immediately knew this is exactly what I'm looking for. This is exactly what I was just thinking I wanted. I dove into this book. What does this book teach you? How important your breath is. And it gives a whole bunch of lessons and research. The author isn't a doctor. He's done a lot of research into breathing and the breath. It gives a whole bunch of research into breathing.

Learning How to Breathe

Now, it was a humbling experience to say the least that, having been born in 1984, and this was probably 2022, that I didn't know how to breathe. You might think like, well, breathing, you know, that's definitely something I've got down. I read this book and I'm like, holy crap, I don't even know how to breathe properly. What this book basically teaches, according to the author, is that breathing through the nose is the designed way the body is meant to operate. His suggestion is to never mouth breathe, except in emergencies or needing to talk. He writes that mouth breathing causes problems, and he did some experiments that were awful, like plugging his nose up for a couple of weeks with plugs. He was shocked at the health problems that, as he describes, quickly manifested by not nose breathing.

One immediately effective solution that I applied in reading this book is that he suggests, while you're awake, that you keep your mouth shut and consciously breathe through your nose. And if you notice your mouth breathing, shut your mouth and breathe through your nose. But when you're asleep, sometimes your body will betray you and you'll wake up mouth breathing. And the way he suggests to correct that is to buy some mouth tape. Now, these, it's not like you duct tape your whole mouth shut and you're going to suffocate. There's little specific pieces of mouth tape they sell for this exact purpose. And what it does, it holds your mouth shut just hard enough so that when your body's unconscious, it will keep your lips shut. So you will not mouth breathe while you're asleep.

Now, what happens instead, of course, if you really tried, you could easily just open your mouth and the tape would come off. So if you were conscious, the tape would practically fall off easily. And it's so gentle, like sometimes it fell off at night while I was sleeping. So we're erring on the side of a gentle keeping the lips shut tape, not like that. What I found is that when your nose gets clogged up at night, with the mouth tape, you wake up wide eyed as your brain is struggling to get enough oxygen, you wake up wide eyed, having not been able to breathe enough. And I would lay there for hours, some nights in the middle of the night, nose breathing, because I was born with a deviated septum and I had been in the habit of mouth breathing. Often when the deviated septum breathing would come into play, or during exercise especially, and at night, I often would mouth breathe a lot. The author writes that mouth breathing often causes respiratory and throat issues. And what I believe is one big reason I have not had a cold or a flu any time in the last year and a half is because of this book, because I've eliminated mouth breathing except when talking. And I still try and remember when I'm filming to nose breathe, but I get to talking so fast sometimes that I end up sucking breath in through the mouth. One of the easiest ways I've found you can eliminate mouth breathing is with the mouth tape at night. Now, I've spent a good number of nights awake feeling like I was breathing through a needle, but refusing to mouth breathe and being calm.

Slow Breathing and Longevity

Another thing from this book it talks about is that, according to the author, animals that tend to take slower breaths tend to live longer. And one of the things he suggests you can do if you're into anti aging and you want to be at maximum health and not age, is to slow down your breathing. A lot of people take these really short, shallow breaths, which he associates with emphysema. And his idea is that if you will take big, long, slow, deep nose breaths, oh my God. When I was reading this book, I started doing 30 second inhales, 30 second exhales, one breath per minute. I think the average person breathes like 10 or 12 breaths a minute. Reading this book for months, I was obsessed with my breathing. I consciously slowed my breathing down so that my default breathing state now is drastically slower. Especially doing something like yoga, I'll often find myself taking 5, 10, 20 second in breaths and really long out breaths also. And I never mouth breathe exercising now.

What I've learned from this book is that, when I tried running while applying it, if I'm running so hard that I can't get enough air by nose breathing, then the intelligent thing to do is slow down. Walk and catch your breath, then resume running. Do not mouth breathe. In fact, he showed research in this book that athletes, as soon as they start mouth breathing, their performance goes downhill, because nose breathing is so much more effective. In fact, he cites how some of the ancient Indian tribes didn't even want to open their mouth to smile for fear of letting air out of their lips. And he writes that a lot of teeth problems we have come through mouth breathing. This book is an example of the sheer quantity of help that, in my experience, you can get in one single book.

A Year and a Half Without Getting Sick

This book has been huge for me in eliminating colds and respiratory stuff. Because I notice my kids often end up having coughs and respiratory stuff and bronchial things, and they're mouth breathing at night. And I've encouraged them to try the mouth tape. They're not interested in it. I'm not going to force them to do it. But I've noticed in the last year and a half, every member of my family has had some kind of cold or flu. I have not.

Now, I've been around all kinds of people. I go to AA meetings where you've got homeless people in there. I shake everyone's hand. I'm up in everybody's face, sitting next to everybody. I'm at yoga almost every day, same thing. My kids are in school. They're in elementary school. So all of our current programming would tell you that you're not going to be able to avoid getting sick, that you're in a germ infested environment. So why is it that in a year and a half, being around as many people as possible, I have not experienced a single day sick, not one single cold, not one single flu, and everybody else in my family, even though they're pretty healthy, they've all got something, not once for me? What I believe is that this book is one of the biggest parts of it.

But why did I find this book? Because I opened my mind to it. I knew it existed. And, in my experience, I pulled it to me almost instantaneously as soon as I desired it. This is how I believe you start getting this hope.

The Seth Books by Jane Roberts

What I've come to believe is that your health challenges can be eliminated way faster and way easier with way less suffering than you ever imagined before. Let's look at some more books. There's a series of books I've read by Jane Roberts, who narrates and channels a medium named Seth. I've read a bunch of them, all the audio books. If you're thinking, man, I can't read books, I don't like to read, hopefully you didn't dip on this video already. But I guess you wouldn't be hearing this. It's like it's not happening if you did.

I listen to almost all these books on Audible, in audio book format, because personally, the stuff I read is on the computer, chat messages. I spend enough time reading with my eyes that I want to take in books usually through audio books, so that way I can wash the dishes, walk the dog, hang clothes, etc., and take in a book at the same time. So I listen to the Seth books, a bunch of Seth books by Jane Roberts. These books share some of the most out of the box health ideas I've ever heard before, and in my experience they're extremely powerful.

Now, not every little suggestion and thing worked. One of the things suggested, instead of sleeping one long sleep throughout the night, was that you break your sleep into multiple parts and get up in the middle of the night and take a nap during the day. I tried that and that worked horribly for my body. But I did at least try it. I tried a new way of sleeping. And I'm not here to tell you that the exact things I've done will work the exact same way for you. But what I've come to believe is there is what might seem like now a magical way that you can be at the best health you've ever been in before, and that some of the things that work for me will work exactly the same for you. Others of them won't work as well, or there'll be an alternative that somebody else gives you that will work as well.

So this book has a ton of beliefs and ideas about health and well being that, in my experience, ring much more true than anything I'd ever heard outside of the books I've shown you here.

The First Sign of a Loss of Vitality

For example, one of the last books I read was specifically about health. And it was written while the author was in the hospital dying. And meanwhile, she's channeling this medium talking about health. One of the most powerful phrases in the book said that the first sign of a loss of vitality is a lack of play and a focus on one's personal problems. And I was like, wow, wow.

If you look at kids, what I've noticed is children are generally very healthy unless they live in an environment with adults who are very sick. In which case, the adults often are so impactful on the children that the children mirror the adults. My children are very healthy. And a big part of that, I believe, is because they live with me and with my wife, who is also very healthy. What I also notice is children are always playing and having fun. And children are not focusing on personal problems.

And almost everyone I have ever observed who is chronically ill or bogged down by health challenges is a very serious, not fun, not playful person who is totally consumed with their own selfish, self centered health issues. So I'm not saying you should deny all your health issues and never look at what's going on, but what I believe is that it needs to be not the main focus of your life. Health challenges should never be the main focus of your life. Personal problems should never be the main focus of your life. Play, fun, joy, learning, creativity, growth, connection, and serving and helping others, all those things are signs of life and health and vitality.

Being isolated, alone, brooding upon your health issues, having a life where all you do is watch TV and go to the doctor, I mean, in my view that's the lifestyle of a sick person. And what I believe is that if you will live like a healthy person, you will be a healthy person. There's many people who were perfectly healthy and started living at home, that stopped working, that their spouse died and all they did is sit at home and watch TV and then go to the doctor, and all of a sudden they're sick.

So this nature of personal realities, and the Seth books, are extremely powerful. And some of the other books are kind of a more gentle introduction to some of these ideas, which to many people versed only in Western medicine thinking will find some of these things shocking. And I loved the ideas I got out of these Seth books. And it's not just about health, but there's so many other areas of life. There's so many out of the box, powerful ways of thinking.

What I've come to believe is that many health challenges come about from limiting, frustrated ways of thinking, suppressed emotions that then burst out in the form of a health condition. Many people I've observed manifest health issues.

The Last Time I Got Sick

Let me tell you about the last time I got sick. And this is a line of thinking that I got from this book and the many others similar to it. The last time I got sick, or experienced what you would call, if you looked at me, you'd say he's sick or he has a cold, was October, 2022. At the time I had had quite an experience of health before that. And it was Sunday. The end of October, 2022, the next day I had a flight booked to go help my mother move in Mississippi. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida.

And on the surface, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go help mom move. This is great. I've wanted this for a long time. But deep down, I really, really did not want to drop my entire life, which I love, with my wife and my kids and my yoga and my AA meetings and my video games and my videos that I create, at the time my live stream. I really did not want to drop that stuff for a week to go help my mother move.

And I started to experience fatigue. Fatigue was about the only symptom I had. I started to experience this huge level of fatigue, like you would experience with getting a flu or something. But there were no other symptoms, just fatigue. That's what's amazing, in my experience, when you start kicking. If you can just kick one single health challenge and be conscious of your role in doing that, then you can start to realize there's new ways to be sick, or to not identify as sick. But if you do have a health challenge, what I've found is you can actually enjoy it. And it can be way softer and gentler and kinder. Like for me, the only symptom I experienced was fatigue.

And Sunday night, I started to get this foreboding sense of fatigue. I started to feel like my body was betraying me, that it was going against what I had asked it to do. And I was dreading calling my mother Monday morning, telling her I couldn't make the plane flight and I was too sick to come help her move, and rescheduling the flight. At the same time, though, there was a part of me that was thrilled. Great. I'm off the hook. This is the only reason I could think of that I could get out of this. There was some unacknowledged part of me that thought it was awesome that I could just lay around at home instead of going to help my mother move, which was quite a task.

But what I did after I called my mother, I immediately got enough energy to get out of bed and sit around and play some video games. Isn't that funny? And then I started to consciously integrate everything like, hey, body, I really do want to help my mother go move. I'm serious. I'm willing to drop my games. I'm willing to miss the time with my family. I really, really, really, really want the energy to go help my mother move.

And within 48 hours, my body spun my energy back up again. There were no other symptoms. There was no diagnosis. It was simply a drop of energy to where I could barely just lay in bed, barely do anything. And once I got clear with my, I really want the energy to go help my mother move. It took a couple of days, and what I've found is you need to have patience, especially if you've had an ongoing health challenge.

Sometimes things like coughing can disappear almost instantaneously. With some things like my natural eyesight improvement, this has been a journey I've been on for years of doing some work and then stopping and then giving up and then coming back to it and seeing progress. So some things, they're not going to disappear instantaneously in some cases, especially if you have deep beliefs. So give yourself patience and love and kindness and allow things to take time and be persistent.

So after two days of thinking, I really, really, really want to go help my mother move and I'm serious and I'll let go of everything else. It's fine. I'll take a week off of my life. It's fine. I'll do it. My body spun the energy right back up and I was on a plane to go help my mother move on Wednesday.

Over the next week, I mostly by myself loaded 15,000 pounds of stuff out of her house and storage lockers into a U-Haul and then dumped it into the landfill. So that's 15,000 pounds up into the U-Haul and then 15,000 pounds out of the U-Haul. A bunch of trips to the landfill, to the thrift shop to give stuff away. I did one of the most amounts of physical labor I've ever done in my whole life. And my body, just a few days after having no energy to lay down, spun the energy up and I had the perfect amount of energy to help my mother move. And the move went very smoothly. There were four men who moved like 30 or 40,000 more pounds of her stuff in two trucks to her house here.

And I realized what had happened afterwards. What I came to believe is that because there was this unacknowledged part of me that really didn't want to help my mother move, it manifested the drop in energy to give me what I was asking for that I didn't want to consciously admit that I wanted. Does that make sense? There was this suppressed, strongly suppressed urge that I didn't even want to think about consciously. But, in the way I understand it, my body gave me what it thought I wanted. My body gave me, oh, you don't want to go help your mother move so much that you're embarrassed to even admit this? Well, let's just suck all your energy down the drain and there, that'll give you what you want, won't you? Aren't you happy now?

My daughter, the other day, children are often very, very easy to latch on to some of these ideas. And you can see powerful examples of how, especially kids like my daughter's age, 8 years old, powerful examples of how these ideas work for them.

How Much of Our Illness Do We Create Ourselves?

A week or two ago, my daughter gets up in the morning and she's like, I want to stay home today. And before, we had set this narrative up, as most parents do, that as long as you're healthy, you need to go to school. So my daughter had learned through the environment she was in that if you want to get out of doing school, you can. And many of us have learned that we can get out of doing work, we can get out of things in our relationships, we can get out of commitments we've made by making ourselves ill. And once you start, this idea starts to blow up in your brain. It's like, oh my God, how much of my illness in my life has been totally self-created by my unacknowledged desire to get out of going to a job I hate, a school I don't like, a relationship I don't want? That's what I've come to believe from my own experience.

My dad passed away 10 years ago. And at the time, you know, he had some disease. It doesn't even matter what disease. He also had heart issues. He had a bunch of health problems. And at the time, we're all sad and it was all horrible and he didn't want to die. And 10 years later, what I've come to believe is, he totally did want to die. It was the only honorable exit he could make from his life. He was not happy. He was not enjoying his life. His decisions, in my view, indicate he did want to get sick and die because he wanted to move on and do something else with his life. And he didn't feel there was any honorable way to do that besides get sick and die. He didn't feel like he could just leave my mother and go start some new life.

And my father-in-law, by comparison, he has had a few health challenges come up. And he has changed his diet. He started all these things like changing his diet. He's made a drastic change to his diet to eating mostly vegan. And he's paying attention. He's exercising. He's getting out. You can see he wants to live. He wants more time with his wife, with his kids, and with his grandkids. His decisions indicate his desire for life. And his health challenges have inspired him to make changes.

So what I've come to believe is this: you can let your health challenges be a horrible curse that has been put on you because you're a bad person. Or you can let your health challenges be a signal, an opportunity to change, and to grow, and to learn, and to confirm — do you really want to be here or not? Looking back now, this is such a surprising point of view, but I believe my father totally did want to die. On the surface, he'd tell you to your face that he didn't. He was sick, and this was just his life. But he wouldn't make any change. He wouldn't do anything to try and take better care of himself. He wouldn't even quit smoking. To me, he clearly wasn't that interested in continuing to live. And I don't blame him for it. But I understand, in my own experience, how powerful this stuff is.

My Daughter and the "I'm Sick" Show

So let me go back to my daughter now. My daughter, who is eight years old, comes out to the table, and she starts putting on this whole I'm sick show. And my wife was even doubting it, like, you know, you're not sick. And so my daughter was doubling down because she really wants to stay home. And me, having read what I've read, finally put my daughter's behavior together with her desires. Many times in the past, like once every month or so, my daughter would wake up and be sick. She wouldn't eat anything in the morning. She'd drain herself of energy. She sometimes would cough or even throw up. And she'd lay around all day. No one else would ever get whatever she had. Like my wife and I and her little brother, my son, we would never get what she had. But she'd go through this routine of being sick — half the time she'd throw up and lay around, not eat and be sick.

So I started to catch on to this, and to put these ideas together with what I was learning. And I started to believe she wants to stay home from school. And she's been conditioned that she has to be sick to stay home from school. So she makes herself sick to stay home from school, because that's what she thinks is expected of her. That's how I've come to understand it.

So a couple of weeks ago, I saw her start to do this. And I said, look, you can stay home for any reason. The morning had evolved as it usually had. She laid around, she refused to eat. And the more my wife questioned, you know, are you really sick? You don't look sick. She started to try and act more sick. And then she eventually went to get in her bed and rest. And my wife's understandably like, all right, if you're sick, go in your bed and rest. So my daughter got in bed. She wouldn't eat. She was resting. She was putting on this whole sick thing.

So I walked in and stood by her bed. And I said, Madeline, you are free to stay home from school anytime you want to. And I would prefer you to be in full health when you stay home from school. I don't want any more of these days where you're at home sick, throwing up, not eating, laying around, sometimes crying or having a heating pad. I'm like, if you want to stay home from school, just say, Dad, I'd like to stay home from school. I would prefer you to be in full health so that we can have a nice day together, so that you can enjoy your day at home. That's what I would like for you to do.

And then I shared my experience with getting sick. The last time I had been sick was when my mother — I was going to help her move. I told her that. And I said, Madeline, in my experience, my body made itself drained of energy to give me the unacknowledged thing, the only way that I thought was appropriate to receive it. The only way I could stand to call my mother and say I couldn't make it and that she would accept it is if I said I was sick. Now, she still was disappointed, but she couldn't really fault me for being sick. That's how I understand what happened to me.

So I told her, I'm like, Madeline, I would prefer you to be healthy today. You are very smart. Your body makes things happen based on what you want to happen. She's like, I do want to go to school, Dad. I do want to see my friends. I'm like, often these things are unacknowledged. Do you really wholeheartedly want to go to school and see your friends? Because if you do, I believe your body will make that happen. And she's like — this was Easter weekend — she's like, we spent all weekend with people at Easter. There were all Easter egg hunts, parties. I really would like a day to just stay home and be by myself and read and do my tablet. And I'm like, see, there you go, Madeline. Now, can you get up and have a day in health? Can you eat your breakfast? Can you be healthy? Can you enjoy this day at home? She said, yes. She got out of bed. She immediately plowed through her breakfast and she enjoyed the rest of the day at home in health.

Now, I did tell her, I'm like, Madeline, you can only miss so many days of school before you get kicked out of your school and then we'd have to homeschool you. So you're free anytime to say you don't want to go to school. You don't need to provide any reason at all. And I prefer you to be healthy when you do so. That said, if you take advantage of that too much, you will get kicked out of your school. You will need to homeschool, which we know you don't want.

The Difference It Made

So today, my daughter wakes up. And, you know, my wife still often does things on momentum. Madeline's like, Mom, I'd like another day to rest. And Laura's like, you don't look sick to me. And I'm like, Madeline, you can stay home today. You don't need any reason to stay home. I would prefer you to be healthy if you stay home. You know, I get a little bit of a glare in the kitchen. Laura's like, are you sure you want to stay home? Madeline's like, yes, I'd like to take one more day. I really want to go to school tomorrow.

And on the day I was telling you about after Easter, and all the previous times that Madeline had been sick like that, she'd spent all day in bed, often thrown up and not eaten and had almost no energy and sometimes missed two days of school. That time, she took four walks. She walked with the dog with me while she was home that day. Today, she has been at her abundant, usual, joyful self. She's enjoyed playing some checkers with Laura. She took the dog for a walk with us this morning. She's been full of energy. She's been eating normally. And I'm just like, in my experience, it's amazing to see how fast this stuff works in an honest, open, willing person. To see my daughter almost instantly just turn off playing sick. And go right back to what is normal, healthy, playful, joyful, full of life, not focused on personal problems.

Breaking the Conditioning

Now, I have love and I have compassion for you. And I know some of this will sound hard and foreign. If for 60 years, you've been conditioned that the only way you can miss work is if you're sick, the only way you can not give your husband or your wife what she wants or whatever is to be sick, the only way that's acceptable for you to take a break is if you're sick — if you've had that much conditioning, what I believe is that you can start right now to break all of it in your mind. It may take some time for the whole infrastructure to collapse, though. So if you can start right now: I am healthy. Let the sick man say, I am healthy. If you can start to see the abundance and joy you have for life, you can start to break all this stuff down now and have patience with yourself as the system collapses around you and you rebuild anew.

And these books helped me rebuild new ideas. Another author I read is Dr. Joe Dispenza, very popular in the whole kind of vibe I'm sharing here. Joe Dispenza has several great books with a bunch of stories of people who, he says, have done this exact thing in their life, all kinds of chronic health conditions. And Joe Dispenza is a doctor. He shares all kinds of people who, again, have done the same kind of process I'm telling you about here. And in my experience, you generally are going to need some assistance with this, some kind of community or some kind of support group for this.

My Support Groups: Alcoholics Anonymous and Yoga

I go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I go to yoga. These are two of my key support groups for being healthy. I love being healthy enough every day that I can show up to a power yoga flow. I love it. I really do. I get there to the power yoga and my mind used to complain about the exertion, and now I get there and I'm like, thank God I can do this. Thank God it has been a year and a half since I've had one single day that I didn't feel up for doing a power flow class. I love it. If you want to follow along with how I live all of this out day to day, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist.

The more you read books like this, it often can be a critical threshold too. What can be challenging is if you've been programmed, you've been told your entire life a certain way of thinking, and then you get a different way of thinking in there, the first thing that will happen is often conflict. I've noticed this with my eyesight journey. I'll be thinking about what clear vision I have and how grateful I am, and then my old habits are so deeply programmed that my eyes often will gravitate immediately to the one object in my field of vision that, in my old way of thinking, proves that my vision is not perfect. There'll be one tiny font somewhere in this huge field of vision. My eyes will lock onto that and be like, you can't read that. So then I manually correct, and I'm like, look at what you can see. Tell me what you can see. Car, road sign, stoplight, grass, house, sky, clouds. Show me all the stuff you can see.

Read Every Word You Can: Why I Suggest All Eleven Books

So I'm suggesting you read every single word that you can see, one of these books start to finish, because the first book might give you some hope, but often a little bit of hope is just enough to be miserable. Now you know there's another way to live, but you don't really feel like you identify with it or can do it. So you read all 11 of these books. It starts to really sink in when it's explained, you know, 11 different ways with the same basic idea.

There's another couple of books that are not directly related to health, but they've been extremely powerful for me. Really, your life is a spiritual one. You're a spiritual being having a human experience. One of the books that really helped me get honest, open minded, and willing was Brené Brown's lecture on the power of vulnerability. I remember listening to this with a hangover as I was struggling to get sober, and I felt this surge of hope.

Vulnerability and Sharing Health Challenges

Vulnerability, when you're sharing your health challenges in front of a group of people, can be disgustingly vulnerable. I've shared all kinds of things at AA meetings, and I didn't want to share those things I was saying. They made me look bad. Some people even got resentments and didn't like me over my willingness to talk about my innermost thoughts and struggles, and some people got triggered. It's often that you feel disgustingly vulnerable opening up about health challenges especially, and getting honest with people. Somebody says, how are you doing? And you're like, I'm not good. This health challenge is kicking my butt. But it's from being vulnerable and opening up and asking people for help. That kind of honest conversation, where you can say exactly what you're going through and actually get help, is a big part of why I created Jerry Banfield Family, so we can talk it through and I can support you directly.

What's essential? In my experience, there's a way to share about health challenges that will allow you to get help, and there's a way to share about health challenges that will actually keep them in place. So if you go around complaining about your health situation, people will generally stop wanting to hear about it. If you go around and say, look, some things in my vision are not clear, what do you suggest I do to see most clearly and to remove the old programming that my vision is anything less than perfect? Do you see how, when you ask like that, the feedback you get will be much different than saying, how's it going, Jerry? Well, it sucks. I can't see clearly and I'm trying to get rid of my glasses, but my eyes just won't cooperate. Do you see the two different ways of talking about the same base reality?

If you will talk about it and be vulnerable, and say, look, I'm having this health challenge, I would love for your thoughts, I would love for you to share any ideas you have. Lots of times we're afraid of being so impressionable that anyone can give us any dumb suggestion and we're just automatically going to take it. But when you get vulnerable, it also ironically gives you more courage to say, you know what, just because somebody suggests something doesn't mean I have to do it.

Self-Harm Thoughts and Rejecting the Wrong Advice

Lots of times I've had people who got vulnerable and I shared about my health challenges and my mental health challenges especially. For me, self harm thoughts are a health challenge. Self harm is one of the biggest causes of death, especially in the younger age groups. In my view, self harm is a serious health condition, the mental obsession and thought about that. So for me, getting vulnerable about that brought some dumb suggestions. To me they were dumb. Like, Jerry, you should just go see a psychiatrist and get medicated. I'm like, that's a stupid suggestion. I'm not going to take your stupid suggestion. Thank you for trying to help me, but you do not have the suggestion that will give me what I'm looking for.

Now, every one of us has somebody else for whom that might've been the perfect suggestion. For me, that was absolutely not it. So I know there will be some resistance to opening up to other people, because on some level you're afraid both to be seen as not this perfect person who has it all together, but also that if they actually do give you advice and it's bad, you have to take it. Feel free to reject advice that doesn't feel right. In my experience, the right advice will feel exciting.

I asked my wife what to do about my thoughts and she said, you should see a counselor. And I'm like, another counselor? But I realized many times there's a way to do this. If you get a suggestion and at first it's a little annoying, sometimes you can tweak the suggestion so it gives you exactly what you want. My wife's suggestion to see a counselor was mirrored by many other people. I'd already seen counselors, but clearly we still hadn't got through the self harm thing.

Hypnotherapy and Reprogramming the Subconscious

I eventually found a hypnotherapist who helped. She did both talk therapy and then hypnotherapy, where she'd help me relax and get into the conversation. I think that's one of these deep subconscious experiences. What I've come to believe is that hypnotherapy could be a really powerful thing for reprogramming the health challenges you have today, because some of these things are deep, deep subconscious programming. And if you can get around in there and have new experiences, those will overwrite the old ones.

For example, for me, after we did a talk therapy session, I discussed my goals. I discussed that I wanted my mind to be unconditionally focused on my thoughts. I wanted to be emotionally and constantly programmed to love myself under any circumstances and to never do that self harm thinking again. Then when she helped me relax with hypnotism, I got into a state where my mind was clear enough that I remembered the moment that me as a soul bonded or accepted or got into this human body and joined it. It was such a moment of love and joy, like wrapping into a roller coaster, a ride that you've been waiting in line for, that you're ready to go on, that you're thrilled for the ups and downs, that you're excited for the journey. It felt way better than that. The moment my soul and this fetus, that was a fetus and is now this body, came together, that experience eliminated the health challenge of the self harm thinking for me.

Solving Health Through Joy, Not Suffering

And that was not a straight, logical, linear path that, you know, A to B to C. It was kind of like, how the heck did I even get there? Well, I got vulnerable. I opened up. I disregarded suggestions that didn't leave me feeling joyous, and I took suggestions that I thought were right, but I needed to find a way to make them joyous to me. In my experience, the solving of health and elimination of health challenges should always be done through love and fulfillment and enjoyment. What I've come to believe is that it should never be done through "this sucks and this is just suffering I have to go through." Never, never, never like that. It should be done through "this is the most joyous experience I can find, and I'm really thrilled to do this as a part of my journey."

Like my journey with eye health has been, you know, "I'm going to try these eye exercises, this is fun, this is cool, I'm doing something new." It's not been like, "Oh, I have to do this and suffer." It's, you know, my entire journey with annihilating my health challenges has been one of joy, except where I consciously chose to suffer, and now I just generally don't.

Losing the Weight, Yoga, and My Back Pain

For example, my back pain and neck pain, which I used to frequently take things like Advil for because I had so much back pain and neck pain. And there were things I was doing that were contributing to the neck pain and the back pain a lot. For example, carrying around 60, 70 extra pounds of weight. It's logical that you're going to have back pain and neck pain. When I lost the weight, which I tell the full story of in how I lost 80 pounds and transformed my health, and then I started getting massages, and I started doing yoga, that, in my experience, has just been a miracle for eliminating back and neck pain all naturally. That again was not a straightforward like A to B to C. It was like all these surprising things happened, and now I'm grateful that the vast majority of the time I'm free from any neck pain, I'm free from any back pain, which at one point in my life seemed pretty hopeless because I got regular headaches and I had very regular back pain. I had back injuries.

I had an injury as a police officer at work, injured my back and was off for weeks, and got so stir crazy I came back to work before it was fully healed up, injured it again as a police officer, injured it again several other times. And, you know, today my back got tight, like it used to put me out of work and put me on my back to rest. I had a similar experience last year, and I went to yoga right after it happened. I went to yoga when my back was so tense I could barely walk properly, and I'm in a power yoga class, and I'm just crying. There were a couple of poses that it seemed wise not to do with a strained back, but I was able to function normally.

So even if some of your health challenges don't instantaneously disappear, in my experience there are ways that the edge can be taken off just by your thinking and just by doing things that are naturally healthy and good. And it all starts with being vulnerable and opening up to other people and letting all of us collectively help you.

Getting Out of the Mind: The Power of Now

Another thing that really helps, in my experience, is to get out of the mind and get into the present moment. The Power of Now was one of the most powerful spiritual books I read in early sobriety, and this really dives into the mind and the nature of thinking and the dualism of reality. I listened to hundreds of hours of Eckhart Tolle retreats. What I've come to believe is that the more calm you are, the more you know yourself as more than a mind and more than a body, the more health challenges start to not be such a big deal. The more there's a little gap between the identification that "I am a person with these health challenges," there starts to be a bit of a gap. It's like "I am," and here's my experience. The Power of Now talks a lot about acceptance, and you know, that has a lot in common with my spiritual journey as well.

Proof of Heaven and the Fear of Dying

There's another book called Proof of Heaven. You know, what I've come to believe is that a lot of the health challenges we have are a function of being very rigid, very scared of dying, holding on to life way too hard. And Proof of Heaven is a really powerful book because, as the author tells it, there was a neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience, and according to all the training he had received, the experience he had was impossible. His brain was not capable of giving him the experience that he had. This is an example, in my belief, of how you can start to see your health challenges as God-given or self-manifested for the purpose of what you're trying to achieve.

So, as he describes it, he got a life-threatening bacterial infection that shut down his whole body and his brain. At the time everybody was scared, and this was an awful thing that was happening. It was a serious health crisis, it was a tragedy, and he nearly died. But then he comes through it, and he wakes up with this near-death experience that he, as a neurosurgeon, was certain before it happened to him was not possible. And what he realized, according to his account, is that consciousness does not require a brain. And that, to him, is a massive breakthrough. Consciousness does not require a brain. That in fact, whatever the consciousness is, it operates and conducts life and communicates through a brain, but you do not need a brain or a body to be alive. And he personally experienced this. He came back with memories that he could not explain, that clearly his brain had downloaded, but it was not capable scientifically of having those experiences based on the fact that he was brain dead. And he had these experiences that directly conflicted with his beliefs. He shared these amazing memories of heaven that he experienced during his near-death experience.

This is a big book that, in my experience, helped me get over the fear of dying. You'd be amazed how often, especially as a teen, I had no fear of dying. I didn't fear getting hurt either. I was out there snowboarding, falling all over the place, hurting myself. I nearly fell into a river, you know, like that was a good drop into the river, I don't know, 10, 20 feet into a rocky river. And I'm like, I'm just having fun. I wasn't afraid of dying because I knew that life was eternal, that this body is just kind of a temporary experience I'm having. And often as grownups we forget that. This book, for me, is a powerful reminder that you don't need to be afraid of dying, and the goal is to truly live right now. And what I've come to believe is that often our challenges in health manifest from unacknowledged fear.

Wayne Dyer and Letting the Fear Out

And like Wayne Dyer talks about, he got these — his body got to be ridden with disease. And the cure, as he describes it, was this remote surgery where somebody in another location did this remote surgery on him. There were no actual tools, nobody there in person. These entities did this, like an etheric body surgery on him. And what did they do? As he tells it, they took the fear out of his body. And from there he experienced a whole new life. What I've come to believe is that the more books you read like this, the more it'll let the fear seep out of your body. And one of the ways the fear will come out of your body, in my experience, is crying. You'll often be able to cry the fear out of your body. And if you can feel the joy and let go of it, the fear will literally run out of your body in tears.

Brian Weiss, Past Lives, and Health

And another book, if you're thinking, you know, these are isolated instances, this is just one person — here's a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, who ran into a patient that was having a health challenge that, according to his account, was caused by a past life memory. And this is where health challenges can get a bit fun, because, you know, in his telling, the past life could cause a health condition. He firsthand — he was completely skeptical, he didn't believe in any of this stuff. He had a patient that had a health condition, and he tried hypnotherapy because nothing else would work on this patient. This is a prominent psychiatrist, he had a tough patient, none of his regular stuff was working. Out of desperation, he tried hypnotherapy.

And he tells her, you know, he keeps going back further and further in her life, and he can't find the cause of this thing. He's like, "We'll just go back to whatever the cause of this thing was." And she goes back into a past life. I think this was the one from the beginning of the book — he has a lot of these in his books, the books I've read. I don't remember exactly what it was, but one of the prominent memories in a past life was, you know, this woman was holding a baby and drowned with the baby in a flood. And then that was having some kind of a cause on a condition in the present life. And as soon as she remembered the past life, according to his account, the present life health issue that she was having went away.

And Brian Weiss was just blown away. He's like, "I can't even explain that. It makes no sense except what I just saw — the past life regression, the past life memory, and then the immediate ending of the present moment health challenge that nothing else would work on. Like that past life must have had something to do with causing the current issue, and when it was addressed and expressed, it stopped."

He has a bunch of books, and I've read a bunch, all of them similar, things as crazy as this. Like somebody had headaches their entire life, and the only thing that worked to get rid of the headaches, as he tells it, they did a hypnotherapy past life regression. And in some past life, they'd been hit on the head with something and killed. And in the present life, their headache would start in the exact spot where they were hit on the head and killed. And once they remembered the past life memory, the headache stopped in the present life.

Breaking the Western Medicine Reality

I mean, the point of all these books and all these ideas, for me, is to completely break the reality that most people with health challenges have been living in. You know, this Western medicine idea — fight the body, the body's wrong, go to war with germs. I don't go to war with germs today. And I don't even believe that germs are the cause. What I've come to believe is that I am the cause, and any germs that will be found are simply the effect of my cause. I don't believe other people get me sick today. What I believe is that my own body is responsible for the conditions.

What I've Come to Believe About the Body

In my experience, my own body creates its own reality, and my spirit creates reality constantly. There's an interplay between health and the body and all those various things that come up, and the way I see it, the body is always trying to help us. I don't believe that germs are the cause of our problems. Any germs that get found are simply giving me what I want and helping show me what I'm wanting to see, especially if I've been unwilling to see it.

I'm even noticing my throat getting a little ticklish right now, and to me the point of that is to stop talking. Okay, Jerry, it's been almost an hour and twenty minutes. You've said enough. You crammed it all into one single piece that could change somebody's life. Be quiet.

I'm a full-time YouTuber, and I have so much more that can help you in your life. If this gave you some hope, you can keep watching more of my newest videos in my Life playlist. Thank you for being here. Love you, you're awesome. I really appreciate you being here for all of this. I hope to connect with you again soon.

One important note: everything I've shared here is my own personal experience and what I've come to believe from my own journey and the books that have helped me. I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and nothing here is meant to diagnose, treat, or replace care from a qualified medical professional. Please make your own health decisions with your own doctor. I'm simply sharing what has worked for me in the hope that it gives you some encouragement.

What If You Never Got Sick Again

From my video published April 11, 2024.

A quick note before I start: this is my own personal experience and what I've come to believe about my health, not medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and nothing here is meant to diagnose or treat anything or to tell you what to do with your body. Please make your own health decisions with the professionals you trust. I'm just sharing what has worked for me.

What if you never got sick again? This is an idea I'm going to explain that I've lived for over a year and a half. I have not been sick a single day in the last year and a half. This is something nobody has probably ever told you or helped you imagine. I want to explain the theory behind how I've been able to be the healthiest I've ever been, and what I believe could help you too.

If you want to hear more of the stories and the individual details of symptoms, and the last time I got sick, I just did a related post called I haven't had one single sick day since October 2022. You can read that after this one. But the most important idea is to just start imagining a life where you never have to get sick again. Because I've gone a year and a half without a single sick day, in my experience I know it's possible that I could go the rest of this body's life that way.

Start with a what-if

As soon as you start thinking this, some of you will feel immediate resistance. Your mind will be like, that's not possible. He's lying. This can't be true. Why? If this was true, why wouldn't everyone have told me about it already? Everybody should know this if it's legit.

Well, I'm a pursuer of hidden knowledge, of the knowledge that is most powerful for me to have, and I've been doing this for a long time. I've found some incredible knowledge about health that has allowed me to achieve a level of health I've never seen somebody else have before. I've read about it. I've heard other people talk about it. There's a book by Louise Hay called Heal Your Body that's been very helpful to me.

The main way to make this a reality of not being sick, of not being afraid of being sick, and of having a really healthy, vibrant body, is to start thinking: how am I going to make this a reality? How would you feel if you woke up feeling great every single day, and how can you feel that way now?

I know some of you have chronic health problems, and your mind is saying that's not possible, my doctors told me so, I know it can't be possible. The first thing I'd suggest is to just go into a what-if, just a theoretical scenario. I have a family member who's chronically ill, and she had literally never once conceived the idea of: what if your health problem suddenly went away, what would your life be like? She wouldn't even dare to try to think about that. So the first way to change, in my experience, is to think differently.

I know it can feel like lying. If you've got chronic health problems, it can feel like you're lying to yourself, or being unnecessarily optimistic and setting yourself up for disappointment to even think that way. But I've had chronic health issues too, and I've shredded them. I used to be sick very frequently. When I was a police officer, I had weeks off of work in 2009 because of being sick, and I went into work sick plenty of other days. If you want to stop being sick, the first thing I'd say is to imagine what your life would be like if you weren't sick, and to know that it's possible. It is possible.

All the miracles you've read about in any of your religious literature that touch your heart — it's not like the ability for miracles stopped happening. I believe they're happening all the time, every day. And often miracles are just science that's not understood. Other times, science has not come up with, or has ignored, logical, simple explanations like the ones I'm about to give you for health that can change drastically.

I hope I've talked through a lot of your resistance beforehand, because an idea like this is so powerful, and you've been conditioned so hard to resist it by the rest of your life. Your mind will often violently resist just thinking, what if I never got sick again?

Why I love the idea of never being sick again

I love the idea that never again do I have to suddenly change my plans because my body is ill. Never again do I have to go to the doctor or the hospital for any kind of sickness. Never again do I have to be in a body that I hate being in and feel has betrayed me. I get to have the rest of my life in health with no chronic illnesses. That sounds fantastically exciting to me.

I'll do anything it takes that is also considerate of others. I'm not going to drain other people's energy and be a vampire so I can be healthy, but I'll do anything that is loving and considerate of myself and other people to achieve that. If I need to change my diet, exercise more, or change my relationships up, I'll do it.

For example, in my experience, if you hang out with people who are chronically ill, it likely means you're going to be chronically ill too, if you're not already. If you hang out with people who are fantastically healthy, you're probably going to be very healthy. I've had to let go of some family members, because I'm not going to hang out with someone who's chronically ill all the time. I can love you, but I'll love you from a distance.

The mental component of chronic illness

What I've come to believe is that chronic illness always has a mental component as well as a physical component, because there are many illnesses you can have physically that won't manifest at all based on your lifestyle. For example, with things like Alzheimer's and dementia, there have been studies showing that people can have the exact same brain scans, and one person, because of their lifestyle choices, can be completely unable to care for themselves, while another person with the same kind of brain scan physically can't even be diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia. There are many different things you can have physically that, based on your choices and your beliefs, you won't have to experience. It can be like they don't exist.

We know, with viruses for example, that you can have a virus and it cannot affect you or give you any symptoms at all. There's been this ridiculous thing perpetrated on us of: well, if you have a virus and you don't have any symptoms, then you should stay away from other people. Instead, why don't we investigate why some people have viruses and have no symptoms, while other people have the same virus and die from it or have a ton of symptoms? That's what I'm getting at — the ability to be exposed to something, a virus or bacteria, to have some kind of chronic illness, and to have no outward symptoms, to have it not affect your lifestyle at all. In my experience, that is absolutely possible.

What my sobriety taught me

For example, I am an alcoholic, and I've been sober almost 10 years. But I could not just stop drinking without experiencing a whole bunch of other addictions and suffering and insanity. The transformation I've seen in my own life has been miraculous to me.

Most people who are allergic to alcohol like me — where as soon as I have one drink, this physical and mental craving comes on for indefinite more amounts of alcohol — most people with that die as an alcoholic, or try to stay sober and really suffer a lot. Many people and sciences argue that there's perhaps a difference in genetics between people like me, who have one drink and this craving goes off, and other people who have one drink and that craving doesn't happen. What I've found is that I'm able to live a very happy, healthy life and not miss alcohol at all, and to be a very sane, normal person. You'd have no idea that when I used to have a drink 10, 15, 20 years ago, the absolute insanity would ensue. And even if I wasn't drinking, I still was insane.

The lump I refused to be afraid of

I've also had many minor health issues, and even some more major ones. I had a lump on one of my testicles. This was in my early 20s. I simply refused to believe that it would be anything bad or harmful. I refused to go to the doctor. I didn't even tell anybody about it. I remember feeling it one day, and I remembered all the programming I'd been told, that based on what everyone else said I should do, I ought to go to the doctor and get this checked out. And I'm like, F that. This is going to go away on its own with no intervention. It appeared from nowhere, and it will go away back to nowhere.

It lasted for years. It was there for years. But I refused to be afraid of it. I refused to believe that it could turn into anything else. I continued to be certain that it would be gone one day. And then one day, years later, I went feeling around there again, and it was gone. And I'm like, nice. I knew it. I want to be clear this is my own story and what worked for me, not a recommendation for what anyone else should do.

The man in the X-ray

There was a book I read that talked about a guy who went to the hospital, and they did an X-ray and found this big lump in his lungs. They said, this looks like cancer, we think you're going to die soon. And he was dead within a few months. The doctors, post-mortem, were reviewing his medical charts and records, and they found that 20 years before, the same lump was there in his lungs. No one had told him at that time that it might be a problem, so he didn't get the idea in his head that it was a problem. But it really appeared, in this story, that the doctors had literally done some witchcraft, or cursed him, putting this idea in his head that this lump is bad and it's going to kill you. And he believed it, and he manifested it.

So the key that I've found to my own health is knowing that I am a huge part — maybe not absolutely responsible, but I believe 99.9% of what happens inside this body is a function of me, and what I create, and the stories I tell, and what I believe.

Who profits from your sickness

Now, yes, I think we've all been conditioned to be victims. We've been conditioned by a society that makes a huge profit off of illness, that tries to keep people down through all kinds of ways, from alcohol and drugs to unnecessary medications, and that pushes the belief that other people are the cause of our illness, rather than us taking responsibility, looking within, and seeing how we manifest our own illness.

In her books, like Heal Your Body and Heal Your Life, Louise Hay talked about how she cured what for most people would have been a fatal disease. She was able to cure it herself without using any of the standard treatments. I've read a bunch of other stories like that, which are not often told to people. In fact, there are certain specific things I'm intentionally not talking about, because even in certain areas the guidelines prevent even doctors with medical experience from suggesting that there are alternative treatments that work, beyond the things we're told.

So, in my view, our whole culture has been set up to make us sick, and to make us not take responsibility for the symptoms our body is manifesting. Once you realize that it's profitable for you to be sick, that it's profitable and easier to control you if you're ill — a healthy person who is free is difficult to control. A sick person who feels trapped, who's afraid they can't get pills from their doctor, or can't have the drinks they need to relax, a dependent sick person is easy to control and manipulate. So what I'm talking about, breaking out of illness, is also claiming your own power.

The biggest thing for me that's helped with not being sick is taking absolute responsibility and seeing that this body manifests things because I manifest things. I want to keep sharing these ideas openly, and if you want to go further with me on this, you can join Jerry Banfield Family.

How my body made me sick before my mother's move

I talked about in my autobiography how my body made me physically ill, because I had an unacknowledged big part of my emotions, a big part of my mind, that did not want to go help my mother move in October 2022. Consciously, I thought I did. I planned on doing it. But there was this big emotion, this big section of my mind, that I refused to acknowledge or look at, that did not want to leave my life — all my family besides my mother, and my friends, and my AA meetings, and my games, and my YouTube studio. There was a big part of me that really didn't want to go help my mother move, and my body made itself sick, because it knew that was the only way I would tell my mother that I couldn't fly out there to help her move.

But then, after I called her and told her that, I'm like, come on, body, I really do want to help my mother move. Please rev your energy back up and get over this. I was so healthy at the time, and I'm even healthier now. I had no other symptoms. It was literally just fatigue. And my body revved up, and just two days later, I flew out to help my mother move. Over the next week, I moved 15,000 pounds of stuff by myself into a truck, out of a storage locker and her house and into the landfill or into places to give away. Then the movers moved like 30,000 more pounds. That was such a powerful lesson to me.

Kids and playing sick

I talked to my daughter and shared this with her too. Our kids are often conditioned that if they don't want to go to school, the only way they can get out of going is to be sick. Some parents send their kids to school sick anyway, and the kids often get the point that being sick is not going to get them out of school. So sometimes they either double down and get more serious illnesses, or they'll just stop trying to be sick and figure out other ways to get out of going to school.

For me personally, growing up as a kid, that's what I had to do. If I wanted to skip school, I had to be sick, so I'd just make myself sick. As a kid, you're often consciously aware that you're doing this, but as adults we forgot. And society often rewards people for being sick by letting them miss work. Oh, you're sick — people are very understanding. Oh sure, you can skip this family gathering, you're sick. That has made it very rewarding to be sick.

So I've told my kids, look, if you want to take a day off, you can take a day off anytime you want to. You don't need to be sick. Last time, my daughter was starting to try to make herself sick. Kids often intentionally do stuff like not eat, or lay in bed, and you can see them trying to make themselves sick. With adults, it's so ingrained that it's just automatic and hard to observe, because they set themselves up the night before by drinking or staying up really late. But with kids, it's often super obvious. I told my daughter, look, just tell me you want to stay home and you can stay home. If you stay home too much, you'll have to get homeschooled, just keep that in mind, but you can stay home whenever you want. Just say, Dad, I want to stay home from school today, and you can. You don't have to be sick. I would prefer you to be healthy and stay home and have a great day at home. She stopped. She immediately stopped playing sick. She ate her breakfast and she had a normal, healthy day at home. It was nearly instantaneous.

How fast symptoms can shift

Once you realize how instantaneous your health can be, it changes how you relate to symptoms. I've observed symptoms in my body, pains. I had a friend last night who was talking about how her body was in horrible pain, so bad she was crying, and her mind was telling her a story that she had some virus and was going to be sick. She refused to just buy into that narrative completely. She went to sleep and felt great when she woke up the next day.

I've had physical symptoms disappear almost instantaneously once I started realizing that, in my experience, I'm controlling so much of this process. For example, I woke up one morning and my throat had a little raw sensation in it. I thought, this is a reminder to thank my throat for all it does — for all these videos I do, for all the words I say — to thank my throat for being such an avenue of creative expression, for swallowing all my food, for doing a great job in helping the rest of this body function. It may not go away absolutely within a second or two; you need to be patient. But a few hours later, I realized that little rawness in my throat had almost instantly disappeared within a few minutes after I did the affirmations. I also set the intention: I'm just going to forget about this.

It's a story you tell. I've been doing these eye exercises, and I felt a new sensation from some muscle way inside my eye. A fear story came up, like, oh my God, your retina is going to detach, you're going to be in the hospital. And I'm like, no, stop telling that story. What I realized is that my eye muscle twitching inside, in a way I've never felt it deep in my eye before, is a sign my natural eye improvement exercises are working. It's like when I do yoga: if I go a little too far — like some of the first times I tried wheel pose, I strained a little muscle in my neck because I was pushing my muscles to the limit. You could tell a story that this is a sign something bad's going to happen, or you could tell a story that you're getting exactly what you want, based on the exact same physical symptom. So I'm like, this eye muscle twitching is a sign I'm exercising muscles I've never exercised before. This is a sign that my eyes are improving. This is a sign that I'm making the changes people think are impossible in my body. I refuse to believe any negative story, because I'm totally focused on never being sick again.

Heal Your Body and the willingness to change

In that book, Heal Your Body, there's a huge list of symptoms and the corresponding mental things that go with them. For example, with the throat: the throat is an avenue of expression, a channel of creativity. The normal, healthy functioning affirmation is that I open my heart and sing the joys of love, that I feel free to express myself creatively, and my throat is allowing me to share my joy with the world. A sore throat is connected with the feeling of the inability to speak up for oneself, swallowed anger, stifled creativity, refusal to change. The affirmation given is: it's okay to make noise, I express myself freely and joyously, I speak up for myself with ease, I express my creativity, I'm willing to change.

This one has been extremely powerful for me. Just the "I'm willing to change" part — anytime I have a little cough, I immediately say, I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I'm willing to change. And in my experience, I have eliminated coughing from my life, all but an occasional cough or two. I've noticed people with chronic coughs are often some of the most rigid, unwilling-to-change people. They'll cough for 30 minutes, and not once will they open up to changing. What's amazing is that I've told them this. I'm like, I've found I've eliminated 99% of coughing from my life, and all I have to do is say, I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I'm willing to change, and mean it. Because often after you say "I'm willing to change," you'll see something to change.

The cough, the money, and acknowledging the symptom

When I first started doing this, I realized I needed to ask my wife for money, because I'd blown my finances up in 2019. I was going to go bankrupt; I wasn't going to be able to make any of my minimum payments unless I asked my wife for money. I felt very unmanly. It felt like an utter failure. I sobbed in the car. And that happened after my body coughed.

What I've come to believe is that the symptom is here to assist me, to help me see something physically that I'm ignoring mentally. If I acknowledge the symptom — I use the affirmation as the acknowledgement — I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I acknowledge the symptom, then the symptom stops, because it has been heard. It has served its purpose. And then my mind changes. I've told this exact process to people with chronic coughs, and their response is often, that's nice, that worked for you, but you don't know about me, and it won't work for me.

I'm like, where do you get these limiting ideas? Where do you get these limiting ideas that you know everything, and yet the things you know keep you sick and miserable? Break out of there. You don't have to be sick and miserable. You have a lot of choice.

You have more choice than you've been told

Now, I'm not saying that if you are very sick and ill every day, you're instantaneously going to shred every one of your physical conditions. What I'm telling you is that if you make a decision now, explore this idea, and stick with it — keep listening, keep reading some of the books I recommend — one day you may find yourself so healthy that it shocks you, as it does me, that holy crap, it's been a year and a half since I got sick. I've never in 39 years on this earth had that level of health before. Not when I was a kid, not as a young adult. Never have I been that healthy. In my experience, I believe you can do it too.

You need to give it some time. But if you make a 10-year plan — like, in 10 years I want to be in the absolute best health I've ever been in, I want to have no sickness, and I want to eliminate any symptoms, I want to be at peak health — you can be at your very best health. I don't care what age your body is. I remember reading a book from a guy saying that in his 60s he was in the best health of his life. If I can be in the best health of my life at the oldest I've ever been, I believe that can be for you too.

If you want to keep exploring ideas like this with me, I share much more of my day-to-day thinking on health, mindset, and life in my Life playlist. You might also enjoy here is hope for your health challenges and Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin, on whether you can heal yourself, which both dig into these same themes from different angles.

I hope this has been helpful for you. Thank you, and I hope to connect with you again soon, in the best health you've ever been in.

Mind-Body Health: Why I Stay Well and How I Heal

Originally published April 10, 2024.

Here is my short answer. I have not had a single sick day since the end of October 2022, and I believe the main reason is what goes on in my mind and in my daily habits, not luck and not the genes I was born with. Here is what I believe, how I got there, and how my view has changed.

What I believe now is more careful than what I wrote in 2024. Back then I argued that the mind drives most of what happens in the body, and that you can create your own disease. I still think thoughts and daily choices matter a great deal. But I now say more clearly that my stories are my experience, not proof for anyone else.

The story I return to most is in my post about not being sick since October 2022. I had booked a flight to help my mother move from Mississippi. The night before, I felt a heavy drain on my energy with no other symptoms, and the next morning I was stuck in bed. Looking back, part of me did not want to give up a week of my normal life, so my body gave me the excuse I was secretly looking for. When I admitted I really did want to help her, my energy came back within a couple of days, and I moved about 15,000 pounds of her things over the next week, mostly by myself.

The mind-body thread goes back further. In 2019 I had a cough, and I read in Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life that a cough can be tied to resisting change. I started saying, I am willing to change, and the cough stopped. I have not had a consistent cough since. In a June 2024 post I took that line of thinking furthest, arguing that you create your disease and on some level love it. I would now write that post with much more caution.

The daily practices matter just as much to me. In my 2021 post on physical health practices I wrote that no amount of positive thinking makes up for neglecting the body. My routine included a 90-minute massage once a week, a walk of at least 30 minutes most days, and yoga most mornings, five or six days a week. Most nights I am in bed for eight to nine and a half hours. I eat mostly whole plant foods and take only a minimal B12 supplement. For more on yoga, see my yoga page.

None of this would have been possible while I was drinking. At my worst I was drinking a gallon or more of vodka a week, and stopping that damage came first. My recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous is part of that foundation. In my April 2024 post on health challenges I list what changed after I got sober. I went from 250 pounds to 173 and kept the weight off since 2016. My eyesight, which I was diagnosed as nearsighted in 1999, was the one challenge I was still working on.

My thinking took a different turn in 2025. I started massage school that September, and in my September 16, 2025 journal entry I describe questioning my instructor about germ theory after reading Can You Catch a Cold?, and asking an optometrist to lower my prescription to minus 0.75, because the stronger lenses felt forced. I still enjoy asking hard questions. In a post from the same weeks I describe asking a student to stop stretching me, because I would rather spend the time receiving touch.

The most recent post below, Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart, from July 2026, is the one where I am most measured. I still believe the words we use shape how we feel. But I also said plainly that I have hurt my wrist, elbow, shoulder and both knees playing tennis, that minor injuries heal, and that I would go to a doctor or an emergency room for anything severe. That is the balance I hope you take from my work: listen to your body, do not catastrophize, and get real help when you need it.

Below you will find every post on this subject, newest first, in full. The 2021 and 2024 posts cover the practices and the theory. The 2025 journal entries show me questioning the experts, and the 2026 post shows where I have landed. None of this is medical advice. I am not a doctor, and what has worked for me may not work for you. If you want to talk through a health question of your own, you can get a personal video review from me at jerrybanfield.com/review/.

On this page

Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.

1. Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart (July 10, 2026)
2. What Sleep Gave Back (March 10, 2026)
3. Awake Enough to Question the Experts (September 16, 2025)
4. Knowing My Body Well Enough to Say Stop (September 12, 2025)
5. Why I Believe Honesty Can Keep Disease Away (September 11, 2025)
6. You Created Your Disease, and on Some Level You Love It (June 2, 2024)
7. Here Is Hope for Your Health Challenges (April 29, 2024)
8. What If You Never Got Sick Again (April 11, 2024)

Stop Saying Your Body Is Falling Apart

From my video published July 10, 2026.

I was at the yoga studio recently, and this woman was describing how her body's just falling apart — that now she's in her late 40s, everything just doesn't work right anymore, and how broken it is. Even though she's at a hot power yoga class, everything looks like it's working pretty well to me. And then this woman who's in her late 20s starts agreeing with her, talking about how things just don't work the same for her either, and she's getting injured, and it's taking longer to heal.

So I interrupted the two of them after listening to this for a few minutes. I said, stop saying you're falling apart. You're applying the nocebo effect to yourself — the opposite of the placebo effect.

The Nocebo Effect: Hexing Your Own Body

If you're not familiar with that, the placebo effect is where you convince yourself that something that is inert, or doesn't really do anything, has some magical powers. And because you believe it, it produces that real positive effect. Nocebo is the opposite, where you're essentially hexing or cursing yourself — where something that perhaps doesn't have any real meaning or impact, you start believing that it does, and because of that, you manifest it.

I interrupted them to say, look, I'm 42 — just a handful of years younger than the woman saying everything's falling apart, and more than a decade older than the other woman. And I'm saying my body works better than it's ever worked before.

For example, over the last two years I started playing tennis, and I've injured my wrist, injured my elbow, injured my shoulder multiple times, and both of my knees. Now, these are minor injuries. I certainly am open to going to the doctor or the emergency room if there was a severe, debilitating, massively painful injury. But for minor things — and I'm obviously not a doctor — what I do for myself is I trust my body to heal up minor injuries. In fact, I don't want more examination of them, because I trust my body will fix it just like it always has. What I've noticed is that I have this positive belief, I live on it, and my body just feels fantastic — anything that goes wrong, generally I only experience minor little injuries. And I'm not going to do anything that I don't want to do.

The brilliant thing about me now is I'm much more sensitive to listen when my body is giving me a gentle signal. For example, three weeks ago my friend got me out to this run club — which apparently some people on YouTube say is just for hookups. I can kind of see that, but I went once and haven't been back, and it didn't seem 100% like that to me. But I did get a minor injury in my shoulder when I tried to do about 30 push-ups at once. Now, I've been doing yoga for years, but I don't think I've done more than 20 push-ups at once, without stopping, in years. One of the guys there encouraged a whole bunch of us — yeah, let's get down on the pavement and do 30 push-ups. Well, I had just run, and I guess my shoulder was a little tight. So some little thing aggravated in my shoulder, kind of right around my collarbone.

Now, I'm sure some doctor could tell me what that is and why that happened. But do I need to know that? No. Maybe it's some placebo, maybe it's just reality, but I know my body will fix that. And yet, when I go to yoga, I am not doing push-ups until that sensation stops. I do everything else I can do. But when I go to do a push-up, I feel this extra tension right there, so I just back off. When I had a couple of little minor knee injuries playing tennis, I just went out there and ran slower — I'd run at like 50% speed instead of all-out sprinting. And I'm super grateful now.

One time a few years ago, I was walking around the house, and my calf muscle suddenly — I thought I got shot or something for a minute. I heard this gigantic loud pop, I felt like I got shot in the back of the calf, and I fell on the floor immediately. I'm not sure what happened with that, but that fixed itself. I've also sprained ankles. My body is still fixing itself just the same as it used to, and I pay attention to it better than I used to.

Pain Is Information, Not an Identity

So I understand that pain is information. But if I can help anybody stop these negative stories — making pain an identity and hexing the body with all kinds of this negative self-talk — please stop that.

Now, I will validate that perhaps the woman who's in her late 40s has some experience that's valid — that maybe her body is not healing as rapidly as it did 20 years ago. There may be some validity to that. But here's an idea worth sitting with: how much capacity is your body operating at right now versus what it used to? What potential does it have now? And what are you doing with it now to help it succeed?

To boil that down: maybe this woman has a legitimate point that her body is running at a limited capacity compared to what it used to do. Let's say maybe 80% capacity — that perhaps she has lost 20% of her edge. But you've got to still think about that 80%: most things are functioning correctly the vast majority of the time. Realistically, it's probably more like 95%. Now, this is just a metaphor — it's not an objective measurement.

If you look at the Army PT test — at least the last time I took it, which was a long time ago — you would basically peak in your mid-20s or so on what was expected of you in the fitness test, and then the standards would progressively drop off. Now, is that because it wasn't possible to maintain that level of fitness? Or was it because people who were in their 30s and 40s in the Army often just weren't needing to exercise as hard? Or maybe their bodies couldn't quite perform at that same level, and the bar was set down so that people on average could meet it more often?

My Body Responds to What I Do With It

What I found is that what I do with my body is a big part of how it functions. For example, when I first went to hot yoga, maybe two or three years ago, I felt like I was dying after a fairly easy, not-that-hot hot yoga class. I do much more intense hot yoga classes now. I just go in and knock out a hard, hot power flow class where it's 95-plus degrees in the room with infrared heat on, sweat an incredible amount, and go about my day. No more feeling like I'm dying. Why? Because my body adjusted to that.

Now, if you took me nine or ten years ago — back when I had been doing personal training and cardio, but then I moved, stopped personal training, and started just walking my dog — and dropped me into the hot yoga class I do today, I don't think I could do it. My body ten years ago was not in as good a shape to do a hot power yoga class as it is today. I've done probably 100 hot yoga classes by now, and I've worked up to that.

So the idea that age primarily determines our body's health — and then pouring our stories into talking bad about our body — is just insane. I am so grateful for how well my body works today.

This conversation goes for lots of different parts of the body and all different things. My friend, who's in his late 70s, just called me and said his testosterone tested at the same level most men in their 40s test at. And I'd be willing to bet that if I were to get a test, mine would be at the same level most men in their 20s or 30s are at. Because I take care of my body. If you look at me, I don't look old. If anything, if I showed you pictures from 15 years ago, back when I drank and I was overweight, you'd probably think I was about the same age then as I am now. The powerful thing about weight loss is that it's not just about the weight — it's about the body.

Lifestyle Choices Changed Everything for Me

The powerful idea I have to share with you here is this: think about how amazing your body normally works, and think about how many choices you make that impact how it works. Because this woman who was complaining about her body and putting it down with her words — she may have some additional valid points, but some of those may be her lifestyle choices and her beliefs.

I found that when I changed my lifestyle choices, my body responded dramatically. For example, I switched to whole plant, away from eating a practically carnivore diet before that was even a thing — carnivore diet plus junk food and an occasional fruit or vegetable. When I switched from that, my blood pressure dropped 20 points. My weight, along with quitting drinking and switching to whole plant, dropped 80 pounds — and I got more mindful about what I ate. In the times when I drank and disrupted my sleep, my mental health took a serious dive. Today, the way I take care of my body, it functions as well as — if not better than — I was used to it functioning in my 20s.

Now, is it possible that maybe some of the injuries I had before might have healed somewhat faster? Is it probable that if I had a hangover today, after being sober for 12 years, it would completely debilitate me compared to the hangovers I used to have, where I'd go through the whole day miserable? Is there some validity to the idea that the longer you've been here, the more your body has been through? Yes, there's some limited validity. But what I see is mostly people sabotaging themselves and making exaggerated conclusions. You can't really control your age, but you can control what you put in your body and how you take care of it. Therefore, you can have a huge influence on how your body functions at any age.

The more you put your focus on things you can't control and set yourself up as a victim, the more it pulls your attention away from the things you can control — like your diet and your exercise and your beliefs and your words and your sleep. So I hope you will never use language like "my body doesn't work anymore." I would hope you would say, "my body needs a different approach today." Because yes, maybe some of these bodies, the longer they've been here, might get a little more delicate.

And yes, some days I think, would I have had this shoulder injury doing the same thing 20 years ago? I don't know. And that's what you should lean into. I remember I got all kinds of injuries throughout my teens and my twenties, and they all healed up. I remember one time, from drinking, I had sprained both ankles — that was nice, trying to walk, especially being overweight and getting drunk.

Respecting My Body Without Calling It Old

So I don't use terms like "I'm too old for this." I do try to be a little more gentle and respect my body, and I generally avoid doing things I don't see a need to do today. The woman in her twenties was talking about being injured doing some kind of very advanced move right next to her boyfriend — they collided, and she got injured. I used to go snowboarding, and I hurt my back snowboarding and just kept snowboarding straight through it. I looked like I'd been beaten head to toe from all the falling bruises. I don't see the need to go snowboarding today. Maybe my body could handle it, but I don't see the point of putting myself in a position where a more serious injury is probable — like Owen getting his leg destroyed going skiing. Now, he went skiing a lot of times before he got his leg destroyed. But at the point I'm at, I try to put my body in positions where it's less likely to get injured.

I played tennis today, and I've played through a lot of injuries and done yoga through lots of minor injuries — but I limit doing things where injuries are more probable. I used to practice to level up my yoga skills — getting into handstands and all these more advanced things. But I talked to a guy who's 10 years older than me, and he said, "I did all that stuff and I kept hurting things." I probably would have hurt things doing that in my twenties too. The difference is that now I don't see why I'd try to do handstands in yoga, at least until the rest of my body is strengthened. I can always work on that later. I share more stories like this in my Life playlist.

Thus I encourage you to think about how grateful you are for your body. I don't panic over every minor sensation. I just observe and give my body a chance to heal when it's injured. I try to proactively take care of it. I am very willing to seek medical attention if I'm not confident something will fix itself or if I could get some help. That said, I don't have any health insurance, because I don't like paying for it and I'm borrowing money anyway. So I try to take care of myself. And I invite you to take care of yourself.

Let's Build a Life You Love Together

If this sounded good to you — if you're looking in the mirror and your life looks fine but it doesn't feel good — I'm here to support you in building a life that feels good and creating a life that you love. I'll work with you to see what's keeping you stuck. You can post in the group, direct message me, or bring it to your weekly one-on-one call with me in the Jerry Banfield Family, and we can work on rebuilding your mind and body together.

I don't provide medical advice. I have lost lots of weight, I take great care of myself, and I show you what I do. If there's something I don't know about, I'll suggest you go get help, see somebody who does know about it, or read a book. I'm here to help you build a life that you love living every day. And I have a community that's all about that. It's holistic — we talk about making money, dating, AI, crypto, and YouTube. We're here for you every day. Thank you very much for reading all of this.

What Sleep Gave Back

Originally published March 10, 2026.

This is my journal entry from March 10, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.

After a night of sleep, I feel restored to sanity and have a nice morning waking up with the kids. Everybody gets off to school at a leisurely pace. Then I come back home and I've got a fire under my ass to deliver these envelopes. I grab 50 envelopes out of my house and I walk for 50 minutes delivering these envelopes to neighbors. I get back home. And I'm feeling kind of paranoid, you know, I'm thinking, let me see if there's anything legally I need to look up. I thought I looked up stuff before, but I ask in more detail now. And it turns out one of the suggestions that ChatGPT and Google's AI have to provide is that if somebody has a no trespassing or no soliciting sign on their house, then it's certainly safer and smarter to avoid leaving anything at that house. It is possible that if I left something in a house like that, I could get fined $93 for that, which is because of a local ordinance. Not a huge deal, but also something, if somebody doesn't want any soliciting, you know, they're probably thinking door to door, but I don't want to leave an envelope at their door either. They're more closed off than usual, and I'd rather skip that house.

My mind starts to get paranoid because I'm like, shit, I think I put, you know, a couple of them down. But most people don't have signs like that. And I wasn't sure what to do with just dropping a letter compared to door to door. What I'm doing apparently is called canvassing, where I'm not actually knocking on any doors. So the rules and regulations are pretty wide open for that. Although it is recommended to stay between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. I think technically I started at 8.45. And that's, I that's all right. I get a couple of my books, get a new book letter printed and get those into the little library near my house as well.

Then I'm out to play tennis with a friend. I arrive and I set up my camera on my phone with the swing vision app on top of the fence. I'm trying this out and seeing if it's fun to record the matches or not. I get the match recorded going and my friend and I have a nice warm up. We have a very competitive first set that ends up going to a tiebreaker and he eats out the tiebreaker. Then he steamrolls me in the second set. I was playing so little and relaxed and I realized I was getting gripped by insanity at the end of the second set. Like, so what? You know, we're just playing tennis. Like, it's insane to be getting so upset about it. We wrap this long game of tennis we played today, which took two hours in the full sun, no clouds. Had a good conversation. I told him about the girl yesterday, and he said that's why he doesn't mess with women. I mean, he has dated and been married to women in the past, but now he's just taking his own time and his own space and is pretty closed off to dealing with any of that. And I'm like, you know, today, more than usual, I can see the virtues of living that way. I know that's not for me, though. I'm a guy that I like. I'll deal with the downsides because it's so much fun having something really nice with a girl, you know, from the sex to the companionship, the, you know, depth of the spiritual connection, the relationship, you know, the inspiration. I just love being with someone and having it good. And I am seeing today that it's up to me to use my discretion to cut off things and stay away from, especially women that don't leave me feeling good, but that I have bad feeling interactions with. I need to stay away from them. If you keep getting pulled back toward relationships that leave you feeling worse and you want help learning where to draw that line, book a one-on-one call with me and we'll work through your pattern together.

I come home from tennis with my friend and I take a cold shower to try and cool off after I was out in the sun for almost an hour this morning, although there's lots of shade walking different houses in my neighborhood. Still, I had almost three hours out in the sun this morning and early afternoon, so I cool off with a cold shower. I start to get a bit upset as my mind starts to spiral into how bad things could be if I can't pay my bills, and I just sit with how real and uncomfortable that financial fear is. And I think about how much I love my kids, and I think, well, I better get my ass to work on my business. Like, I better, you know, I'm figuring like, what should I prioritize? And it's clear based on this, like I need to prioritize getting clients. I found a business model that all everything is validated, that helping people write books seems to be the best thing for me to do. So get clients like that's what needs to be done. So I get more letters printed out. I stuff more letters, stamp more letters and get prepared when I get my hat with my neck covering. Then I can do, you know, long stretches, maybe two, three hours out in the sun, as long as I can do without burning my arms, which should be two or three hours at least, because even today, my arms aren't burnt. I don't wear sunscreen either. So the neck and the head burn faster than anything else. I feel like a chicken roasting up in this business.

I picked the kids up from school. And I take them to a local market on the way home, get them each a smoothie. We grab some fruits and vegetables, come home. Then my ex-wife arrives at the dog right after that. I give her a hug, tell her about the girl from yesterday. And some of the things I point out for the conversation, my ex-wife's like, yeah, that is pretty crazy for someone to struggle having a conversation that much. And I try and turn things over to empathy for this girl. You know, I'd feel bad if if I struggled to talk about my life that much. I know if I was in a place that I had that hard of a time opening up to somebody, you know, I would be frustrated with that. And, you know, maybe she was a bit excited to be talking to me and it made it maybe she is normally much better at communicating with other people. And I just triggered her. And, you know, I I put her in a situation where she maybe felt like she couldn't be her best either. And maybe she's regretting how the conversation went, wishing she hadn't been so defensive. Or maybe she's just totally judging me and thinking about how awful I am or whatever for asking regular ass questions.

Also, I did get a new match from the matchmaking service today, which is really exciting because I read this girl's profile. We're going to meet up for a coffee and walk date downtown St. Pete. She lives in St. Pete, which I really appreciate not driving to Sarasota. Her profile sounds like she's looking exactly for me. Like, this match is nuts. She has, you know, 38 no kids and a non-drinker, which is perfect. She focuses on healing people and their bodies. And listen to her. She lives a very health-conscious lifestyle, eats clean, and is looking for a partner who values healthy living as well. Now check this out. In a partner, she's drawn to someone healthy, intelligent, ambitious, and family-oriented. Someone with an out-of-the-box mindset, a strong growth mentality, and a desire to build a meaningful life together, including having children of her own in the future. I mean, could you match me any more clearly with your description? Like, out-of-the-box thinking? That's not something people are asking for that I've seen very frequently in swiping a whole bunch of dating profiles. And I am an out-of-the-box thinker. Our date's scheduled for Saturday, which seems like a ways off already at five days compared to how fast the last one came up.

Then after I get the kids home from school, I tell them about the match. I talk to my ex-wife about it. She says that sounds good for me. And my ex-wife, as much as anybody, wants me to find a woman. So, you know, she's not divorcing me and then still being territorial. Like, we're just friends now, and it's really nice that she supports me having a good future because that's good for her too. My ex-wife reveals that she's been doing a sauna and cold plunge. I'm just like, what the hell? Like, where did that come from? I was doing stuff like that before, and I'm really enjoying seeing my ex-wife having the space to explore and try some new things. She also tried playing Mahjong with her friends, which, again, is awesome. I'm so happy to see her growing and trying these new things. She's got some plans for the house in the backyard, which sound nice. My ex-wife and I don't end up taking the kids and the dog to the dog park, but we go out to Crescent Lake for a bit and come back.

Then my ex-wife heads out and the kids go over to play with their friends for a few hours. Meanwhile, I'm just hammering out work stuff. I'm stamping envelopes, printing more, cleaning up around the house. And I do want to still keep up with these daily autobiographies and not get so far behind. But maybe I could do just like try and do an average of edit two of these a day because it'd take a few months, but then I'd get caught up. And the same time, I want to get that money, Jerry. After the kids are over at their friend's house for a few hours, my mother comes over and my mother plays Exploding Kittens with the kids while I'm doing things like helping the kids you know get food you know changing sheets and i even sit at the table and do more envelopes while my daughter and my mother are playing a second game of exploding kittens i would have played with them but i didn't have time to learn how to play while they're all playing but learning how to play because they're watching a video and i was cleaning and getting food ready. I made my daughter some kale chips and my mother ends up wrapping things up with the kids about 9.45.

We all get ready for bed. I have some nice snuggles. My son does his reading activity. I played a bit rough with my son today too, which was fun. I'm grateful that the more space I have to be with my son myself without my ex-wife around, I'm getting much more comfortable playing with him. And I think that's really good for both of us. Like I was doing some kicks, you know, gentle kicks, but like, you know, to take his feet out from under him and he just loved it. And it helps him also not play with my daughter in that way so much, which he really appreciates. I'm grateful as I go to bed, I feel restored to sanity and myself. And I'm having a lot of empathy for the girl I talked with yesterday. As sometimes people say in recovery, if you have a resentment, pray about it two weeks. To me, the best way to pray about it is to thank the girl yesterday for the conversation and to, you know, think loving thoughts. I love her. I'm glad she helped me reveal changes I need to make within myself and reveal where, you know, my overenthusiasm and lack of boundaries is, you know, leading me into places that I get hurt. And I go to bed feeling very grateful, very grateful to have the kids there. Very grateful for this new match. Very grateful for the conversation I had yesterday and that, you know, I'm so resilient that after feeling just wrecked yesterday emotionally, you know, I made it through and I didn't resort to any coping mechanisms. I didn't dump my emotions on the kids. And, you know, I even reached out and asked for help in a way to, you know, to try and get some perspective and not just bitch. If you're carrying a resentment or coming through a rough emotional stretch and want to talk it through with someone who's stayed sober through plenty of them, schedule a private call with me and bring it to our call.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Awake Enough to Question the Experts

Originally published September 16, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 16, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

After massage school today, I found myself questioning everything—my decision to enroll, the direction of my life, and whether any of this makes sense for me. I’m so effective when I work with my mind that it feels almost absurd to dedicate this much time to training my hands. I keep wondering if I’ll ever be an effective massage therapist, or if this path is just a detour that doesn’t fit who I really am. Seven more months of school feels like a long commitment when I’m unsure whether it’s truly worth it.

The day itself was fine. We started by going to the park for a walk to get some movement in before class. Then we returned to learning the basics of massage and focused on draping. That part was more challenging than I expected, especially given how many massages I’ve received and how quickly some of my classmates picked it up. It was humbling. Still, I reminded myself that while they might have an easier time with physical technique, I excel at memorizing anatomy and understanding the body’s systems. Everyone brings different strengths.

After class, I drove to the tire shop to get one of my tires balanced. It had started vibrating after being repaired a week ago, but thankfully they fixed it for free. While I waited, I began reading a book I’d bought months ago called Can You Catch a Cold? The timing felt perfect, since just yesterday my instructor dismissed any questioning of germ theory during lecture, insisting that “the science doesn’t support it.” He wasn’t open to debate, which only made me more curious. This book, on the other hand, challenges that entire framework. It’s packed with scientific arguments suggesting germ theory might be deeply flawed or even irrelevant in explaining illness.

The author points out that many diseases once thought to be contagious—like scurvy and beriberi—turned out to be caused by nutritional deficiencies. For centuries, people believed scurvy spread from sailor to sailor, when in reality it was nothing more than a lack of vitamin C. Because they clung to the contagion theory, they failed to solve it for hundreds of years, and countless sailors died of something that could have been prevented with a few oranges or a splash of lime juice. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that anyone could have believed such a thing, yet I wonder what ideas we cling to today that future generations will laugh at.

In the book’s introduction, the author also describes people who live in complete filth—never bathing, rarely washing their hands, eating whatever food they find—and yet they remain perfectly healthy. If germs alone caused disease, their survival would be impossible. It’s fascinating to read something that so directly challenges mainstream science, and it’s opening my mind to possibilities I hadn’t considered. If you love thinking this way too, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we’ll dig into these kinds of questions together.

Part of me wants to hand the book to my instructor and ask him to read it, though I doubt he’d be open to it. Still, I’m grateful for the curiosity it’s awakened in me. Whether I stay in massage school or not, at least I’m expanding my understanding of how the human body—and perhaps life itself—really works.

After getting the tire balanced, I stopped by VisionWorks to finally buy a new pair of glasses—something I hadn’t done in sixteen years. I’ve been wearing the same pair since 2009, and with all the driving I do these days, it seemed time for an upgrade. My current prescription is minus one, which has always felt a bit too strong, so I went in hoping to get something with a little less correction. What amazed me was that, after all this time, my eyesight seems to have held steady. The optometrist confirmed that my vision hasn’t really changed in sixteen years, which I found encouraging.

What has changed, though, is me. Sixteen years ago, I would have walked in, followed directions, and accepted whatever they told me without question. This time, I couldn’t help but examine the entire process more critically. When they asked me to cover one eye and then the other, I noticed right away that my vision was dramatically better when both eyes were open together than when tested individually. I could read the 20/40 line with both eyes, but only about 20/60 with one eye at a time. To me, that means my true vision is 20/40, not 20/60, since I almost never use just one eye in real life.

I also questioned the testing environment itself. The room was dimly lit, with only a single fluorescent light and no windows, and I couldn’t help but think that measuring eyesight in a dark, artificial setting doesn’t reflect how people actually see in the real world. I see much better in sunlight, where my eyes feel alive and relaxed, compared to the dull glow of that exam room.

When the doctor came in, I asked how long it took to become an ophthalmologist. He said four years of post-bachelor’s schooling, and when I commented that it didn’t sound too bad, he didn’t seem thrilled by my tone. I told him about Can You Catch a Cold and used it as a bridge to question the assumptions in his own field. I asked him why alternative approaches like eye exercises weren’t taken seriously and whether he’d ever seen peer-reviewed studies on them. He said that if such studies existed, maybe he’d consider them valid.

That’s when I countered: who would pay for a study like that when there’s so much money to be made selling glasses? And who would publish research that undermines an entire industry built around corrective lenses? The question seemed to make him think, though it also made him visibly uncomfortable.

He tried to prescribe me a slightly stronger correction than I had before, but I pushed back and asked him to lower it to –0.75. I explained that too much correction doesn’t feel good to me—that while the world looks sharper, it also feels forced, unnatural. The lenses that made things crystal clear actually strained my eyes, as if they were overcompensating. What felt best was a nearly imperceptible blur, just enough clarity without overdoing it, allowing my eyes to relax instead of constantly adjusting to an artificial level of precision.

I left feeling proud of myself for questioning the process and advocating for what felt right in my body. Sixteen years ago, I would have blindly trusted the experts. Today, I’m awake enough to observe, ask questions, and challenge what doesn’t make sense. It ties perfectly into what I’ve been reading—that the most powerful thing we can do is stay curious, pay attention, and never stop questioning how the world works. If you’re at a crossroads like I was that day and want to think your own direction through out loud with someone, you can book a private call with me and think it through with me there.

After getting the prescription, I bought some glasses with the total coming to $530—which, thankfully, I can pay from my health savings account. The store was running a buy-one-get-one-free promotion, so I walked out with two pairs. Still, what a racket. The frames probably cost five dollars to make, and the lenses maybe twenty or fifty at most. The markup in that industry is absurd. Yet I’m still grateful for the gift of sight—that something as simple as a pair of lenses can make the world so sharp and vivid again.

Not long after, I got a text from a friend asking if I wanted to play tennis. I dropped the kids off with my mom—they love spending time with her—and headed to the tennis club. The guy I played with, a friend, absolutely crushed me a year ago when I first started learning. Back then, I could barely return a ball, and his level of control and precision felt worlds ahead of mine. This time, things were different. Over the past year, I’ve practiced relentlessly, while he’s been traveling and hasn’t played as much. Our styles have diverged, too. He focuses on form, always trying to hit the perfect shot. I focus on results. I’ll swing wildly, improvise, hit whatever it takes to win the point—even if it looks ridiculous. Sometimes those unexpected, chaotic shots are the most satisfying.

We ended up tied at 6–6, then played a tiebreaker that I won. The victory felt incredible, not just because I’d improved enough to compete with someone who used to destroy me, but because I played freely and joyfully. I could sense his frustration that his timing was off, and I had empathy for that, but not so much that I held back. I’ve learned to balance compassion with competitiveness—to honor my own growth without dimming it to make someone else comfortable.

That night, after I put the kids to bed, I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me. I actually cried for a few minutes, just thinking about how lucky I am to have them, how much I love them, how perfect our little life together feels when I really stop to notice it. I made sure to tell them that, too—to let them know how deeply they’re loved.

Later, I spent some time editing I Was Famous on the Internet and realized I might need to split it into two books. I already have about 90,000 words of raw transcripts, and instead of cutting too much, it might make more sense to publish two shorter volumes. I also got some positive feedback on Author in St. Petersburg, which meant a lot. I’ve given away about ten copies now, and I had a bit of a vulnerability hangover earlier this week—doubting whether I’d shared too much, whether it was too raw. But hearing from a reader who said they were enjoying it lifted me up. It reminded me why I write—to connect, to tell the truth, and to let my real life be seen.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Knowing My Body Well Enough to Say Stop

Originally published September 12, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 12, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

The fifth day of massage school began with our second anatomy and physiology lesson, where we explored the shoulder girdle, learned directional terms like superior and inferior, and studied how the humerus connects into the shoulder joint. Lunch was again with some classmates, and I enjoyed the conversation. I noticed a classmate sitting alone at a distant table and wondered whether my company would be appreciated there instead. A classmate suggested it looked like she wanted some solitude, so I sat where I had the day before. We all talked about who might eventually drop out of the program. I hope no one does because I genuinely like everyone. At the same time, I can see how it might be difficult for one classmate. He is here in Florida away from his wife and child, and he misses them deeply. He said he may not see them until Christmas, and I could understand how hard that would be. In fourteen and a half years with my ex-wife, I have never been away from her longer than eleven days. I could not imagine choosing to miss that much time with my family, even for school. A classmate also missed class today, and I said she seemed at risk of dropping out after already being late or missing a day twice in the first week. I hope she makes it because she brings a gentle loving mom presence to her touch that will be great for massage.

After lunch came one of the most exciting parts of the week: receiving our rookie massages from the juniors and seniors. These students had anywhere from two to six months more experience than us. We picked our tables without knowing who would be assigned to work on us. I chose one covered with a floral blanket. Many of my classmates giggled nervously while trying to undress under the sheets, which had us all laughing. Soon, the juniors and seniors entered, and I was paired with a woman named a student ahead of me in massage school.

A student ahead of me in massage school faced a challenge from the start, knowing I have received between five and six hundred massages. I made a conscious decision to communicate clearly with her while also being careful not to hurt her feelings. At one point, during the face massage, she worked too close to my eyes, and I asked her to stop that. Later she began incorporating stretches. After she rotated my arms and started stretching my legs, I requested that she stop those as well. I practice enough yoga that I prefer to manage all stretching myself. Stretching on the massage table feels like wasted time when I could be receiving touch, and I’ve had therapists take stretches too far in the past, causing minor injuries. I felt grateful to be confident enough to voice my preferences, even at the risk of her being offended.

In the group debrief afterward, I complimented a student ahead of me in massage school for using several strokes I had never experienced before, which is rare given how many therapists I’ve worked with. It was especially impressive considering she has only been in school a few months. I also encouraged my classmates to advocate for themselves during massages. Most classmates had enjoyed the stretches, and I explained why I hadn’t. The point, I told them, is not whether a client wants stretching or not, but that every client feels empowered to communicate their needs. It isn’t personal—it’s simply about knowing your own body.

On the drive to and from school today, I dictated the sixth and seventh parts of my dating book, totaling two and a half more hours of material. That brings me past sixty thousand words of raw dictation, which should cut down to around forty or fifty thousand once I refine it in ChatGPT. By the time I finished, I felt confident I had enough material for the book.

Later in the day I talked briefly with my sponsor, picked up the kids, and spent a little time at home before heading out to hot yoga. I hadn’t done a hot class in a while, and the intensity caught up with me quickly. My heart rate rose close to its maximum just moving through a standard sequence of poses in the heat. The sweat combined with massage oil made an interesting and messy mix on my towel covering my yoga mat. Fortunately, the girl next to me was so pretty that I got euphoric just being next to her. Afterward, I went home, showered, and went to my AA meeting.

These days, nearly every time I share in a meeting, I talk about how central massage has been to my sobriety. Early on, my nervous system was so agitated and locked in fight-or-flight that I couldn’t relax enough to take in new information. I couldn’t truly hear the message of AA or engage in the steps in that state of body and mind. Getting massages gave me my first taste of real relaxation, which cleared my mind enough to see the value in getting a sponsor, reading the Big Book, and attending more meetings. That combination was what allowed me to work the steps and make profound changes in my life. Without massage, I may not have had the clarity to start. If the way relaxation and bodywork became the ground under my sobriety resonates with you, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll talk through building a calmer life you don't need to escape from.

Because of that, I’m considering a requirement for my future sponsees: if someone wants me as their sponsor, they need to commit to getting massages. That may sound unusual, but AA is flexible enough for each sponsor to work in their own way. If a person isn’t willing to try massage to help themselves relax and become more receptive, then they can choose another sponsor. For me, it’s that important.

Doctor

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Why I Believe Honesty Can Keep Disease Away

Originally published September 11, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 11, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

Our fourth day of massage school was another great one. My morning routine has become efficient—I can get out of bed and be on the road in just fifteen or twenty minutes. At school, we began learning the foundations of Swedish massage, starting with something as simple as resting our hands on another person to connect, followed by light compressions. Our teacher filled the day with personal stories about her career, which not only taught us techniques but also helped us bond as a group. I arrived with more confidence than yesterday and felt far less awkward putting my hands on the two people I practiced with. I’ve come to see that almost anything I do, even something as basic as gentle compressions, can make another person feel better. With more learning, my ability to help will only deepen, but the foundation itself is already therapeutic.

Lunch was another highlight. I sat with some classmates, and the simple act of eating with people outside my family felt refreshing. For so many years I either ate alone at home or went out for solitary lunches. Now I feel like I’m back in a work environment, sharing meals and conversations, and it surprises me how good that feels.

On my drive back, I had a long conversation with an old college friend—an hour and a half that went by quickly. The most powerful part of our talk came when I shared a theory I’ve been piecing together. It draws from several sources: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, which argues that disease often originates in the mind and emotions, and Mind Over Medicine, written by a doctor who frames similar ideas in research-based medical language. Both suggest that our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can drive the creation of illness.

I connected these ideas to something a life coach once shared with me about her own past—how unprocessed pain from her younger years had shaped her choices and behavior for a long time afterward. It struck me as another example of how what we carry inside can ripple outward into our actions and, I believe, into our bodies.

That conversation resurfaced when I thought of a close friend from college, who died of cancer almost two years ago. He was close to me in age and married shortly before I did. As I reflected, I sat with my own belief that unprocessed shame, guilt, and remorse can weigh on a person over time, and I wondered what private burdens any of us might carry silently.

When I presented this theory to my friend on the phone, I expected skepticism. Instead, he received it openly. He said he could believe it and even found comfort in the idea. I asked why, and he explained that if cancer is truly random—striking by genetics or chance—then living in fear makes sense. But if behavior and unprocessed experiences play a role, then he felt reassured, because he has been faithful to his wife and avoids that kind of destructive secrecy. It left him feeling more secure in his own health, and I was grateful to have given him a new perspective. For me, it reinforced my own belief that as I live now—honestly, without destructive secrets—it feels impossible for cancer to take root in my body. If I ever carried something like that, I wouldn’t doubt that it could manifest. But since I don’t, I feel no fear of disease appearing out of nowhere. That conversation was one of the most meaningful I’ve had recently, and I’m grateful for my friend’s open mind. If exploring how honesty and what we carry inside might shape our health speaks to you, this is exactly the kind of conversation I'd love to have with you, so you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll think it through together.

Later, I went to the tennis clinic at the tennis club. My friend a friend was there, and whenever we play together, laughter follows. Our humor clicks effortlessly, though I’ve only ever seen him on the court. Today we had a new coach, a tennis coach, who was friendly and helped us have fun. We all joked, showed off, hit some incredible shots, and missed plenty of others. After the clinic, a friend and I stayed to play with a couple of other guys, continuing the fun.

What I value about a friend is that I can speak honestly with him, the same way I write honestly in my books. That said, in my books I sometimes generalize or soften the edges so the material is consumable by a broad audience. In private conversations, though, I strip that away by being more graphic or dark. What you read here is still the real me, just considerately adjusted so the book doesn’t provoke the kind of extreme reactions my past writings once did—like the time I was swatted because my raw honesty triggered someone into making up an insane story and calling the police. With a friend, I don’t have to hold back. By the end of the day, I felt content and ready for rest. I made it into bed by 10:45, grateful for another day that was both meaningful and fun.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

You Created Your Disease, and on Some Level You Love It

From my video published June 2, 2024.

You created your disease, and so did everyone else, and on some level you actually love it. I know how that sounds. Stick with me, because this is a crazy idea you've probably never heard before. It's built on personal responsibility, and on the understanding that you are the creator of your entire reality. For me, seeing it this way has unlocked a lot of power and a lot of ideas, and I think you're going to love where it goes.

Let's look at the opposite first, because the opposite of saying you created your disease and you love it is saying you didn't create your disease and you hate it. That seems to be what's normal in our society, and to me it sounds a lot like a victim mindset: I didn't do this, I hate it, I didn't do anything to deserve it. I'd rather take the responsibility, because responsibility is where the power is.

The year I manifested my own crisis

Let me give you an example from my own life. In 2020 and 2021, like a lot of people, I was upset with the state of the world. I was very annoyed with everything that was going on. I was in the best health I'd ever been in, and I thought everybody else was being insane and that nothing was being presented honestly.

The one idea that helped me stop being upset was remembering: I am God, and this is my universe. So why did I create this? When I sat with that, I realized I had manifested it. Back in 2019, I was in the worst financial position of my life, and I was manifesting really hard. There were two things I wanted more than anything. One, I wanted to get out of the financial situation I was in, so I wanted some really low-interest-rate loans, which at the time seemed about impossible. The idea that I could get a 3% loan on $100,000 with my crappy credit seemed absurd. And two, I really wanted to be successful as a content creator online.

Think about those manifestation goals at the end of 2019. There seemed to be no possible way that anything would come along to address them. And then 2020 came along. As someone who had been live streaming since 2013, back when most people were just trying it for the first time, I had seven years of experience and millions of followers. Then the government gave me disaster loans at 3% on $120,000, with my crappy credit. And in 2021, I made over a hundred thousand dollars of profit in a single year playing video games on Facebook, after blowing up my business and watching everything go downhill in 2019, struggling, and then finding my way again in 2020.

In 2021, after being absolutely miserable and making videos complaining about the state of the world, I realized I had literally manifested all of this. This was exactly what I asked for. I just hadn't been specific. I said, get me out of this financial situation, I want low interest rate loans, I want to be able to just stream and be a full-time content creator. And life said, here you go, this is what you wanted. And I said, no, wait. I guess this is what I wanted. I'd better be more specific next time. That one shift, just changing my interpretation of the world, brought me right back to being completely happy.

My dad's disease, and the exit he chose

Let me give you this in a few other forms. My dad passed away ten years ago. At the time he had some kind of bone disease, something like leukemia, along with heart disease and other problems. I was miserable over it. If you had told me back then that my dad created his own disease and loved it, I'd probably have punched you in the face.

But ten years later, a depth of understanding has come to me. Once you start to look at reincarnation and immortality the way I do, you see that yes, this body may pass, but the body dying is kind of like falling asleep. You go to sleep, you go off on some other adventures, and whenever you're ready you can wake up in a nice new baby body and start the whole experience over again.

When I look at my dad's life, he didn't seem happy in his marriage to my mother from around the year 2000 on. By 2014 he was stuck in a rut, and he didn't see any honorable exit. If he left, he couldn't leave my mom without everyone in his life being disgusted with him, from her to my brother and me to the rest of his family. He'd been married more than thirty years. I think he wanted out. But he was born in 1950. What was he going to do at 64 years old, leaving his wife? He could have done a lot of things. But I don't think he saw a way out, except getting sick and dying.

I realized this the other day, and it hit me hard: I think my dad, on the deepest level, intentionally got sick and died because he wanted out. He wanted to make an honorable exit. On the surface he never would have said that. But deep down, his spirit was bored and apathetic about his life. All he did was sit on the couch, watch the news and TV, smoke cigarettes, and go to the doctor. Who would want to keep living in that scenario? The way I see it, his disease was self-manifested to give him a chance to move on to something new, and to make an exit where everyone would say, what a shame, he was such a good father and husband. If he had simply left my mother, everyone would have called him a jerk. In many ways it was easier for him to die, let go of everything from this life, and start over fresh in a new body, or go off and do anything else his soul wanted to do.

People who seem to choose when they go

When you look at it that way, you start to notice how many people very intentionally seem to pass away. There was a lady in her 80s at the AA meeting I used to go to. Outwardly she appeared healthy, and nothing seemed wrong. But one day at a meeting she said that her husband and her son, who had both passed away, were building her a house in heaven that would soon be ready for her. At the time I didn't think much of it. She died a few days later, and we all realized she knew exactly what she was doing. She went intentionally. She decided it was time to move on.

To me it seems clear that you're either in the middle of this life loving it, growing and expanding, with nowhere you'd rather be, which is exactly where I am right now, or you've lost that. There's nowhere I'd rather be. There's no other body I'd like to inhabit. I'm not interested in being a baby again, because I love being a grownup. I love my life. I'm thriving, I'm growing, I have a passion and a joy for living. But if you lose that passion and joy, getting sick and dying could actually be the best path to a new body, an honorable exit, and a new adventure.

My sponsor in AA, who I'd been with since 2015, I believe recently passed. I don't have proof, but the last time we talked he said he was at the doctor and wasn't doing well. He'd talked a lot about dying over the last few years, and I told him, don't be scared, Bob. It's a whole new adventure. You can get another body and go do whatever you want. If you're not happy in this reality, you don't have to suffer before you move on. It's okay to go whenever you want to.

The woman who was terrified of one disease

There's a book called Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani. It's her story, so I'll stay general and let you read the details from her, but here's the overview. She spent her whole life terrified of getting one specific disease. She did everything she could think of to avoid it, but the entire time she obsessed over it, feared it, and thought about it constantly. And she got it. All the things she did to prevent it didn't work, because, as she put it, she was thinking about it and afraid of it all the time, and then she got it.

When she went into the hospital, very nearly dead from the disease, she had a near-death experience. She could see that she had manifested the disease through her choice to focus on it and fear it, and she saw that her situation could even be a great opportunity to help free others who were struggling the same way. She made a full recovery that the doctors had never seen anyone make. Her story got shared by Wayne Dyer and inspired countless people. She chose to come back rather than go down with the disease, so she could show people there's another way.

So much of what happens in your life, you are self-creating. Even when you lean on a doctor, or a healer, you're giving away a power that is actually yours. There are real opportunities to work together, but the power is still yours. There's another book I love on this, Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin, and I've shared my full thoughts on whether you can heal yourself if you want to go deeper on the science side of this.

I'll reference one more. There's a doctor named Gladys who lived into her hundreds and wrote a book. She got one fatal disease and treated it two completely different ways. The first time, she treated it with a holistic solution that most doctors don't even know about and that existing science calls unproven. You're not really allowed to be specific about it, which is why I'm not, but she actually treated her disease successfully with that exact solution.

Diseases have many ways to be treated

The second time the same disease showed up, she chose to treat it with regular Western medicine, because she thought it would be a different experience from the first time. So diseases have a lot of ways to be treated.

For me, the biggest disease that's manifested in my life is alcoholism, and that was obviously self-created. Some people will die as alcoholics and never stop drinking. They'll go to their grave that way. Many people look at it and say, well, it's just a disease, I got it genetically, and there's nothing I can do about it. I don't see it that way. Yes, I may have different genetics than most people when it comes to alcohol. When I take one drink, it sets off a physical craving that perhaps 90% of people never experience. But what kind of person, finding out that a single drink starts a ruthless physical obsession, would keep drinking anyway, except someone who on some level wants to be an alcoholic?

There's so much research showing that our genetic foundation is generally secondary. It's our epigenetics, the way our genes express themselves based on our lifestyle, that's primary. You have the potential to be a small body or a big body, to be lean or to carry a lot of muscle, to be high energy and joyful or low energy and miserable. Your basic genetic code is more like a realm of possibilities. Almost all of us are genetically capable of manifesting almost any of the basic diseases we go through. The real question is why some people manifest them and so many others don't. Why do some people seem to do everything to live healthy and still die young, while others have a real joy for living, barely pay attention to preventing anything, and live into their 90s?

The only common factor that makes sense to me is that you are the one who creates everything in your life. You create the ease, the comfort, the love, and the joy. And you create the dis-ease, the downsides, the problems, and the disasters. What I've noticed is that people who reach the highest ages keep a passion for life, a will to live, a flexibility, a willingness to change, and strong relationships with other people. Those strong relationships are worth building, and if you want help doing that you can schedule a one-on-one call with me, where we talk through staying willing to change and growing toward a life you don't need to escape from.

Isolation, and why my dad's death freed me

By the end of his life, my dad was very isolated. Almost the only person he spent time with was my mother, and almost everything he really lived for was gone. I was married and living with my wife and didn't really need my dad anymore. My brother was off living his own life. My mom certainly needed him and was devastated by his death. But honestly, my dad's death was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it freed me to have other father figures and to see more possibilities in my life.

I wouldn't be surprised if my father had the idea that dying was the best thing he could do for everyone, and that the way to do it was to get sick and go through the routine at the doctor so that everyone would feel it was inevitable, that it just had to happen. His death gave me the experience of awakening and wanting to be different. Often, especially as kids, we think love means wanting to be exactly like someone else. When my dad died, it unlocked all this desire in me to be different from him.

Now I look at my father-in-law. My own father quit drinking and quit drugs, and it's amazing he even lived into his 60s, given how hard he struggled with addiction in his 30s and 40s. By 40 he'd given up all his addictions except smoking, and he chose to keep smoking. He chose to ignore his doctor's advice. The doctor said, Mr. Banfield, you need to get out and walk and exercise and be active, and my father chose to ignore that and keep smoking. To me, those were his decisions, and on some level I think he was at peace with how much longer he'd live. I feel similarly about myself. I don't care that much about an extended life. I'm fine if I die in my 60s.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law is in his 70s and just switched to a whole plant-based diet. If you read the book How Not to Die, written by a medical doctor, there's a huge amount of evidence and research that has convinced me, beyond a reasonable doubt for my own life, that eating a whole-food plant-based diet can help prevent, halt the progression of, and even reverse the top 15 causes of death. So why don't you hear that research all the time? My belief is that it's cheap and quick to give you, and there's far more money in selling you disease, making you a victim, and keeping you sick and easier to control. Healthy people are harder to control and manipulate. Sick people, unfortunately, are much easier.

The healthiest I've ever been

I'm the healthiest I've ever been in this entire life. I haven't had a single sick day since 2022, which is more than a year and a half ago now, and I can tell you exactly why I got sick that last time. It was because I didn't want to help my mother move. I've shared the longer version of how I haven't been sick since October 2022 separately, but this is the heart of it.

This is what's tricky about saying you love your disease and you created it. Your disease is often trying to fulfill some unacknowledged desire. On the surface, under no circumstances would my dad have said he wanted to die, unless you could get deep, deep down and ask: are you really fulfilled? Is your life full of joy? If you could have anything, would you choose to sit at home in your 60s on the couch watching the news? Is this your idea of the best life you could be living in any reality? If those questions land hard and you'd like to talk through what your own body and your own life might be pointing to, you can book a private call with me — not as medical advice, just honest conversation on our call.

What I've noticed is that our diseases are sometimes the deep desires we consciously suppress. They come up to give us something we want but won't consciously acknowledge. My dad's diseases, I think, came up because he wanted more action. His life had been action-packed: he went to Vietnam, he had all those addictions, and it stayed intense until he settled down and raised us. He was fine with that for a while, but after my brother and I left, he never really picked his passion back up. I imagine he wanted more action, more learning, more growth, and couldn't consciously dig his way to it.

The last time I got sick

The last time I got sick, I was due to fly to Mississippi and spend a week or more helping my mother move. Consciously, I would have told you I wanted to help my mother move. Deep down, though, there was a big part of me, maybe 49%, that really did not want to go. There was a deep part of me that did not want to stop live streaming, playing Gods Unchained, making love to my wife every other night, seeing my kids, and going to all my yoga people and my AA meetings. But there was a conscious 51% that said, we're doing this, I'm not listening to any objections. So the 49% got very vocal.

Often your mind thinks about it backwards. The night before, I remember thinking, I can't get sick, I'm supposed to go help my mother move, I don't want to do this. I felt betrayed by my body. Why are you doing this to me, body? Notice the words: not "I want to go help my mother move," but "I planned on it." I was dreading having to call my mother and tell her I couldn't come. And often the very thing you're afraid of is something a part of you actually wants to happen.

I was also paranoid about uploading a video, even though it wasn't in the least bit violating any policies. And I realized part of me would love it if I couldn't upload videos anymore, because then, and only then, would I be free to do something else. As long as I can upload videos, I don't see anything better to do professionally. But part of me would honestly love to just get banned, sell all my office stuff, and be free to go do whatever else I want with my life. When you dig into that, you start to see that parts of you will manifest things because, on some level, you want the experience.

Once I got sick, on the last day, in October 2022, I literally had no symptoms except fatigue. No sniffles, no cough, just fatigue. My whole body felt drained of energy, and I could hardly get out of bed. What's nice is that the more personal responsibility you take, and the more you love your body and take care of it, the more your body gives you exact, specific symptoms. I just had fatigue, and I couldn't get out of bed, until I called my mother and told her I couldn't make it. Then I managed to get up and play Gods Unchained right afterward. Interesting how I had energy for what I wanted to do, but none for what I didn't want to do.

What happened when I honored the real reason

Then I started consciously setting the intention: I really do want to go help my mother move. I'm okay if it's uncomfortable, I'll deal with it. I started to think of it as an adventure, the biggest and most challenging thing I'd done in a while, and I told myself I wanted that challenge.

My body revved the energy back up over the next couple of days. I'm not saying that in most cases a disease you've manifested will instantly go away. But once you get clear and honor the reason it's there, you may find it goes away rapidly. Just a few days later, I moved 15,000 pounds of stuff, mostly by myself, into a truck and out to the landfill and the thrift shop. It was amazing how much energy my body had for that, because deep down I genuinely wanted to do it.

Peaches, and a dog who came back

It gets even better, so I'll wrap up with one last story. A few years ago we had a dog we absolutely loved. She was found in a peach orchard, so we called her Peaches. She'd lived out in the wild, had to kill for food and defend herself against wild animals, so she wasn't a purely domesticated dog.

One day our daughter put her arm around the dog's neck and sort of rode her, and Peaches bit my daughter in the face. It wasn't catastrophic, but it certainly seemed bad at the time. My daughter had a spot on her face from a tooth mark and a gash on the side of her head, and we took her to the hospital to get it sewn up. Now, right before that, the dog had had some kind of disease the vet said was fatal, telling us to just go home and help her die. Instead, the dog decided to live and cured the disease entirely on her own. We gave her extra love and attention, but no medical treatment, and whatever the vet said was fatal, she cured herself. I've told the full story of how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease if you want the details.

After she bit my daughter, we kept both dogs separated from the children at all times so a bite could never happen again. But the dog wasn't living her best life that way, and she died about a year and a half later. What kind of life was she living at that point? And now there's a dog on my bed right now that looks almost exactly like the dog we used to have. She was adopted by my wife's parents. To me, it looks like the dog intentionally got sick, died, reincarnated, and came right back to our family in a fresh new body.

Things make so much sense sometimes if you can see beyond one lifetime and take absolute personal responsibility. If somebody gets sick and dies, on some level you can respect it, because on some level they must have wanted to. There was something else they'd rather do. That's what I hope to communicate: a bigger vision of life and possibility, one that helps you enjoy life, find your passion, and stop suffering in areas where, to me, the suffering is optional.

I appreciate you taking this idea in. These are the kinds of conversations I keep going in my Life playlist, where I share more about reincarnation, recovery, health, and taking radical responsibility for everything in your reality.

Here Is Hope for Your Health Challenges

From my video published April 29, 2024.

If You or Someone You Love Is Having Health Challenges, This Is for You

If you or someone you love is having health challenges, this is for you. By the end of this, not only do I hope you feel better, but you just might be saying thank you for these exact health challenges. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I personally have seen the elimination of an incredible amount of health challenges in my life. I'm in the best health I have ever been in today. And I'm sharing this because one of my friends recently shared about her health challenges, and I asked her, I said, are you open to some alternative ideas that, in my own experience, might be extremely effective and make your life so much easier and allow you to completely eliminate the health challenges you're facing? And she said yes, and I said, great, this is for you. So this is for her and for all of you in similar situations, and I will at all times share my exact experience with you. I have 11 books, some of which are written by medical doctors, that I've found fantastically helpful.

So the very first thing is to start feeling right now how you would feel if whatever health challenge is currently in front of you were gone. How would you feel when that's gone? If you can start closing your eyes and picturing that right now, in my experience you will start to bring all the solutions towards you rapidly and speed up the process and make it so much easier.

The Health Challenges I've Overcome

To give you a bit of my experience, what health challenges have I overcome? Because if you look at me, you might just purely see health, that this guy's in great health. My worst health challenge I've experienced is alcoholism, which came with both a mental and a physical illness, tremendous mental and physical suffering. And 10 years ago, it looked impossible that I could get a solution to that. I could not imagine a way or see a way that either I could stop drinking at all, or to be sober and actually like it. And out of desperation, I prayed, God, please, I'll do anything to get sober. And that's key if you really, truly want to be free of whatever health challenge it is, at least that's what I found in my own journey.

Honesty, identifying this is here, this is what I'm experiencing now, not denying it and pretending like it's not there, but honesty and sharing that with others. Like my friend did, she courageously shared in a room full of people the exact health challenges she was having. Sharing with other people gives us the chance to help you. Open-mindedness, after you're honest, having an open mind to take in the help, to take in this message, and then willingness to actually take some of the suggestions and to put into practice many of the things I'll tell you, which I'll tell you I'm putting into practice myself.

So that's exactly what I did. I finally, after 11 years of drinking and dishonesty and denial and all these attempts to not have it and to make it work, I finally got honest and said, I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking even if I want to. Now, in my experience that's a serious mental and physical illness, a serious health challenge. And I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and the people there helped me not only learn how to stay sober, but how to love staying sober and so much more than that.

I've had many other health challenges like being overweight, getting sick and having every flu and cold that would come along. I've had back pain that I dealt with for years. I had these what are like pockets of yeast all over my chest and back for many years. In my own experience, all of it has been eliminated. I'm sober 10 years. The spots on my back and chest are gone. I do not experience neck pain or back pain on any kind of a regular or even not regular basis. Rarely, I may have a little bit here and there and it goes away quickly.

I today have one single remaining health challenge. Oh, I also lost weight. I was 250 pounds 10 years ago. I am 173 pounds today and I've kept the weight off since 2016, which is eight years ago now. And from 2014 to 2016, I steadily lost the weight in a very joyous, healthy way.

My Last Remaining Health Challenge: My Eyesight

The last health challenge I currently am facing is that in 1999, I went to the doctor after focusing on that which I could not see and got a prescription for glasses and was diagnosed with myopia, which is nearsightedness, which most of Western medicine considers uncurable and irreversible outside of surgeries that can be dangerous and sometimes cause harm to your eyes, which I'm not willing to take on. However, I am personally going through a process of natural eyesight readjustment. It turns out there's books from people who have, in their own accounts, gotten their myopia reduced through eye exercises, through changing beliefs, and through other practices like palming — some so drastically that where they were once nearly blind, now they could drive, and others to at least make huge improvements. So, in my own experience, I'm currently experiencing my eyesight improving. And this is something much of medical science says is impossible, while there are books out there, that they're not reading, that say exactly how the authors believe it can be done.

So that is my personal track record. And from that point of view, I've also seen a lot of things other people have dealt with. I've learned so many things that have helped me be healthy, that I'm going to just give all of that to you here. For example, in my own experience I have not been sick one single day since October 2022. And I know exactly why I got sick that particular time, and I had been very healthy before that. That is a year and a half, not one single day of sickness — that is the healthiest I've ever been in my entire life, healthier than I ever was as a kid or a young adult. And if that's possible for me, what I've come to believe is that you too can experience a higher level of health than you've had before.

Let the Sick Man Say I Am Healthy

And the starting point, for me, is this. Let the weak man say I am strong, as is said in the Bible. Or to put that in health terms, let the sick man say I am healthy. What I've observed in every person who is self-labeled as sick, they identify as I am sick. I am a sick person. I have chronic health issues. And every single person like me who is healthy identifies that I am healthy, and I am free from any chronic health issues. That might sound like it doesn't matter that much. But from the deepest level of the world, what I've come to believe is that what you manifest is often based on your identity, who you think you are. And from there is where, in my experience, you can make instant change.

So I encourage you, if you are thinking of yourself as sick, to consider, from my own journey, stopping thinking that way right now, and to say I am healthy. I am healthy. I am healthy. And I know if you've identified as sick, and if you've been talking about how you have these health problems, and I'm going through this, that this will often feel like a lie in the moment. It will start some conflict within you, you'll be standing there saying I'm healthy, or laying there saying I am healthy, and your brain will be like, no, you're not. This is the same thing that's been going on with you.

Mind Over Medicine and Becoming My Own Doctor

And I'm going to lay out a bunch of examples of books, and stories of my own. The first book I'm going to share with you talks exactly about this point. And this is written by a medical doctor. I am not a medical doctor, I don't practice medicine. In my mind, I am my own doctor. So I've learned enough to educate myself to be my own doctor. And this was one of the key books I read. It's named Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin, who is an MD who's practiced quite a while. And the subtext is scientific proof you can heal yourself.

If you really want to be free from your health challenges, I'm going to give you 11 books here. And to demonstrate your willingness, I suggest you read every single one of them start to finish as I have. Because what I've found is that the number one issue with health challenges, in my own experience, is the way our minds are programmed — that if you'll change your mind's programming, the physical structure of your body can change too. I've seen the physical structure of my body change in response to changing my thinking. But often, you have to change your actions to change your thinking, and that will then change your identification and your body.

So this book is written by a medical doctor who became very frustrated with the traditional Western practice of medicine, where it's basically an industrial assembly line, or a process of making as much money for the doctors and the hospitals and the health insurance companies in the shortest amount of time. And it's a hard time for everyone involved, where you're just showing up, and as a doctor, you don't even really get to usually know your patients. All you're often doing is telling them what's wrong with them, giving them drugs or surgeries or similar treatments that, in her view, often actually harm the body. And the body is so resilient and so amazing in healing itself that, as she argues, despite many Western medicine treatments actually harming the body, the body gets well despite the treatments given by Western medicine.

So this book has so many incredible stories in it from a medical doctor who got so frustrated with the practice of medicine, she quit being a doctor and started an online business instead. And after years, she felt called to come back and be a doctor, but this time to be what in her mind was the kind of doctor she'd imagined being, the reason she got into medical practice — to really help people from a holistic point of view, and to really get to know her patients. What she describes as the biggest failing of Western medicine is just looking at things one way and being a for-profit system.

Why So Much of This Information Isn't Shared

A lot of health challenges in our current system, in my belief, exist because they're profitable. And this is why information like I'm sharing is something that, in my opinion, really everyone should know, but a lot of people don't know. Why? Because this is information that, in my own experience, has eliminated all kinds of needs to go to the doctor and have surgeries. From the way I see it, it's profitable to have people who are sick, who have to go to the doctor all the time, that have to go to the hospital all the time, that have to take drugs all the time, because every step of the way, it's not profitable for the collective, for all of us, but there are certain parts — like hospitals, doctors, the companies that are health insurance — there's a certain part of the system that, in my view, makes a huge profit off of sick people, and that part of the system is thriving.

So one of the biggest challenges is if you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you the most powerful information possible to stay healthy, such as reading a book like this — or as my uncle did. My uncle is a general practitioner who's practiced over 40 years. One of the big turning points in my health is when he gave me the book How Not to Die.

The Book My Doctor Friend Gives Every Patient

He said he gives every one of his patients that visits his walk-in clinic this book, every time, on their first time into his clinic. The subtitle of this book is Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease. It's written by Dr. Michael Greger. In his book, he gives a ton of evidence that if you eat a whole plant based diet, whole plants are fruits, as he defines them: fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans that have been minimally or not processed at all. For example, buying a fruit or beans straight off the vegetable or fruit aisle out of the grocery store, that have not been turned into something like tofu. For example, tofu is a processed soybean, which means much of the nutrition has been stripped out of it.

His book says that, based on huge amounts of research and his personal experience, if you eat a whole plant based diet, you can do some combination of slow, stop, prevent, and or reverse all 15 top causes of death. I want to be clear that this is the claim Dr. Greger makes in his book, drawing on his research and his own experience. I'll repeat it because it's really important to me. According to his book and his research, if you eat a whole plant based diet, a diet which primarily consists of minimally or not processed at all fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, along with perhaps a B12 supplement, which I take an occasional B12 supplement maybe every other day or so, if you eat like that, his book says it will prevent, stop the progression of, and or reverse all 15 of the top causes of death. All 15 top causes of death with one single affordable, natural treatment that, in his telling, you don't need to go see anybody about.

Now, this is uncommon for doctors to give their patients a book like this on the first visit. Why? Because, in my experience, when you really practice this book, you don't hardly need to go to the doctor anymore. I have not been at a doctor in years. I have no need to go to the doctor because I feel healthy. Do you see how that is a conflict of interest for our existing healthcare system, which makes a profit when people go to the doctor, when people take drugs, when people go to the hospital, when people are sick? Our entire, quote, healthcare system would almost completely collapse if there were more people like me who feel healthy and do not use the system. It would almost completely collapse. As I see it, it is funded on sick people.

And this means your doctor, if they give you the best information, that's counterproductive in terms of their business. Now that's a problem because, the way I see it, that's often subconscious, and that dictates how medical schools are taught. Now you might be wondering, well, how does this relate to my health challenges? My belief is that your health challenges are profitable, and for that reason, the entire system is set up to help you have and find and feed health challenges. And what I've come to believe is that if you will change how you think about health challenges, you will find an abundance of books and stories and resources that, in my experience, will help you eliminate almost every health challenge you can imagine. And that's what I've experienced firsthand. And that's what I'm going to continue sharing with you here, some of my experience with doing that. For me, there's no substitute for reading these books. I'm going to go through the rest of the books here, and then I'm going to share a bunch of my own stories.

Louise Hay and You Can Heal Your Life

This book by Louise Hay. Now, the first two books I gave you, those are both written by medical doctors with a bunch of research backing them up. Now, keep in mind, in my view, most research in terms of healthcare is funded by those in a position to make a profit, which means most research in terms of human health is funded by drug companies and companies that are looking for ways to make a profit, which means much of the medical research you hear about that's published is, as I understand it, driven by profit motives, not actually by keeping people healthy. But there is research you probably haven't seen that Dr. Greger goes through in detail, that Lissa Rankin goes through in detail, that, in my opinion, shows things your doctor should know but might never have heard of before, that I find incredibly powerful and that have worked for me.

Now this book by Louise Hay is called You Can Heal Your Life. This is an incredible book where she describes healing what she calls a terminal disease with alternative treatments. And even with the YouTube terms and conditions, the system is set up so much that I have to be careful, even in what I say, because the YouTube terms and conditions are even set in favor of promoting one-way thinking about certain diseases, and alternative treatments, you can't even talk about them. So this book talks about what, for many people, was a terminal disease and involved a painful end of life treatment plan. She describes healing it through alternative means that, in her account, were not only very effective for her, but they allowed her to then share what she had done in her life with so many others.

So this is how, right now, you can start saying, thank you for this health challenge. I am very grateful for my journey with my eyesight, because this is more and more material for my future videos. This is more and more material I can help other people with. And this allows me to be in this with you. So I'm not just standing here saying I have cleared every single last health challenge out of my life. I'm always working on my own. And yet I only have one, and it's incredibly minor. What I believe is that if you'll focus on the biggest health challenges you have first, you can clear those out and then continue to go through the smaller and smaller ones until you don't have any painfully acute, difficult health challenges left. In fact, this journey with my eyesight has been fun. It's been thought provoking. It's been surprising.

The Mind-Body Connection

So this book by Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, reading this book was so powerful, and she said one little thing in it. Basically, this book elaborates further on the mind body connection and starts to talk about it. It promotes a belief that symptoms in the body are connected with the way you're thinking. And this is something that Lissa Rankin, in her book Mind Over Medicine, goes into with details and research. But this book dives deeper into the practice of that.

Here's an example that was instantly effective for me. She talks about how, once she realized that the symptoms and the disease she manifested in her body had a specific lesson for her and a specific path that she could treat it, that was all natural, alternative treatments, not painful or awful to go through, and that this was a gift to her. In her account these things tended to be predictable, and the exact thing that manifested in her would often manifest in other people and have very similar reasons for that person. And she started to find that, in her belief, all kinds of different symptoms in the body have a way of thinking that is connected with that symptom, and that if you modify your thinking, the symptoms will often stop almost immediately.

The first powerful experience I had with this was with coughing. For me, one indication: if I'm coughing, I take it as an indication of an opportunity to change, to open my thinking, to stop doing often whatever it was, or whatever I was thinking about right before I started coughing. Let me give you a very clear example of the first time this happened.

2019: Willing to Change

In 2019, I had got myself in the worst financial situation of my life because of thinking, I am broke, I don't have enough. In 2018, despite external circumstances, I had more money than ever externally. Internally, it wasn't enough for me, and I started thinking broke. A year later, my finances matched that. At this time, I was heavily resisting taking the changes I needed to get out of that. Number one, getting fully transparent and telling my wife how much money I'd spent and how bad of a position I'd gotten myself in, that I was borrowing money on credit cards to make minimum payments at ridiculous interest rates.

And I kept thinking, you need to ask your wife for money, or you're going to go bankrupt, or you're literally going to default on everything. Like, you need to ask for help. You need to talk about this. And I'm like, no, no, it's not manly. I can't do that. I'm the income provider for my family. And I was coughing, coughing and coughing. And I was thinking about the money and coughing, and thinking about my finances and coughing.

And I remembered this book, and I said out loud in the car by myself on the way to pick my daughter up: I am willing to change. I am changing. I am willing to change. And I started crying, and I realized, you need to ask your wife for money. And you're going to ask your wife for money. And you're going to stop spending all this money. You're going to ask your wife for money. You're going to ask everybody for your help. And you're going to change your financial situation. And I cried. I felt like I was such a failure as a man to be asking my wife for money. And I mean, I had to ask my wife for all of her money, all of her investments, all of her cash. It took everything just to get through without declaring bankruptcy, so that we could keep paying the bills. My wife had been relying on me to pay the bills for years, since our daughter was born. And I felt like an utter failure, with sobbing.

My cough instantaneously stopped. And then I realized what had happened. My willingness to change. What I came to believe is that my cough was a little encouragement from my body to change, to open my mind, to allow a new creative expression to come through. My cough, in my experience, was a signal that I was resisting that which I wanted, that which I needed. My cough was a signal to stop thinking how I was thinking, to open up to change. And as soon as I said, I'm willing to change, I opened up, and my cough immediately stopped.

I have never had a consistent cough again in five years. No matter what else has happened in my life, at the first or the second cough: I'm willing to change. I'm changing. I'm willing to change. Come on, I'm open. Let's go. Let's not resist. Let's just let the change happen. I have never consistently had a cough since I realized, for me, the coughing and the willing to change are mentally and physically linked. I'm telling you what I believe: there are symptoms you are struggling with today that, in my experience, if you will understand the mental signal, the connection, you can instantaneously eliminate certain symptoms like coughing. And sometimes things like coughing will reveal exactly what you're feeling, exactly what you need to change.

My friend was talking about coughing for hours. And to me, the obvious cause of the coughing for hours was what she did right before it. And to her it wasn't obvious. Sometimes these things are super obvious. And this is why, in my experience, we need to ask other people for help.

Ask, and You Will Hear Amazing Stories

I promise you, if you ask, the more you share about your health challenges and ask for advice, you will hear some amazing stories from people that they don't often tell. This is one of the reasons I love it when people join Jerry Banfield Family and actually ask and share openly. And I've found, there's so many more of these out there. There's a book called You Can Heal Your Body that Louise Hay wrote, which has exact symptoms, exact problems and causes, and exact affirmations that you can do. In my experience, some things will take more time than others. Other things, if you'll do the affirmation, the symptom will stop almost instantaneously. I don't very often have symptoms in any part of my body for any length of time, because what I do is I go to the book, I look at the symptom, and I start doing the affirmation right away. And in my experience, I know it works for me. This is an example of the level of information that's out there that I believe can completely change your life.

Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me

Let's look at some more of these books. Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me. This is a book where the author describes a near death experience where she went to a stage of cancer that, as she tells it, nobody had ever survived. And she had a near death experience. As she describes it, she chose to come back here and her body healed, rapidly. And she could see that all the way she had thought, she had set herself up. She had been afraid of cancer. No matter how well she ate, she had been dreading it, she had been afraid of it. According to her book, it's like she created this experience for herself, through her fear, her expectations, her attention to it. She created this experience. And then, as she tells it, simply changing her identity and letting go, the cancer almost very rapidly went away. And the doctors were blown away. They'd never seen that happen before.

There's a lot of stories like this out there. I've even watched it in my own home, with a story I tell about how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease. So Dying to Be Me, this was a really good book, in my experience, if you feel like you're hopeless. I mean, she was about as hopeless as you could get. And since this book came out, she's spoken with Wayne Dyer and traveled all over the world to share her message, and written additional books. What I've come to believe is that there is very powerful information in here that defies a lot of the things we've been taught and we've been told.

Breath, and the Last Time I Had a Cold

Here's another book called Breath. Let me tell you about the last time I had a cold. It has been years since I've had a cold. What I've come to believe is that once you get a hold of this information I'm sharing and you start to realize how much control you have over what goes on in your body, if there's a symptom, a health challenge you don't like, you start to realize there's a book for that. There's a way to change my thinking and my behavior that, in my experience, will eliminate that.

The last time I got a cold and I was sniffling and I was coughing, I said, this is stupid. I believe that there's some change I could make. There's some information I could get a hold of that would eliminate this. I never want to have a cold or a flu again. I'm done with it. Never ever again. That's what I was thinking. Literally as I'm having the last symptoms of it, I'm thinking I want information right now. Never again. Cold, sniffles, flu, I'm done with this crap. Not coughing, but congested. Never again.

I walk into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I shake the hand of one of my friends there. I tell him what I was just thinking about. And he gives me this book, Breath. Almost immediately. And for me, it was completely effective. I said, and this is why I believe you need to get honest and ask other people, you would not believe what information people are holding on to that, if you will just share your struggle, they've got an answer. And it's often not logical. Like how is it that I'm having this sniffles and this cold and I walk in and I go to the exact guy in an AA meeting who's read the exact book that would be extremely effective for me? I mean, to me, life is magical. What I've come to believe is that once you realize life is magical and you are creating it, as soon as you realize it, as soon as you think of something, you start bringing it to you. And as long as you don't repeatedly push it away and bring it in, push it away, like as long as you just open up and let it come, in my experience it can come almost immediately.

So he immediately told me about this book. I immediately knew this is exactly what I'm looking for. This is exactly what I was just thinking I wanted. I dove into this book. What does this book teach you? How important your breath is. And it gives a whole bunch of lessons and research. The author isn't a doctor. He's done a lot of research into breathing and the breath. It gives a whole bunch of research into breathing.

Learning How to Breathe

Now, it was a humbling experience to say the least that, having been born in 1984, and this was probably 2022, that I didn't know how to breathe. You might think like, well, breathing, you know, that's definitely something I've got down. I read this book and I'm like, holy crap, I don't even know how to breathe properly. What this book basically teaches, according to the author, is that breathing through the nose is the designed way the body is meant to operate. His suggestion is to never mouth breathe, except in emergencies or needing to talk. He writes that mouth breathing causes problems, and he did some experiments that were awful, like plugging his nose up for a couple of weeks with plugs. He was shocked at the health problems that, as he describes, quickly manifested by not nose breathing.

One immediately effective solution that I applied in reading this book is that he suggests, while you're awake, that you keep your mouth shut and consciously breathe through your nose. And if you notice your mouth breathing, shut your mouth and breathe through your nose. But when you're asleep, sometimes your body will betray you and you'll wake up mouth breathing. And the way he suggests to correct that is to buy some mouth tape. Now, these, it's not like you duct tape your whole mouth shut and you're going to suffocate. There's little specific pieces of mouth tape they sell for this exact purpose. And what it does, it holds your mouth shut just hard enough so that when your body's unconscious, it will keep your lips shut. So you will not mouth breathe while you're asleep.

Now, what happens instead, of course, if you really tried, you could easily just open your mouth and the tape would come off. So if you were conscious, the tape would practically fall off easily. And it's so gentle, like sometimes it fell off at night while I was sleeping. So we're erring on the side of a gentle keeping the lips shut tape, not like that. What I found is that when your nose gets clogged up at night, with the mouth tape, you wake up wide eyed as your brain is struggling to get enough oxygen, you wake up wide eyed, having not been able to breathe enough. And I would lay there for hours, some nights in the middle of the night, nose breathing, because I was born with a deviated septum and I had been in the habit of mouth breathing. Often when the deviated septum breathing would come into play, or during exercise especially, and at night, I often would mouth breathe a lot. The author writes that mouth breathing often causes respiratory and throat issues. And what I believe is one big reason I have not had a cold or a flu any time in the last year and a half is because of this book, because I've eliminated mouth breathing except when talking. And I still try and remember when I'm filming to nose breathe, but I get to talking so fast sometimes that I end up sucking breath in through the mouth. One of the easiest ways I've found you can eliminate mouth breathing is with the mouth tape at night. Now, I've spent a good number of nights awake feeling like I was breathing through a needle, but refusing to mouth breathe and being calm.

Slow Breathing and Longevity

Another thing from this book it talks about is that, according to the author, animals that tend to take slower breaths tend to live longer. And one of the things he suggests you can do if you're into anti aging and you want to be at maximum health and not age, is to slow down your breathing. A lot of people take these really short, shallow breaths, which he associates with emphysema. And his idea is that if you will take big, long, slow, deep nose breaths, oh my God. When I was reading this book, I started doing 30 second inhales, 30 second exhales, one breath per minute. I think the average person breathes like 10 or 12 breaths a minute. Reading this book for months, I was obsessed with my breathing. I consciously slowed my breathing down so that my default breathing state now is drastically slower. Especially doing something like yoga, I'll often find myself taking 5, 10, 20 second in breaths and really long out breaths also. And I never mouth breathe exercising now.

What I've learned from this book is that, when I tried running while applying it, if I'm running so hard that I can't get enough air by nose breathing, then the intelligent thing to do is slow down. Walk and catch your breath, then resume running. Do not mouth breathe. In fact, he showed research in this book that athletes, as soon as they start mouth breathing, their performance goes downhill, because nose breathing is so much more effective. In fact, he cites how some of the ancient Indian tribes didn't even want to open their mouth to smile for fear of letting air out of their lips. And he writes that a lot of teeth problems we have come through mouth breathing. This book is an example of the sheer quantity of help that, in my experience, you can get in one single book.

A Year and a Half Without Getting Sick

This book has been huge for me in eliminating colds and respiratory stuff. Because I notice my kids often end up having coughs and respiratory stuff and bronchial things, and they're mouth breathing at night. And I've encouraged them to try the mouth tape. They're not interested in it. I'm not going to force them to do it. But I've noticed in the last year and a half, every member of my family has had some kind of cold or flu. I have not.

Now, I've been around all kinds of people. I go to AA meetings where you've got homeless people in there. I shake everyone's hand. I'm up in everybody's face, sitting next to everybody. I'm at yoga almost every day, same thing. My kids are in school. They're in elementary school. So all of our current programming would tell you that you're not going to be able to avoid getting sick, that you're in a germ infested environment. So why is it that in a year and a half, being around as many people as possible, I have not experienced a single day sick, not one single cold, not one single flu, and everybody else in my family, even though they're pretty healthy, they've all got something, not once for me? What I believe is that this book is one of the biggest parts of it.

But why did I find this book? Because I opened my mind to it. I knew it existed. And, in my experience, I pulled it to me almost instantaneously as soon as I desired it. This is how I believe you start getting this hope.

The Seth Books by Jane Roberts

What I've come to believe is that your health challenges can be eliminated way faster and way easier with way less suffering than you ever imagined before. Let's look at some more books. There's a series of books I've read by Jane Roberts, who narrates and channels a medium named Seth. I've read a bunch of them, all the audio books. If you're thinking, man, I can't read books, I don't like to read, hopefully you didn't dip on this video already. But I guess you wouldn't be hearing this. It's like it's not happening if you did.

I listen to almost all these books on Audible, in audio book format, because personally, the stuff I read is on the computer, chat messages. I spend enough time reading with my eyes that I want to take in books usually through audio books, so that way I can wash the dishes, walk the dog, hang clothes, etc., and take in a book at the same time. So I listen to the Seth books, a bunch of Seth books by Jane Roberts. These books share some of the most out of the box health ideas I've ever heard before, and in my experience they're extremely powerful.

Now, not every little suggestion and thing worked. One of the things suggested, instead of sleeping one long sleep throughout the night, was that you break your sleep into multiple parts and get up in the middle of the night and take a nap during the day. I tried that and that worked horribly for my body. But I did at least try it. I tried a new way of sleeping. And I'm not here to tell you that the exact things I've done will work the exact same way for you. But what I've come to believe is there is what might seem like now a magical way that you can be at the best health you've ever been in before, and that some of the things that work for me will work exactly the same for you. Others of them won't work as well, or there'll be an alternative that somebody else gives you that will work as well.

So this book has a ton of beliefs and ideas about health and well being that, in my experience, ring much more true than anything I'd ever heard outside of the books I've shown you here.

The First Sign of a Loss of Vitality

For example, one of the last books I read was specifically about health. And it was written while the author was in the hospital dying. And meanwhile, she's channeling this medium talking about health. One of the most powerful phrases in the book said that the first sign of a loss of vitality is a lack of play and a focus on one's personal problems. And I was like, wow, wow.

If you look at kids, what I've noticed is children are generally very healthy unless they live in an environment with adults who are very sick. In which case, the adults often are so impactful on the children that the children mirror the adults. My children are very healthy. And a big part of that, I believe, is because they live with me and with my wife, who is also very healthy. What I also notice is children are always playing and having fun. And children are not focusing on personal problems.

And almost everyone I have ever observed who is chronically ill or bogged down by health challenges is a very serious, not fun, not playful person who is totally consumed with their own selfish, self centered health issues. So I'm not saying you should deny all your health issues and never look at what's going on, but what I believe is that it needs to be not the main focus of your life. Health challenges should never be the main focus of your life. Personal problems should never be the main focus of your life. Play, fun, joy, learning, creativity, growth, connection, and serving and helping others, all those things are signs of life and health and vitality.

Being isolated, alone, brooding upon your health issues, having a life where all you do is watch TV and go to the doctor, I mean, in my view that's the lifestyle of a sick person. And what I believe is that if you will live like a healthy person, you will be a healthy person. There's many people who were perfectly healthy and started living at home, that stopped working, that their spouse died and all they did is sit at home and watch TV and then go to the doctor, and all of a sudden they're sick.

So this nature of personal realities, and the Seth books, are extremely powerful. And some of the other books are kind of a more gentle introduction to some of these ideas, which to many people versed only in Western medicine thinking will find some of these things shocking. And I loved the ideas I got out of these Seth books. And it's not just about health, but there's so many other areas of life. There's so many out of the box, powerful ways of thinking.

What I've come to believe is that many health challenges come about from limiting, frustrated ways of thinking, suppressed emotions that then burst out in the form of a health condition. Many people I've observed manifest health issues.

The Last Time I Got Sick

Let me tell you about the last time I got sick. And this is a line of thinking that I got from this book and the many others similar to it. The last time I got sick, or experienced what you would call, if you looked at me, you'd say he's sick or he has a cold, was October, 2022. At the time I had had quite an experience of health before that. And it was Sunday. The end of October, 2022, the next day I had a flight booked to go help my mother move in Mississippi. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida.

And on the surface, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go help mom move. This is great. I've wanted this for a long time. But deep down, I really, really did not want to drop my entire life, which I love, with my wife and my kids and my yoga and my AA meetings and my video games and my videos that I create, at the time my live stream. I really did not want to drop that stuff for a week to go help my mother move.

And I started to experience fatigue. Fatigue was about the only symptom I had. I started to experience this huge level of fatigue, like you would experience with getting a flu or something. But there were no other symptoms, just fatigue. That's what's amazing, in my experience, when you start kicking. If you can just kick one single health challenge and be conscious of your role in doing that, then you can start to realize there's new ways to be sick, or to not identify as sick. But if you do have a health challenge, what I've found is you can actually enjoy it. And it can be way softer and gentler and kinder. Like for me, the only symptom I experienced was fatigue.

And Sunday night, I started to get this foreboding sense of fatigue. I started to feel like my body was betraying me, that it was going against what I had asked it to do. And I was dreading calling my mother Monday morning, telling her I couldn't make the plane flight and I was too sick to come help her move, and rescheduling the flight. At the same time, though, there was a part of me that was thrilled. Great. I'm off the hook. This is the only reason I could think of that I could get out of this. There was some unacknowledged part of me that thought it was awesome that I could just lay around at home instead of going to help my mother move, which was quite a task.

But what I did after I called my mother, I immediately got enough energy to get out of bed and sit around and play some video games. Isn't that funny? And then I started to consciously integrate everything like, hey, body, I really do want to help my mother go move. I'm serious. I'm willing to drop my games. I'm willing to miss the time with my family. I really, really, really, really want the energy to go help my mother move.

And within 48 hours, my body spun my energy back up again. There were no other symptoms. There was no diagnosis. It was simply a drop of energy to where I could barely just lay in bed, barely do anything. And once I got clear with my, I really want the energy to go help my mother move. It took a couple of days, and what I've found is you need to have patience, especially if you've had an ongoing health challenge.

Sometimes things like coughing can disappear almost instantaneously. With some things like my natural eyesight improvement, this has been a journey I've been on for years of doing some work and then stopping and then giving up and then coming back to it and seeing progress. So some things, they're not going to disappear instantaneously in some cases, especially if you have deep beliefs. So give yourself patience and love and kindness and allow things to take time and be persistent.

So after two days of thinking, I really, really, really want to go help my mother move and I'm serious and I'll let go of everything else. It's fine. I'll take a week off of my life. It's fine. I'll do it. My body spun the energy right back up and I was on a plane to go help my mother move on Wednesday.

Over the next week, I mostly by myself loaded 15,000 pounds of stuff out of her house and storage lockers into a U-Haul and then dumped it into the landfill. So that's 15,000 pounds up into the U-Haul and then 15,000 pounds out of the U-Haul. A bunch of trips to the landfill, to the thrift shop to give stuff away. I did one of the most amounts of physical labor I've ever done in my whole life. And my body, just a few days after having no energy to lay down, spun the energy up and I had the perfect amount of energy to help my mother move. And the move went very smoothly. There were four men who moved like 30 or 40,000 more pounds of her stuff in two trucks to her house here.

And I realized what had happened afterwards. What I came to believe is that because there was this unacknowledged part of me that really didn't want to help my mother move, it manifested the drop in energy to give me what I was asking for that I didn't want to consciously admit that I wanted. Does that make sense? There was this suppressed, strongly suppressed urge that I didn't even want to think about consciously. But, in the way I understand it, my body gave me what it thought I wanted. My body gave me, oh, you don't want to go help your mother move so much that you're embarrassed to even admit this? Well, let's just suck all your energy down the drain and there, that'll give you what you want, won't you? Aren't you happy now?

My daughter, the other day, children are often very, very easy to latch on to some of these ideas. And you can see powerful examples of how, especially kids like my daughter's age, 8 years old, powerful examples of how these ideas work for them.

How Much of Our Illness Do We Create Ourselves?

A week or two ago, my daughter gets up in the morning and she's like, I want to stay home today. And before, we had set this narrative up, as most parents do, that as long as you're healthy, you need to go to school. So my daughter had learned through the environment she was in that if you want to get out of doing school, you can. And many of us have learned that we can get out of doing work, we can get out of things in our relationships, we can get out of commitments we've made by making ourselves ill. And once you start, this idea starts to blow up in your brain. It's like, oh my God, how much of my illness in my life has been totally self-created by my unacknowledged desire to get out of going to a job I hate, a school I don't like, a relationship I don't want? That's what I've come to believe from my own experience.

My dad passed away 10 years ago. And at the time, you know, he had some disease. It doesn't even matter what disease. He also had heart issues. He had a bunch of health problems. And at the time, we're all sad and it was all horrible and he didn't want to die. And 10 years later, what I've come to believe is, he totally did want to die. It was the only honorable exit he could make from his life. He was not happy. He was not enjoying his life. His decisions, in my view, indicate he did want to get sick and die because he wanted to move on and do something else with his life. And he didn't feel there was any honorable way to do that besides get sick and die. He didn't feel like he could just leave my mother and go start some new life.

And my father-in-law, by comparison, he has had a few health challenges come up. And he has changed his diet. He started all these things like changing his diet. He's made a drastic change to his diet to eating mostly vegan. And he's paying attention. He's exercising. He's getting out. You can see he wants to live. He wants more time with his wife, with his kids, and with his grandkids. His decisions indicate his desire for life. And his health challenges have inspired him to make changes.

So what I've come to believe is this: you can let your health challenges be a horrible curse that has been put on you because you're a bad person. Or you can let your health challenges be a signal, an opportunity to change, and to grow, and to learn, and to confirm — do you really want to be here or not? Looking back now, this is such a surprising point of view, but I believe my father totally did want to die. On the surface, he'd tell you to your face that he didn't. He was sick, and this was just his life. But he wouldn't make any change. He wouldn't do anything to try and take better care of himself. He wouldn't even quit smoking. To me, he clearly wasn't that interested in continuing to live. And I don't blame him for it. But I understand, in my own experience, how powerful this stuff is.

My Daughter and the "I'm Sick" Show

So let me go back to my daughter now. My daughter, who is eight years old, comes out to the table, and she starts putting on this whole I'm sick show. And my wife was even doubting it, like, you know, you're not sick. And so my daughter was doubling down because she really wants to stay home. And me, having read what I've read, finally put my daughter's behavior together with her desires. Many times in the past, like once every month or so, my daughter would wake up and be sick. She wouldn't eat anything in the morning. She'd drain herself of energy. She sometimes would cough or even throw up. And she'd lay around all day. No one else would ever get whatever she had. Like my wife and I and her little brother, my son, we would never get what she had. But she'd go through this routine of being sick — half the time she'd throw up and lay around, not eat and be sick.

So I started to catch on to this, and to put these ideas together with what I was learning. And I started to believe she wants to stay home from school. And she's been conditioned that she has to be sick to stay home from school. So she makes herself sick to stay home from school, because that's what she thinks is expected of her. That's how I've come to understand it.

So a couple of weeks ago, I saw her start to do this. And I said, look, you can stay home for any reason. The morning had evolved as it usually had. She laid around, she refused to eat. And the more my wife questioned, you know, are you really sick? You don't look sick. She started to try and act more sick. And then she eventually went to get in her bed and rest. And my wife's understandably like, all right, if you're sick, go in your bed and rest. So my daughter got in bed. She wouldn't eat. She was resting. She was putting on this whole sick thing.

So I walked in and stood by her bed. And I said, Madeline, you are free to stay home from school anytime you want to. And I would prefer you to be in full health when you stay home from school. I don't want any more of these days where you're at home sick, throwing up, not eating, laying around, sometimes crying or having a heating pad. I'm like, if you want to stay home from school, just say, Dad, I'd like to stay home from school. I would prefer you to be in full health so that we can have a nice day together, so that you can enjoy your day at home. That's what I would like for you to do.

And then I shared my experience with getting sick. The last time I had been sick was when my mother — I was going to help her move. I told her that. And I said, Madeline, in my experience, my body made itself drained of energy to give me the unacknowledged thing, the only way that I thought was appropriate to receive it. The only way I could stand to call my mother and say I couldn't make it and that she would accept it is if I said I was sick. Now, she still was disappointed, but she couldn't really fault me for being sick. That's how I understand what happened to me.

So I told her, I'm like, Madeline, I would prefer you to be healthy today. You are very smart. Your body makes things happen based on what you want to happen. She's like, I do want to go to school, Dad. I do want to see my friends. I'm like, often these things are unacknowledged. Do you really wholeheartedly want to go to school and see your friends? Because if you do, I believe your body will make that happen. And she's like — this was Easter weekend — she's like, we spent all weekend with people at Easter. There were all Easter egg hunts, parties. I really would like a day to just stay home and be by myself and read and do my tablet. And I'm like, see, there you go, Madeline. Now, can you get up and have a day in health? Can you eat your breakfast? Can you be healthy? Can you enjoy this day at home? She said, yes. She got out of bed. She immediately plowed through her breakfast and she enjoyed the rest of the day at home in health.

Now, I did tell her, I'm like, Madeline, you can only miss so many days of school before you get kicked out of your school and then we'd have to homeschool you. So you're free anytime to say you don't want to go to school. You don't need to provide any reason at all. And I prefer you to be healthy when you do so. That said, if you take advantage of that too much, you will get kicked out of your school. You will need to homeschool, which we know you don't want.

The Difference It Made

So today, my daughter wakes up. And, you know, my wife still often does things on momentum. Madeline's like, Mom, I'd like another day to rest. And Laura's like, you don't look sick to me. And I'm like, Madeline, you can stay home today. You don't need any reason to stay home. I would prefer you to be healthy if you stay home. You know, I get a little bit of a glare in the kitchen. Laura's like, are you sure you want to stay home? Madeline's like, yes, I'd like to take one more day. I really want to go to school tomorrow.

And on the day I was telling you about after Easter, and all the previous times that Madeline had been sick like that, she'd spent all day in bed, often thrown up and not eaten and had almost no energy and sometimes missed two days of school. That time, she took four walks. She walked with the dog with me while she was home that day. Today, she has been at her abundant, usual, joyful self. She's enjoyed playing some checkers with Laura. She took the dog for a walk with us this morning. She's been full of energy. She's been eating normally. And I'm just like, in my experience, it's amazing to see how fast this stuff works in an honest, open, willing person. To see my daughter almost instantly just turn off playing sick. And go right back to what is normal, healthy, playful, joyful, full of life, not focused on personal problems.

Breaking the Conditioning

Now, I have love and I have compassion for you. And I know some of this will sound hard and foreign. If for 60 years, you've been conditioned that the only way you can miss work is if you're sick, the only way you can not give your husband or your wife what she wants or whatever is to be sick, the only way that's acceptable for you to take a break is if you're sick — if you've had that much conditioning, what I believe is that you can start right now to break all of it in your mind. It may take some time for the whole infrastructure to collapse, though. So if you can start right now: I am healthy. Let the sick man say, I am healthy. If you can start to see the abundance and joy you have for life, you can start to break all this stuff down now and have patience with yourself as the system collapses around you and you rebuild anew.

And these books helped me rebuild new ideas. Another author I read is Dr. Joe Dispenza, very popular in the whole kind of vibe I'm sharing here. Joe Dispenza has several great books with a bunch of stories of people who, he says, have done this exact thing in their life, all kinds of chronic health conditions. And Joe Dispenza is a doctor. He shares all kinds of people who, again, have done the same kind of process I'm telling you about here. And in my experience, you generally are going to need some assistance with this, some kind of community or some kind of support group for this.

My Support Groups: Alcoholics Anonymous and Yoga

I go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I go to yoga. These are two of my key support groups for being healthy. I love being healthy enough every day that I can show up to a power yoga flow. I love it. I really do. I get there to the power yoga and my mind used to complain about the exertion, and now I get there and I'm like, thank God I can do this. Thank God it has been a year and a half since I've had one single day that I didn't feel up for doing a power flow class. I love it. If you want to follow along with how I live all of this out day to day, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist.

The more you read books like this, it often can be a critical threshold too. What can be challenging is if you've been programmed, you've been told your entire life a certain way of thinking, and then you get a different way of thinking in there, the first thing that will happen is often conflict. I've noticed this with my eyesight journey. I'll be thinking about what clear vision I have and how grateful I am, and then my old habits are so deeply programmed that my eyes often will gravitate immediately to the one object in my field of vision that, in my old way of thinking, proves that my vision is not perfect. There'll be one tiny font somewhere in this huge field of vision. My eyes will lock onto that and be like, you can't read that. So then I manually correct, and I'm like, look at what you can see. Tell me what you can see. Car, road sign, stoplight, grass, house, sky, clouds. Show me all the stuff you can see.

Read Every Word You Can: Why I Suggest All Eleven Books

So I'm suggesting you read every single word that you can see, one of these books start to finish, because the first book might give you some hope, but often a little bit of hope is just enough to be miserable. Now you know there's another way to live, but you don't really feel like you identify with it or can do it. So you read all 11 of these books. It starts to really sink in when it's explained, you know, 11 different ways with the same basic idea.

There's another couple of books that are not directly related to health, but they've been extremely powerful for me. Really, your life is a spiritual one. You're a spiritual being having a human experience. One of the books that really helped me get honest, open minded, and willing was Brené Brown's lecture on the power of vulnerability. I remember listening to this with a hangover as I was struggling to get sober, and I felt this surge of hope.

Vulnerability and Sharing Health Challenges

Vulnerability, when you're sharing your health challenges in front of a group of people, can be disgustingly vulnerable. I've shared all kinds of things at AA meetings, and I didn't want to share those things I was saying. They made me look bad. Some people even got resentments and didn't like me over my willingness to talk about my innermost thoughts and struggles, and some people got triggered. It's often that you feel disgustingly vulnerable opening up about health challenges especially, and getting honest with people. Somebody says, how are you doing? And you're like, I'm not good. This health challenge is kicking my butt. But it's from being vulnerable and opening up and asking people for help. That kind of honest conversation, where you can say exactly what you're going through and actually get help, is a big part of why I created Jerry Banfield Family, so we can talk it through and I can support you directly.

What's essential? In my experience, there's a way to share about health challenges that will allow you to get help, and there's a way to share about health challenges that will actually keep them in place. So if you go around complaining about your health situation, people will generally stop wanting to hear about it. If you go around and say, look, some things in my vision are not clear, what do you suggest I do to see most clearly and to remove the old programming that my vision is anything less than perfect? Do you see how, when you ask like that, the feedback you get will be much different than saying, how's it going, Jerry? Well, it sucks. I can't see clearly and I'm trying to get rid of my glasses, but my eyes just won't cooperate. Do you see the two different ways of talking about the same base reality?

If you will talk about it and be vulnerable, and say, look, I'm having this health challenge, I would love for your thoughts, I would love for you to share any ideas you have. Lots of times we're afraid of being so impressionable that anyone can give us any dumb suggestion and we're just automatically going to take it. But when you get vulnerable, it also ironically gives you more courage to say, you know what, just because somebody suggests something doesn't mean I have to do it.

Self-Harm Thoughts and Rejecting the Wrong Advice

Lots of times I've had people who got vulnerable and I shared about my health challenges and my mental health challenges especially. For me, self harm thoughts are a health challenge. Self harm is one of the biggest causes of death, especially in the younger age groups. In my view, self harm is a serious health condition, the mental obsession and thought about that. So for me, getting vulnerable about that brought some dumb suggestions. To me they were dumb. Like, Jerry, you should just go see a psychiatrist and get medicated. I'm like, that's a stupid suggestion. I'm not going to take your stupid suggestion. Thank you for trying to help me, but you do not have the suggestion that will give me what I'm looking for.

Now, every one of us has somebody else for whom that might've been the perfect suggestion. For me, that was absolutely not it. So I know there will be some resistance to opening up to other people, because on some level you're afraid both to be seen as not this perfect person who has it all together, but also that if they actually do give you advice and it's bad, you have to take it. Feel free to reject advice that doesn't feel right. In my experience, the right advice will feel exciting.

I asked my wife what to do about my thoughts and she said, you should see a counselor. And I'm like, another counselor? But I realized many times there's a way to do this. If you get a suggestion and at first it's a little annoying, sometimes you can tweak the suggestion so it gives you exactly what you want. My wife's suggestion to see a counselor was mirrored by many other people. I'd already seen counselors, but clearly we still hadn't got through the self harm thing.

Hypnotherapy and Reprogramming the Subconscious

I eventually found a hypnotherapist who helped. She did both talk therapy and then hypnotherapy, where she'd help me relax and get into the conversation. I think that's one of these deep subconscious experiences. What I've come to believe is that hypnotherapy could be a really powerful thing for reprogramming the health challenges you have today, because some of these things are deep, deep subconscious programming. And if you can get around in there and have new experiences, those will overwrite the old ones.

For example, for me, after we did a talk therapy session, I discussed my goals. I discussed that I wanted my mind to be unconditionally focused on my thoughts. I wanted to be emotionally and constantly programmed to love myself under any circumstances and to never do that self harm thinking again. Then when she helped me relax with hypnotism, I got into a state where my mind was clear enough that I remembered the moment that me as a soul bonded or accepted or got into this human body and joined it. It was such a moment of love and joy, like wrapping into a roller coaster, a ride that you've been waiting in line for, that you're ready to go on, that you're thrilled for the ups and downs, that you're excited for the journey. It felt way better than that. The moment my soul and this fetus, that was a fetus and is now this body, came together, that experience eliminated the health challenge of the self harm thinking for me.

Solving Health Through Joy, Not Suffering

And that was not a straight, logical, linear path that, you know, A to B to C. It was kind of like, how the heck did I even get there? Well, I got vulnerable. I opened up. I disregarded suggestions that didn't leave me feeling joyous, and I took suggestions that I thought were right, but I needed to find a way to make them joyous to me. In my experience, the solving of health and elimination of health challenges should always be done through love and fulfillment and enjoyment. What I've come to believe is that it should never be done through "this sucks and this is just suffering I have to go through." Never, never, never like that. It should be done through "this is the most joyous experience I can find, and I'm really thrilled to do this as a part of my journey."

Like my journey with eye health has been, you know, "I'm going to try these eye exercises, this is fun, this is cool, I'm doing something new." It's not been like, "Oh, I have to do this and suffer." It's, you know, my entire journey with annihilating my health challenges has been one of joy, except where I consciously chose to suffer, and now I just generally don't.

Losing the Weight, Yoga, and My Back Pain

For example, my back pain and neck pain, which I used to frequently take things like Advil for because I had so much back pain and neck pain. And there were things I was doing that were contributing to the neck pain and the back pain a lot. For example, carrying around 60, 70 extra pounds of weight. It's logical that you're going to have back pain and neck pain. When I lost the weight, which I tell the full story of in how I lost 80 pounds and transformed my health, and then I started getting massages, and I started doing yoga, that, in my experience, has just been a miracle for eliminating back and neck pain all naturally. That again was not a straightforward like A to B to C. It was like all these surprising things happened, and now I'm grateful that the vast majority of the time I'm free from any neck pain, I'm free from any back pain, which at one point in my life seemed pretty hopeless because I got regular headaches and I had very regular back pain. I had back injuries.

I had an injury as a police officer at work, injured my back and was off for weeks, and got so stir crazy I came back to work before it was fully healed up, injured it again as a police officer, injured it again several other times. And, you know, today my back got tight, like it used to put me out of work and put me on my back to rest. I had a similar experience last year, and I went to yoga right after it happened. I went to yoga when my back was so tense I could barely walk properly, and I'm in a power yoga class, and I'm just crying. There were a couple of poses that it seemed wise not to do with a strained back, but I was able to function normally.

So even if some of your health challenges don't instantaneously disappear, in my experience there are ways that the edge can be taken off just by your thinking and just by doing things that are naturally healthy and good. And it all starts with being vulnerable and opening up to other people and letting all of us collectively help you.

Getting Out of the Mind: The Power of Now

Another thing that really helps, in my experience, is to get out of the mind and get into the present moment. The Power of Now was one of the most powerful spiritual books I read in early sobriety, and this really dives into the mind and the nature of thinking and the dualism of reality. I listened to hundreds of hours of Eckhart Tolle retreats. What I've come to believe is that the more calm you are, the more you know yourself as more than a mind and more than a body, the more health challenges start to not be such a big deal. The more there's a little gap between the identification that "I am a person with these health challenges," there starts to be a bit of a gap. It's like "I am," and here's my experience. The Power of Now talks a lot about acceptance, and you know, that has a lot in common with my spiritual journey as well.

Proof of Heaven and the Fear of Dying

There's another book called Proof of Heaven. You know, what I've come to believe is that a lot of the health challenges we have are a function of being very rigid, very scared of dying, holding on to life way too hard. And Proof of Heaven is a really powerful book because, as the author tells it, there was a neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience, and according to all the training he had received, the experience he had was impossible. His brain was not capable of giving him the experience that he had. This is an example, in my belief, of how you can start to see your health challenges as God-given or self-manifested for the purpose of what you're trying to achieve.

So, as he describes it, he got a life-threatening bacterial infection that shut down his whole body and his brain. At the time everybody was scared, and this was an awful thing that was happening. It was a serious health crisis, it was a tragedy, and he nearly died. But then he comes through it, and he wakes up with this near-death experience that he, as a neurosurgeon, was certain before it happened to him was not possible. And what he realized, according to his account, is that consciousness does not require a brain. And that, to him, is a massive breakthrough. Consciousness does not require a brain. That in fact, whatever the consciousness is, it operates and conducts life and communicates through a brain, but you do not need a brain or a body to be alive. And he personally experienced this. He came back with memories that he could not explain, that clearly his brain had downloaded, but it was not capable scientifically of having those experiences based on the fact that he was brain dead. And he had these experiences that directly conflicted with his beliefs. He shared these amazing memories of heaven that he experienced during his near-death experience.

This is a big book that, in my experience, helped me get over the fear of dying. You'd be amazed how often, especially as a teen, I had no fear of dying. I didn't fear getting hurt either. I was out there snowboarding, falling all over the place, hurting myself. I nearly fell into a river, you know, like that was a good drop into the river, I don't know, 10, 20 feet into a rocky river. And I'm like, I'm just having fun. I wasn't afraid of dying because I knew that life was eternal, that this body is just kind of a temporary experience I'm having. And often as grownups we forget that. This book, for me, is a powerful reminder that you don't need to be afraid of dying, and the goal is to truly live right now. And what I've come to believe is that often our challenges in health manifest from unacknowledged fear.

Wayne Dyer and Letting the Fear Out

And like Wayne Dyer talks about, he got these — his body got to be ridden with disease. And the cure, as he describes it, was this remote surgery where somebody in another location did this remote surgery on him. There were no actual tools, nobody there in person. These entities did this, like an etheric body surgery on him. And what did they do? As he tells it, they took the fear out of his body. And from there he experienced a whole new life. What I've come to believe is that the more books you read like this, the more it'll let the fear seep out of your body. And one of the ways the fear will come out of your body, in my experience, is crying. You'll often be able to cry the fear out of your body. And if you can feel the joy and let go of it, the fear will literally run out of your body in tears.

Brian Weiss, Past Lives, and Health

And another book, if you're thinking, you know, these are isolated instances, this is just one person — here's a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, who ran into a patient that was having a health challenge that, according to his account, was caused by a past life memory. And this is where health challenges can get a bit fun, because, you know, in his telling, the past life could cause a health condition. He firsthand — he was completely skeptical, he didn't believe in any of this stuff. He had a patient that had a health condition, and he tried hypnotherapy because nothing else would work on this patient. This is a prominent psychiatrist, he had a tough patient, none of his regular stuff was working. Out of desperation, he tried hypnotherapy.

And he tells her, you know, he keeps going back further and further in her life, and he can't find the cause of this thing. He's like, "We'll just go back to whatever the cause of this thing was." And she goes back into a past life. I think this was the one from the beginning of the book — he has a lot of these in his books, the books I've read. I don't remember exactly what it was, but one of the prominent memories in a past life was, you know, this woman was holding a baby and drowned with the baby in a flood. And then that was having some kind of a cause on a condition in the present life. And as soon as she remembered the past life, according to his account, the present life health issue that she was having went away.

And Brian Weiss was just blown away. He's like, "I can't even explain that. It makes no sense except what I just saw — the past life regression, the past life memory, and then the immediate ending of the present moment health challenge that nothing else would work on. Like that past life must have had something to do with causing the current issue, and when it was addressed and expressed, it stopped."

He has a bunch of books, and I've read a bunch, all of them similar, things as crazy as this. Like somebody had headaches their entire life, and the only thing that worked to get rid of the headaches, as he tells it, they did a hypnotherapy past life regression. And in some past life, they'd been hit on the head with something and killed. And in the present life, their headache would start in the exact spot where they were hit on the head and killed. And once they remembered the past life memory, the headache stopped in the present life.

Breaking the Western Medicine Reality

I mean, the point of all these books and all these ideas, for me, is to completely break the reality that most people with health challenges have been living in. You know, this Western medicine idea — fight the body, the body's wrong, go to war with germs. I don't go to war with germs today. And I don't even believe that germs are the cause. What I've come to believe is that I am the cause, and any germs that will be found are simply the effect of my cause. I don't believe other people get me sick today. What I believe is that my own body is responsible for the conditions.

What I've Come to Believe About the Body

In my experience, my own body creates its own reality, and my spirit creates reality constantly. There's an interplay between health and the body and all those various things that come up, and the way I see it, the body is always trying to help us. I don't believe that germs are the cause of our problems. Any germs that get found are simply giving me what I want and helping show me what I'm wanting to see, especially if I've been unwilling to see it.

I'm even noticing my throat getting a little ticklish right now, and to me the point of that is to stop talking. Okay, Jerry, it's been almost an hour and twenty minutes. You've said enough. You crammed it all into one single piece that could change somebody's life. Be quiet.

I'm a full-time YouTuber, and I have so much more that can help you in your life. If this gave you some hope, you can keep watching more of my newest videos in my Life playlist. Thank you for being here. Love you, you're awesome. I really appreciate you being here for all of this. I hope to connect with you again soon.

One important note: everything I've shared here is my own personal experience and what I've come to believe from my own journey and the books that have helped me. I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and nothing here is meant to diagnose, treat, or replace care from a qualified medical professional. Please make your own health decisions with your own doctor. I'm simply sharing what has worked for me in the hope that it gives you some encouragement.

What If You Never Got Sick Again

From my video published April 11, 2024.

A quick note before I start: this is my own personal experience and what I've come to believe about my health, not medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and nothing here is meant to diagnose or treat anything or to tell you what to do with your body. Please make your own health decisions with the professionals you trust. I'm just sharing what has worked for me.

What if you never got sick again? This is an idea I'm going to explain that I've lived for over a year and a half. I have not been sick a single day in the last year and a half. This is something nobody has probably ever told you or helped you imagine. I want to explain the theory behind how I've been able to be the healthiest I've ever been, and what I believe could help you too.

If you want to hear more of the stories and the individual details of symptoms, and the last time I got sick, I just did a related post called I haven't had one single sick day since October 2022. You can read that after this one. But the most important idea is to just start imagining a life where you never have to get sick again. Because I've gone a year and a half without a single sick day, in my experience I know it's possible that I could go the rest of this body's life that way.

Start with a what-if

As soon as you start thinking this, some of you will feel immediate resistance. Your mind will be like, that's not possible. He's lying. This can't be true. Why? If this was true, why wouldn't everyone have told me about it already? Everybody should know this if it's legit.

Well, I'm a pursuer of hidden knowledge, of the knowledge that is most powerful for me to have, and I've been doing this for a long time. I've found some incredible knowledge about health that has allowed me to achieve a level of health I've never seen somebody else have before. I've read about it. I've heard other people talk about it. There's a book by Louise Hay called Heal Your Body that's been very helpful to me.

The main way to make this a reality of not being sick, of not being afraid of being sick, and of having a really healthy, vibrant body, is to start thinking: how am I going to make this a reality? How would you feel if you woke up feeling great every single day, and how can you feel that way now?

I know some of you have chronic health problems, and your mind is saying that's not possible, my doctors told me so, I know it can't be possible. The first thing I'd suggest is to just go into a what-if, just a theoretical scenario. I have a family member who's chronically ill, and she had literally never once conceived the idea of: what if your health problem suddenly went away, what would your life be like? She wouldn't even dare to try to think about that. So the first way to change, in my experience, is to think differently.

I know it can feel like lying. If you've got chronic health problems, it can feel like you're lying to yourself, or being unnecessarily optimistic and setting yourself up for disappointment to even think that way. But I've had chronic health issues too, and I've shredded them. I used to be sick very frequently. When I was a police officer, I had weeks off of work in 2009 because of being sick, and I went into work sick plenty of other days. If you want to stop being sick, the first thing I'd say is to imagine what your life would be like if you weren't sick, and to know that it's possible. It is possible.

All the miracles you've read about in any of your religious literature that touch your heart — it's not like the ability for miracles stopped happening. I believe they're happening all the time, every day. And often miracles are just science that's not understood. Other times, science has not come up with, or has ignored, logical, simple explanations like the ones I'm about to give you for health that can change drastically.

I hope I've talked through a lot of your resistance beforehand, because an idea like this is so powerful, and you've been conditioned so hard to resist it by the rest of your life. Your mind will often violently resist just thinking, what if I never got sick again?

Why I love the idea of never being sick again

I love the idea that never again do I have to suddenly change my plans because my body is ill. Never again do I have to go to the doctor or the hospital for any kind of sickness. Never again do I have to be in a body that I hate being in and feel has betrayed me. I get to have the rest of my life in health with no chronic illnesses. That sounds fantastically exciting to me.

I'll do anything it takes that is also considerate of others. I'm not going to drain other people's energy and be a vampire so I can be healthy, but I'll do anything that is loving and considerate of myself and other people to achieve that. If I need to change my diet, exercise more, or change my relationships up, I'll do it.

For example, in my experience, if you hang out with people who are chronically ill, it likely means you're going to be chronically ill too, if you're not already. If you hang out with people who are fantastically healthy, you're probably going to be very healthy. I've had to let go of some family members, because I'm not going to hang out with someone who's chronically ill all the time. I can love you, but I'll love you from a distance.

The mental component of chronic illness

What I've come to believe is that chronic illness always has a mental component as well as a physical component, because there are many illnesses you can have physically that won't manifest at all based on your lifestyle. For example, with things like Alzheimer's and dementia, there have been studies showing that people can have the exact same brain scans, and one person, because of their lifestyle choices, can be completely unable to care for themselves, while another person with the same kind of brain scan physically can't even be diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia. There are many different things you can have physically that, based on your choices and your beliefs, you won't have to experience. It can be like they don't exist.

We know, with viruses for example, that you can have a virus and it cannot affect you or give you any symptoms at all. There's been this ridiculous thing perpetrated on us of: well, if you have a virus and you don't have any symptoms, then you should stay away from other people. Instead, why don't we investigate why some people have viruses and have no symptoms, while other people have the same virus and die from it or have a ton of symptoms? That's what I'm getting at — the ability to be exposed to something, a virus or bacteria, to have some kind of chronic illness, and to have no outward symptoms, to have it not affect your lifestyle at all. In my experience, that is absolutely possible.

What my sobriety taught me

For example, I am an alcoholic, and I've been sober almost 10 years. But I could not just stop drinking without experiencing a whole bunch of other addictions and suffering and insanity. The transformation I've seen in my own life has been miraculous to me.

Most people who are allergic to alcohol like me — where as soon as I have one drink, this physical and mental craving comes on for indefinite more amounts of alcohol — most people with that die as an alcoholic, or try to stay sober and really suffer a lot. Many people and sciences argue that there's perhaps a difference in genetics between people like me, who have one drink and this craving goes off, and other people who have one drink and that craving doesn't happen. What I've found is that I'm able to live a very happy, healthy life and not miss alcohol at all, and to be a very sane, normal person. You'd have no idea that when I used to have a drink 10, 15, 20 years ago, the absolute insanity would ensue. And even if I wasn't drinking, I still was insane.

The lump I refused to be afraid of

I've also had many minor health issues, and even some more major ones. I had a lump on one of my testicles. This was in my early 20s. I simply refused to believe that it would be anything bad or harmful. I refused to go to the doctor. I didn't even tell anybody about it. I remember feeling it one day, and I remembered all the programming I'd been told, that based on what everyone else said I should do, I ought to go to the doctor and get this checked out. And I'm like, F that. This is going to go away on its own with no intervention. It appeared from nowhere, and it will go away back to nowhere.

It lasted for years. It was there for years. But I refused to be afraid of it. I refused to believe that it could turn into anything else. I continued to be certain that it would be gone one day. And then one day, years later, I went feeling around there again, and it was gone. And I'm like, nice. I knew it. I want to be clear this is my own story and what worked for me, not a recommendation for what anyone else should do.

The man in the X-ray

There was a book I read that talked about a guy who went to the hospital, and they did an X-ray and found this big lump in his lungs. They said, this looks like cancer, we think you're going to die soon. And he was dead within a few months. The doctors, post-mortem, were reviewing his medical charts and records, and they found that 20 years before, the same lump was there in his lungs. No one had told him at that time that it might be a problem, so he didn't get the idea in his head that it was a problem. But it really appeared, in this story, that the doctors had literally done some witchcraft, or cursed him, putting this idea in his head that this lump is bad and it's going to kill you. And he believed it, and he manifested it.

So the key that I've found to my own health is knowing that I am a huge part — maybe not absolutely responsible, but I believe 99.9% of what happens inside this body is a function of me, and what I create, and the stories I tell, and what I believe.

Who profits from your sickness

Now, yes, I think we've all been conditioned to be victims. We've been conditioned by a society that makes a huge profit off of illness, that tries to keep people down through all kinds of ways, from alcohol and drugs to unnecessary medications, and that pushes the belief that other people are the cause of our illness, rather than us taking responsibility, looking within, and seeing how we manifest our own illness.

In her books, like Heal Your Body and Heal Your Life, Louise Hay talked about how she cured what for most people would have been a fatal disease. She was able to cure it herself without using any of the standard treatments. I've read a bunch of other stories like that, which are not often told to people. In fact, there are certain specific things I'm intentionally not talking about, because even in certain areas the guidelines prevent even doctors with medical experience from suggesting that there are alternative treatments that work, beyond the things we're told.

So, in my view, our whole culture has been set up to make us sick, and to make us not take responsibility for the symptoms our body is manifesting. Once you realize that it's profitable for you to be sick, that it's profitable and easier to control you if you're ill — a healthy person who is free is difficult to control. A sick person who feels trapped, who's afraid they can't get pills from their doctor, or can't have the drinks they need to relax, a dependent sick person is easy to control and manipulate. So what I'm talking about, breaking out of illness, is also claiming your own power.

The biggest thing for me that's helped with not being sick is taking absolute responsibility and seeing that this body manifests things because I manifest things. I want to keep sharing these ideas openly, and if you want to go further with me on this, you can join Jerry Banfield Family.

How my body made me sick before my mother's move

I talked about in my autobiography how my body made me physically ill, because I had an unacknowledged big part of my emotions, a big part of my mind, that did not want to go help my mother move in October 2022. Consciously, I thought I did. I planned on doing it. But there was this big emotion, this big section of my mind, that I refused to acknowledge or look at, that did not want to leave my life — all my family besides my mother, and my friends, and my AA meetings, and my games, and my YouTube studio. There was a big part of me that really didn't want to go help my mother move, and my body made itself sick, because it knew that was the only way I would tell my mother that I couldn't fly out there to help her move.

But then, after I called her and told her that, I'm like, come on, body, I really do want to help my mother move. Please rev your energy back up and get over this. I was so healthy at the time, and I'm even healthier now. I had no other symptoms. It was literally just fatigue. And my body revved up, and just two days later, I flew out to help my mother move. Over the next week, I moved 15,000 pounds of stuff by myself into a truck, out of a storage locker and her house and into the landfill or into places to give away. Then the movers moved like 30,000 more pounds. That was such a powerful lesson to me.

Kids and playing sick

I talked to my daughter and shared this with her too. Our kids are often conditioned that if they don't want to go to school, the only way they can get out of going is to be sick. Some parents send their kids to school sick anyway, and the kids often get the point that being sick is not going to get them out of school. So sometimes they either double down and get more serious illnesses, or they'll just stop trying to be sick and figure out other ways to get out of going to school.

For me personally, growing up as a kid, that's what I had to do. If I wanted to skip school, I had to be sick, so I'd just make myself sick. As a kid, you're often consciously aware that you're doing this, but as adults we forgot. And society often rewards people for being sick by letting them miss work. Oh, you're sick — people are very understanding. Oh sure, you can skip this family gathering, you're sick. That has made it very rewarding to be sick.

So I've told my kids, look, if you want to take a day off, you can take a day off anytime you want to. You don't need to be sick. Last time, my daughter was starting to try to make herself sick. Kids often intentionally do stuff like not eat, or lay in bed, and you can see them trying to make themselves sick. With adults, it's so ingrained that it's just automatic and hard to observe, because they set themselves up the night before by drinking or staying up really late. But with kids, it's often super obvious. I told my daughter, look, just tell me you want to stay home and you can stay home. If you stay home too much, you'll have to get homeschooled, just keep that in mind, but you can stay home whenever you want. Just say, Dad, I want to stay home from school today, and you can. You don't have to be sick. I would prefer you to be healthy and stay home and have a great day at home. She stopped. She immediately stopped playing sick. She ate her breakfast and she had a normal, healthy day at home. It was nearly instantaneous.

How fast symptoms can shift

Once you realize how instantaneous your health can be, it changes how you relate to symptoms. I've observed symptoms in my body, pains. I had a friend last night who was talking about how her body was in horrible pain, so bad she was crying, and her mind was telling her a story that she had some virus and was going to be sick. She refused to just buy into that narrative completely. She went to sleep and felt great when she woke up the next day.

I've had physical symptoms disappear almost instantaneously once I started realizing that, in my experience, I'm controlling so much of this process. For example, I woke up one morning and my throat had a little raw sensation in it. I thought, this is a reminder to thank my throat for all it does — for all these videos I do, for all the words I say — to thank my throat for being such an avenue of creative expression, for swallowing all my food, for doing a great job in helping the rest of this body function. It may not go away absolutely within a second or two; you need to be patient. But a few hours later, I realized that little rawness in my throat had almost instantly disappeared within a few minutes after I did the affirmations. I also set the intention: I'm just going to forget about this.

It's a story you tell. I've been doing these eye exercises, and I felt a new sensation from some muscle way inside my eye. A fear story came up, like, oh my God, your retina is going to detach, you're going to be in the hospital. And I'm like, no, stop telling that story. What I realized is that my eye muscle twitching inside, in a way I've never felt it deep in my eye before, is a sign my natural eye improvement exercises are working. It's like when I do yoga: if I go a little too far — like some of the first times I tried wheel pose, I strained a little muscle in my neck because I was pushing my muscles to the limit. You could tell a story that this is a sign something bad's going to happen, or you could tell a story that you're getting exactly what you want, based on the exact same physical symptom. So I'm like, this eye muscle twitching is a sign I'm exercising muscles I've never exercised before. This is a sign that my eyes are improving. This is a sign that I'm making the changes people think are impossible in my body. I refuse to believe any negative story, because I'm totally focused on never being sick again.

Heal Your Body and the willingness to change

In that book, Heal Your Body, there's a huge list of symptoms and the corresponding mental things that go with them. For example, with the throat: the throat is an avenue of expression, a channel of creativity. The normal, healthy functioning affirmation is that I open my heart and sing the joys of love, that I feel free to express myself creatively, and my throat is allowing me to share my joy with the world. A sore throat is connected with the feeling of the inability to speak up for oneself, swallowed anger, stifled creativity, refusal to change. The affirmation given is: it's okay to make noise, I express myself freely and joyously, I speak up for myself with ease, I express my creativity, I'm willing to change.

This one has been extremely powerful for me. Just the "I'm willing to change" part — anytime I have a little cough, I immediately say, I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I'm willing to change. And in my experience, I have eliminated coughing from my life, all but an occasional cough or two. I've noticed people with chronic coughs are often some of the most rigid, unwilling-to-change people. They'll cough for 30 minutes, and not once will they open up to changing. What's amazing is that I've told them this. I'm like, I've found I've eliminated 99% of coughing from my life, and all I have to do is say, I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I'm willing to change, and mean it. Because often after you say "I'm willing to change," you'll see something to change.

The cough, the money, and acknowledging the symptom

When I first started doing this, I realized I needed to ask my wife for money, because I'd blown my finances up in 2019. I was going to go bankrupt; I wasn't going to be able to make any of my minimum payments unless I asked my wife for money. I felt very unmanly. It felt like an utter failure. I sobbed in the car. And that happened after my body coughed.

What I've come to believe is that the symptom is here to assist me, to help me see something physically that I'm ignoring mentally. If I acknowledge the symptom — I use the affirmation as the acknowledgement — I'm willing to change, I'm changing, I acknowledge the symptom, then the symptom stops, because it has been heard. It has served its purpose. And then my mind changes. I've told this exact process to people with chronic coughs, and their response is often, that's nice, that worked for you, but you don't know about me, and it won't work for me.

I'm like, where do you get these limiting ideas? Where do you get these limiting ideas that you know everything, and yet the things you know keep you sick and miserable? Break out of there. You don't have to be sick and miserable. You have a lot of choice.

You have more choice than you've been told

Now, I'm not saying that if you are very sick and ill every day, you're instantaneously going to shred every one of your physical conditions. What I'm telling you is that if you make a decision now, explore this idea, and stick with it — keep listening, keep reading some of the books I recommend — one day you may find yourself so healthy that it shocks you, as it does me, that holy crap, it's been a year and a half since I got sick. I've never in 39 years on this earth had that level of health before. Not when I was a kid, not as a young adult. Never have I been that healthy. In my experience, I believe you can do it too.

You need to give it some time. But if you make a 10-year plan — like, in 10 years I want to be in the absolute best health I've ever been in, I want to have no sickness, and I want to eliminate any symptoms, I want to be at peak health — you can be at your very best health. I don't care what age your body is. I remember reading a book from a guy saying that in his 60s he was in the best health of his life. If I can be in the best health of my life at the oldest I've ever been, I believe that can be for you too.

If you want to keep exploring ideas like this with me, I share much more of my day-to-day thinking on health, mindset, and life in my Life playlist. You might also enjoy here is hope for your health challenges and Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin, on whether you can heal yourself, which both dig into these same themes from different angles.

I hope this has been helpful for you. Thank you, and I hope to connect with you again soon, in the best health you've ever been in.

The Physical Health Practices That Have Saved and Lengthed My Life

From my video published April 9, 2021.

Physical health practices, for me, are essential for my mental health and well-being. I find that no amount of positive thinking or positive affirmations will make up for a lack of physical practices. For example, I was feeling a bit down earlier today, and I thought lots of positive things and did lots of affirmations. Then I went and got a massage, my God, a whole body massage for 90 minutes, and my whole body felt so much better afterward. The better my mind feels, the better my body feels, and the better my body feels, the better my mind feels. It's a feedback loop. If you're struggling mentally, one of the best things you can do is turn to physical health practices that are uplifting, that give you the ability to instantly feel better no matter how you're feeling in your head.

Things like breathing techniques can be very helpful. One of the most basic things to do is take a deep breath in through the nose, nice, long, and slow, and then a deep breath out through the nose, nice, long, and slow. Breathwork techniques are physical practices that can make an instantaneous difference. I noticed that when I was getting sober, for example, I felt like I was suffocating, and I actually was, because my body kept holding its breath. My body almost continually held its breath over and over again, and that left me feeling like I was suffocating.

What I Mean By Physical Practices

Physical health practices are anything you do to help your body feel better. It doesn't have to be specifically intensive physical activity. I'm talking about practices that will engage your physical body. A whole body massage is a relaxing physical activity, kind of like the opposite of going for a run. It's something that deeply engages and heals the body.

Now, of course, anything you can do to stop damaging physical practices immediately makes a huge difference. For example, it doesn't matter if you're getting massages and running and doing all that stuff, if you're then smoking a bunch of cigarettes, drinking a bunch of alcohol, taking lots of drugs and pills, and eating a diet that's not very good. Often the very fastest thing to do is to clean up the negative stuff you're doing to your body, and then the physical health practices will benefit you a lot. Sure, it can be great to do some positive and negative together, but what's most effective is to almost immediately focus on clearing out anything you're doing that's making your body feel worse, and then, as soon as possible, focus on adding those physical practices in.

For example, when I realized that as long as I drank, my physical health was never going to go anywhere. I could never get control of my diet. When I would get drunk, I'd throw my diet out the window. I wasn't going to try anything like massage as long as I could get drunk and relax that way. And I would often not be able to exercise because I was so physically sick from my hangovers. I'd spend days in bed with hangovers, and then I'd often over-exercise on the other days. Physical practices like massage are about relaxing your muscles so they work to get stronger. Physical isn't always going for a run.

My Physical Practices

Here's what works for me. These are my physical practices. I do a whole body massage for 90 minutes once a week, which is extremely helpful. I take a walk of at least 30 minutes on average every day of the week, unless I do some more intense exercise that day. Often I'll take a walk of upwards of an hour. I find that exercise is one of the most consistent things at promoting a change of state. If you're in a negative space in your head and you're looking to feel better, exercise is one of the most consistent ways to feel better. These bodies are not meant to just lie around and do nothing. These are worker bodies. These bodies are meant to be used, and that's why children are often so happy: because they're using their bodies, they're exercising a lot, they're running around, they're playing, they're getting out, and they're balancing their energy and their health that way.

A massage will absolutely help your cardio, too, because what we need in order to regenerate is to go into a deep state of relaxation. A lot of us, especially if we're doing intense exercise and pushing ourselves, are often pushing into those zones of stressing the body. But what we really need, in addition to stressing the body, is for the body to truly relax. When I get a massage, my resting heart rate goes down afterward, which is helpful for the heart to relax a bit, and that encourages the whole body to heal and to regenerate. Then every single system works better, the blood flow is better, and, because your body is a whole unit, you don't want to separate parts of it out and say, well, just look at one system or another. Your body is a whole, and I find that for me, massage helps my mind relax a bit because it helps my entire body work better and be better connected.

Ideally, what you want is a variety of physical practices. You want some very relaxing physical practices. Stretching can be relaxing, meditation can be relaxing, massage can be relaxing, and yoga can be very relaxing. Even a walk after an intense workout can be very relaxing. So what I do is combine a bunch of physical practices. I consistently take at least a 30-minute walk every single day. A couple of days a week, I do a more intense workout class for about an hour with more high-intensity activity. For example, we'll do a circuit of six different exercises for two minutes each, and we'll get our heart rates up toward the maximum, let it slow down, and then get the heart rate up again. It's important to have some vigorous exercise and not just do walks. For a couple of years, I did mostly just walks, and that's great for a baseline, but these bodies seem to work best if you also get some more intense physical activity in there.

Food, Water, and Sleep

For additional physical practices, I consider the way I eat and drink water. Those are important physical practices. No amount of being positive and cheerful and thinking happy thoughts is going to make up for poor eating habits. If you're overeating, that single-handedly can take a mood down. If you're under-eating, that can lead to a lot of anxiety. If you're eating foods that you believe are bad for you and not healthy, that can lead to the same mental state. If you're eating foods that are good for you and that you believe are healthy, that can lead to a positive, nourished mental state. Same thing with water. You can be all kinds of positive all day in your mind, but if you get behind on drinking water, your body and your mind state will often go downhill.

Getting sleep is the same. Sleep regenerates your entire body, and I find that about seven or eight hours of sleep every night leaves me feeling very well rested, leaves me feeling energy all day, and that is a very powerful practice.

Stopping the Damage First

You can absolutely help all kinds of health conditions by stopping any damage you're doing to yourself. For example, I used to drink alcohol. I would drink a gallon or more of vodka a week, and I'd often split that into two or three days of drinking, drink it all up, and then have a hangover. As long as I was doing that, all the other physical practices I was doing were greatly limited in their ability to uplift me. If you're doing things to beat yourself down, that is something that needs to be stopped immediately, because then all your other physical practices will be more beneficial. Now, yes, if you drink a lot of water while you're drinking alcohol, like I used to do, it might make the hangover less severe. But why have a hangover in the first place? If you're doing drugs and things like that, there are alternatives. For example, massage helps me relax as much or more than a drink ever did, and without any of the consequences.

What's important is to figure out your unique body's balance. Some of you can drink coffee and that will feel just fine. Others of you, like me, prefer not drinking coffee. For me, water feels very nourishing, whereas coffee feels kind of like I'm stimulating myself with a bunch of caffeine, and it leaves me with more potential for things like anxiety and out-of-control energy. It helps a lot to figure out what the best practices are for you in your life, because everyone's physical routines aren't the same. Our bodies, as a general rule, want to be nourished and active, and that's something all of us could agree on. Most of our bodies don't appreciate being poisoned with one thing or another.

What You Have To Give

The idea is that I do the most I can to keep myself physically healthy, because that helps me feel good mentally, and it's a feedback loop. The better I feel mentally, the more I will help myself feel good physically, and the more I feel good physically, the more I feel good mentally. And the better I feel, that's what I have to give to others. Whatever you are, however you're living, is what you have to give to others. Back when I was drinking a whole lot and not doing as many physical practices to take care of myself, I was often aggravated, often in a negative space in my mind and body, and that attracted me to situations where other people felt the same. I'd get into car chases with people because of things in driving, running people off the road, and them tailgating and honking at me. These are things that, if you're taking care of your body and you're relaxed and you're peaceful, you just don't get into at all. Now that I do all these physical practices, I've got a lot more peace and love to give away instead of aggravation, instead of negative energy, and that makes a huge difference.

A long deep stretch, a short walk, and a cold shower really change your day. They do. Cold showers are a physical practice that can be very useful, and I apply a cold shower whenever it feels right. A cold shower also helps when I notice that sometimes I don't want to really feel anything. A cold shower really helps me consciously work through any discomfort instead of avoiding it. It helps wake my body up. It's beautiful.

What a liter of vodka a day cost me

When I drank a lot, I was generally drinking about every other day or so, and I would have about a liter of vodka, like 70 proof vodka. Sometimes I'd switch it up and have half rum, half vodka, but my baseline was about a liter of 70 proof liquor. Some days I wouldn't have that bad of a hangover. Other days I'd have a miserable hangover.

I remember one day, seeing my wife when she was pregnant with our daughter, and she was throwing up and sick in the bed. This was after I'd been sober about a year. I thought, wow, she's going through this to bring a child into the world, which certainly seems worthwhile. And I used to put myself through that once or twice, sometimes three times a week, just to try and have a little bit of fun. That's because I didn't know a better way to have fun. I didn't realize that you don't have to pay a price to have a good time. You just need to learn how to have a good time without alcohol or without drugs.

You don't have to pay a price to have fun

I can relax today, and if you're taking good care of yourself, you will naturally be able to have fun. My kids don't need a beer to run around and act crazy. Adults who take care of themselves, who are full of self love and self worth, don't need a beer or a drug to have a good time, to laugh, to get silly. It's normal for a healthy human being that has a sense of self worth, loves themselves, and is connected with God or a higher power or some kind of higher awareness. It's very easy and natural to have a good time.

My wife can tickle my armpits and I'll be just laughing and cutting up instantly. I can listen to stand up comedy on Netflix and laugh. I can hang out with my friends and play some games and have a good time. Before I drank, I was very aware of all these ways I could have good times. But the more I drank, the more I forgot how easy it was to have a good time sober. Sometimes I put alcohol into my body and it took my physical health down.

So the goal is to get your physical health as high as possible, which means eliminate anything you're doing to take it down. For me, overeating has been one of my recent issues that I'm just finally doing so good with. I'm eating just the right amount because I've overcorrected. I did under eating for a while, where I did intermittent fasting and I wouldn't eat that much, and I found I'd get really anxious if I did that.

There is always hope if you surround yourself with the right people

Here's the thing: there is always hope for you. If you can find someone who's been where you've been and now is where you want to be, all you need to do is surround yourself with enough of those people, and you will find that you become like them. That's what I did going to Alcoholics Anonymous. If you find you can't stop bringing yourself down physically, then you need other people to show you another way.

When I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I still consistently go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, I'm going to one tonight in about an hour. When I went, I found people there who were able to have fun and dance and laugh and go to weddings. I got to know them and I said, okay, I've got a wedding coming up. How did you deal with weddings? I surrounded myself with people who got out of the situation I was in, and they left me knowing that was possible for me too, if I would do what they did and take some of their suggestions and accept their help.

I love talking about this, because this helped me a lot and it helps me. I'm teaching and sharing these things so that I really internalize and master them myself. The most we can do for the people around us is to lead by example. That's where, for me, there's a deep motivation to master myself and to take the best care of myself, because that's where I can teach from.

Seven years ago, when I was drinking a gallon of vodka every week, I was very often in physical pain and miserable mental pain, aggravatable and irritable and overweight. That's what I had to teach and give away. If I tried to talk about anything besides where I was and what I'd experienced, I was teaching hypocrisy: well, you should do this, but I'm not doing it. You should eat healthy, but I'm not. You should be sober, but I'm not. That's why I'm so motivated to do these, because I love being around people like me who take care of themselves, who love themselves, who have a sense of self worth. Being around people like me gives me hope for the future.

Loving yourself is what makes recovery possible

I know there are lots of people like me on this planet. I've been able to come to this point where, having felt at my lowest physically and mentally, I surrounded myself with people that didn't feel that way, and they lifted me up. You might think, well, that's not a good deal for the people who are feeling good to be around you. Well, it actually is, because I feel so good reaching my hand out today and lifting someone else up. That leaves me feeling really good, with a sense of purpose in my life. So I've dedicated the whole rest of my life to lifting as many as I can up, and it really helps to get into action.

I know a nice person can still not like themselves. That was me seven years ago. If I was really brutally honest, I would have been able to say I knew deep down I was a nice person, but I had all these reasons I didn't like myself. What helped me was to go through Alcoholics Anonymous and work the steps, especially to write down all the reasons that I didn't like myself, all the things I thought I'd done to people, and then to talk with people in Alcoholics Anonymous and share those things. This is what I did, and this is why I hated myself. When I heard their experiences, they'd say, whoa, let me tell you what I did. And I'm like, wow, you can actually love yourself having done that? Well, yes, I can, because I've learned what not to do and now I can help people.

It doesn't do any good to beat yourself up. In fact, the more you don't like yourself, the more it's okay for other people to treat you the same way. The more I take good care of myself physically, the more I'm in good shape mentally, and I also have no tolerance for people around me who are not in that space and who are directing that at me. Therefore, my life is filled with people that love me and support me, because if you're not on that wavelength, I love and respect myself and I will not tolerate anyone that doesn't treat me as good as I treat myself.

That's why it can be hard, if you're beating yourself up, if you're mean to yourself, to get rid of anybody else in your life who does the same thing, because deep down you feel like you deserve it. Today I don't. I know I don't deserve to be abused or mistreated. I deserve to be loved and respected, because that's what I give to others.

Concrete acts of self love

The beauty of doing all these physical practices is it shows me in a concrete way that I can do it. You can think, oh, I love myself, and I'll give myself a hug all day. But when I take an hour and a half out of my day to get a massage, I know I must love myself to do that. When I take two hours out of my day to do a fitness class and a yoga class, that is a concrete way I can point to and say, I do that because I love myself, because I want to feel good. When I take a walk at night with my dog, a 30 minute or an hour walk, same thing. It gives me time to listen to a book, and it gives me time to say, look, this time's for me.

Some of us think we need to make sure everybody around us is happy first. But that's like the oxygen masks on an airplane. If you're fooling around putting everyone else's oxygen mask on, and maybe some of them are struggling and fighting you, and all of a sudden you pass out because you didn't put your own mask on, then you're of no use to anybody. A lot of us as human beings on this planet spend all this time trying to tell other people what to do, and meanwhile we're not taking care of ourselves. Have you noticed how resistant people are when you tell them something that differs from what you're doing? Have you noticed when your parents told you to do something, like not swear, and they didn't do it themselves? The hypocrisy.

Feeling bad is a message to change

Quitting smoking, drinking, all of it works the same way. The more you take good care of yourself, the more it tends to make taking even better care of yourself easier and easier. The worse you take care of yourself, the only benefit of that is getting a really powerful desire to do something different. The last day I had a hangover, I had a massive desire to get sober, and that was the benefit.

So the way you can forgive yourself, if you're thinking that you're just not worthy, that you're an awful person, is to say: look, now I know what I don't want to be. I don't want to be like this, or I don't want to be like that. And then you can say, okay, how do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be? How come I stopped playing Warzone? Because I wasn't feeling good when I was playing Warzone. The more I take care of myself and feel good, the more obvious it is whenever I'm doing something that is taking my energy or taking how I'm feeling down.

The way I look at it, our emotions and our bodies are guidance systems from our highest selves and our highest powers, and we feel bad when there's something that needs to change. When I had that last hangover, I felt absolutely terrible, absolutely miserable mentally and physically. And the message from that was change. Stop drinking and do whatever it takes to stay sober.

One message I finally received loud and clear, after a whole bunch of other messages that never landed, was this: start your day with a cold shower, stretch, and walk outside. Then make a small list of a couple of easy things to get rid of. I've come to believe that the worse you've been beaten down, the more you hate yourself, the greater the desire is also there for something different. If you are all the way at whatever you think the bottom is, and you're utterly miserable, there will be an equally strong desire there for relief from that. When you lean into that desire, like I did with that last hangover seven years ago, "Oh my God, please, I'll do anything to get sober and stay sober," then the thought comes that going to an AA meeting might be a part of anything. If you really want something, prayer is the first place, and then it involves getting material, physical help. It's not enough to just say, "Oh God, please help me get sober," and then lay on your bed and keep doing the same things you've been doing and expect to get different results.

Changing a habit means rewriting your programming

When you first change a habit, it's normal to feel like you're fighting yourself. You are in this place where the way you've programmed yourself previously is conflicting with your new programming. In my experience, you are the immortal god soul consciousness that is operating this body. The body and the mind are the result of your previous programming. My body and my mind operate now based on every single moment that I've programmed in the past.

What happens when you're trying to change a habit? When you first start trying to rewrite the code and say, "Look, I want to quit smoking, I want to be a person who's not interested in cigarettes, who takes deep breaths of clean air instead of dirty air," all that previous programming is still coming at you. For example, with drinking, I programmed myself that when I play Call of Duty Zombies, I drink. I drink when I'm upset. I drink when my wife is out of the house. I drink when I move. I drink when I go hang out with friends. I drink when I want to have a lot of fun. I drink when I'm feeling kind of sad. I drink when I need to relax. I drink when I'm anxious. I programmed all of those at one point.

When I then decide, "Okay, I want to unprogram those, I want a new set of instructions here," then it's up to me, as the operator, as the controller, as the consciousness, to go reprogram each of those. At first it can be a little difficult, because you can only really get in and program one thing at a time. Okay, now when I get anxious, what am I going to do? Now when I want to relax, instead of drinking, I'm going to get a massage. That programming in my mind was set at one point, in the middle of the night, when I said, "Okay, I want to relax, I drink." I set that at one point, and then I changed it to, "When I want to relax, I get a massage." That still left all the other programs there. So I went through and programmed every single one of those individually, one thing at a time. Now I don't associate hanging out with friends and drinking. Now I don't associate relaxing with drinking. Now I don't associate having fun with drinking. It took a while.

By the way, if you'd rather listen to something like this on a podcast, I've got the Jerry Banfield Show podcast, where I'm taking these recordings and putting the audio up there. That way I don't have to edit it, I can just stick it up there.

Resistance is just your old programming

It's normal to run into what I'd call resistance, and resistance is really just your old programming. If you know that, you can go through the discomfort of adjusting all the programs until they all line up. A normal program is the belief that you're not going to be able to program yourself to stay sober. For me, I had hundreds of other little programs that told me, "Okay, if this happens then you drink," or "when that happens you drink," or "drinking is a lot of fun when doing this." When you first try to make a change, it's kind of daunting to look at all the other programs, but you just fix one thing at a time. Okay, I can play Call of Duty Zombies sober. You know what, if I can play that sober, I can probably play Call of Duty multiplayer sober. And you know what, I can probably play any game sober. You just go through and reprogram all those, one at a time.

When the truth being spoken makes your mind itch and want to turn away, that's normal too. When you set up programming on things, you will set it up so deep that you also program in any resistance to be blocked. For example, the way my drinking was programmed: if someone suggests staying sober, block that. If someone starts talking about going to Alcoholics Anonymous, block that, don't be friends with them anymore. If someone around you gets sober, stay away from them, you might catch it. Our programming is often so effective that we will actually have in our own programs a command to block out anything resistant.

When you see that you can override any programming you have, then you know your truest self. You know that who you are is really not this mind or this body, because no matter what your mind says, you have the ability to veto it. If your mind says, "I have to do this right now," you have the ability to veto that and say, "I don't care what you think we should do right now, I am going to do this." That's when you really get to know yourself.

When I see people going to Alcoholics Anonymous, their mental programming will often block them from any of the help received. For example, I went with a new guy once, and he was really getting excited, and then he said, "You know, Jerry, this is just too much." That's your old programming, that's your defense mechanism. Is it too much to want to be healthy? Is it too much to want to have the best life you can possibly have? Is that too much? I mean, what are you doing here? Are you just trying to live as long as you can before you die?

Honesty is the first step

When you can see that your mind is trying to push and block things out, and you can actually stay present with it, that shows the number one thing. If you are going to make any change and live your best life, the first step is honesty. That's in Alcoholics Anonymous too, the first principle is honesty. The last time I had a hangover, I also had honesty. I looked at myself and I said, "I'm going to take my own life very soon if this keeps up, and given what I've seen in the past, I don't know any way that this won't keep up."

It doesn't matter if you want to change your programming; if you try to make a change, your programming will suck you right back into it. That's where I discovered my true strength, in praying to God to do anything to get sober. I was really connecting with my highest, most powerful self, and then through that highest, most powerful self, I was attracted to be around the help I needed. When I focused, and I still am focused, my life became full of people who help me. My massage therapist, where I have great conversations. I discover new podcasts, new people to connect with, new health practices. My yoga instructor and the people in my yoga class. The people at my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. My family, my friends. Everyone around me lifts me up, and it's beautiful, because that's what I want. That's what I've begged for, and asked for, and worked for.

I go out here every day with the hope to give you that same knowledge: that you are an all-powerful, immortal creator. You've made this body, you're here, and your life can be however you want it to be, as long as you're willing to do what it takes and get the help you need to make it however you want it to be, and to push through that resistance. I'm so grateful today for getting sober, because getting sober was so difficult that every other change I've made by comparison since then has been relatively easy. I've been through lots of changes since. Some of them have taken longer, and many of them have felt just like getting sober, like my finances a year and a half ago felt just like getting sober.

If you're in a bad place, you can't even picture how good your life can get. If you would have told me seven years ago, "Jerry, you're going to be playing video games and having little chat sessions, and you're going to be playing video games for your job, and you're going to make more money doing that than you did risking your life as a police officer and going to college and trying to make a career. People are going to just give you money, without you having to ask or beg or hustle. People are going to give you more money to do what you absolutely love than you made trying to do what you thought people wanted you to do." I never could have pictured it.

Picturing how good your life can get

You're going to have a wife who loves you and is more at peace with you than ever, and I'm so grateful for that. You're going to have two children you love so much and you're there for every single day. Your health is going to be better than it's ever been in your whole life. You're going to love the way your body looks more than you have since you were a child, since you were a baby. You will have physical health and ability. You'll have energy all day, every day. You'll be able to do anything you set your mind to. You will have friends who uplift you. You will feel good almost all day, almost every day. You will have people who give you compliments.

There was a friend of a friend who said, "Jerry is the nicest person I've ever met." You will get compliments you would absolutely not even believe were possible for you to receive. You just can't picture how good your life can get. A lot of us are very good at picturing how bad our life could get, picturing our physical health going down and getting worse. But what I do differently is I picture how good my life can get. I really care, and I'm very interested in the answer.

I'm rocking these Jerry Banfield show shirts, and I'm going to get these up on Spreadshirt soon.

The physical practices that add up

I forgot to put that sex is a very powerful practice. Regular sex is one of my most powerful physical practices. I have sex every other day with my wife, and it's fabulous, and I love it. I've set an intention that I want to have amazing sex consistently. I've seen studies that show people who have consistent sex, at least every two or three days, are much happier. No wonder I feel so good. When you put all these physical practices together, it changes everything.

My dad passed. A lot of times I can hear him in my ear saying, "I'd have been a hell of a lot different father if I'd have had massages every week, yoga, sex every couple of days. My God, what a father I would have been." Today I'm very grateful for my father exactly as he was, because sometimes an example from somebody can show you powerfully what you don't want. My dad held on to smoking. He said, "I gave up alcohol. I gave up sex with any woman besides my mother. I gave up drugs. I'm not quitting smoking." And my dad died of an illness related to smoking. My mom has now been on her own for seven years. That was a powerful example to me. I will give up absolutely anything that is bad for my health, that takes my health down, or that might take away from time with my loved ones. I'll quit playing Warzone if it stresses me out.

Getting sober and asking for help

My parents were alcoholics. I've seen a lot, but I've also seen the changes when a person asks for help, and when a person changes spiritually. It's still a struggle, but you get better every day. Trust me. Live life, be smart and healthy, and thrive. It's a pleasure to share all of this. If you'd like to keep the conversation going and get to know me, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family.

Someone asked what my wildest drinking story is. Listen to my book, Officer Banfield, on Audible. That has my wildest drinking stories in it. I can give you a quick summary. One night I was watching Fight Club and wrecked my car. Pretty wild drinking story. That's the real quick version of it. I almost took my own life drinking a bunch of other times. I had all kinds of drinking stories. Going to the strip club, dropping my gun when I was a police officer, and it came falling right out of my pants. The stripper was giving me a lap dance and saying, "Is that a gun?" I'm like, "No, it's my wallet," and then I'm shifting my gun into the back of my pants because I was paranoid. I'd been watching Scarface a whole lot, and Training Day. Just like, "I don't care if I'm drunk in the strip club, I'm a police officer, I've got my gun." So listen to Officer Banfield. I've got all those stories in great detail.

All there is, is life, and more life

Someone asked what comes after death. This, what we're living now, is after a death we've had in the past. All there is, is life. There's life, and more life. If you'd like a detailed experience, I've remembered some deaths pretty clearly through different methods, from dreams to hypnotherapy to just feeling so much. And they're not bad. They're so good. What's cool is, the better you feel, you can have experiences you might think of as similar to LSD or trips. You can have experiences sober, in a regular state of mind, that are kind of like that.

After you die, a pretty common experience is you kind of go into the grave void, which is actually like a vacation. There's nobody who expects anything of you. Utter and complete total rest. Often a spiritual guardian or angel will come get you. For example, after one of my lives, I ended my own life, and it looked like a Jesus figure came down to get me, but really it was my spiritual guardian, not Jesus. It kind of looked like that. He came down to get me and take me on to my next adventure. Often when you pass on, you'll be greeted by people who have already passed on, who will essentially hold your hand in whatever kind of experience is most meaningful for you and take you on to more life.

All there is, is life, and more life. To me, that is what really promotes treasuring and taking care of this life, because there's no getting out of life, generally. You're going to be alive here or alive somewhere else. Maybe it's in a different body, and it could even be an alien body. I've had dreams where I've been disincarnated, just in a kind of energy ball. So you're going to keep living one way or another. And someday you will shed all these things that are painful, all these habits, all this baggage, one way or another. The question is, are you going to do it now or are you going to do it later?

We are all drops of God

We are all pieces of God, is how I see it. Each drop of water — the ocean is water, and the ocean is water. To me, God is like the ocean, and we are each drops of water. You could look at it as the ocean being made up of drops of water, and the drops of water individually are the same as they are collectively. So we're all drops of God. And yes, everything we are made up of is immortal. You are made up of energy that can't be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. That's what promotes me to take good care of myself, because I remember how much energy and focus it's taken me to bring this physical body into where it is. I have a respect for how much more it would take to do it again. And I also have a desire to do it again.

Living without crutches

Someone said the things we don't give up because we believe we need them are never worth it. Yes. I like to go through life with as few crutches as possible. To me, things like alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes are unnecessary crutches. I already need food, I already need water, and I already need human companionship and a connection with God. That's enough crutches. And I need all these physical practices. That's enough. I remember somebody telling me that as long as they could have their beer and their cigarettes, everything was fine. I'm like, that's lame. Imagine that you could be fine without any beer or cigarettes. Crutches can get you by for a while, the same way a wheelchair can assist you on a temporary basis. But wouldn't you like to walk? Being free of crutches is a gift. I just have so much gratitude that I don't have to drink to get through the day again.

Prepare yourself to receive

Someone told me they've always wanted to have great sex, and because of these words they felt like they could accomplish that. You absolutely can, if you set the intention that this is what I really want and I'm going to let it happen. What a lot of us do is say, "I really want this, but it's not going to happen." Like I said, I wanted a beautiful girl to have great sex and make a life with, and I've wanted that since I was a little kid. What I did for most of my single life was block it. God would offer, "Here you go, how about her?" "Oh, no, not that one." "How about her?" And it'd be one thing or another. This girl talks on her cell phone too much. This girl is too prude, she won't have sex. This girl has too much sex, she's done half of the ROTC unit already by the beginning of the school year — now that's too much sex. How about this girl? Well, she's a bit too difficult to get into bed. This is ridiculous. How about this girl? Well, she's a bit too forward, I don't know if I really want it. How about this girl? She's a bit too fat. How about this girl? Well, she lives in a different state. How about this girl?

If you prepare yourself to receive, to say, "This is what I want and I'm going to get ready to receive it," it means stripping away any of the habits that are based on not having it. I love being able to share that. The idea of having energy, friends, a partner, having your life back, the will to socialize, the lack of anxiety — with all of the above as the inspiration you need, you can have all of that and a whole bunch more.

You will get everything you want

You can have all of that. You will get every single thing you want. The only question is, when will you be prepared to receive it, and how patient are you willing to be? I know that I could do anything I want to in this universe. If I wanted to be a professional basketball player, I could do that. Now, I don't know if it would happen in this particular body, or if I might need to die and be reborn in a different body that's more suited to being a professional basketball player. When you've got that level of awareness, when you know you're going to get whatever it is you want, then the question becomes: okay, what's practical? What would I really like to have right now or soon? I'd love to have grandkids, but I don't need that right now. What I really want to do is enjoy my day.

Love yourself first

Someone brought up that pleasuring yourself saves money. It does, but it also isn't something you would probably do if you were with a partner. It's certainly a good thing to enjoy yourself and your own body. If you can do that in a way where you look at it as practicing, so that when a partner comes along you're going to be ready for them, that can be good. But if you're doing it from a mindset of, I'm so sick of being alone and this is all I can get, then that actually blocks the flow of getting a partner into your life. So it's all about loving yourself. In my experience, there's nothing better you can do today than to love yourself, because when you love yourself and take care of yourself, you are much better equipped to go help somebody else. And if you hate yourself and take yourself down, you're much worse at it. It all balances out.

The best you can hope for, if you're hurting yourself and knocking yourself down, is to be a bad example that someone else looks to. I have a friend whose cousin killed himself when he was 17. That bad example was so powerful for my friend that he did not do that himself. So even if you go all the way down the drain and pass on before you get to have any joy or pleasure, even then you can still help other people by being a bad example. But what I've found is that it's much more joyous to take good care of myself, love my life, and show what it looks like by living it, by showing how amazing life can be. The beauty of it is that I then tend to be surrounded by people who feel the same way. And the people who aren't feeling that way often want to. I get great joy out of showing, hey, this is how you do it.

Saying goodnight

It's time to say goodnight to my family and go to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. So thank you all for being here, and thank you for listening to this. If you prefer just the audio, I'm putting this on the Jerry Banfield show, which is my podcast, and you can find it anywhere. You can also go to my website if you want direct links to it, along with more of what I share in my Life playlist. I'm recording this, putting it on the show, and setting the intention to show up and try to help somebody here every day.