Thank you for your great comment…and praise. I sure appreciate your thoughtful response.

I had the fortune to live in Asia for a year. Originally from TX, this was a mind-blowing experience for me. It was like going to the antipodes, where everything is backwards. I lived in Taiwan, primarily. I also traveled through Thailand, Nepal, Hong Kong, India, and Indonesia.

I went to Asia via a grant I received (a Fox Fellowship) to…get this…Study ritualistic mask dancing with village master teachers in Bali and India.

That year changed my life, for the better. It enabled me to ask a lot of questions of myself and it very much served as a soul searching process. It was not any easy year. I spent most of that year in the Belly of the Whale. Change is hard and I was wrestling with it. Did I want to pursue the typical commercial path I was trained for at Yale Drama School? Or do I become an artistic monk of sorts–traveling the world and engaging and studying in acts of theatre? Both seemed like extremes. I ended up in the middle–back in the states, but implementing the knowledge and change I had found in Asia. I ended up building my first school with that–The International Theatre Academy Norway.

In a way, I was forced to return from Asia, which I really, really did not want to do. Asia was a major place of personal discovery for me–one I loved very much…but life called.

Part of what I found in the belly of that whale in Asia was that there were some very poisonous elements in my life. There were friends who were more like vampires than friends–real energy suckers and there were relationships and personal habits that did no good for me.

Returning from Asia, I made a conscious decision to not let any poison exist in my life. So, I cleaned out my closet. I looked at all of my friendships and asked, “is this life-affirming or negative”? If the relationship was healthy and positive, I poured energy into it. If it was poisonous or rotten, I literally severed ties. I let go of about 4 friends upon one fateful day. And you know what? Once I cleared all of the garden’s end of year rubbish, I was able to make way for positive, life affirming possibilities and growth.

So, to make a long comment summarized, I made a decision. The decision was to nurture the good and cut off the bad. You only have so many minutes and hours in a day. Why let any of it be consumed with that which drags you down?

That process, as brutal as it sounds, enabled me to gain some phenomenal courage and confidence. I think those feelings came to me (in abundance), as I had made a choice to take care of myself.

I hope that offered a little more to the dialog.

By the way, loved your site.

Jim

I want to remind you of JFK’s words:

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too”.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Carve out the time. What could be more important than self awareness? It tells you what your needs are and when they are and are not being met. You deserve that time. Don’t let others interrupt it. If you need to build a quite place for yourself, do it. Such a process would be well worth the time and energy. If you go about building yourself a place to meditate (and I do not necessarily mean a physical structure), you meditate on the act of what it is for. It could be a chair in corner or a particular windowsill.

Find that space.

I wish you well and thank you very much for commenting. I love the ability to have dialog, such as this–in a forum as interesting as this.

Jim