“Are You Praying for Rain While Standing on the Garden Hose?”
Dear Planet Perry Member,
One of my wife’s best friends is a spunky young mom named Angel. She’d had bulimia in high school that included a stint in the hospital. She thought she was finished with it way back when. But then 8 years ago that bulimia came back with a vengeance. It marched back into her life and slammed with hurricane force. Literally at 1:45pm on a Tuesday afternoon in November. Suddenly she was purging every meal and dropping pounds fast.
She tumbled over the edge of a cliff. Angel really did have a 36-24-36 body. She wasn’t a fashion model, but she was as attractive as anyone can expect a 30-year-old mommy to be. Suddenly she’s 82 pounds and her ribs are showing and she’s gaunt and pale and her butt and breasts are flat and her jeans are baggy and her arms are bony and we’re imploring Angel Angel please, you’re so skinny and you’re going to kill yourself, please please please get some professional help and start eating…
…yet when she looks in the mirror every brain cell is SCREAMING, “Angel, YOU ARE SO FAT!!!”
I had never confronted anything like this before and it was one of the most truly bizarre things I had ever witnessed. Laura and I kept wanting to say, “Snap out of it!” as though she could just suddenly decide to start eating. But she couldn’t. Something deep inside her belief system was desperately wrong and until that changed, nothing would change her behavior.
It was her love for her children that forced her to dig in and deal with it. Because logically she knew (and yes she really did know) that she could very well end up killing herself if she didn’t get to the root of this problem, this belief, this rogue program. And her kids would lose their mommy.
There are different levels of knowing. All of us have beliefs that are different from what we say we believe or want to believe.
The essence of self-improvement is changing these beliefs. It’s not the same as changing a creed or fixing your attitude. The human mind contains a marvelously complex piece of software and all kinds of little programs – viruses, if you will – get implanted. Sometimes intentionally but as often as not it’s accidental.
So here Angel is with a major crisis on her hands. Laura can’t fix her, her husband can’t fix her, and she doesn’t know how to fix herself. Laura’s in crisis intervention mode trying to put band-aids on the problem for her friend and something needs to be done.
Little by little, Angel makes headway:
- She finds a counselor whom others say is really really good at this stuff. (80/20 applies to counselors too, by the way – 5% of the counselors achieve 50% of the results, and the patients of the other 95% are throwing darts in a blizzard. I have pretty much the same opinion about therapists as I have about MBA’s.) This guy turns out to be really good. He asks such good questions.
- She goes on an anti-depressant for awhile and it definitely does get things under control
- Her friends take care of her kids and help with house work so she can devote some time to herself
- She starts journaling – pouring out feelings and thoughts and attitudes onto a piece of paper so she can begin to talk to her inner self and get to the bottom of those beliefs
Slowly but surely, Angel re-programmed those beliefs.
Every single one of those changes was important, but from what I can tell the thing that helped her the most was the journaling. And the most important part of that was listening to herself journal. Listening to herself for the very first time. Not listening to her mother or whatever other voices were shouting for her attention and sanity.
Because in those quiet moments away from the distractions and the kids, God would speak to her too. Memos from the Head Office: Angel, don’t you know how much I love you? Angel, you know what I like about you? I like the way you cradle your son and sing to him in the afternoon and play with his toes… Angel, you don’t need to do anything, you don’t need to be anything, you don’t need to fix anything, I don’t just love you, I like you, just the way you are.
Angel would write these words down as they came streaming in, and she would experience those beliefs being transformed at the deepest level. Software patches from the Master Programmer.
Angel’s Epiphany was: When she began to love herself just as she was already loved… as she became willing to bless herself even as she was already blessed… that’s when she experienced the healing balm.
She stopped trying to kill herself. She’s not bulimic anymore. She’s healthy and she’s as lovely as anyone expects a 38 year old mommy to be. Hear the sound of thick wooden doors splintering and iron chains breaking. Joy as a prisoner is released from her cell.
Do you have financial anorexia? Where you never can seem to get a good solid meal? Do you have financial bulimia where you engorge yourself with success but then vomit it all up and have to start over?
Another story. This time it’s about me…
I’d been working at my first “real” sales job for a couple of months. Totally wet behind the ears. My boss scheduled a trip to Detroit to get me some sales training.
The morning of my trip I woke up with a start. It was 8:00am.
My FLIGHT was at 8am.
I lived 40 minutes from O’Hare airport.
I bolted out of bed frantically. I jetted in and out of the shower, pulled my pants on and Laura drove me to the airport.
Don’t you HATE that thick, sticky sensation of panic and adrenaline coursing through your body? A feeling almost like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Liquified stress throbbing in your veins. My head was numb.
As Laura drove, I booked a later flight from my cell phone and I stumbled to the gate just in time for a 9:55 takeoff.
I wasn’t the only guy who was frantic. Fred, my boss, heard from one of the other reps that I was missing. He couldn’t get me on my cell and he thought I’d gone AWOL.
I got to Detroit, rented a car and navigated the I94 expressway. I arrived at the firm (I was a commissioned sales representative for this company, you understand) at Noon Detroit time – just in time for lunch.
I had to know what had gone wrong with my alarm clock. When I got home late that night I carefully examined it. Yes, the alarm had been set. Yes, it had been set to the right time. Yes, the volume control was “up”.
So far as I could possibly tell, my alarm clock HAD gone off, just like it was supposed to.
And I hadn’t merely hit “snooze.” I had hit the off button and gone back to sleep.
I NEVER did that on ordinary days.
Nope. Just on days when it really mattered.
Why did I do that? What was going on?
Have you ever done that?
If you’re constantly on the edge of success and you suddenly miss a key appointment like that, it’s just like that compulsion to stand in front of the refrigerator and eat ice cream and destroy yourself.
If you compulsively gamble or have anorexia or financial self sabotage; if you cut or pull hair or drink or battle food or sex addictions, willpower will eventually fail you. You have to re-write your inner software or you’re doomed to stay on the same treadmill.
Yeah, I know. This seems really depressing. But I’ve gotta start by telling you the facts. I resolved to get to the bottom of this.
It was abundantly clear to me that this type of problem is THE #1 reason why people fail in business. Even though they know, in theory, how to succeed, and spend tens of thousands of dollars on education. Even though they invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars starting businesses. Because financial demons are really no different from anorexia or compulsive eating or alcoholism.
Purging Your Inner Head Trash, Personal Demons
and Financial Self-Sabotage:
The Story of My Own 20-Year Quest
About five years ago I was gunning hard, running mach 2 with my hair on fire, growing my business, putting down roots, applying appropriate amounts of paranoia and diligence.
And I could feel myself getting tired. Not just “need some sleep” tired, but emotionally tired. Like, “Dang, I need to slow down and get some rest. Maybe take a long vacation. I need to read, re-charge, re-orient myself, gather my energy for the next surge of creativity.”
I was also becoming more aware of inner emotional garbage that needed to get cleaned out. I had some, Laura had some; we didn’t know just how much but we did know that we’d made an attempt a few years before and ultimately had shoved it all back in the closet and gotten busy with other things.
It was the end of the 2007 Bobsled Run. I had just reached a point where I could take my foot off the gas and breathe easy for a bit. I vaguely expected that I might take some time off, recharge my batteries and press forward.
My ‘inner self’ had different plans.
No sooner had I hit that “OK you can coast for just a bit” spot than some inner voice said, “Alrighty now, it’s time for Mr. Perry to shut down for repairs.”
Literally at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, it hit. I tumbled into this black hole. I was an erratic emotional mess for about six months. Suddenly everything I’d been shoving down came up. I sort of vomited stuff up for the rest of the year.
This is the kind of spot where a lot of guys buy a Porsche, join a health club and find themselves a 28-year-old bubbly blonde mistress.
I managed to not do anything quite that stupid. But I truly was a mess and suddenly I became acutely aware of a bunch of problems I’d been ignoring. It was as though whatever anesthetic or denial that was maintaining the peace evaporated. I was unhappy with all kinds of things, and just because you have a successful biz doesn’t automatically fix all the other departments in your life.
(Having a successful business can cause you to neglect all the other departments in your life, though, and I was certainly guilty of that.)
I put a bunch of stuff on the back burner and dug in. I approached it the way I’d approached speaker design and engineering and marketing mania: I completely immersed myself & attacked it with full force. In some ways it was the hardest kind of work I’d ever done in my life because I was fighting my inner demons.
Shall I list the various approaches I experimented with?
- “Lay on a couch and talk to a shrink” therapy
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
- EFT “tapping” on acupressure points
- Positive Affirmations
- Left Hand-Right Hand journaling (“non-dominant hand exercises”)
- Theophostic prayer
- Extended group therapy (I spent a week of total immersion in California with six other people, facilitated by an experienced counselor, working on our ‘stuff’. Grueling. Incredibly insightful.)
- Sound Therapy
- Energy Healers
- Long, deep, self-indulgent conversations with my friends about our respective “junk”
- Meditation
- Bitching
- Long stretches of prayer, begging and groveling and all that
I’m sure I’ve left out a thing or two, but you get the idea.
Almost all of these things were useful to some degree. But here’s what I learned:
Almost all this stuff has something to do with solving addictive behavior. Compulsive gambling and excessive risk-taking, starting things you never finish, financial self-sabotage, cutting, hair pulling, anorexia, bulimia, drinking, drugs, compulsive eating, casual hookups, endless squirrel cages of accumulating money but never quite having enough, bouncing from relationship to relationship – all these things are ways people try to medicate pain from wounds that never healed.
I can show you the most advanced marketing techniques in the world. But if there’s a rogue program in your head that’s not ready for success, then somehow or another it won’t get done. It won’t even get started, or it’ll get done wrong. Or it’ll get done right but something else will still screw everything up.
Your spouse can love you as perfectly as the Blessed Virgin Mary cares for Jesus… but if you don’t believe you’re worthy of her love, you’ll vomit all over her and reject whatever she gives you. You’ll pine for someone different, someone better. You’ll get Herpes from some basket case drama queen in a tryst at the Holiday Inn on a cold lonely Tuesday night in November.
You can have a perfect 36/24/36 body and healthy food in the refrigerator, but if some virus in your head says you’re ugly and you deserve to be punished, you’ll be anorexic or bulimic. When you stand naked in front of a mirror weighing 85 pounds with your ribs showing and breasts sagging like flat pancakes hung from your chest, you’ll still see a fat ugly person. All your husband’s and children’s pleas to their mama to please take care of herself will fall on deaf ears.
About them wounds:
1) You can understand what happened. You can explore what someone did to you in excruciating detail (they abused you, molested you, yelled at you, humiliated you, hit you, lied to you, told you you’re a worthless piece of shit, yada yada yada) but understanding what happened does not necessarily “fix” you in any way, shape or form. All you do is become excruciatingly aware of how screwed up you are and why.
2) You can try to change your behavior from the outside. But one of my counselors Abby Rohrer put it this way: “Do you like ice cream? Yes of course. Everybody likes ice cream. Most of us love ice cream. But just because you love ice cream does not mean you stand in front of the freezer for hours pigging out on ice cream.
“So if you do find yourself standing in front of the freezer for hours eating ice cream – and you can never quite get enough and you can’t stop – at some point you’ve got to admit to yourself that this really has nothing to do with ice cream. You have to admit that if you don’t get to the bottom of this ‘thing’ then all you’re going to accomplish by eating ice cream is gain 600 pounds and kill yourself.”
As a “business guru,” having interacted personally with thousands of people and worked closely with hundreds; having been immersed in the entrepreneurial world for 20 years; I can assure you that a person can learn everything they need to know to grow a successful business in 1-3 years. But if your inner demon is determined to kill your success, it doesn’t matter what you learn, the demon always wins in the end.
I had achieved a certain amount of victory over financial demons; that wasn’t my #1 problem.
But the Other Demons were Bound and Determined
to Take Me Out
Again, I tried a bunch of stuff that was supposed to heal me of my internal garbage and re-program my software but it was only partially effective at best. I held out great hope for NLP because as an engineer I understand how it works. It’s “cognitive engineering.”
NLP frames your inner experience as a series of sights, sounds, smells and feelings that pass through your mind and body. NLP looks at the “tapes” and “film strips” that run through your mind when you’re afraid of spiders or when you have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or whatever, and replaces parts of that film strip.
I found this stuff was somewhat effective. But it did not get to the root, the core, the bedrock of my problems. Mostly it just re-arranged how I reacted to them. This was certainly better than nothing, but it wasn’t a complete solution.
I spent the better part of two years passionately drilling into this stuff. Absolutely maddening.
I had my demons. Plus, Laura had hers. Just as many as me. (For a long time I thought she had more issues than I had and I thought I was waiting for her to deal with her stuff. Eventually I discovered I had a lot more of my own stuff than I thought. One of my therapists gave me a wry grin, narrowed her eyes and told me: “Perry, you are really really good at hiding your shit. I don’t think your last counselor even picked up on it.”
I took this as a compliment. Growing up I was taught how to hide it and I was really good at it. So I thanked her and confessed, yes, I’ve got a lotta work I need to do here.
Let me tell you briefly about Laura’s. As a result of…. something…. we’re not entirely sure what but we can make some pretty educated guesses – certain things would drive her into deep depressions, slam her with headaches and sleepless nights. When it would hit it would last 12-72 hours and she’d be a puddle of misery. She took medication for several years which was only partly effective, and it had side effects.
It’s not a lot of fun to be married to someone who’s got migraine headaches and depression. Perhaps you’ve experienced that.
All this stuff we were doing, none of it got to the root of the problem. A chiropractor was a big help with the migraine headaches, by the way, but his physical expertise did not touch her emotional wounds.
There were some days, some weeks, some months, that I just thought I was gonna go crazy dealing with the combination of her stuff and my stuff. It was a bitch.
And of Course the Fun Part is:
1) You can understand why you’re screwed up and you can understand what you do, but it doesn’t fix it.
2) You can apply will power and you may be able to keep yourself out of trouble. But will power does not solve the core problem. It just expends your energy as you try to fight it.
Parallel to this, some folks at my church were searching very hard for healing models that would address these precise issues. They, like me, were trying all kinds of stuff.
We experimented for several months with something called Theophostic Prayer. It is absolutely excellent and it was definitely one of the more effective things I tried. Then they started experimenting with another model, which is similar to Theophostic but more structured, called Sozo.
Before I explain it, let me tell you what it did.
Laura and I both got a Sozo session within a week of each other, then we went on a mini-vacation to Montreal.
Suddenly on our trip, it became blazingly obvious that Laura’s sleeplessness, depression and a sizable chunk of her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was gone. Just like that.
It was the best trip we’d had together in 10 years. If not 20. This was like, WOW!!!
It was like having a 30-pound sack of cement strapped to your neck for years, and suddenly realizing it’s melted away and vanished.
It didn’t solve everything. There were still issues that needed to be handled; life wasn’t instantly a bowl of strawberries. But I’ll tell ya what, it was like taking the biggest, nastiest weed and pulling it out by its roots – cleanly and completely, so that it doesn’t grow back.
ALSO: There was not a need to “pry open” Laura’s past, or excavate some dark memory as though we had to crack open some ugly walnut and peer at the inside. Sozo generally does not involve re-living horrific events or dredging up the past. What it does, instead, is simply reverse whatever lie you believed as the result of the trauma.
It’s not what happened to you that did the real damage. It’s the lie you believed as a result of what happened to you.
Laura’s lie was uprooted and new things needed to be planted in its place. Other weeds still needed pulling. But the biggest weed was utterly gone.
Wow.
That was a year and a half ago.
As for me, I decided: Rather than succeeding through anger and determination, I want my next level of success to be achieved through inspiration and imagination.
I was sick and tired of being vaguely upset about all kinds of stuff and not quite knowing why. There are lots of rich miserable people in the world and I don’t want to be one of them, and trust me – neither do you.
Deep down I sensed: Perry, if you get through this, another season of productivity and prosperity will follow. So I continued to clean out my emotional garbage can. And sure enough, once the garbage was cleaned out, the fire in the belly returned.
Plus there was an added bonus:
My Intuition is Sharper Than Ever Before
I have a far greater awareness of what is going on inside, a new ability to hear my inner voice and judgment. I started getting comments from my friends about how I seemed to be turning up the heat and grooving in an Über-Productive Zone.
I said to myself: This is incredible. Self, you need to get trained on this and understand how it works.
I also said to myself: If it’s possible to heal deep emotional wounds from childhood, then it’s possible to heal people’s internal garbage about money and success too.
I enrolled in a Sozo training course. I even did some experimental “financial Sozo” sessions with my friend Nathan Beauchamp.
I know how and why it works. Allow me to explain what this is, and why Sozo is refreshingly different.
In almost every form of therapy or self-healing, you dig into your beliefs and memories, attempting to reason with them and re-arrange them. It’s all well and good, and most people will tell you it’s helpful. But what’s maddening is that you seldom seem to quite be able to get down to the roots.
Frequently your therapist or facilitator or whoever you’re working with is also giving some level of interpretation or advice as to how to proceed or what to think. Or else they’re guiding you to look for answers within yourself. Which is better because it’s less invasive.
Sozo is built around prayer and all the facilitator is allowed to do is ask you to ask God questions and to reinforce and affirm what you hear when you listen. What actually happens is entirely between you and God. It’s nearly impossible for the facilitator to impose very much of his own interpretation or agenda because there’s almost no opportunity for him to do so.
I call this “Memos from the Head Office.”
It’s one thing for you to recognize that a lie was believed and for you to tell yourself what the truth is.
It’s an entirely different thing for God to speak to the lie and break its power.
First of all, many times only God knows exactly what the lie actually was. Second, the voice of God has a power that none of us possess. This power shifts your spiritual belief system rather than merely affecting your physical, chemical, emotional or intellectual belief systems.
And that is why this works. It works because humans are, first and foremost, spiritual beings having a physical experience. We are not merely physical beings who happen to have spiritual thoughts. We didn’t invent our spirituality; it’s not a product of our imagination; it’s not just a word we throw around. We are intrinsically spiritual. We are made that way.
When you believe lies – financial lies, success lies, lies about eating or self-image or addictions – you believe them on a spiritual level and spiritual problems cannot be solved by medication or conversation. They have to be solved with an encounter at a deeper level.
I’ve got this friend named Anthony. I don’t know what, but something really bad happened to him when he was a kid and he’s been messed up ever since. He’s kind of a melancholy guy and although he’s brilliantly funny sometimes, Laura started blocking his Facebook posts because so many things he said were so depressing.
I was in the room observing during his Sozo session. It was clear that he had a lot of stuff that was happening on the inside; all we could see and hear was what little he was telling us on the outside. But he would ask God questions and God would answer right back. I watched him and God have a conversation for two hours about all the stuff that had gone on and the lies he’d believed.
He said, “Normally when I pray all I hear is static. But this was absolutely crystal clear.” The progress he made from that two hours was stunning. This has become evident on a weekly basis during the last year.
You could tell just from his Facebook posts that something very deep and fundamental had shifted inside of him. That was about a year ago, and I have continued to watch Anthony experience more and more victory in his life.
In my own Sozo session, Memos from the Head Office helped me straighten out misunderstandings I had about my mom and my marriage. I closed doors on rooms that were leaking poison into my life and ushered me into a new chapter.
This is why in June 2012 I held a workshop called Financial Sozo for Entrepreneurs in Chicago. At this workshop I brought in Dawna DeSilva from Redding, California who pioneered the Sozo™ method for inner healing. I also brought her husband Stephen. Along with Angel Boldt, who I told you about at the beginning of this story.
Stephen DeSilva wrote the book “Money and the Prosperous Soul” which may be the best book I’ve ever read that offers a sane spiritual understanding of money and success. He is a Certified Public Accountant and CFO who has worked with Dawna to develop a “Financial Sozo™” version of the Sozo™ process.
I believe God wants you to be successful but He also wants you to have the right KIND of success. He wants you to own your success. God does not want your success to own you.
When I was in Amway, once in awhile someone would say something like, “God wants you to succeed.” I would BRISTLE when I would hear that.
Then I would say to myself, “Perry, if you think God does not want you to succeed, do you think he wants you to fail? If the idea that God wants you to succeed offends you, then why are you trying to succeed? What’s the point of trying to do anything well? Do you think God wants you to pursue excellence, yet be ineffective and poor?”
We’re doing this because people have tons of garbage in their heads about money and success.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Not
This had in many respects the texture and atmosphere of a business seminar. But it was a very different kind of business seminar. This is not Sunday School. Nor is it a marketing seminar.
We approach these issues explicitly and without apology from a Christian point of view. If Christian ideas or talk about Jesus and whatnot offends you, this it not for you.
That said, you do NOT have to be a Christian to listen, to enjoy it, to participate, to get incredible benefits, to get a Sozo session, to get “Memos from the Head Office,” to have a great experience. I have always found that non-Christians often have a lot less preconceived notions about what God might want to say to them than Christians do, less trouble hearing what they need to hear. This event was no exception.
If you’re an atheist and you hate religion and religious ideas, Do Not buy these MP3’s and videos.
If you’re a Christian who is militantly opposed to the idea of God speaking to people today, because you believe God stopped talking to people 1900 years ago, you’ll probably be even more offended than the atheists.
If that’s you, stop now and go do something else. Do not buy this.
However if you are….
- A person who is spiritual in spite of the fact that you do not like organized religion
- A person who often says to yourself “I think the universe is trying to tell me something today…”
- Jewish, Catholic or Orthodox
- Protestant or Charismatic
- Lapsed Catholic, or some other flavor like Methodist or Baptist or Episcopal
- A believer in the “cosmic consciousness” and the harmony of all things
- An agnostic who’s open to the possibility that there might be more out there
- A seeker who wants a stronger spiritual center
…then I think you’ll love this.
This was not a “Come to Jesus” meeting. If you want to come to Jesus that’s fine. But nobody will force you, coerce you, or put you in any kind of situation that is publicly uncomfortable. In private Sozo sessions, facilitators completely respect your wishes. (The recordings come with recommendations for people and organizations that offer Sozo sessions for you personally. Those sessions are NOT included in the price of this package.)
If you’re New Age, Hindu, Muslim, Latter Day Saints or Buddhist, you might be comfortable with this. Or you might not. You need to decide based on what I’m telling you right now and how it sits with you.
In the Members Area, you will get links to people and organizations that can give you a 2-hour private session, either in-person or via skype. My facilitators will help you get “Memos from the Head Office” that smash the lies about money and success that are holding you back.
By the way, notice I didn’t say they’re going to get Memos from the Head Office and pass them on to you. YOU get the memos YOURSELF. It’s uncanny. And it’s the best channel for inner healing I have ever found.
What This is and What This is Not
I’ve thought hard about how to price this, because this is not a “marketing seminar.” We don’t say much of anything about direct response marketing, Google ads, Facebook, Unique Selling Propositions or any of that. We’re going to be talking about spiritual principles of success and using a special process to help you overcome what’s holding YOU back.
Ed Rush also did a section on Time Management that is absolutely killer, by the way. Very unconventional, very contrarian. Probably the best single hour on the subject I’ve ever heard.
If religious people or ideas have given you all sorts of conflicting feelings, if trying to make money feels like a war inside your head – because the meek shall inherit the earth, because it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of the needle – if these fears war with your adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit – then you need to hear this conference. Because it’s incredibly hard to achieve a success that you’re internally conflicted about.
Stephen DeSilva has entirely re-framed these questions, so you clearly understand the pitfalls on BOTH sides of the equation – the poverty side and the “worshiping money” side. Both are two sides of the same nasty coin. Few escape their clutches.
Again, the special price is $199.
If you know that “head trash” and inner conflict about money and success are holding you back, then buy these recordings, and please also budget another $50 to $200 to pay for a private Sozo session with one of my recommended facilitators.
In this seminar I speak candidly about my own experiences; I have special guests weighing in with all kinds of fascinating angles; and you’ll get steered towards a 2 hour private session with my facilitators. My promise to you is this:
If you watch/listen to the sessions and book a private session, and don’t feel that you are being transformed into a new man or woman, if your belief system is not renewed by this experience, just ask for your money back within 30 days an
