Preface

Amazon-Reviews-Goodology-280x300A woman returned my smile asking, “What are you smiling at?”  I didn’t know.  It just happens when I walk by another person.  And so, the question arises in a book’s preface, ‘why did I write this book?’

The reason for this book comes from the energy that inspired that smile.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to do good.  I was a sixteen year old working in a grocery store being nice to the senior citizens.  I wanted to make them feel safe and supported.  I was an eighteen year old little league baseball coach.  I wanted the kids to feel encouraged and inspired. 

When I bought my first lottery ticket at the age of eighteen, the jackpot was 1.2 million.  I thought (okay naively) that it’s a lot of money for just one person.  How could I make that grow into a larger sum to help more people?

Graduating from college was interesting because I was caught up in the buzz of landing a job and a salary.  I loved to work.  I showed an ability to work long hours and care about the quality of my work   I was offered a nice promotion within a few months at my first job, but instead I decided on getting into business for myself, a distributorship in the automotive industry serving Western Connecticut.

It was then that I had a lot of time to plan my life and dream.  Deeper desires began to become conscious.  When I boiled things down at the age of twenty-five I realized that I wanted to do good.  Although I loved the work in certain career options, it was not the grand vision. I really didn’t see careers for myself, I saw people.  I saw need, emotion and hope.  I wanted people to have everything they wanted in their lives.  How could I help?  How could I be of service?  How could I make people’s lives better?

It was my energy inside of me that I wanted to follow.  But it was not easy because there was no path to follow.

I just pursued good.  I felt there were enough doctors and lawyers.  I wanted to create something that wasn’t made up of the preexisting learned labels.  As far as employment goes, I felt that you could do good through a job, like in a customer service job.  But, I didn’t want the product I was associated with to do harm.  If an ingredient in diet cola showed to be unhealthy for human consumption, then I didn’t want to be involved.  If another product was shown to cause cancer, I could not connect with earning a paycheck from that.

I wondered how people could earn a paycheck from producing a product that harms.  I was running out of industries to be involved in.  When I looked at it, industries served companies and not people.  I didn’t want to put my energy into toward things unproductive and hurtful.  I became angry at that.  Ah ha. 

Now I was onto something.  I learned anger and I learned frustration.  I remember that feeling clearly.  I wanted to know what that energy was also.  This energy was different, a massive block inside of me.  That energy could disappear for a while, then reappear without notice.  I sensed that my success would match this level of energy within me.  Yes, I was onto something.  But it was not laid out in words.

On one hand the thrill, happiness and appreciation I had when I saw someone smile and enjoy their life was my inspiration and drive.  But as good as I wanted to be, I knew that there was a force holding me back deep inside that I could barely see.  That force was dictating the amount of success that I would have, ultimately directing traffic.

Through college and after college I consumed a lot to feed that pain whether it was eating, drinking or drugs.  I would run baseball camps being positive all day, then drink at night. 

At the same, there were other pains occurred.  When I was nineteen years old after basketball practice on my college team, I was in a major car accident that nearly took my life.  There was a shattered knee cap, a femur that looked like confetti and a split hip. The leg was moments from being amputated.  Worse were the internal injuries.  There was a lacerated liver and spleen.  There were broken ribs and the hundreds of stitches throughout my face and head.

Three doctors worked on me simultaneously.  Miraculously, I was out of the hospital in just six weeks.  The funny part about this accident is that it was like stumbling.  You brush yourself off and get up.  An incident happens; you deal with it and move on.  The accident was little more than that.  There was nothing heroic about it.  I had the benefit of youth, healing and attitude.  Within about six months I was walking.  Six months later, I ran a 10k road race with the doctor who repaired my leg.

Physical pain from the accident did nag at me.  But through this, I really began to see that there was no pain greater than the pain I felt inside.  There was no pain greater than that which I had created seeing an abused or neglected child.  I saw starving children in another country or poverty in the USA.  The physical pain from the car accident was not greater than seeing someone picked on, taken advantage of or even down on their luck.

I wanted to see fairness, and happiness.  I wanted to understand the energy.

Everywhere I looked, I wanted to help.  I watched a daytime TV talk show many years ago (Jenny Jones or Sally Jessy Rafael) which had an overweight nine year old girl on.  She was sweet.  She was an angel from Atlanta, GA talking in her southern accent about how she was picked on during and after school.  When she got home she would cry until dinner time.  While she was on stage telling her story, she began to cry through her words.  It was painful to watch as she continued telling her story.

Suddenly, as she was crying while telling her painful story, the lights brightened and upbeat music began to play. Richard Simmons came out dancing smiling and hugging the girl.  Her tears turned from those of sadness to tears of happiness and safety because Richard was there to save the day.  The immediate feeling is to do something to help her.  I mean just to be supportive for a hug and tell her that everything is okay. 

As nice as this scene was, I felt that the issue with the young girl would not be resolved because there were deeper energies steering the ship.  This was around twenty years ago.  It was no secret then that kids got picked on then.  It is no secret that kids get picked on now.  Now that I think about it, I remember my Grandmother telling me that she was picked on in school for being overweight!  My Grandmother was born in 1910.  Advance one-hundred years, the USA Today on May 3, 2010 wrote a story, “Chubby kids get bullied more often.”  Have we experienced growth?

Self-help programs or new books would come on the scene and initiate hope.  But, the results didn’t happen.  If I didn’t have success in these programs then how could it happen for others who I wanted to help?  I knew the self-help programs worked for some people because the advertising said so.  I knew the issue was within me.  How could I effectively help others when while I honestly had powerless moments? 

I let my business dissolve when I was twenty-seven, but I studied everything I could get my hands on.  My first area was personal health and nutrition.  I studied Natural Hygiene, lived the principles and loved it.  Still, through all of my study, I learned that people were driven by something other than knowing the proper foods to eat.

I realized that changing diets was nice and could create energy but the solution was deeper.  The second area I studied environmental health thinking that good environmental choices would support positive health choices.  An intellectual and rational argument didn’t have a lot of impact as I saw people still driving gas guzzlers, eating fast food burgers.  People were feeding a furnace inside.

The morning televisions today are the same as they were twenty years ago, different books, same material.  I moved to Phoenix, AZ.  I could barely afford to pay the bills yet I was giving homeless people money on the streets.  Before I knew it, I was housing and supporting homeless people employing them in my house painting business. 

When I began studying spiritual health things changed because I saw that the solution began with energy within me.  Success happened quickly and naturally.  I began to have great success in business as a corporate trainer and then owning a grocery store.  Things were effortless.  It was all coming together for one reason.  It was because I allowed it.  I allowed my energy inside of me to flow.

As much as I wanted to help people, I realized that the drive for that came from within me.  I was matching a feeling within myself.  If we were going to solve emotional problems, weight problems, environmental problems or any problem, we would have to understand the furnace inside that we were feeding.

When I realized that the furnace inside was the same energy as my smile above, opportunities were more plentiful and saying yes to those opportunities was a breeze.  Every single one of us has the same possibility of connection.  We will open up the flow by seeing and feeling the most plentiful currency for what it is, kindness, goodness, compassion and love.

How to use this book

Treat Goodology as an exercise.  Many people physically exercise to keep their body in shape.  Movement is good.  Caring for one’s self is good.   It’s not always the sustainable answer depending on the driving reasons for the activity.  A person can have rippled muscles but still act like a dingbat.  They say if you give someone coffee to sober them up, you have a wide awake drunk.  The issue is still inside no matter how you paint it on the outside.

The exercise of good is energy movement within you.  Continually doing moving your energy makes you stronger and more connected with your greatest power.  The issue, as we will learn, is that our energy is very compressed and hidden.

For that reason, I use repetition at times and you’ll see that points are intertwined because through living, our energy is so compressed within us that we fall back into our own defense mechanisms batting away anything that may be deeply empowering. We may take something in intellectually, but not get the movement in our life that we desire because it doesn’t get inside of us.  Much of our previous learning has created meaning.  That meaning is not always a correct foundation on which to build.  For those reasons, take your time and feel your own energy throughout reading the book.

All levels and degrees of understanding Goodology are worth it!  You will recapture energy just by reading through the book.  Your energy will shift positively.

Did you ever have someone finish your sentence like they knew what you were going to say?  But, they really didn’t and the conversation went in a different direction.  There are a few instances where that might apply in this book.  You may think you know where I am going with a point, but it may not be the direction that I am heading. 

This book travels to some places that are different.  I also try not to use familiar words and phrases from popular books so you don’t anticipate a trip down a certain path.

I haven’t seen personal development material out there quite like this.  Even taking in a small amount of the information will increase your available power within. 

I do believe that any healing modality that you have tried or self-help technique, should work better when using the principles in this book.  There are four sections beginning with light stories to which you can relate, moving toward inner depth.

The Introduction has some degree of detail and depth, because I want you to begin to see your energetic insides from the start.  The greater the depth at which we study this frontier within us, the more rewarding it will be.

Each chapter begins with a short one-hundred forty character mini-burst of information which is a short version of the chapter’s content.  The concepts of Goodology are simple so that each of us can do it.  No one has more or less skill or ability to see these solutions which simply came from listening to my own insides. 

World peace comes from inside of you. The good news is that your energy is all good and it is inches away.

It is…the energy that inspires smiles.