Archives | Tom Evans

Phases of Life

by Tom Evans | Dec 28, 2018 | Expanding

This month saw the unexpected passing of my mother-in-law. She has been in a care home for 8 years and wasn’t ill (for once). She had had a happy day, laughing and joking and was chatting to my father-in-law watching TV early evening. She was alive one second and gone the next. We had just moved them to their 3rd care home as my father-in-law had had a stroke and needed more care.

It was peaceful and painless for her and we were lucky to get a funeral slot just before Xmas. We are now left with a bereft person who doesn’t want to be around.

It makes you reflect and realise about the cycles of life. We have been in elderly care mode for at least the last 10 years and this gave me the impetus (and opportunity) to write at least 10 books and create hours of meditative visualisations and resources

Efforts Redoubled

So now our care and attention will increase, as father-in-law will need company, before the end of this year, next year is mapping itself out. When we encounter death, it is natural that we think about our own mortality. The fear of death left me many years ago but I do have a desire to leave behind a legacy of what I have learned for others (and possibly a future incarnation of myself/my soul). So this puts a focus on the next orbit of the Sun.

Project 1 : Soulwave : The Novel : I’ve now decided not to pressure myself on this and just to get the 1st draft written by my next birthday in March. Then to produce the audiobook by the 21st June, which will double as the the best proof read and edit you can get. And then to make the publication date, the 21st September.

Project 2 : Just for Today : These daily nuggets of mindfulness have been going out for well over two years now, latterly illustrated. In the New Year, Siri and I will be taking them to a new place where community involvement sits at the core.

Project 3 : Meditations : My free meditations are already on Insight Timer and more will be coming. One short story (from the Germinatrix) and one new free meditation will be published a month. Plus a new 30 day course will appear Q1 of 2019 which will replace three of my existing standalone courses.

Project 4 : The Big Awakening : While all of my creative output has been finding its way to the world, a massive amount of esoteric wisdom has yet to see general release. Some 1-2-1 mentoring clients have seen and experienced small snippets. I am giving no shape to how it gets out there but I know, with publication of The Big Ü, a channel now exists. Watch this space and it will be revealed – and all I know is that projects 1 to 3 above are the foundations.

Related Links :

Soulwave – draft available for Just for Today Patrons

Just for Today daily nuggets of mindfulness

My meditations on Insight Timer

The Big Ü

Paths of Return

by Tom Evans | Nov 30, 2018 | Illuminating

The Paths of Return

This month has been nothing less than amazing … and that’s after a load of amazing months.

It has been a time when many threads have come together and many seeds planted years ago finally germinated. The only factor was time.

Thanks to the new Insight Timer courses, my meditations have lead to a steady, monthly sleeping income from sales of The Art of Timefulness course. Just today, I recorded the 30th of 30 new meditations for my second course which will go live in the New Year. A third course will follow 6 or so months later. A monthly ‘pension’ of sorts is now flowing in which means I can create even more and more.

By way of confirmation, I was interviewed at the start of the month about my career, and path, to date by Helena Holrick and Kelly Tyler for their ChangeMaker Portal – here’s an extract that you might find amusing.

The upshot is that it can take all your life to become an overnight success and that we can end up in a better place than we planned by not having a plan, watching the signs and going with the flow.

Another big realisation came to me this month when I was researching what will be my 18th book – an opus coming out around this time next year. It is said there are 32, or 33, Paths of Return. I have always thought this was too low. This is because paths can be combined and interleaved. So if there are indeed 33 paths, it occurred to me there are 33 factorial ways they can be combined, at the very least.

It is this theme that I will be exploring in 2019 – so which of 8,683,317,618,811,886,495,518,194,401,280,000,000 paths do you plan to follow?

What’s Next?

Now the 30 day course is in the can, I plan to get back to completing the last 10% or so of my novel Soulwave in December. This should give me enough time to have it edited and done and dusted in time for my birthday next March.

The publication of the course on Insight Timer means I can drop at least two, if not three, meditation courses that I currently self-host. This means I can reduce hosting costs and get rid of loads of clutter on my web site. At the same time, all of this, and the above, allows another domino to fall down. Over the course of 2019, all my current course materials will be revamped, augmented and rebranded under the Big Ü banner and form a new course that leads on from the Big Ü book called the Biggest Ü.

More monthly musings this time next month as 2018 comes to a natural close …

A Blog Going Back to Basics

by Tom Evans | Oct 29, 2018 | Chatting

When blogs first came about, they were mainly designed to act as a chronological journal. Some still are but many, including this one, are repositories of articles, often categorised to make blogs easier to find.

Latterly whole web sites, again, including this one and all my other sites, are built on blog technology.

Right now, I am in transition, a kind of retirement but only insofar as I am ‘retiring’ from the old way I used to operate and transitioning into a new modus operandi. You could see this also as a transformation from chrysalis to butterfly.

The overarching philosophy I am adopting going forward is ‘an attitude of gratitude’. I am so grateful for all the blessings bestowed on me in life – amazing life partner, not one but two beautiful homes (one going or transitioning), an unexpected career trajectory from BBC TV engineer to author and meditation guide and also gratitude for good health, a sprinkling of wisdom and the ability to explain and share the unexplainable and what is then mostly unshared.

These are the new seeds. This blog will now become a monthly journal of what happens next.

The Trigger

In August, Louise had a new hip and two days before her op, her father had a major stroke. Looking after both, and caring for mum-in-law and Lou’s sister with learning difficulties has consumed the last few months and will occupy the foreseeable future.

So Lou’s decided it’s time to scale down her business and I’ve decided to alter the course of mine. The latter has been helped by three events this year:

1. Insight Timer creating a revenue source for teachers and guides whilst still being mostly free
2. A new found speaking career
3. A collaboration with Laurence Udell and the co-creation of the Big Ü

So as a result of all this, we are selling (or renting out) our Surrey house, moving into our new eco-lodge in Wiltshire and the in laws have already moved from the most ludicrously expensive care home in West London to one 5 minutes away from our Wiltshire pad.

The Cunning Plan

So this is what the trigger has triggered …

The workflow for Just for Today’s on Patreon will simplify so it takes 25% of the time currently
In Q1 2019, a new 30 day Insight Timer course will replace many of the standalone sets of meditations on my site
Also, during the 1st half of 2019, all my current online courses will migrate to a new programme on the Big Ü portal
In time, this will all form the building blocks to a philanthropic foundation
And most importantly, I will start writing and creating a new opus.
That is after my 17th book, Soulwave, the one that has taken the longest to write, is published in 2019

The Slowest Book I’ve Written

by Tom Evans | Sep 30, 2018 | Scribing

In 2012, on September 3rd, I started writing what became my quickest book called This We Know. 14 days later, on the 17th September (that same year), a copy of the print version arrived in the post – and it was available worldwide.

This blog tells the story of the slowest book I have written. It is novel which foretells the end of life on Earth, as we know it, within 100 years. While it is channelled fiction, some the events I first wrote over 14 years ago have already come to pass.

Genesis

Back in 2005, I was on holiday in South Africa, on the Garden Route at a place called Hog Hollow near Plettenberg. I had a shock when I ended up sharing a shower with a tarantula. A strong G&T later, I calmed down. At the time I was reading a book by Teilhard de Chardin called The Phenomenon of Man – it is deep and profound but also a little inaccessible.

A combination of tarantula shock and the G&T brought a light bulb moment along. What if I was to die when I know a lot of useful ‘stuff’ that could be shared? I had a pile of books that went some way to explaining the Universe and how we came to be. Many of them were as complex as Teilhard’s.

The idea was, what if I was to decode them, distill them and explain them?

I started mind mapping what I could share, along with imbibing a second G&T. The memory is still so vivid, I can even remember we were playing this amazing album, African Groove.

The Light Bulb Moment

This idea came in. What if the Universe was built on soulwaves? They were waves of energy that connected everything to everything. This was the missing dark energy and dark matter. I had no proof and no theories, just intuition.

So what if I shared what I knew in a novel? No proof would be needed, it would just be a story.

A few months later, I had about 60,000 words written. Then it ended up sitting on my hard drive for what would be 12 years, until I picked it up again.

What happened next was that 16 other books came along. I did release a short story version of a snippet of the book for Kindle in 2011. That got some good reviews that told me I should really finish it some day. At that time, the Universe was busy making an unexpected meditation guide out of the unsuspecting author though – and This We Know was about to arrive!

Winding on several books later, I ended up spending my 59th birthday, in 2017, at my best friend from school’s funeral. I resolved then to get this story our before my 60th, just in case I wasn’t around for much longer.

I ended up rewriting it from the ground up, and inserting some new intertwining plot lines, but I only got 90% of it done. Just the last 20 chapters or so need finishing off.

The reason I only got 90% of the way last year was that yet another book project that I didn’t plan came along. The Big Ü is done now and was published on the 8th August 2018.

Of course, these diversions are not irritants. In a Universe connected by soulwaves, all is ‘meant to be’. Apart from anything, I know more stuff now than I did back in 2005 and I hope that I have become a better writer. I am certainly more internally confident at the very least.

So the latest planned schedule is to get the print, ebook and audiobook published on the 21st September – all in 2019 that is.

Tuning into cosmic timings is one of the many memes touched on in the book!

What’s It About?
I have now discovered that the book now has a genre – post-dystopian cyberpunk.

It starts in 2059 when humanity has got its act together after the excesses of the last few centuries. Sadly, it is all a little too late as something triggered off in 1959, 150 light years away, that would lead to the end of life, as we know it, on Earth.

Our hero is sent from the ‘gods’ to help at the time of transition – as often happens cf Jesus, John Lennon, Kermit the Frog. Like all such characters, he doesn’t know this. He hatches a plan at the last minute to save some of humanity. All along though the dolphins, knew so, so much more.

So the book explains how the cosmos goes through cycles and how death is an integral part of life. Even stars have to die to create more stars … and us!

One Million Listens

by Tom Evans | May 17, 2018 | Expanding

This month I reached a milestone which was not in my wildest of wild dreams and not on any To Do List, or set of goals. My meditations and podcasts on mindfulness have been listened to over 1 million times.

When we hit milestones like this, it’s a good idea to reflect back on how it was achieved and what unexpected events happened along the way.

It also pays dividends to say thanks, so big thanks to Insight Timer for making it happen and thanks to all the 280,000 meditators who listened in. This means many of them tuned in multiple times.

How it happened

The reflections are nicely captured in this podcast with fellow Insight Timer meditation guides, Louisa Tanner Munson and Carl Munson.

[smart_track_player url=”https://www.tomevans.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/insight_timer_1m_listens.mp3″ title=”How to get 1 million listens on Insight Timer” artist=”In conversation with the Munsons” background=”default” social_gplus=”false” social_linkedin=”true” social_email=”true” ]

The unexpected events

#1 : I made a transition from an author who had some meditations as accessories to his books to becoming a popular meditation guide who happens to be an author.

#2 : This directly lead to a new career as a keynote speaker and trainer in practical applications of mindfulness.

#3 : I was commissioned to create seven meditations to help with weight management directly as a result of a meditator, and his 3 year old son, listening. The composer of the ambient background music is Eternell, found through the app.

#4 : The popularity of Just for Today, my most listened to meditation, lead me to creating a series of daily nuggets of mindfulness of the same name. They attracted the illustrator, Siri Stiklestad Opli, and ended up in a book I didn’t plan to write and the formation of a contribution currency initiative on Patreon.

#5 : my new found status has lead to co-authoring a new book called The Big Ü and the creation of an advanced personal development programme called The Biggest Ü. It has been immensely useful in giving credibility and authority to this initiative.

#6 : a steady stream of new clients for my more esoteric self-study courses and 1-2-1 mentoring.

#7 : giving me confidence at the grand old age of 60 to finally put my head fully above the parapet.

Above all it has been the most enjoyable journey and gives me such pleasure to know that 3000 or so people each day are calmer, more relaxed and hopefully a little more enlightened.

All because Maddy Gerrard reached out in August 2016 to ask if I’d like to upload a meditation.

“It only takes one domino to make many others fall down …”

Big thanks to Maddy, Chris, Nico, Bayley, the rest of the team and the generous benefactors who make the impossible possible. Thanks also to the 4 million and more meditators and all my fellow meditation guides for making the best by far free app on the planet.