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.
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.
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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.
This month I begin my 61st orbit of our home star on Spaceship Earth. This means I turn 60.
Incidentally, that’s a journey of over 35 billion miles around the Sun!
It seems somewhat appropriate to mark the occasion with a blog and I was invited to join in with Judith Morgan’s blogfest in January to share some gems of wisdom of how I go about running my business – and Doing It My Way.
If you want to discover how to run your life, as opposed to it running you, I can highly recommend reading Judith’s new book, Your Biz Your Way
The Journey So Far
At 17, I had four A levels, took a year off to work and then went to University with money I’d earned in my bank, and a student grant. My, are things different these days?
I left Uni in 1979 with a Desmond (a 2.2) in Electronic Engineering, a specialisation in TV engineering and walked into a choice of jobs. I said things were different back then. I had to choose between a career at the BBC or ITV. The Beeb paid a little more and sounded more fun, so I did that.
At 23, Sony headhunted me and doubled my BBC salary. At 25, a company in London headhunted me and paid double again. My interview with them was at a David Bowie concert, the Let’s Dance tour, in Rotterdam. Three months later, the company went bust. I could have gone back to Sony, and corporate life, or go forward into the unknown. I chose the latter and within a year, I had formed my own business and had staff. I’d been thrust into entrepreneurship.
This was no problem as I was innovative by nature my new company won two Royal Televion Awards for its products, which had started selling to broadcasters worldwide. By the time I was 30, I had a £750k turnover business. Along the way, the TV industry delivered my life partner too!
The company was sold to another in 1992 and I became Tech Director. I told them we have to get into this thing called the Internet but they said it would never be fast enough for TV and audio. Toys thrown out of pram, I left and became a TV journalist for a year to work off my non-compete clause.
I took a job-job in the CCTV industry and, after a few years, got promoted to the board but then got head-hunted again to create an Internet business. It took me a year to turnover its first £1m. Then the wheels came off the bus. They gave me a £2m turnover in year 2. This stressed me out as I was also heading up project delivery, and commuting 3 hours a day too, so I left.
Mid-life Hiccup
So I’d experienced rapid career progression and had no problem innovating on my feet and creating stuff from nothing but I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me. I cashed in my shares in the new business and started freelancing. I was bored, lost and disillusioned.
Things changed dramatically when someone said I looked haggard (I did) and I should try meditation. At first, like many, I thought it was a waste of time but I persisted. On days I meditated, I had a better time all round. If I didn’t get around to it, I struggled. So the engineer in me started a quest to find out how all this mind magic worked.
Before I knew it, I’d written my first book by accident in a 747 at 39,000 feet. It was called 100 Years of Ermintrude and its publication lead directly to me walking around London for 26 miles in the Walk the Walk marathon. Another unexpected turn of events happened. Quickly afterwards, people started approaching me to help them write their books. I started to write more and more books to support my new career.
The Bookwright Was Born
I went on a few courses and started studying with two estoeric schools. There was also an incident with an Earth Angel and a Demon that doesn’t belong in this blog. In short though, I ‘switched on’ and became a ‘see-er’.
I had become adept at clearing writer’s block (always a life block) and tapping people into their Muse. I’ve lost count of the number of authors I helped get published.
I thought I had found my métier and calling as a creative mentor but the Universe had other ideas.
The Path Found Me
I started to add meditations as accessories to my books and one day I got an email from an app, called Insight Timer, asking me if I would like to upload one. I did and within a month had over 6000 downloads and loads of messages saying people liked the English accent, the sense of humour and how accessible I made everything.
Three years later, I am at over 900,000 downloads and one of the most popular meditation guides on the app, rubbing shoulders with many of the world’s top mindfulness luminaries. Every single day over 2,500 people meditate to one of my meditations, all over the world.
One meditator got in touch with me to commission a set of seven meditations for weight management to be included in his app which is making waves in corporate America.
So the BBC-TV engineer, who became an author who did meditations on the side, became a meditation teacher who happens to have written loads of books – all without setting foot inside an ashram.
Along the way, I also created the world’s first time management course based on mindfulness and coined the term ‘timefulness’. The engineer discovered how to change the speed of time by changing the speed and nature of thought. This is what is now opening yet another new door.
Something else happened from nowhere nearly three years ago. I started to send out daily nuggets of mindfulness called Just for Today (which are now illustrated thanks to Siri Stiklestad Opli). These are changing the world one thought and one person at at a time and are just about to go viral. The first book of a collection of them also got published, kind of by accident.
What’s Next?
Before I wrote any of my current 14 books, I wrote a novel. Ten years later, it’s now been updated and is being published in my 61st orbit. It’s called Soulwave and is a future history of the Earth. It’s got all the revelations in it I couldn’t get into my non-fiction books.
At the same time, after knocking on doors many times, I have finally broken into corporates. It means I can fund Tom the novelist from some very nice consultancy, speaking and training work, teaching businesses how to work smarter, leaner and faster using mindfulness techniques. I’m also running my first live 8 week course on Practical Mindfulness this Summer.
This work will be encapsulated and distilled in a new co-authored book, web site and philanthropic joint venture which is going live in Summer this year.
Even though I am now on a path which has been shown to me, I know intuitively there are more unfoldings and iterations to come. I was given some esoteric information several years ago which has yet to be fully decoded and reconstructed. I hope to share it, at least, by the time I write the follow up blog to this one when I am 70 !
At the end of last year, I had made a switch. Or more accurately a switch had been made for me. Instead of being an author who created meditations to augment his books, I became a full blown meditation creator and producer who has a portfolio of books on the side.
Insight Timer (the first 1)
Like many of these evolutions, it happened gradually and organically and I was about the last to notice. It took this publically available stat for it to really sink in – which increases daily.
In confirmation that this switch had been flicked, I was approached by Todd McGuire, the CTO of IncentaHealth, a wellness company headquartered in Denver, Colorado. They wanted to augment their wellness app to include meditations. At first they merely wanted to re-use some existing meditations but after a few chats it was obvious to us both that something had to be created from the ground up.
Along Came Eternell (the third 1)
I’d been musing anyway about using some new background music to give my new meditations a new energy and I had come across an amazing ambient music composer – and all round enlightened soul, as I subsequently found out. Initially I approached Eternell via Insight Timer about using his existing music. To my surprise and delight, he wanted to create something from the ground up too and produced new music to accompany my new meditation words.
Only one month after this collaboration came about, seven new meditations to help those on a weight loss or weight management programme came to be. I posted a sample of the seven on Insight Timer and it seemed to resonate …
You can listen to this introductory meditation to sample the delights of what we created together …
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In Autumn 2015, my meditations got discovered by the Insight Timer app, and its marvelous community of worldwide meditators. I discovered that people seemed to really like them.
Imagine my absolute joy this morning, a year later, when I got an email from Maddy Gerrard, the Inflow Manager at Insight Timer, telling me that my most popular meditation, Just for Today, is now available in six other languages.
Initiatives like this can only lead to a calmer, more gentle world. If you have any French, Spanish, Portugese (Brazilian), Norwegian, Czech or Chinese friends, point them here.
Note that this meditation and the app will always be free.
With the Insight Timer 365 Day meditation challenge, 2017 was already lining up to be a great year. Find out more about this challenge and opportunity in this podcast with Christopher Plowman, the CEO of Insight Timer.
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Master Charles Cannon on the Zone Show recently after reading his book, Living an Awakened Life. I highly recommend the book and you can listen to the podcast here.
Around 26m30s in you will hear me ask him what he meant by a lovely, evocative phrase that jumped out at me from the book …
“Meditation is your ally in transition”
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I’ve been musing on this phrase for a week or so and feel minded to explain and explore the nature of this transition … having been through it myself and being on ‘the other side’ for some years now.
The transition comes in three phases :
Phase 1 : Short Term Benefits
After meditating every day, for a couple of weeks and for just 10 minutes a day, we get pretty much an instant payback on our investment of time. We become more relaxed and our stress levels reduce. We become more tolerant of situations that would normally annoy us and, in turn, we become more pleasant to be around. We discover that meditation is a ‘nice addiction’ to have.
Phase 2 : Medium Term Realisations
After meditating for a month or two, new areas in our neurology become activated and our mind expands to a new level of capacity. We become more creative and more productive. We also begin to discover we get more done, of higher quality, in less time and that external events and serendipities begin to turn up just at the right time. In short, we stop pushing water uphill and start to go with the temporal flow.
Phase 3 : Long Term Awakenings
After about a year or so of practice, we look back on who we used to be and wonder how we got so stressed. At some point on our journey, we will have experienced examples of what look like magic. We live in a brighter and kinder world, with a glass which is not so much half full as it is over-brimming. At least one amazing change has unfolded within us and at least one life changing opportunity lands at our feet. We awaken our fully alive powers and become a force for change and transformation in whatever endeavour we apply ourselves to.
If you are intrigued and minded to make such a transition and to make meditation your ally, where do you start?
I am so passionate about sharing what I have learned and experienced, the first steps are free and the following steps inexpensive. Like planting a tree, the best time to start meditating is yesterday and the second best time is today. Here’s how to dip you toe into a new way to be.
Step 1 : Free
Download the free app Insight Timer and check out my free meditations – and those of the many other fabulous guides you will find there.
and hear from Chris Plowman, the CEO, on the 365 day meditation challenge in 2017 – a kind of collective transition
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Step 3 : Open Your Minds
For more experienced meditators, my Heart-full Living course takes you on a 15 day journey into another state of being. Your will awaken dormant and nascent mind centres and form a new relationship with your thoughts. As you open your Third Eye, and other mind centres, part of your investment will be donated to fund eye surgery for someone in the developing world. What goes around comes around.
Step 4 : Awaken Your Inner Magician
I have also developed a program for advanced explorers called Awaken Your Inner Magician. This program is available as a fully mentored or self-study course. It is like a software upgrade for the soul, or a death-less reincarnation. Only those who have taken steps 1, 2 and 3 will be invited to partake.
Further listening and reading
This podcast explains more about the applications for practical mindfulness
[smart_track_player url=”http://www.thezoneshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/What-is-Practical-Mindfulness-48k.mp3″ title=”What is Practical Mindfulness?” artist=”Tom Evans” image=”http://www.thezoneshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/TAG-2-PM-333-300×300.jpg” background=”#eeeeff” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” ]
… and, by way of example and illumination, here’s some more blogs on the kind of unfoldings that occur when you make the transition
I had the great pleasure of seeing Dr Strange this weekend – the 3D version highly recommended.
There’s a great scene where The Ancient One, sublimely played by Tilda Swinton, pushes the astral component of a sceptical Dr Strange out his body. Benedict Cumberbatch expresses shock and bewilderment at being thrust ‘out of his body’.
See 1 minute into this trailer for this particular scene …
While much of the film is fantasy, the existence of the astral world and both our gross and subtle bodies might be more ‘real’ than is thought. Components of the astral world may comprise some of the missing dark matter and energy whose whereabouts has the scientists somewhat perplexed these days.
In order to access the astral world, you don’t need a Large Hadron Collider. We are all able to sense and experience the astral plane daily. Here’s five ways to do it, noting the last one is not recommended.
1. Dreaming
We slip into the astral plane each night naturally when we dream. This is especially so when we travel in our dreams and experience what are called lucid dreams.
Sometimes we can feel like we are flying when we have an out-of-body experience. When this happens, you can sometimes look down on your sleeping form.
Some guided meditations can take you to imaginary places and mystical worlds. Sometimes these are called shamanic journeys.
Such meditations that give the most intense experience occur when the person who recorded the meditation was deeply entrenched in the astral world themselves at the time of the recording.To experience an intentionally light state of astral travel, listen to either of these two Visualisations for free on the Insight Timer app.
There are many tales of espionage organisations using native indigenous people to train operatives in the skills of ‘seeing at a distance’.
For a safe ‘remote viewing’ experience, I have produced a jet lag reduction meditation which works by gently separating the gross and subtle bodies. The subtle body gets sent ahead to your destination. When the gross body catches up by actually flying, the two join again and the effects of jet lag are minimised.
The Astral Plane is a conduit and gateway to what is known as the collective consciousness. This is thought to be an even higher dimensional plane where all thought and knowledge – past, present and future – reside.
When we get into the flow state referred to as ‘the zone’, we forge a connection with astral. This flow state is where performers and athletes perform at their peak. Actors sometimes call it ‘channelling’. It is where writers, artist and musicians connect with their Muse.
The key to accessing our Muse, lies in getting into the meditative state with our eyes open. This visualisation on Insight Timer, takes you through a safe and repeatable procedure that also gets both halves of our brain working in synchronism.
While Dr Strange was undergoing CPR, we saw him floating outside his body. As I mentioned, experimenting with NDEs is not recommended. If you are interested in knowing more, have a listen to this podcast with PMH Atwater who is one of the world’s leading experts on NDEs – and has had three herself.[smart_track_player url=”https://audioboom.com/boos/3557894-near-death-experiences.mp3″ title=”Near Death Experience” artist=”PMH Atwater” image=”http://www.thezoneshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PMHAtwater-300×300.jpg” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_email=”true” ]
After listening to one of my sample meditations on the free Insight Timer app, Dr Ashley Curiel got in touch. She read my new book and listened to the 10 companion meditations for 10 days. Here’s what she had to say about them:
“Studies continuously document the psychological benefits of mindfulness and meditation. As a clinical psychologist, I know both personally and professionally just how beneficial a mindfulness meditation practice can be.”
“I frequently suggest establishing a meditation practice to my clients. Those who are able and willing to try it are able to experience their emotions without letting their feelings take over and run their lives; meditation facilitates their ability to stay in the driver’s seat of their lives rather than be relegated to the back seat, with anxiety, depression, or other strong feelings driving the car.”
“One difficulty consistently emerges when I suggest my clients begin to meditate. They are not sure where or how to begin. Once they start, they are often confused about how to sustain their practice.
In The Authority Guide to Practical Mindfulness, Tom Evans masterfully designed a program to introduce the modern individual to a timeless tradition. He demonstrates how, in just 10 minutes per day, one can re-shape the experience of his or her world. His meditations meet and address the needs of society today and offer real-world suggestions to encourage initiating and maintaining a mindfulness meditation practice.”
“I have been listening to the meditations that accompany this guide daily and have witnessed the serendipities and benefits he describes. I recommend this book and the corresponding meditations to my clients nearly every day. When they are able to become more aware of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, they are more likely to be able to effect positive and lasting change in their lives.”
“I now listen to at least one of the ten meditations daily and I love them; in fact, my mind has come to crave them! Sometimes I’ll be having a rough moment and I think “I need one of Tom’s meditations right now!” I used to consistently reach for a cookie, now I crave mindfulness meditation. What progress!”
Learn more about Ashley’s work and philosophies in this podcast from the Zone Show
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The Journey So Far
Before I wrote any of my current 14 books, I wrote a novel. Ten years later, it’s now been updated and is being published in my 61st orbit. It’s called Soulwave and is a future history of the Earth. It’s got all the revelations in it I couldn’t get into my non-fiction books.
We slip into the astral plane each night naturally when we dream. This is especially so when we travel in our dreams and experience what are called lucid dreams.
Some guided meditations can take you to imaginary places and mystical worlds. Sometimes these are called shamanic journeys.
There are many tales of espionage organisations using native indigenous people to train operatives in the skills of ‘seeing at a distance’.
The Astral Plane is a conduit and gateway to what is known as the collective consciousness. This is thought to be an even higher dimensional plane where all thought and knowledge – past, present and future – reside.
After listening to one of my sample meditations on the free Insight Timer app, Dr Ashley Curiel got in touch. She read my new book and listened to the 10 companion meditations for 10 days. Here’s what she had to say about them:
