 When I started to get down under the people pleasing, I could see that initially when I first saw that I said, most of my actions in my life are based on fear of consequences. Why am I with this person? Why am I at this job? Why am I struggling with this thing or that thing? It's because I'm afraid I'm going to lose something. I'm afraid to get worse. Maybe you better appreciate a good thing because it could get a lot worse. And I would do all that comparison. Well, there's a lot of people that have worse off than me. That's just a bunch of comparison. I'm supposed to feel good by putting other people down thinking you're better off than somebody else really. I mean, you start to get wise to these tricks. And what I found is that I was fearful and I was inhibited and I couldn't really speak the truth. I couldn't really demonstrate the truth because of this fear. I had to face the fear and get in touch with every aspect of the fear that was there. Fear of rejection, fear of abandon, fear of betrayal. I remember early on in the course I thought, wow, I've got so many fears and I need to expose and face these. So one of the first things I did back in the late 1980s was I decided I was going to get a little travel trailer and go down and live in the woods like Henry David Thoreau or Robinson Caruso or something and really face the fears. There was a lot of bugs down there, big bugs and snakes, I was just a convenience, a comfort of living in a suburbs and a nice house with no snakes, no bugs and no, but when you're down there and you start to face and even my parents, my girlfriend, what are you doing? My parents were like, you didn't even like Boy Scouts. And now I'm down there with this horse American book in the woods, living out there by yourself. My girlfriend was like, not too happy about that either, like what are you doing with your life? But I realized, I said, like I would read the course and it said, you know, you really think that you are alone unless you are with another body. And I said, yeah, that's right, that's what I believed. Jesus is like saying, so I'm like thinking, so I've got a belief in companionship. And it's like, yeah, and is this good? Remember, you are responsible for your state of mind. You are not lonely because you are not with another body. You are lonely because you're choosing to be lonely. You're lonely because you believe that you're a body, that you believe you're alone. So I had to start facing those things. And that was actually a very helpful hermitage experience. I read the course a lot and oh, I tried starving ego. I tried, you know, asceticism and deprivation. It doesn't work. You know, it's just, ego is just like leavening. Ha! You just think you can just come down here and live in the woods and get rid of me. It's like, ha, ha, ha. Like, just try to meditate down there. Oh, let's see how quiet you are. I'll just wreak havoc down here in your mind. You're not doing nothing. And then I said, okay, I'm going to fast. And he goes like, well, you think you're going to fast me away? You know, you're just not going to eat. You know, I'll be gone. Yeah, I read about it in the book. Okay, let's try. So actually the first time down there, it was like me starting to realize that I knew a lot of mind training to be able to go towards undoing this ego. Like, the ego is like, I'm going to hear from millennia in your mind. Are you just going to like starve me out of here? I said, yeah, yeah, okay. I'm just eating bread and water. Just bread and water. See how you like that? And it's just like, no, we'll see. You want to play that, right? And so I would go for weeks with bread and water and then I would go out to like a Walmart. And my time would be like, just the way I was looking at all this stuff. It was, you know, you could see that you hit, it's a lot of mind training. So round one goes to the ego. But I wasn't knocked out. I was out of my breath. And then actually, that's when the Holy Spirit said, this way it's not working. Why don't you read the I Need to Do Nothing section? Of course, you know, where people have tried fighting against sin and, you know, contemplation and long periods of meditation. He says, no, your way will be different. A holy relationship is giving you as a means of saving time. I said, that sounds good. But the thing was, he was like, no, I want, you're letting me speak to you now. You're hearing me. Now I want you to move to phase two. I want you to let me speak through you. I was like, oh, that's not going to be so easy. You know, I was shocked. I can't go around and can't give you my mouth. He said, you said I can't. Oh, my gosh, I've been going. So then I started to go out to course groups and to travel and to just show up for lots of holy encounters, you know. When you meet anyone, remember it's a holy encounter. And to do that. And that's been my path. It was like being used by the Holy Spirit. So it's not been a path of meditation or contemplation so much as being used in joy at the Spirit to let miracles come through. And that was very helpful. By the time I did that, I did that for several years. By the time I came back, it was guided to my second hermitage, which was up in the woods of Michigan. My mind was much more still from all that purposeful use. You know, he says the one use of the body is a communication device. I had given my body over as a communication device so fully that my mind started to be cleared of all the chatter, the mind chatter. And actually I could drop into some really deep states of mind, not through a bunch of techniques, but just by doing the course workbook lessons and letting the Spirit direct my daily actions and my daily thoughts, that was what really was helpful. So that's what kind of sent me in the right direction. And then it's never stopped. It just wasn't like, okay, you'll do this for three months or six months. It's just continued on and on and on. And the state of mind is still, but the body, it's like the body can be used, the words can be used in very flowing, spontaneous ways. But it's totally involuntary. I don't have a topic in mind when I'm showing up. I really don't have an agenda. I don't know what words will be given, how I'll be spoken through, which is very, very spontaneous.