LISTEN EVERY NIGHT BEFORE SLEEP! – Spiritual Journey

what is true power what is authentic power there was a book I read by a man named Gary zhukov called seed of the Soul and into the soul definition of authentic power meaning the kind of power that can never be taken from you not your looks not your Fame not your money not your square footage but authentic power is when the personality your personality comes to serve the energy of your soul when you are able to align who you are who you've become in the world with really what you've come to do in the world when your personality serves the soul so I thought a lot about that that book was actually life-changing for me and I was building a home in Santa Barbara and as anybody who's ever built a bathroom or a home or anything nothing ever happens on time and it was 2002 and we're supposed to be finished and it wasn't finished and I was like I can't wait to get in my house and I'm finally going to have a great Christmas and I'm going to do the kind of Christmas that I dreamed of from The Courier and Ives you know card so I'm gonna have the reads on the door and but I didn't have a floor so it's a little difficult to do that so I started to think if I can't do that Christmas well what what am I going to do for Christmas my house isn't even ready and what can I do so I started as I was walking around through the trees sitting under that tree because my favorite time is to be alone with my thoughts and as I was alone with my thoughts I was thinking what would be the next best possible Christmas for myself and I thought of the best Christmas I ever had the best Christmas I ever had was when I was 12 years old my mother was on welfare I was living with my mother and a half brother and sister in Milwaukee my mother called me the oldest to say into a room to say we won't be having Christmas this year I said we won't be having Christmas what about Santa Claus there is no Santa Claus I had already figured that out but okay I was embarrassed and I was ashamed because for the first time I had to face the reality that yeah what I've been suspecting that we're not like the other kids that we really are poor is true so we're not going to have Christmas and there is no Santa Claus my first thought after being embarrassed to shame was what will my story be what am I going to tell everybody when we go back to school and they're showing their toys and I don't have anything to talk about what am I going to do I'm not going to go outside tomorrow when everybody is out in the yards in their yards showing the toys they got for Christmas I'm going to stay inside am I going to pretend I'm sick what is my story going to be well late that night some nuns showed up at our house and they brought a basket of food and they brought toys for my uh my brother and my sister and I was overwhelmed with joy those nuns showed up not because they brought me a Tammy doll when I really wanted a Barbie doll I was overwhelmed because somebody remembered that we existed and somebody cared enough in the middle of the night to come to our house with food and toys and also I would now have a story so as I was contemplating what is the that was the best Christmas I ever had I thought how could I make that possible for somebody else what could I do to create the same kind of experience for other children so I took 50 members of my team at Harpo Harriet one of them Sherry the table and hired another 50 people in South Africa and we went to South Africa with the idea of creating something that we ended up doing a documentary about called Christmas kindness Christmas kindness using my personality to serve the energy of myself so we went from Village to Village offering toys and clothes food soccer boy soccer balls to Children who'd never experienced Christmas before and early in the morning you get to see them lining up by the thousands to come and we actually went to 10 or 12 villages to do this and people said to me at the time oh that's so frivolous and the kids won't remember it and why don't you use your money to do something else more substantial Oprah and I said they may not remember the toy they may not remember the clothes although they were most excited the children to open boxes containing clothes because as their caretaker said to us having new clothes made them not feel poor and for so many of these kids was the first time they'd ever experienced having something that was new for them they may not remember what they got in the box but they will remember that somebody remembered them they will remember the experience so during this entire experience Nelson Mandela had invited Stedman and I to stay at his home so when Nelson Mendel invite you you stayed and I was so nervous I was like oh my God what am I going to talk to because it's 10 days it's 10 days it's not just a dinner it's not a lunch it's 10 days it's 10 days breakfast lunch and dinner with Nelson Mandela what am I going to say Stedman said why don't you try listening so I did I had 29 meals with Nelson Mandela at first really really really I was very you know like oh my God it's Nelson Mandela and by the third or fourth day he and I would sit together in his um living room sharing the paper at the end of the day talking about events in the world and one of the things we came to talk about the most was the power of Education to overcome poverty so in one of those Lucid moments I said to him well you know I've always wanted to build a school he said you want to build a school Opera you want to build a school so you got up and made a phone call to the minister of Education I wasn't planning on building it then but all right um the minister of Education comes over later in the day and we start the process of of building a school the reason why I wanted to build a school because I tried different things because I always knew even before I could articulate that my personality needs to serve my soul so I want to talk to you about walking down another Street and um this other street is a street in which you have an awareness that not only do you have a physical body but you have come to believe that this physical body is who you are and that you have locked yourself into these five senses and decided that whatever evidence they provide for you is how you identify and Define your Reality by what I see by What I Hear by what I smell by my wife my life what looks like by how much money I have by the stuff that I possess and this is the world of the ego and this is the world of the false self the false self is the ego the ego is the part of us that has come to believe that who I am is defined by these six things who I am is what I have and so we spend a big hunk of our life attempting to get as much stuff as we possibly can the Dao teaches something very different let go of everything you have when I moved to Maui in 2005 full time I gave up everything that I owned everything twenty thousand books all of my photographs records of every description of furniture all