You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This is a throwback to episode number 110. That episode was titled, “This is Your Greatest Advisor.”
If I were to ask you right now, who or what is your greatest advisor? You might say my grandpa, YouTube, I don’t know who you might pick, but you know, you might say this person, maybe Merrill Lynch is my greatest advisor. What I learned many years ago is there is a path that we are all on. And on that path, you will find your greatest advisor. Most of us ignore the advisor. We don’t want to look at the advisor. We don’t want to see the advisor, and we don’t want to hear or think about the advisor. Many of us are afraid of this advisor. And the truth is, when we accept and we embrace this advisor, our life becomes so much easier, so much more peaceful, and so much more powerful. Enjoy the episode.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation, and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here, you’re going to find no rah-rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.
So your greatest advisor. You know most of us go through life and we’re looking for mentors and people to ask for advice and you know many of us are looking for advisors in many areas of our life whether it be financial advice or you know planning advice or whatever it is but have you ever asked, you know, asked yourself, “what is my greatest advisor that I have available…” I can’t even talk today. What is my greatest advisor that I have available to me in my life on a daily basis? Now, I’m going to go somewhere in this episode, and I know I’ve mentioned and I’ve said this before, but I’m going to share with you today what I’ve learned to be my greatest advisor in my life. And I’m going to talk a fair amount about shamanism and my brother-in-law, Don Javier the Shaman, and what I’ve learned from him in this episode. So what I’ve learned to be, and I learned this from Don Javier, what I learned to be my greatest advisor is death. Now, that’s probably not what you’re expecting, but I’ve learned that death is our (meaning all of us, but I’ve taken it to heart for many years) death is my greatest advisor.
And the reason why, and the reason that I say that is so many of us come to the planet, and I’ve been there, I’m not there at this point in my life, but I remember even in my 30s, I never, ever, ever thought about leaving the planet anytime soon. And as I’m getting older… I’m not that old. I’m 55. But I look at my life in a different way now in that, you know, any day on this planet could be my last day. So I work from death as my greatest advisor. And the next question that I have for you and what I want to share with you is how does death advise us?
Okay, I’m going to jump around in this episode because as I was putting this together in my mind, I kind of had a hard time thinking about how I wanted to organize it all. So I’m going to jump around a little bit. Just stay with me. I’ll tie it all together for you at the end of this episode. I’ve said before, and I want to reiterate a metaphor that I’ve used before that I learned from my brother-in-law, Don Javier, the shaman. And it was just he and I, we were in the kitchen talking. This was about three or four years ago. And he said, “imagine your life like a rental car.” And I’ve probably used this same metaphor three or four times in the podcast. You know, you go on vacation. And when you fly somewhere, you go on vacation, you get off the airplane, and you get your rental car if you don’t have one and nobody’s picking you up. And I’m just laughing at that. But it’s very simple. We go to the rental car place, and we get our rental car. And then what we do is we drive around for three, four, five days a week, however long we’re traveling and on vacation. And then what we do is we take the rental car back and we drop it off and we go home. And the way that I look at life is that our bodies, our bodies are just on loan to us. We’re just renting them. So when I incarnated on this planet, I got this body, which is my rental car. And I’m going to drive it around for however many years I’m on the planet. My intention is to be on the planet in human years for quite some years. But the thing is this, when it’s time for me to go home, meaning leave the planet, I’m going to drop the rental car off and I’m going to go home. But most of us, we never look at it that way. We look at our lives like they’re infinite and we’re going to be here forever and we’re going to own this rental car forever. And that’s just not the case.
So as I said, I’m going to hop around here and I’ve just got questions running through my mind, things I’ve learned over the years from being with Don Javier. But a question… he and I were talking one day and he said something to me that just floored me. And again, I’m going to weave a lot into this episode. Also, I don’t think it’s going to be all that long, but definitely I’m going to weave some stuff into it. But he said something to me that just really flabbergasted my thinking, my mental mechanisms. And he said to me, he goes, “have you ever considered what you gave up to come here?” And I ask you that same question. Have you ever considered what you gave up to come to this planet? Because the truth is this (and I’m not going to go into it in this episode) is, you know, Einstein’s proven this in physics, is that you cannot die. You literally, whether you want to believe it or not, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s a truism, it’s physics, is that you go from lifetime to lifetime to lifetime. Not only that, which I’m not going to get into in this episode, have you even asked yourself, you know what, if that is true in your mind, in your reality, that I go from lifetime to lifetime to lifetime, have you asked yourself where those lifetimes are in the universe? So I’ll just plant that seed for right now.
But back to the question is, what did you give up to come here? Because in the way that I look at this metaphor is, imagine, for example, that you wanted to take all the water in the ocean here on planet Earth. You wanted to take all of that water and put it into a one-gallon container. Well, to me, that’s what we gave up. We gave up the totality of the ocean. I mean, that expansiveness on this planet to cram ourself into a one-gallon container. So you gave up the totality of you without even recognizing you gave it up because you forgot about it when you got to the planet. You gave it up when you got here. Now, what I mean that you gave it up, there’s another example that I was taught many years ago is that the great grand mystery, the great grand creator… this, what I call the great grand mystery. Maybe you call this God. But we’re all in this room, metaphorically speaking, and God said, “who wants to go on a great adventure?” And everyone’s raising their hands. They’re going, “I want to go, I want to go, I want to go.” And God… okay. And the great grand mystery says, “all right, you know what? You all get to go, but there’s only, you know, there’s some caveats. And the caveats are that I’m going to put a bag over your head. You’re going to forget who you are and you’re going to forget about me when you get there.” And then we’re born on this little bitty planet called planet Earth. And we forget everything that I just shared with you, the totality of you that you gave up before you got here. And then what many of us do, and I know because I’ve been there, what many of us do is we spend our entire lifetimes in these little bitty, I mean minuscule models of reality. And that could be 30 years, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years. We spend our entire lifetime on this planet in a little bitty minuscule model of reality on this planet. And we don’t even consider the totality of us like I was talking about earlier, the totality of the ocean that we cram into a one-gallon jug. And that’s what many of us have done.
So as I said, let me hop around here because I’ll tie this all together. At least that’s my intention at the end of this episode. But we’re not here for very long on this planet because we have these illusions of time, which I’ve done another episode on time. Time does not exist. Time is a human construction. But I want you to imagine this for a moment. I want you to imagine in however many years you’ve been on this planet, I want you to imagine a single bolt of lightning that you have seen in your lifetime. Now, it can be yesterday. It can be this amazing bolt of lightning you saw in the car last week. It can be 20 years ago, which you would remember anyway. But I want you to think about that bolt of lightning and how quickly you’ve seen it in the course of this lifetime. I mean, you might see that bolt of lightning for what? One second, maybe, in the course of your lifetime now. Well, the course of your lifetime now, relative to the totality of you, is like that lightning strike in your life now. I mean, it goes in a flash.
So while you’re here on the planet, you’ve heard people say, and it’s a big meme on Facebook and Instagram and everything else, but you hear people saying life is short, yet people don’t really live from that place. They don’t really embrace that life is short. It just seems like it’s something good to say and it makes sense in the moment. But your life on this planet is akin to that lightning bolt in the context of your entire life while you’re on this planet. It goes in a heartbeat. And what I want you to start thinking about in this episode is your mortality, meaning I don’t care who you are listening right now. I don’t care if you’re 17. I don’t care if you’re 12. You’re not going to be on this planet that long. Even if you’re here 100 years, that’s going to go in a flash. You know, I tell people, and especially younger people, that you go to bed at 25 and you’re going to wake up at 50. And that’s been the story of my life. And metaphorically, we go to bed and we wake up and we’re like, where did all the time go?
And I read something a couple of days ago. I think age is literally just a number. I mean, I’m 55, and I think 55 is a new 35. I feel really, really young. Most people say that I look young for my age as well. But I was reading something a couple of days ago, and it was not on CNN, but it was a CNN survey. And they asked people, at what age do people become old? And the age they picked was 57. And I’m like, “bummer, I’m about to be an old person.” And I was just laughing at that because it’s just a number that we humans give to something. But I want you to start thinking about in this episode about your mortality. You’re not going to be on this planet that long. And in full transparency, even working with a shaman for a lot of years, for the early part of that, I squandered a lot of my life. And I have no regrets about that because it is what it is. I did what I did. And I didn’t take my apprenticeship as fully as I possibly could back many years ago. So what I want you to look at is: where do you squander your life?
And I’m going to go to some very just inane, very simple, very banal things. But do you squander your life watching Netflix or watching all this nonsensical stuff? And by the way, I do watch Netflix and everything else like the rest of us. But I ask you, do you squander your life watching stuff like that? And here in the U.S., I think the average American spends, I don’t know, I mean, like on Sunday, they spend four hours watching Netflix alone. And you know what? I’m going to come to your defense in mind that sometimes we need to veg out. We need to chill out. And I completely get that. But where do you squander your life? You know, a place that a lot of people squander their life is in their emotions. Not that we don’t have emotions, but they squander their life being trapped in their emotions. So I want to ask you, which I’ve done on other episodes, and again, bear with me as I kind of weave through this episode, is where do you spend a majority, mentally speaking, a majority of your time in this life? And then look at, is that a valuable investment of my time? Is that a valuable investment in my spiritual growth? And I don’t mean dogmatic growth, but I mean spiritual growth. Is that a good use of the evolution of me while I’m on this planet?
And again, being fully transparent, I am fully transparent in saying that I squandered an early part of my life and just floundering around in life, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, not knowing where I wanted to go, and not using my time wisely, or as I deem it to be wisely today. I also want to address also… somebody wrote me an email. My team actually gets all the emails. If you send me an email, it’s not going to come to me directly. It’s going to go to the team. And somebody said that I shouldn’t apologize. It’s simply just an old habit. I’m apologizing about, like, for example, in this episode. And the reason why I say, “well, just bear with me,” I mean, I don’t have notes on the episode. It’s going to just be under itself, and it’s going to go until I deem it at the end of the episode. But I’m just saying stay with me and bear with me, and I’m apologizing for that because sometimes I know that some episodes are more cogent than others. Some of you are more succinct than others. But the way that I look at it is really, you know, it is telling you what I really feel about it. It is what it is. You want to listen? Listen. You don’t want to listen? Don’t listen. It’s entirely up to you.
But I also look at me, and this is something my brother-in-law, Don Javier, has said before, is that so many of us get caught… and I’m going to come back to mortality and all that kind of stuff we’re talking about… but so many waste, and I’ve talked about this in the podcast, we waste our lives while we’re on the planet, which is not very long. We waste our lives caught in our… and a word that I use is tonal, T O N A L. That’s Toltec, meaning like ego, meaning like, for example, my ego, my tonal would be Jim Fortin. It’s the skin that I walk around in. It’s my identity. It’s my air quote, past history, all that kind of stuff. But we spend so much of our life in our tonal, and we literally don’t even recognize that our tonal is only like 1% of what we are. And then what we do, meaning the totality of us, like I’d mentioned, the gallon jug and the ocean… instead of actually engaging with the ocean, we engage with the gallon jug. And then we’re like, “oh my God, my jug is running out of water. My jug is running out of water. My jug is running out of water,” not even recognizing we’re the totality of the ocean. And when I say jug is running out of water, what I mean by that is we think our life and our time is running out. So what I want you to look at also, our request and our time here is that, and I guess what I’m getting to is how do you invest your life?
Now, something that I’ve mentioned here in the podcast, Don Javier does the majority of his work with me and anyone that he works with in dream time. I mean, by the way, dream time is no different than daytime, it’s simply our matter of perception. And that’s a whole different podcast episode beyond dreaming is that we think when we go to sleep and we’re in dream time, we think that we’re out. No, you’re alive is what you are right now, it’s just a different reality for you. But we do, and he does what’s called candle work, meaning he works with the elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. And I started candle work with him in 1996, actually September of 1996. And that very first night in dream time, I had a dream and we were in ancient Roman garb. And he walked up to me and he had a sword. And in the dream, I’m like, “hey,” you know, back then I called him Javier, not Don Javier. He walked up and he had a sword. And like I said, we were in ancient Roman garb. And he had a sword and he stabbed me in the chest and I died. And in the next air quote scene, meaning the next, you know, image in the dream, he pulls back a curtain and I’m alive. And he said, “see, I told you that death is just an illusion.” And that was one of the very first dreams and the very first night that I had that I started working with him. And I’ve been putting that together for many years in my mind. And I’ve come to greater awareness and realizations over the years. But my leaving this planet, my exiting this planet or you exiting this planet is nothing more… it’s going to happen physically, but it’s an illusion because death is an illusion. You, as I’ve mentioned before, Einsteinian physics, the law of the conservation of energy and the law of the conservation of matter, you cannot die. Meaning you, the ocean, the metaphor that I’ve given you, your soul lives in totality.
Don Javier was once talking to me, and I still cannot get my mind around this. So I don’t try to get my mind around it because I can’t get my mind around it. But he said to me, he goes, “how old do you think you are?” And I said, “I don’t know, a billion years, two billion,” meaning my soul. “Three billion years, I don’t know.” And he said, “no.” He goes, “you are over a googol years old.” And like I said, I couldn’t even get my mind around it. I mean, how do you even fathom a one with 100 zeros behind it in the totality of you? So I haven’t tried to get my mind around it because there’s no way to do it.
But what I’m sharing with you and what you’re getting, hopefully getting, is that your life, your life is a continuum. And this is something else, as I said, I’m kind of hopping all over the place in this podcast, and I will wrap up with somewhere when we’re done with this episode. But these are all things he said to me over the years when he said, “you know what? There’s nothing to be afraid of. Because when you recognize that your life is a continuum, then what’s there to be afraid of?” So when I look at continuum, I look at me, I’m always going to exist. My soul is always going to be maybe different lives. And let me see, let me add one thing here. My brother-in-law taught me or shared with me that… okay, here we go. You chose this incarnation. Whatever you’re experiencing this lifetime, whether you are born in Africa or Germany or Australia or you’re tall or you have a lifetime disease or you’re gay or whatever, ever, ever, ever, whatever you have in your lifetime, you chose before you got here to have this experience for your highest good, your highest learning so that you might evolve. And then when you look at it that way, from that position, it really does give credence to what I say is that life is choice… I mean, the ultimate choice. The ultimate choice in your life was the choice to incarnate on this planet. That’s why I say life is choice, because I touched on that a little bit earlier. It’s a fluid process of choice from moment to moment in your life. So what I want to share with you is this, is, and I think you have it by this point, but wherever you are, and whatever you have, it is by choice.
You also look at stations in life here really quickly is, you know, if you ask people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, all the way down to the homeless, providing there’s no mental illness or anything there affecting the homelessness is… many times people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, poverty level, et cetera, many times they will say, “well, this isn’t my choice. I mean, why would I choose this? I didn’t decide this.” And then if you look at CEOs. You really are going to be hard-pressed to find a CEO that said, “well, how did I become a CEO and make all this money and have a great job and lead this big company? I didn’t choose this.” Well, yeah, you did. Both ends of the spectrum choose. And if you look at people that go from, you know, the old metaphorical phrase, rags to riches, it’s absolutely possible, but it’s based upon the choices that people make.
Okay, so your transformational takeaway is: if you don’t like where you are in life, start making different choices.
Okay, so the next episode, I’m going to actually dig into an email that I got from someone. And I see a theme. This may or may not apply to you, but I see a theme, and it’s definitely worth me answering and spending some time on the next episode. When I say, well, let me back up here, is I attract a lot of entrepreneurs. Not everyone’s an entrepreneur, but I attract a lot. Or people that are wanting to start their own businesses. And basically the gist of the email is this. This was a question in there by Susan. She said, “I started my own business and it’s not working out. What do I do now?” Well, I want to share with you guys on the next episode, if you’re like Susan. If you’ve got a business, you started your own business and maybe it’s doing, it’s doing okay, but it’s not doing really well, or you started a business and it’s not doing well at all, I want to share with you what you may want your next steps to be.
Okay, thanks for listening. I’ll catch you over on the next episode or whichever episode you hop around to. Stay well and make it a great day today. Bye-bye.