You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled Conversations with a Sorcerer, Life Lessons, the Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly. This was from a talk that I had with Don Javier, my
brother -in -law, back probably around March of 2023.
And the theme in this talk was about life lessons and letting go. So things that happen to us, many people hold onto those things and cause themselves
a great deal of pain. And in this episode, I wanna talk about recognizing the
blessing of what happened to us and letting things go. So if you’re carrying a lot of weight, you’re carrying a lot of things from your past And a lot of things are weighing you down, then you’re going to love this episode. Keep listening.
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 raw, raw 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 podcastis 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.

Okay, so as I said in the opening,the theme of this talk was life lessons. I mean, we’ve all heard before that life is about lessons. But in this episode, I want to go deeper and I want to look at the concept of lessons from a deeper, perhaps more profound perspective. I think back to 1996, I started working with Don Javier around that time, maybe 1995. And he called me one day and we were chatting. And it was just a general chat. I mean, he’s my brother -in -law, so it’s a family chat, etc., but he’s also a sorcerer and a shaman and a babalao and on the wall. wall. So there was always an intermingling of spirituality in the conversation. And he used to call me Cunhado, which is Spanish for brother -in -law. But he said, “Cunhado, listen, every single thing that happens to you in your life, no matter what it is, no matter how good that you think it is, or how bad that you think it is, every single thing that happens to you in your life happens because it’s a lesson so thatyou can learn and grow. So in this conversation, he was saying in this particular talk, and this is a direct quote, everything is a lesson, no matter how painful a lesson might be, everything is a lesson and the lessons will continue until you learn your lessons. He said when we have the lessons the first time, we’re supposed to learn our lesson. And when we don’t learn our lesson, and we do it a second time, then it’s a mistake. What I wanna share here is, when he uses the word mistake, I’ll cover that in just a moment. I don’t look at life as having mistakes, only outcomes. But again, I’ll explain why he’s using it in this kind of way. But trust me, when I tell you, I’m no different than you guys. I mean, I learned a lot quicker these days. And even though it’s ending now 2024, we’re starting the fourth quarter of 2024, it was a challenging, challenging year, very challenging year. I had some things going on in my life, a lot of things I haven’t shared because they’re personal to me and other people, that I did a little research many years ago and it talked about the biggest stressors in life. And I
had three of those things going on at the same time. So suffice it to say it was
a hell of a year in 2024. And the way that I look at it is, well,2024 might have been a bitch. But you know what? Look what I’ve learned. Look at the blessings. Look at how I’ve become more and I can be more and I’m doing more as a result of the lessons that I’ve learned over the past one year.
You know, when things are going great in life, we don’t learn the lessons. It’s
generally when things are not going the way that we want is when we have to learn the lessons, but many times we don’t want to learn the lesson. And by the way, I’ve been there. I’m not at that point in my life anymore, but I’ve been there. So talking about the mistake, Don Javier said, when we have the lesson the first time, we’re supposed to learn the lesson. And we don’t learn the lesson from the first time, if we do it again and it happens a second time. And then he said, “Then it’s a mistake.” And that’s how he’s using the word “mistake.” And mistake means, this is what you can say to yourself, is, “I ignored and I didn’t learn my lesson the first time it came and hit me up the backside of the head.” But then he said, “The lesson will keep happening and returning until you learn the lesson.”
And then he asks rhetorically, he goes, “And do you want that to happen to you?” And I think back to many of the things in my life that have been very challenging.And I can say unequivocally, hell no, I don’t want those things to happen again. But I had to learn my lessons so those things didn’t happen again. I want want to share here, Don Javier segwayed in this conversation from lessons into the concept of transitioning or people what most people call dying. He said in everything we have to learn. And this is a quote. He goes, “When I was a little kiddo and my father passed, I was maybe 10 years old. And a lot of people came and they were full of pity and they were saying, “Oh, poor Javier, poor Javier, poor Javier.” And a reminder here, my comment, he is a shaman and he started apprenticing with a shaman when he was a little boy. He’s not a person who just self -designates as a shaman.
I mean, he’s the real deal like you’d find in the Amazon, like I’ve said a
bazillion times on these episodes, but this happened to him when he was 10. And hesaid a direct quote, he goes, “I saw all the beauty. Death is beautiful when you see it. Most people look at it and then it’s tragically painful.
But when you see, you can see the energy, the light, the beings of light, and the love surrounding the transition of the person that has moved off from the planet. And he said to people that were showing him pity when he was a little boy, he said, “Don’t be sorry for me. Don’t bring your pity to me.” And that’s basically how he talks as well, even as an adult, a much older adult. So don’t be sorry for me. Don’t bring your pity to me. What happened here is beautiful. This is a lesson. And he said, “My father didn’t die. He’s in another dimension right now.” And he started joking when he said this because he said people are like, “What’s this little 10 -year -old boy. What’s the wacko that he’s saying? I mean, this kid’s flipped his lid. He’s 10. He’s not in his right mind. But even at 10, and he was already working with a shaman, he was saying, “My father didn’t die. He’s in another dimension right now. So don’t feel sorry for me. This is beautiful.” And he went on to say, “What is happening to all of us us at this time, no matter what time it is in your life, what is happening to all of us, no matter what it is, is a lesson. So let’s learn the lesson so that it does not repeat itself again.
And he was even saying in the context of the conversation when he was 10, when he was in the process of people bringing self -pity to him, and oh, you know, poor Javier, poor Javier, your father died, etc. His exact words were, “This is a lesson.So let’s learn our lesson and not bring pity to the lesson.” The segue off topic, one of his mentors, was the shaman named Donia Maria Sabina, and I remember she waste lling me in the early 2000s or so, that when something happens to somebody, many times we actually think we’re showing love for them when we’re showing pity for them. Oh, poor, poor Susan. Her mom died or her partner died or whatever, and that’s not love, that’s pity. And I’ve learned that now, even at my age, H
I never say that. The reason why is because I’m not sorry. I mean, this is their
journey. This is their path. This is their karma. They’re living their experience,
the person who transitioned. Why would I be sorry about them living their experience? But that in the West is the warped perspective we have on transitioning or people dying, so to speak. Now I do feel empathy in my heart and I will get people a hug and say, you know, my condolences and are there things that I can do to assistyou and etc. But as far as saying, I’m sorry, I don’t do it. And no one who knows me can say they’ve heard me say I’m sorry when somebody passes. Because again,
I’m not sorry because I’m heading that way. You’re listening right now,
whether or not you like it, you’re heading that way, we’re all heading that way.” He went on in this conversation to say, because he was 10, as I’d mentioned, he said, “When I told people not to have pity or pity on me, I wasn’t coming from my little body, meaning the body of a 10 -year -old. I was coming from my knowing, meaning my knowing about the mechanisms of life, the truth about life.And he went on and he said, and yes, I grieved. I grieved for a while because we all have to grieve. You know, thinking back here when my dog, I had to put my dog down Jasper, I love that dog. He was at a Newfoundland mix, an amazing dog. And everyone who met him, people who own dogs think their dog as special, we all do. But everyone who met him just said there’s something different about that boy.He was an amazing boy. There was a big loss in the house when he transitioned
because he was such a big personality. And he transitioned, I had to let him go on a Friday and Don Javier called me on a Sunday. And he said, “Yeah, grieve a little bit and I’m going to go to where I’m going in the podcast here and what he was sharing. And he said this before about people and about different things. He’s like Jasper didn’t die. Jasper as well. He’s just at another dimension right now.
So back to the conversation Don Javier was saying when people were, you know, having pity for him and his dad passed. And he said, yes, I grieved and I grieved for a while because we all have to grieve. And then he said, “Maybe two weeks, maybe a month, maybe two months, but we have to stop and move on.” That’s a hard one for a lot of people, because in the transformational coaching program and all the coaching that I do, I was talking to a lady one time, and she was upset and sad. And I said, “What do you have set about?” And She goes, “My husband died and I’m like my condolences and we were talking and what came out was, ‘Well, when did
that happen?’” And she said, “Ten years ago.” And my head,
I didn’t say it, I kind of exploded and I’ll talk more about that in the episode,
not about my head exploding, but about what happens to us when we hang on to that. But she was hanging on to this grief, toxicity for a decade.
And Don Javier said, you know, maybe two weeks a month, maybe two, but we have to stop and move on and let it go. And then he went on to say something that I just had shared with you about when my dog Jasper, I had to let him go. He goes, my dad, he didn’t die. He’s just at another dimension. He is not in the body,
and even he, which Don Javier was indicating, was part of his lessons,
is his father now understood that he was not the body that he thought that he was, and that was the totality of his being. He was simply inhabiting a body.
In this conversation, Don Javier went on to say, And it goes, “We have to learn.” And if we don’t learn the bigger point of the episodes, learning our life lessons, and this is around transitioning people air -cooled dying, if we don’t learn, then we suffocate ourselves and we burn ourselves. When we don’t let people go, That is toxic and unhealthy. So think there for a moment,
this is from me, not don’t have a year. Think about how many things and people you refuse to let go of in your life. Maybe someone passed two,
three months ago and you won’t let it go. And I know it’s not entirely comforting to hear that. That’s just part of the experience. That’s what we signed up for.
Life in the body, the current body you’re in, is temporary. Even the second you’re born, you already are on the path of death, leaving the planet. But we,
especially in the West, we attach to this ego identity we have,
and we won’t let it go. And I remember something I learned many years ago.
This might help put it into a different perspective just by changing a word and
maybe changing the word lessons is everything that happens to you in your life.
So let’s replace the word lesson. Every single thing that happens to you in your life, no matter how much you like it or you don’t like it, or how good or how, air quote, bad it is, everything is medicine so that you can grow and evolve spiritually. My dad was an alcoholic, as I mentioned before on other episodes. In my earlier life, he was a great dad. But the older that I got into my teens, his alcoholism progressed and he became more and more challenging, more and more difficult, and he literally became an abuse of father when I was in high school, to a large degree.
And even Don Javier is like, “Your dad was tough.” He didn’t know my dad. He could see in the ethers. He’s like, “Your dad was tough.” Yeah, he was.
But you know what? Unlike a lot of people who live their entire life under that
cloud of how they were raised or their experiences or whatever, my take on it,
and I would not have had this without that initial conversation of Don Javier in
1996. Well, I guess I would have, but that’s where it started. I recognized that,
yeah, my dad was tough. He was hard on me and he was abusive. But what are my lessons? What medicine was that? And that sounds so contradictory to say, “Wow, you’re being abused. That’s medicine.” Well, it’s not medicine to the 3D ego, bag of skin, gym, 410 or whatever your name is, but it’s medicine so that we can experience it and let it go and grow above and beyond that. So he said that his father’s transition was a blessing and a lesson. And he told his family when they thought he was bonkers when he’s 10 years old, but he even said they knew There was something different about me as a very little boy, but he said my father passed and It’s a lesson for all of us and we have to learn our lessons and then let it go and then move on of life And he said in this conversation As if we stay on this topic, because I wanted to segue in a little bit, I think, and change the topic to some small degree. But he said, “If we don’t learn,” and trust me, I’ve been here, “if we don’t learn, the lesson will come back, and the impact is going to be harder on us.” You think about that in your own life. Think about when something happened, you didn’t learn your lesson, and you keep doing what you’re doing and being who you’re being, and it comes back again, and you’re generally like, “Shit, why me?” It’s where most people go. Why is this happening?
And I guarantee most people listening to the podcast, this is where they go. Not listening, sorry, because you’re not getting the tools that you’re getting. And people go into, “I can’t believe this happened to me, “and I’m so unlucky, and why does keep it. Well, you didn’t learn your lessons. You didn’t take your medicine. As one of my teachers used to say in grammar school, you got to take your medicine. And a lot of times the medicine is pretty bitter. It’s like taking castor oil. It’s not tasty. But if the lesson can bring me something that I can extrapolate and I can assimilate, I’m going to learn that lesson because I don’t want it to come back at me like a tidal wave hitting me even harder the next time that it comes back.
And in this conversation of Don Javier, he went on, “That’s why a lot of people
get ill in life, is that they won’t learn their lessons.” Ponder that. That’s why a lot of people get ill in life is that they don’t learn their lessons, and the lesson is that we must change. And if we don’t learn here and now,
then as I said earlier, the consequences will be magnified. I think back to many years ago, and this was an act of sorcery on the part of Don Javier, is some things happened to me and they were pretty what somebody might call traumatic and it’s when I lived in New York City and Don Javier has said to me and I’m not going to share the experience in this episode he said we’ve been trying to get your attention and you’ve not been paying attention and now we have your attention because we did something beyond your 3D reality something that there’s no way you could rationalize, which now makes you listen and I have your attention. And then he said to me, he goes, “You can learn your lessons now and if you don’t, well, that’s okay because the lessons are going to come back at you and they’re going to be even more painful and they’re going to hit you even harder.” And then he kind of joked. He’s like, “You’re not going to die, but but you ain’t gonna like the lesson if it has to come back to you again. So what I’m sharing with you before I move on here a little bit, everything that happens to you happens for a reason.
And that reason is so that you can grow and evolve spiritually.
I remember him saying many years ago, and I don’t know the right wording, so I wanna be careful. but it was something along like an ordinary person experiences their lessons either as a blessing or a curse. And a spiritual warrior, they understand that every single thing that happens, which is what I said earlier, happens so that I may grow and evolve. So what you want to do is Look at where you are in life. Look at the things that are challenging because we never learn our lessons when things are hunky -dory great, but look at what’s going on in your life.
Look at the challenges. You’re having them because you’re not learning your lessons. So then he went on in this conversation and he said that many times people get addicted to seeking help And he wasn’t talking about what I’m doing in the transformational coaching program or coaching people. He said many people go to psychotherapy and they get addicted. And where he went here, that was very profound, I think, back when I heard it, is he says many people, when they feel like there’s something wrong with them and they’re trying to heal, they will go to other people to heal them, but they’re going to other people to heal them, here’s a profound part, because they won’t let go.
They won’t learn the lesson of what they’re supposed to learn. So the analogy would be, somebody’s in a challenging life situation and they’re kind of like,
Owl, this hurts, owl, this hurts, owl, this really hurts, ouch, this hurts even more. I don’t know, my life has got so much of this, these
feelings about myself and everything in it, I’m going to go to therapy. What I have found beyond the shadow of a doubt on my own life, even though Don Javier said this and it just dawned on me as I’m talking to you, when I learned my lessons, I let go of things. Things stopped hurting so badly. And the negative side goes to the Buddhist quote of your greatest cause of suffering is your attachments. Now, I do want to say here, we probably have a lot of therapists listening. I know a lot of therapists are in TCP, therapists /coaches. But probably 70 % of people inside TCP are online entrepreneurs of some sort. And Don Javier, I’m just gonna share his perspective, okay? My partner and I have been in couples therapy before. What we learned in therapy was not the therapist helping us be better on the inside. It was better communication skills in the relationship. We learned better about ways to communicate with each other. And for Don Javier, his perspective has always been with people that he works with, like myself, apprentices, is you may need a guide. And because Don Javier is a guide to me and those that he works with, you may need a guide, but don’t become addicted to the
guide. Take your lessons, learn your lessons, lessons and heal yourself and all
fairness. I mean, even today, like last night, I texted Don Javier and needed
something. I wanted his help on something, I texted him. He’s my guide and I guide thousands upon thousands of people and I tell them if they’re staying around for way too long in my perspective and opinion, then they’re not learning their If they want to stay part of the community, that’s one thing because we have a really amazing community over at TCP and people will stay for years. But if they’re staying because there’s always something broken about them, they’re not learning their lessons. So you
take whatever you want from that therapy, not therapy, whatever you want. But he went on to say in this conversation, which is why a lot of people do go to therapy. And I’m going to just tell you these are his words, not mine, okay? When you have something happen to you, let’s say you’re sexually molested,
verbally abused, maybe even assaulted in some way, or whatever happens in life, no matter what it is, we have to make peace with it and we have to learn from it. Because if we don’t make peace with it and we don’t learn from it, we become toxic to ourselves and to other people. Now, in this conversation, he didn’t go further into becoming toxic with ourselves, but I knew what he meant. And what he meant was is that we do. We stew in these lower frequency negative emotions that affect what he calls the biodome, we call it the body, but it affects us both energetically and physically because we’re basically stewing in the toxicity of the emotions. Let me share what that could mean for you and different people. As many times We stew in the angerof something that we perceive someone did to us. And for the purpose of other
people passing in the context of this conversation, many times people stew in sadness and self -pity. And then Don Javier went on to say, “People often think, Poor me. Once upon a time, this happened to me.” But he went on,
“You’re not now who you were back then. What happened, happened back then. That was the past. This is now. We’ve got to be in the now.” And he said, “You know, and I observe this all the time. I see it all the time in the world, and I mean all the time. That’s a universal qualifier, which is pretty much true. Not all people, but most people, we get into the past and the negativity and the feelings and this happened and that happened. And you don’t understand me and this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, excuse, excuse, excuse, excuse. And many people do that and they do it and they never learn the lesson. And the lessons are the good, the bad and the ugly because this is life. Think about that. Nobody promised you a bowl of cherries and a rose garden. Life is the good, the bad and the ugly and we must learn our lessons from that. There’s gonna be a part two to this episode but let me bring the transformational takeaways to you so far. Number one is that every single thing it
happens to you in your life is a lesson so that you can grow and evolve
spiritually. Number two, let go of the past. What happened? That was then, it’s not now. And many people let what happened then infiltrate and live in them now And it festers, and it hurts the person because they won’t let the past go. So a question for you, as we actually wrap up this episode, if you’re someone that hangs on to the self -pity and the anger and the poor me, and no, no, no, you don’t understand. I was abused by my parents 35 years ago. This happened to me. That happened to me. This happened to me. That happened to me. Poor me. Poor me. My life sucks because of XYZ. The question for you, the ponder before the next episode, is what does holding on to the past? What does holding on to all of this give to you? Think about that. And you could say, well, it doesn’t give me anything. Yes, it does. It conveys what’s called a secondary gain. You get some gain, whether it’s pity from other people or whatever and you’re wanting to pity, it’s just different things. But make no mistake, it’s all subconscious. When you reuse to
let go of something that is painful for you, you’re getting a secondary gain, not the initial gain, but the secondary gain. So I’m gonna give you a little example of this. Let’s say you wanna build your own business, but you’re afraid to put yourself out because people are going to judge you. Well, you’re looking at it and saying, well, that’s bad, I gotta put myself out, it’s bad that I don’t do it. But I look at what’s the secondary gain? What benefit do you get from not putting yourself out there. And then people recognize, oh, the benefit I get is that I’m safe and people don’t judge me. Notice even though the behavior is not a desirable behavior, the secondary gain there is a payoff and we have to recognize that. Okay, we’re gonna pick up with this very same topic on the next episode. Thank you for listening and I’ll catch you on the next episode. Bye -bye.