J-H-Parker: Episode 1154

Transcript

[0:00:50] HA: Pay attention to the people you meet, by chance. Often, they are messengers sent to help you along your way. My next guest never had to look far for an advocate and mentor to help him overcome his greatest challenges, from his father’s abuse to the tragic loss of his son. Welcome back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author John Henry, who is here to talk about his new book called, Be the Dawn in The Darkness: The Relentless Pursuit Of Becoming Whom We Are Meant to Be. Let’s flip through it. Hello friends and welcome back to the show. I have a very special one today because I have my friend, John Henry here with me today, talking about his new book called, Be the Dawn in The Darkness. Ah, such a good title. John Henry, thank you for joining me today, man, I really appreciate your time.

[0:01:44] JHP: Thanks Hussein, great to be here.

[0:01:46] HA: Yeah. I was swimming through your book and you know, we talked about this a little bit off the microphone but you know, I found components of characteristics of who I am embedded all throughout your book, which I loved. So, before we get into the book and all the questions I have set up for you, I really want to give our listeners an idea of who you are, perhaps a personal background and maybe someone or something that happened in your life that led you on the path that you’re on now.

[0:02:14] JHP: Well, I’m a behavioral assessment analyst. I’ve been doing that for my career, doing individual and personal transformational work with business leaders and companies but also for the last 25 years, been working with you know, transitioning veterans who are having major challenges and also their families and so I spend a lot of time, in my free time, doing that work and write. I really write you know? I started therapeutically writing to deal with my own personal struggles with grief and loss and recovery and personal transformation and it turned into authoring like my first book. I actually recorded my first book, and that’s more or less what it was, it’s about transitioning veterans and how we get in our own way and what to do about it and it’s really a tribute project for my son who has passed away after he came back from Afghanistan — left the military. This book is as well, it’s about therapeutically being able to process unresolved trauma, being able to mature through grief and loss and it’s just a great amount of personal transformation that we all go through as we mature in our loss.

[0:03:30] HA: Yeah, such a powerful journey. I’m really excited to just have you talk a little bit about this beautiful person that was in your life that influenced you in such a positive way and had this sort of belief in you and I think for me, that person was always my father but it’s different for so many different people. He really saw something in me that perhaps I didn’t see in myself until honestly, maybe after he passed and so you know, I want you to go there a little bit. Can you tell me about this beautiful person that was in your life that kind of helped shape certain experiences?

[0:04:09] JHP: Well, he was an amazing guy and I can say I'm so envious of him because he was successful in so many ways by the time he was 29 when he died that I can imagine who he would have become. He was you know… he and I both grew up in the bad part of Southwest Phoenix, Arizona where there are drugs, gangs, and violence and he and I shared a couple of things right off the bat — is that we were able to get into the military because we didn’t have any felonies and all of our friends did and that was his ticket. That was my ticket out of our neighborhood and his name is Danny. I didn’t meet Danny until he was eight and a half years old and I talk about it in my book. I actually had to go door-to-door in a neighborhood because I remembered dropping his mom off 10 years prior, to her grandparent’s house and he was actually adopted by his grandparents and so there’s more to the story than that. But I was able to locate the house and knock on the door and you know, work my way into his life and it was a challenging relationship. The way I characterized it in the book is it was beautifully broken just the way it was. And we got into the military, that’s where he found his calling, and unfortunately — he called me in, let’s see, August of 2001, telling me that they were asking him to re-enlist. They were going to give him a stripe and a big bonus should he do it. He's got a family and we talked about it and he made a decision to do it and then a month later or less than a month later, 9/11 happened and then he was in Uzbekistan, and by October, I think, 15th, helping to lock down the air bases there for the beginning of what would be the Afghan war or conflict and so he’s just an inspirational guy. I mean, he loved leading his men, he was – I’ve read his performance reviews, he was just super calm and collected in combat and just really, you know, just took care of whatever needed to get done and on one side, he was just really, really gentle, smiling, contagious smile, friendly, charismatic guy and then, he was a warrior. He was just one of the scariest people I’ve ever met. So he really influenced my life in so many levels and that it was in perfect relationship and it’s just the way it was and I just accepted for what I was able to have. Amazing guy, he made it all the way home from Afghanistan and then unfortunately, he needed adrenaline to deal with his PTSD and a lot of pot and some drinking — thrown in there — and you know one night, he was doing a 120 miles an hour down an unlettered road at midnight on his Harley and lost control of it and so that’s all we know. So this book for me it’s about the journey of life, it’s about telling his story and you know, honoring.

[0:07:10] HA: Yeah, I love that so much man, because I felt like the only way can truly connect to what my father I feel like gifted me with was to share about his story in his life and how he quite literally saved us from that refugee camp through his art, through his ability to communicate and be compassionate and loving with other people and I think we learn so much from those human beings that come in and out of our lives that really shape our perspective. And for me, writing my book was you know, again, like I said earlier, it’s just a way to say thank you and a way to just convene with and resolve with all these stories and sit with them and they profoundly changed me and my trajectory and I know that there are so many people out there that can relate to that. There are so many people who have that special someone or special event or special thing that happened to them that helped them see the world just a little bit differently and I think that’s beautiful. So in your book, you cover many challenges and experiences from tragic loss, of course, for your son. Can you share a specific story of just how you decided to, you know, lean into overcoming particularly difficult situations and how did you find hope and resilience in the face of such, you know, hardships?

[0:08:28] JHP: Well, fortunately for me, I had a great aunt, her name was Gladys. We called her Glad and she was just an amazing matriarch of our family and a mentor — and when I was a young boy, she would come down from the cold winters of Canada and she would stay with us in Phoenix for two months a year, just before Thanksgiving until just after New Year’s and she could have stayed with my grandparents — But she actually wanted to be close to my mother and my sister and brother and I, she could create some safety because my father was a really violent and alcoholic violent combat veteran from the Korean War and the Marine Corps and in Vietnam but he would never take her on. He would never do anything but be a gentleman around her and so she would stay — and I think the answer to your question the most is she provisioned me for my hero’s journey that had already begun without telling you that necessarily. And every morning at 4:30 in the morning, she would get up and start making her Canadian breakfast, which was thick-cut Canadian bacon, cheddar cheese, toast and coffee cream, and maple syrup and I would smell the bacon at about 4:30. I would get up and I would sneak out of the room and my brother and sister never caught on and for those two months, I sat at her feet every morning and she would just really just inform me about the world and she was a very famous person in Canada. She was the only Canadian war correspondent in Europe during the rise of fascism and the Nazi invasion of Paris and she wrote a book about it. She’s got a Canadian history channel segment doing a documentary about her life. So I had the privilege of having this woman really, really represent to me what a strong, healthy, balanced woman was in my life and she told me I would do extraordinary things with my life and I believed her because she said it. You’re very impressionable when you’re really young and when you have that sort of level of gravitas, that magnitude, she’s the only one in my life that actually sat down and talked to me and asked me how was doing and talked to me about the hero’s journey and talked to me about this arc of maturity and finding my gifts and an important part of it was to pay attention to the messengers that you seem to meet by chance because they’re often the ones who are here to teach you the most. I just became naturally curious about, “If I get a flat tire, who am I supposed to meet?” Like I’m in a bad situation, who am I supposed to meet? And so her guidance carried me through a lot of trauma and a lot of really terrible situations and then when she passed away in my 40s, she became like the angel on my shoulder and like my son, Danny, she’s the other main character throughout the entire book. To answer your question more specifically, she told me that God was love. She researched all the different religions of the world and she said that if you take out the extreme aspects of all of them, they have one common denominator: God is love — and she said, “Do you believe that?” and I had to pause because my dad was like on the other side of a curtain, listening. She noticed was nervous and she said, “Take me for a walk to the park.” So we get there and she’s like, “You want to talk about anything?” “I’m not allowed to talk.” She’s like, “What do you mean you’re not allowed to talk? Did your father tell you, you couldn’t talk to me?” and I’m just – I really just clammed right up ‘till finally, she’s like, “You can talk to me on anything, this is between you and I. So, what is it about God that’s love that you don’t understand?” and I said, “God is love, that may be true for you but it’s not true for me because why am I afraid all the time, why is this happening to me?” And so what came from that was an ongoing discussion where she said, “You are going to discover your purpose in life and you're going to discover for yourself at some point that God is love.” I always came back to that but the funny thing about it is, of all the tragedies that I’ve had in my life and all the very, very violent, traumatic situations, just before the impact of what was going on, I cannot tell you how many times I‘ve asked myself, “If God is love, why is this happening to me?” So I didn’t discover my purpose ‘till later in life and I discovered for myself that God is love and I also discovered the purpose for my suffering. “Why is this happening to me?” was to be given the gift of empathy so I could understand the pain of others. This whole writing project started out therapeutically to process unresolved trauma and I just had all these different pieces of work and then I watched a documentary called, Finding Joe. It’s about finding Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey that he developed and I did a screen capture of the hero’s journey graphic that they did a really good job with and then I put it in PowerPoint and I created all these little snippets of my life in chronological order that absolutely matched the arc of the hero’s journey and then I wrote my table of contents and then I started writing like, with a purpose and I saved all the really, really bad stuff for last. But it turned into a 600-page book and then I had to narrow it down to less than 400. The therapeutic relief, it’s like I coughed up all these hairballs and I was able to get it outside of my body, somatically and I no longer held on to it and I was able to look at it and feel it but it was different because it was outside of me. So that’s really where it came from and how it ended up to be.

[0:14:11] HA: It’s so powerful man, I love this movement in your journey from your aunt whom I just want to hang out with because she sounds like such a beautiful human being that took so much of the necessary time to help you see who you can truly become and at least planted the seeds, in trusting that they will sort of grow and manifest as they should, right? When you go through those experiences. When you find what God is love to you and how you begin to define it, those things are all up to you to decide but how she got to it and how she wants you to get there are two different things, and this idea of just planting the seeds and believing, how much do we crave someone believing in us and loving us and it just takes one person. So I love that so much that she was in your life and it really helped you cultivate a sense of intuition and looking ahead at the transformation that was bound to unfold and so you know, your book is obviously filled with these stories of growth, transformation, and redemption. What advice would you give to someone who feels stuck or struggling to find hope? How can people turn their struggles into opportunities for growth and positive change?

[0:15:28] JHP: I’ve been there a lot, focus on who you’re becoming. Really I think for me, I didn’t want to go to counseling, you know? Because I was in the Marine Corps and you don’t ask for help. So focus on who you’re becoming or maybe I’ll just use a story from the actual book that the trajectory of my life when I was really withdrawn, trying to figure out what I was going to do when I left the military, I met a messenger. And there’s no other way to look at it and he said, he noticed I was going to be getting out in a couple of weeks and he said, “Can I give you some advice?” and he was a warrant officer and it’s just some, a special type of person becomes a warrant officer in the military and somebody who was enlisted and they went back to school and they came back in as an officer. So they really know what they’re talking about and he said, “You know, you’re going to get out in a couple of weeks and you’re going to find out that the world doesn’t need another hard-ass Marine who can parachute out of helicopters at night and carry big heavy packs, they just don’t care about that and if I were you, I’d go to the closest bookstore and I’d go to the self-help section and I’d find anything that jumps out the shelf at me and I’d start reading about who I’m becoming.” He said, “The world is exactly the same as when you’ve left home but you’ve changed.” I only talked to him for like five minutes. This is definitely one of those messengers sent from Glad, where I shook his hands, thanked him very much and I went directly to the bookstore. Now, they didn’t have bookstores on Marine Corps bases, so I had to go to the Air Force base about six miles away. It was in Okinawa, Japan and I had to ask the lady at the front desk. He told me, he said, “Do not go to the psychology section, go to the self-help section” so I asked the lady where the self-help section was and she took me over and it’s just a big long bookcase and he just suggested look at all the spines and start pulling them off the shelf, make a stack and then pick three that really speak to you. The first one was, The Magic of Thinking Big by Schwartz and I’m like, “That just sounds like a great book. I got to get that one.” The second one was, Psycho-Cybernetics, which was really a funky name but after I looked at it, I was like, “This makes a lot of sense.” He was a plastic surgeon who made people beautiful but they still couldn’t see it because of their history and their self-perception.

[0:17:48] HA: Oh wow. My god, that is – yes, continue. This is just so good.

[0:17:52] JHP: Yeah, it is good, you know? Here I am in this impeccable Marine Corp uniform but the outward projection that I put out to other people absolutely did not match the internal representations in my mind and in my psyche and my self-worth, it is called the internal cohesion of what you project to others is really seriously who you are, then that means you have a high level of internal cohesion and I certainly didn’t. So that was the second book and then the third book was, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Again, the title is just like, “That’s the book I need” and so I would say to your audience if you’re depressed, if you’re suffering like I was the wounded healer for 10 years after my son was killed if I didn’t move my pain, it ate me alive and I would sometimes sit in my apartment for days and really not even shower, barely eat, wouldn’t go outside. So I’ve been there and personal development, transformational development, finding people that I could relate to that were struggling with some of the same issues, part of it was finding a tribe of people who understood the difficulty — I had people say they understand when they don’t understand, being able to reach out and talk to people but also they don’t have many bookstores these days. But the personal development store-side of Barnes & Noble or get on the Internet if you’re more of an auditory learner, just start filling your head with thoughts and ideas, understand what you are up against. If you’ve got some type of diagnosis, then learn about it. It is not a life sentence but I’ve been diagnosed with some pretty severe things in my younger years — and I’m not on any medication and I have a life that is fulfilling. So there is a way through and I really think personal development, and transformational development in combination, in tandem with seeing a therapist, I also discovered Native American healing rituals and vision quests and then I ultimately discovered plant medicine journeys were the most impactful for me, personally. So lots more to talk about around that.

[0:20:05] HA: Man, that is so powerful. You know what they could do too is also go pick up your book and audiobook because they’re both amazing and you know, I love that you really mentioned this idea of a messenger. I can’t agree with you more on so many occasions, there have been people in my life that have come in and out who have sort of pointed at something that I look at or pay attention to or just think about or dwell on. I think those people are – they are just so, like you said, their gifts from the other side and we may not know it at the time but certainly in hindsight. I think that’s beautiful and I love how you shared this idea of just going to the bookstore, picking up a few self-help books and you know, what goes into your mind is what starts to swirl and not everything is going to apply. You may not learn anything from those books. But you just now absorb something of a possibility, perhaps you know what? I think books are definitely for me they are the water to those seeds, those seeds of thought and those seeds that Glad has planted and even the seeds that your father or mother or whomever you grew up with that maybe, you know, we thought would be like a negative thing in our life actually transforms us in different ways. I think by nourishing our minds with this knowledge of to make sense of those past experiences and to make sense of them can now enable us to, you know, turn them into fuel and see how they can serve us today and I think for me reading did that and it helped me reflect on my refugee experience in a much more positive way, not that that’s a positive thing is just how I started to reframe it and say, “Okay, well this thing happened. How can I use it now to sort of nourish my future as opposed to limit me or prevent me from doing things?” I totally agree, I think the book that altered my perception of things was, The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer. It was such a deep, deep book and it just deeply resonated with me and so that led me on my path of course of opening up more books, really opening up my mind. So I love that, I love that part of the transformation is really, you know, going inwards and really unraveling those things. Your book is a testament to the power of self-reflection I think. It is obviously not just personal growth but of course, resilience. What’s one lesson that you hope readers will take away from your story and how can readers use that experience to find their own sense of purpose and fulfillment?

[0:22:40] JHP: Well, I just think being curious and being a passionate learner, there is a quote that I love, you know, “Learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with the world that no longer exists.” That’s from Eric Hoffer and I think I showed up in the world after the military learned and I was hard-headed like a lot of people are, I didn’t want to take any advice and I had to run into the brick wall myself and be curious. I mean, really, really start looking at how you view things because, for me, it was about learning more things. There is only one thing that I know for sure, I know how to learn, and when I looked at what it’s going to take for me to get through the things that I’ve been through, there is so much I could talk about but I’m just going to try to hit a couple of things. So the book is about this transformational journey. I wrote it in such a way that I’ve read a lot of self-help books, you know, this is not the seven steps to being successful kind of book. There is plenty of books out there like that but it is a deeply transformational body of work that’s kind of disguised as a narrative memoir. Any time I started noticing in my writing that I was starting to teach or tell, I immediately copy that content and put it somewhere else. Because I want people to learn in the struggle vicariously like what actually happened and I am transparently sharing that and what I actually learned and what happened for me because I learned and what came next. I say this a lot to people is that the teachers fall from the pedestals we put them on. So I am not a teacher, I’m not here to teach anybody anything. I am here to live my life and to share what my experience has been. So people may learn vicariously through what I discovered like the layers of one of those Russian dolls. Every time I popped it open, I’d be excited because I’d made a huge breakthrough only to find that there was the hard surface of the next layer, and the more I kept on uncovering those layers, the more I started getting down to the core and then I really started discovering what I was up against. For me it was rage, it was retribution and the smallest little nugget down there was joy and so I had all this rage and retribution guarding my joy and I thought, “That’s really strange. Why is rage guarding my joy?” you know? It’s a longer story than that but there is just this relentless pursuit of becoming who we are meant to be is real. We learn we grow, and we evolve. You know, I am a behavioral assessment analyst and I regularly survey myself annually and my friends and clients annually because we learn, we evolve, we grow, we fail, we mature and we’re not the same as we were a year ago. We may have similar characteristics but the more you put yourself out there, you know, into the world and you become curious and you become uncomfortable, you know, the learning is in the struggle. That’s what this whole thing is about, there are just so many parts to it. Speaking of parts, there is The Parts Work by Dick Schwartz, Internal Family Systems, I learned a lot about myself when I sort of understand that I may feel depressed right now but it’s not really who I am. Part of me is depressed at times and so this whole thing about parts of ourselves are in conflict but not the whole self, we have moments, we have conflict. We have parts of us that stay in conflict but it is about resolving that part not necessarily changing our life and questioning who we are. So these are some of the insights that I picked up along the way that are in the book. It is a cookie crumb trail to help people look at where might you be looking. So the examples are, there are many chapters in the book about thought leaders that I went through their programs. You know, I went through events and experiences and I write about the epiphanies that I experienced, you know like the warrior’s wisdom with Stuart Wilde and a weeklong trip out in his house in New Mexico and the wilderness doing all kinds of crazy outward bounds kind of experiential exercises and then you know, getting into non-duality and then mindfulness with Adyashanti and Richard Miller and wonderful people that have actually impacted my life so profoundly that I don’t use their quotes without giving them the credit. I have a synthesis of what’s mine but I believe in dedicating time and effort to talk about these great teachers and how they’ve impacted my life. So this transformational journey is about self-discovery and we can only do that by opening your mind and remaining open and curious.

[0:27:38] HA: That’s so beautiful man, I love that. I just feel like you know, as you’re speaking I like you kind of analysis on the hero’s journey to see yourself in it. As you’re speaking there are so many components in which I see myself in and that’s really the beauty of writing. The beauty of writing I feel like helps us get to that core of not only who we are but what we really want to share, which is an experience. Once we tap into that, then I think there’s a fluidity and connection and I think for me as I read throughout your book, there are so many components that I related to because we all are humans, we are experiencing difficulties and challenges but it’s how we choose to kind of look at them, appreciate them, come up against them and where the rubber meets the road is where the transformation happens. I’m just grateful that you really compounded those years of wisdom and how not only you see yourself but opportunities for greater connection throughout your book is so powerful but I got to ask you, I mean, writing a book is a whole journey in it of itself, what is your favorite part of putting the book together?

[0:28:45] JHP: Oh man, opening up my phone yesterday and seeing that the audiobook is available today. You know, there is –

[0:28:52] HA: Let’s go. That’s awesome.

[0:28:55] JHP: I think when my wife and I, we listened to it, and when we heard “the end” we both looked at each other and got very excited because that’s it, there’s no more editing. There’s no more editing like three years of editing man, it was crazy-making, it was frustrating and it was joyful — just the stress honestly of putting myself out there in such a transparent way has been the most difficult. But after I heard it, I mean, writing the words I was obsessed over the words and I couldn’t stop worrying about it but when I heard the audio version, I just instantly relaxed and said, “Okay, this is what I intended. This is exactly what I intended.” It came out exactly the way I wanted it to.

[0:29:39] HA: That’s so powerful man, I love that so much. That was also one of my favorite parts of the journey was when it all got sewn together. I think my favorite part was holding it in my hand, you know? It’s like it is done. The journey in which we go on to make this thing come to life is difficult, it’s excruciating in some components but it is here, it is done. I think not only did you do a good job of just pulling me in, but there are also so many parts where I was like, “Man, I got to put this down. I got other things I got to do.” So there is that and you did such a good job of just keeping the reader engaged, which I just really appreciate because that’s a really difficult thing to do. So John, thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your stories and experiences with me. They are truly profound. I encourage everyone listening to go get the book. The book is called, Be the Dawn in the Darkness: The Relentless Pursuit of Becoming Whom We Are Meant to Be. So powerful. Besides checking out the book, where can people find you, sir?

[0:30:40] JHP: Well, obviously on Amazon, barnes&noble.com, you can also get it on Kindle, you can get it on Audible. You can also go to harvestingwisdom.com and there’s information about the book and my first audiobook for veterans, those are the destinations.

[0:31:00] HA: Well, thank you, John Henry, I appreciate you so much for your time today, your stories have profoundly impacted me today and I feel good. It’s a Thursday but man, I am feeling good. So thanks again for the call, I appreciate just learning about you today and learning about your journey man. Thanks again and again, congrats on your book. I know it’s going to hit some major number-one sellers, so I’m excited.

[0:31:22] JHP: Yeah, I’m excited too, and really, doing a little research on your background was really great for me to prepare for this call, and thanks for making it really comfortable.

[0:31:30] HA: Absolutely John Henry, it’s my pleasure and I’m grateful that you spend some time lurking out there, looking at all the things that I’ve been blessed to do in the world and I owe it all to my father of course and I know you owe a lot to the people who have come into your life. So I know we have that in common and that is beautiful. So thanks again today, man.

[0:31:49] JHP: Thank you, take care.

[0:31:51] HA: Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find the book, which is called, Be the Dawn in the Darkness: The Relentless Pursuit of Becoming Whom We Are Meant to Be. You can find it right now on Amazon. For more Author Hour episodes, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.