It was September and one of the busiest periods in my life with multiple major projects scheduled for more or less the same time.
On top of the list was the launch of my book, I THINK, THEREFORE I LIE.
The audiobook version was going to be released in October, only a month later. That was number two on my list.
I had my annual recurrent pilot training (standard for all airline pilots) that included four days of simulator training and one day of oral and simulator exams. This recurrent training was scheduled for November and I usually needed at least one month of advance preparation (studying and arm-chair flying). That was number three on my list. I had to keep putting food on the table, after all. (You aren’t legal to fly if you don’t pass your recurrent training.)
Then there was the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Jose where I was going to meet with my target audience in late October.
I was also planning on starting a YouTube channel as well as a podcast, so I had enrolled in online courses on how to do both. These courses weren’t a high priority, but I’d paid in full, forking out several grand, so I had enough skin in the game to want to see the courses through to the end.
Finally, I was working on the finishing touches on my second novel and I was several months behind on the promised deadline, so I’d told my readers the book would be released by the end of a year.
I was getting invitations to do several radio interviews, and to top it off, I was asked to give two talks in Israel in early November.
With four boys (three still at home), a wild, impossibly cute, and equally mischievous, Bichon Frise, my piano practice, the requisite time min time at gym, and all the chores that come with having with being part of a family of five, I had hands full even without all the additional projects I’d taken on.
It was going to be tight. But doable . . .
. . . or so I thought.
Stranger-than-fiction happened soon after I was feeling I had all my ducks lined up and under control. It began in early October of last year when my mother told me she wouldn’t be able to attend my son’s birthday.
Just to give you some context here, Mom was eighty, but she was more fit and active than most sixty-year-olds I know. Only a couple of months earlier, she’d been on a trip visiting Europe, swimming in the Mediterranean, and right after that, she was bouncing around the east coast, visiting friends and family. (She didn’t go zip-lining this year, as she had done in the past, but I think that was probably because she couldn’t fit it into her crazy schedule.)
My mother never missed an opportunity to be at a family gathering and we were the only family she had in the area. She looked forward to her grandkid’s birthdays with almost exhausting enthusiasm. To say that her canceling on an important family occasion like this was unexpected could qualify as the understatement of the decade.
It ended up working out fine—I simply postponed the birthday festivities for the day after my return from a memorial in London. I knew I’d be jetlagged, but I figured it was nothing I couldn’t handle.
When I returned, however, my mother canceled for the second time because she still wasn’t feeling better.
When I asked her if she was eating normally, the answer was no. “Normal” for her meant eating like most people do for the first five minutes and then declaring she was full only a few nibbles later. At eighty, she could fit into the same size jeans she wore as a junior in high school.
I asked her if she was drinking, because here in Arizona if you don’t drink enough liquids you can dehydrate before you know what hit you.
She said she couldn’t hold down more than a few sips.
That’s when I decided to take her to the ER.
Two hours later, we were told she had pancreatic cancer.
My mother was the first person other than me to have practiced the ITTIL (I Think, Therefore I Lie) technique. When I reminded her that she was caught in the trap of believing her thoughts, she followed the steps of the technique and in so doing, she was able to step back and see that her thought was untrue and, in this case, not beneficial to her right now.
We’d just had a diagnosis but without staging, making a determination about how long she had to live was premature and of little value to anyone, especially to someone like my mother who still had the tendency to worry.
A week later, the doctors at Mayo Clinic informed us that my mother had stage three pancreatic cancer that it was operable. This was great news since most surgeons would not operate on pancreatic cancer patients unless they determined there was a good chance the surgery would cure the disease. This was because the surgery is in itself potentially life-threatening. Had surgery not been an option, her oncologist had said she’d only have eight months to a year left to live.
As of that moment, my mother and I started planning for the months ahead. She applied her typical can-do attitude to following the surgeon’s recommendation of remaining as active as possible. The very next day, she was at the gym, on the elliptical. I kid you not. She also set out to eat more carbs, because she was underweight. Normally, it’s good to be thin, but as they say, cancer eats first, so a few extra pounds can be beneficial in this case. (This is where it’s not helpful to be too thin! A little tidbit that could serve as a dangerously good excuse for people avoiding a diet, like me right now!)
Now that things seemed under control and her prognosis was good, I had to reassess my situation, because, at this point, I had a way too on my plate. Even for me.
Something had to give.
My mother’s health and recovery were at the top of my priority list. Like everything else, I started thinking more in terms of what I felt I had to do rather than what I’d like to do.
Studying for my recurrent pilot training was clearly a must-do item. I’ve always gone to simulator events and oral exams well prepared, and I wasn’t about to risk my career and my position as a nineteen-year captain by not doing so now.
Though I still spent a little time working on my novel, I pushed back the publication date to 2020, knowing there was little chance of having the book released by Christmas as planned.
Despite the money I’d already invested, I decided to drop out of the online courses I was taking. I simply had no time left to do the required weekly assignments and live group sessions.
Some things I did maintain, but barely: I went to the gym every other day, and I practiced the piano whenever I could for the minimum time needed to sustain my classical repertoire. I tried my best to take my seven-year-old to the chess academy and help him with his homework, but my wife ended up doing almost all of it, and for the most part, she was on her own with the family.
My wife and I would exchange brief words, but with my heavy flying schedule, all the projects I’d taken on, and the situation with my mother, I felt more like a guest at my own home rather than a husband and father.
For the week prior to my mother’s first chemo session, it seemed that things were somewhat under control. Yes, my life would be very different for the next four to six months of Mom’s treatment and subsequent recovery, but all I needed to manage was getting through November, and the talks in Israel and my recurrent training would be behind me and the workload would be significantly lighter. I’d be able to spend more time with my family, working on my novel, practicing the piano, and staying fit.
At the time, I thought that the plan seemed sound and that my expectations were reasonable.
It turns out they weren’t even close.
What had been a slight discomfort that my mother had mentioned offhandedly on one or two occasions prior to the diagnosis had quickly turned into severe pain. The palliative care team at the Mayo Clinic had not given her enough morphine to last until her next visit, and so I ended up taking her to the ER three times over the following ten days.
Because I couldn’t be with my mother 24/7—not in the long-run at least—we both agreed she needed a caregiver that could be with her for at least eight hours a day while she was undergoing the treatment.
After some research, I found a company that had decent reviews. My mother didn’t get along with the first caregiver and so, the next day, they sent over a different lady. That seemed to have gone well, according to my mother, but when I went over to visit that night (after the caregiver had gone), Mom got a phone call.
She seemed agitated at the person speaking to her, and after a few words, she handed me her cellphone.
It was the police.
The sergeant calling said there were “concerns” of morphine misuse, and he was calling to “make sure everything was okay.”
I explained to the officer that my mother was eighty and she had pancreatic cancer. The officer informed me that he was required to make this “wellness call” because the caregiver company had called 911.
When I spoke to a manager at the company, I was informed that the caregiver had voiced concerns that my mother wasn’t taking her meds properly, and that they are obligated by law to inform the police.
I asked the manager if that law also obligated them to not inform the emergency contact of the concerns before going nuclear and calling the cops.
He said they had no emergency contact number on file. I informed him that I personally gave the number to the caregiver, had her repeat it, and my mother actually witnessed her write the number down. He made lame excuses and offered even lamer apologies. Needless to say, I fired the company. My mother was now without a caregiver, and so I had to find someone that would take care of her ASAP.
I did a lot more research this time. I spent a full day finding a company that would serve her area and that had outstanding reviews. There were just two, but neither could start until early the following week, two days after the chemo was scheduled.
The experience with the police call left a bad taste in my mother’s mouth and I think she lost a good deal of her enthusiasm about having a caregiver and her enthusiasm about her treatment in general.
Mom’s first chemo session did not go well. She was in so much pain they had to stop the infusion to administer IV meds. Still, she did not give up.
That evening when I saw her, though she was visibly drained from the ordeal, she seemed basically okay considering. I figured this was probably just a hiccup in her treatment and that given time, she’d get used to it and things would flow more smoothly. I’d figured wrong.
She woke me up at 01:00 AM the next morning.
She was in pain. For her to call me at that hour, it had to be something serious. She told me her pain was out of control—a nine out of ten on the pain scale.
I had a decision to make and I had to make it fast. The Mayo Clinic was a thirty-five-minute drive from where she lived. They had all her records there and it was the best hospital in the area by a long shot.
On the other hand, the nearest emergency room was only five minutes away, but that hospital was not the greatest—I’d had a few unpleasant experiences of my own there in the past.
This kind of decision was right up my alley. It was like a simulator situation transposed to real life. We agreed that we’d try the nearby ER but if there was a line, we’d go straight to the Mayo Clinic. I figured I might be able to shave five minutes off the ride if I were to drive ten miles over the speed limit. We’d assessed the situation. We’d communicated. We’d balanced our resources against the time constraints and took appropriate action. (This is pretty much word-for-word what they teach us pilots on how to handle critical situations.)
There was no line at the nearby ER. They gave her IV pain meds and for the time being, she was okay, and I was able to stand down from red alert.
Once she was asleep and the crisis was contained, I faced a new challenge.
As pilots, we’re trained to handle situations in the flight deck. But there are duty and flight hour limitations and minimum rest requirements for airline pilots. And for good reason—sleep deprivation can affect the decision process as much—and depending on the situation, even more so—than being intoxicated.
I hadn’t been sleeping well for the two weeks following her diagnosis, and that night I took her to the ER, I’d only had half-an-hour of shut-eye.
Sleep-deprived, I was holding on to the ITTIL technique like an oxygen mask.
My thinking process was as follows: She needed me there because the hospital staff there were not as trustworthy as the professionals at the Mayo Clinic.
I wanted her transferred to the Mayo Clinic as soon as possible.
It was six in the morning. She was asleep and on morphine—out for the count, at least for the next few hours. I was exhausted and feeling queasy.
I was thinking the shift was going to change in an hour and the doctors would be doing their rounds at some point, and I wanted to be there when they did.
On the other hand, there was no way of knowing exactly when the doctors would pass by. I could have held out for another hour but holding off until 09:00 or 10:00 AM would have been pushing my limits. Moreover, I was still aware enough to know that I wasn’t in a position to make good decisions at the moment, and waiting for longer would only make it worse for me.
I needed rest.
There’s a reason flight attendants tell passengers they should put on their oxygen mask first before helping children with theirs. You can’t be of much help to anyone when you’re in need of help yourself.
So I went home and slept for three hours.
Still tired, but no longer feeling brain dead, I rushed back to the hospital to find a social worker there trying to convince my mother that she should consider hospice and get her affairs in order.
I explained that my mother had stage three, operable cancer which means there’s a chance for a cure.
The social worker responded as though I were either mentally challenged or deluded. She said—in deliberately slow words—that there’s a spot on my mother’s liver that means she has stage four, not stage three cancer.
Spot? What spot? Nobody had told me about a spot.
The social worker acted as though the three hours I was absent had been three days. While I was gone, she explained, the hospitalist had conferred with the radiologist following the CT my mother had been given shortly after she’d been admitted.
Okay. That explains the spot. But the spot could be anything, including a glitch in the imaging process.
I asked her if they had done an MRI or a liver biopsy in as part of the staging. I knew they hadn’t (I’d never heard of staging being done overnight) but I asked the question anyway, just to make a point.
She informed me that they hadn’t done staging but that in such cases the outcome is pretty much a given.
My first impulse was to remind her that she was not a doctor—she wasn’t even a nurse—she was a social worker, and that it was not her place to come up with diagnoses. The ITTIL technique kicked in and I said none of those things. Instead, I told her that my mother has already had staging done only a few days ago, and from the Mayo Clinic, no less. I reminded her that the surgeon there who specializes in these cases said her cancer is operable, ergo it’s curable. Therefore, I concluded, it’s not time to be talking about hospice, instead, we need to find a way to manage her pain during the treatment process.
Somehow, she didn’t seem to get the logic in my statement. Ignoring what I’d said as though I weren’t even in the room, she continued her monologue with my mother, giving her recommendations for hospice services in the Phoenix area.
Slowly but surely, Mom was reverting to her former belief that she only had a month to live. She had also developed the belief that there were no meds other than those administered through an IV that would work for her. She further believed that only hospice could offer such meds. (Though the social worker supported this belief, we later found out this was not the case.)
I think her experience with the caregiver had played a significant role in helping my mother revert to these negative conclusions.
She was obviously upset, and I knew from experience this was not the time to remind her of the ITTIL technique. This is because even when someone is not under phycological distress as my mother currently was, you can only help that person if they want to be helped. This applies not only to the ITTIL technique but, in most cases, for any offer of help.
I tried to contact the oncologist at the Mayo Clinic, but he was not available. The Mayo Clinic staff informed me that since my mother was staying at another hospital, she would have to consult the oncologist on call at that hospital.
However, the hospital where she was currently staying had admitted her for pain management and since the pain was being managed, the reason for her admittance was considered resolved. According to that hospital’s policy, she would have to return to her oncologist at the Mayo Clinic to get continued care.
Getting Mom back to the Mayo Clinic had been my intention from the moment the ER staff had have given her pain meds the night before, but there were no available beds.
I found a loophole in the hospital policy—the spot on her liver. She may have been admitted for pain management, but the hospital had discovered the spot, and therefore my mother had the right to have it diagnosed.
Kafka was still having his way, however. It took all day to get in touch with the hospital oncologist. Her office informed me that the doctor cannot give a consult because my mother was currently under the care of another oncologist at another hospital (the Mayo Clinic).
I explained that there were no beds at the Mayo Clinic and that the oncologist there would not consult with her unless she was readmitted. I might as well have been trying to have a conversation with Siri.
While I was attempting to get out from under that catch-22, I faced yet another challenge.
Over the past days, Mom wasn’t as clear as she used to be. She’d said on several occasions that her thinking was fuzzy, but I attributed that partially to her age and mostly to the heavy meds she was taking.
The palliative nurses at both the Mayo Clinic and her current hospital had said that lack of clarity in cognitive function while expected in the beginning when a patient is on pain meds, should normalize after a few days. In my mother’s case, it had not normalized, it had gotten worse.
The next day, the hospitalist and two palliative nurses were consulting with my mother about her getting hospice care. They were saying the same things the social worker had said, but unlike the social worker, I must say, they did listen to my point of view without treating me as though I needed a pacifier and a change of diapers.
It was their conclusion that the cancer had most likely metastasized to her liver and even if it hadn’t, the chances of curing stage three cancer in a patient her age were slim. Furthermore, the cure could very well end up being worse than the cancer itself. The chemo could rob her of the quality of life she would otherwise have enjoyed without it during the months she had to live.
I let them know that I could see the logic in what they were saying, assuming we knew for certain she had stage four cancer. But the last diagnosis was stage three. This was from the Mayo Clinic. After lab work and an MRI with full staging completed. I said it seemed highly improbable to me that in the matter of the few days since the staging and the finding of the “spot” on her liver, her cancer would have metastasized and gone from stage three to stage four.
When I was done, my mother said, “I want this to end. I want to go to hospice.”
So to put this in context, for a pilot, it would be the equivalent of having your copilot say, “Let’s just let this damned jet do its thing and crash.”
I said, “Mom, let’s find out if you have stage three or stage four cancer first. If it’s stage four, I can understand how it would make sense to go into hospice if the alternative might mean suffering through chemo with very slim chances of getting better.”
To my surprise, the doctor agreed with me and he said that they can do an MRI in the next hour if she wanted. Once in hospice care, however, he said they would not be able to do any further testing whatsoever since it would not be covered by insurance.
Mom said, “What’s the point?”
I’d just explained what the point was. Had she forgotten? She was forgetting a lot lately.
After doing a very rudimentary evaluation of her cognitive function (he asked her the name of the President of the United States), the hospitalist said, “Are you sure you don’t want an MRI? We could do it right now.”
Mom said, “No. I just want to go.” She looked at me, paused, and said, “Sorry.”
My brother is a very clear thinker, and it was especially helpful having him listen in on the conversation. Together he and I assessed the situation and determined since hospice seems to be what our mother wanted—compromised cognitive function or not—it made sense to do what made her most comfortable now, even though doing so would mean that she most likely wouldn’t live for more than a year. This circled back to the logic that there’s no point in trying to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
I drove Mom to a local hospice facility three hours later.
They gave her a fentanyl patch along with morphine, and her pain was being managed quite well. She was having fewer and fewer periods of lucid thinking, but it seemed to me that she was a lot more comfortable than she’d been since the diagnosis.
Three days after being admitted at the facility the hospice doctor declared her unfit to handle her own affairs. That means from that point on, I had to make decisions on her behalf.
During one of her lucid hours, I explained to her what had happened. She looked at me with sad eyes and said, “That must be so hard on you.” I was touched by her compassion and trust. It turns out it wasn’t tough on me at all. My guidelines were simple: do what she asks and fulfill her needs as long as it doesn’t compromise her physical or psychological wellbeing.
All she asked for was to go back home so she could be with her beloved cat and have her family and friends visit when she was feeling up to it.
She was happy with her caregiver and I was visiting on a daily basis. I’d made arrangements for her sister to come over and visit that weekend.
Her oncologist at the Mayo Clinic said he’d be surprised if she lived for another year. This pessimistic-sounding prognosis turned out to be a lot more optimistic than what the hospice doctor said—three weeks to three months.
Since I had to pay the bills and stay current, I decided to fly a short, two-day trip.
The day before that trip, my mother and I spent most of the day together. She was quite lucid and in a surprisingly cheery mood. So much so, I was thinking that there might even be a chance she could live more than just three months. After all, people in far worse physical shape than my mother was when she was initially diagnosed had managed to outlive their term several times over. I knew, of course, that every person was unique, but I was open to the possibility that she could live for longer than just three weeks. Still, I wasn’t going to make any plans based on that more optimistic estimate.
When I returned from the trip, she was sleeping. I asked her home caregiver how much morphine she’d given her. It was the usual dosage. I called the hospice hotline and told them it seemed to me that my mother was taking too much of the pain meds.
Yes, she seemed comfortable, but I didn’t think she wanted to spend her last three months or weeks sleeping away most of the daylight.
I was there with her older sister, who had traveled all the way from Chicago to visit her. What was the point if my mother was going to be sleeping through the visit? The hospice nurse on the other end of the line told me that my mother had been very busy with nurses the day before and she was probably tired and getting some much-needed rest. Nevertheless, she agreed to send someone to see about regulating my mother’s meds.
The nurse came over and asked me if she could examine my mother. I thought that was an odd question. Wasn’t that the point of her visit, after all?
Five minutes later, she said, “Your mother is coming to the end of her journey.”
I was looking for something concrete, not some cheesy metaphor. I said, “I know. The hospice doctor told me: She has three weeks to three months to live.”
“No,” the nurse replied. “It’s more like 24 to 72 hours.”
What?
That seemed preposterous, given that no physician had said anything about even the remote possibility that she could die so soon.
I had the nurse call the hospice doctor to verify that prognosis. Two hours later, I had the official confirmation from the doctor. I called my brother in Greece and told him if he wanted to see Mom alive, he’d have to get on the very next flight.
He left as soon as he could, but as he was waiting for his connecting flight in London, I called him again, this time to tell him Mom was dead.
It’s interesting because three and a half years earlier, we were in a similar situation, but our roles were reversed. I was flying to Greece to see my father, and just when the jet pushed back from the gate, I got a message from my brother stating that my father had just died.
My brother came, as did other family members that could make it on such short notice. The funeral was held only four days after her death.
The very next evening, I left for Israel and gave the two talks with minimal preparation. I didn’t have to do the talks, but it was a rare opportunity that my mother had supported with great enthusiasm. Besides, I didn’t know if I’d get a chance like that again in the future.
The radio interviews could wait, so I put them all on indefinite hold. Actually, I put a lot of things on hold. I stopped going to the gym. I stopped writing, and that included everything—fiction, nonfiction, and even articles such as this one. Actually, this is the first thing I’ve written other than emails since my mother died.
My piano practice—a significant aspect of my life since I was seven—went from a daily occurrence to a bi-weekly event.
The Chief Pilot at my crew base had my training pushed back to December, so that I could have more time to prepare.
The need to make major decisions and adjust plans ended when my mom died, but the workload did not lessen, it actually increased.
See, my mother had set up a trust and she’d made me the trustee. I’d told her that I didn’t want to be the trustee, but in all fairness to my mom, I hadn’t been able to offer her any decent alternatives since there was no other family member living nearby.
Though I was doing my very best to take care of business and settle my mother’s affairs, the more I tried to resolve things, the more I discovered I had to do.
The plan had been to have me be the trustee on a temporary basis, but as the saying goes, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.”
It turns out the trust had not been set up properly, and it became necessary to hire an attorney and have the estate go into probate. I ended up becoming both the trustee and the executor of my mother’s estate. I won’t get into the gritty details of what’s involved when taking on both these responsibilities at once.
On a practical level, it’s basically a full-time job and then some.
On an emotional level, handling the trust and the estate feels like you want to move on, but some goblin has grabbed you by the back of your head and is ramming your face in a grinder. Everywhere I looked, there were memory triggers. Her past was being unearthed shovelful by shovelful. Boxes and boxes of photos. Documents. Her high school yearbook. Her finances. Things about her I’d never imagined existed popped up like zombies in a B movie.
Things didn’t start winding down until only a couple of weeks ago. I’m still spending most of my free time trying to tie up loose ends. My home office is currently packed from wall to wall with my mother’s treasured belongings (pictures, documents, letters, knickknacks, you name it) to the point where I have to play Twister like a Yogi just to get from the door to my computer.
I took a two-week vacation at the end of January and got some much-needed rest.
Though the ITTIL technique spared me the potential self-inflicted suffering that I imagine I could have otherwise experienced, it didn’t have the ability to create half a dozen Warren Archer clones as in the movie Multiplicity, so that I could have everything taken care of without trying to do it all on my own.
I learned how to set priorities and how to ask the question, “Do I really have to take care of this right now?”
I learned to leave things unresolved until the time was right.
If you’re a pilot or someone whose job it is to make decisions on a regular basis, the experiences I had with my mother brings up an interesting point: the decisions you make are only as beneficial as the information upon which you base them.
Planning is based on a reasonable estimation of probable outcomes. That estimate comes from past observations.
What was amazing here was that almost all my estimates were off.
The decision-making process is greatly improved with the ITTIL technique.
Throughout the process, I did not worry and there was no self-induced suffering. There were no regrets either because I didn’t view my decisions as being right or wrong. I gathered all the information I had so that I could assess the situation, make a decision and plan a course of action. That said, I had no control over the quality of the information given to me.
I was surprised by the relentlessly unexpected events, but I wasn’t torn apart by them because I wasn’t holding on to any belief about the future. I was just taking action based on probable outcomes.
I did learn a lot, however. On many levels, not just practical ones.
I learned not to underestimate the tradeoffs involved in taking on more than you can reasonably handle. Task saturation lead to long-term sleep deprivation. In order to compensate, my body needed more energy and therefore I ate more. Because my schedule was turned upside down, I didn’t have many opportunities to eat during the day. So I’d basically fast during the day, and overeat late at night.
As a result, I gained 30 pounds in three months.
Following my mother’s death, even though I did reduce my task load, I was still taking on more than I could reasonably handle. The crisis was over, after all. The trust and the estate could wait. But I was running on adrenaline from the prior month. I felt like I’d turned myself into the Flash.
I hadn’t made sleep a priority. That affected my health and productivity. I could accomplish more in less time had I given myself a minimum of eight hours of sleep every night.
I go over what happened to show that the past can be of great value when it’s used as a tool for action in the present. Pilots evaluate their actions in a time of crisis to learn from the past. This is what I’ve been doing as well. No regrets, just a series of great lessons that have helped me in many ways.
If this sounds like self-improvement, that’s because it is. I grew in many ways. Too many to list in an article and probably even in a book.
While personal development is great, it’s not the point of ITTIL. The purpose of the ITTIL technique is to end the suffering created by the thoughts you are believing. It doesn’t necessarily improve your personality, though in most cases, you’re more likely to be a more pleasant person to hang around with if you’re not suffering!
I mention some of the things I learned through this ordeal in the context of gratitude. Not only do I not regret my decisions, my actions, or any of the events that I experienced, I am deeply grateful for everything that happened.
Gratitude is one of the deep and powerful side-effects of the ITTIL technique.
Without suffering, you see things as happening for you, not to you. Put another way, what you used to view as negative situations become lessons and powerful opportunities for presence.
I’ll leave you with this:
When the doctors left the ER, after telling my mother she had pancreatic cancer, once she applied the ITTIL technique on her negative belief, she found gratitude.
She discovered it with the question: How can I feel grateful for this?
It was a question seemingly directed at me, but instead of replying, I offered her a smile.
In answer to her own question, she said:
“I am grateful I have pancreatic cancer because I no longer have a choice—there’s not much I can do at this point—so I no longer have anything to worry about.
“I am grateful because this has brought us closer than ever before.
“I am grateful because now I am free to treasure every moment.”
My mother had transformed late in her golden years. She’d only been practicing the ITTIL technique a short while, yet according to her, she was far more present and at peace than she’d ever been in her entire life. She worried a lot less and was learning to let go of negative beliefs, in some cases, the very moment they took hold of her.
As for me, I’ve been working on restoring balance in my life. I’m eating reasonably, sleeping reasonably, spending a lot of time with my family, and gradually learning how to do less of what’s not so important to me in order to give myself the space and time for everything that is.
I’ve been off the grid for a while . . . now you know why.
I consider you part of my extended family, and as such, I want you to know that I’m here for you. If you need any assistance with applying the ITTIL technique to your present situation or you have any questions, please feel free to contact me here.
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