Years ago, when I entered into drug and alcohol abuse and recovery coaching, I was in the midst of being five years removed from such behavior and dealing with terminal liver failure that ultimately led to liver cancer.
Between 2011 when I was diagnosed and stopped using, and the summer of 2015, I had made a complete transformation across the board in how I lived my life when I entered coaching.
I sought to help others by living life as I was and simply talking about it not as a teacher but as an example. Over the next few years, as I became certified as a Drug and Alcohol Counselor and added cancer to my health conditions, the two went hand-in-hand as I continued my path to a renewed life.
Freedom from or freedom to be?
The terminal diagnosis ended for me in 2019 when I underwent a successful liver transplant and had cancer and the failed liver removed. The following year, amid the Covid pandemic, I left counseling when I put the few things I possessed in storage and departed the United States. Though I maintained a residence in Athens, Ga., my certification was rendered invalid. It was only valid if the client and I were both in the State of Georgia. However, my certification as a recovery coach is worldwide as we are not formally certified by clinical medicine. Recovery coaches are second-class citizens in the therapy process. A placement that had long bothered me as coaches often see a practice’s clients for more clock hours than the counselor or therapist they pay to see in groups and individual sessions.
These events rendered me both free from the illness and the limitations of clinical work. The likewise enabled me to enjoy the freedom to be anything I chose.
Since the fall of 2020, I have been traveling south of the border, first in Colombia for seven months, currently in Mexico, and I have no intention of maintaining a permanent residence any time soon.
So, it could be said that I have lost a lot. The sickness saw the end of my 16 years in high-profile online media when I sold my business to YAHOO! Sports, I lost my home, my car and even saw the dissolution of my family. I was nearly broke when I returned home from the Pittsburg VA Medical Center in January of 2019 and moved my counseling practice online.
Things were looking good at first. I was contracting with local practices in Athens, Georgia, where I had been receiving clients the previous four years, but then the glaring differences between how I worked and how clinical psychotherapy demanded led to another dissolution. This time, it was opting to forgo counseling and return to recovery coaching.
Freedom from everything is the freedom to be anything
Oddly enough, just as cancer had, in a way, saved me as it caused my MELD score, the number indicating how close you are to the end of life with liver disease and to massively increase and moved me up on the transplant list. That gave me increased hope in 2017 as there was now a light at the end of the tunnel that I could see, receiving a new liver.
It also inspired me to begin taking classes to move from coaching to counseling to afford to move out of the US—something I wanted to do in the years just before diagnosis in 2011.
Then the pandemic hit in the same month; I relaunched WindAndRaven.com as an online counseling site and not just recovery coaching with a spiritual twist. The combination of being cut off from my clients and the massive influx of counselors moving online, along with the myriad of coaches, sages, gurus, and self-appointed experts on social media, buried me just as I was about to begin a marketing campaign.
So, I began planning my exit. Thus, on October 1st, 2020, I moved to Medellin, Colombia, to meet a woman I had known online. We have been together since as @twoamericannomads on FaceBook, Instagram, and YouTube.
While I maintained a small load of long-time clients beyond recovery and living “the good life,” I also kept in touch with a couple of fellow Veterans who I had been helping on their recovery path.
Still, the marketing campaign never happened. I stopped posting much about it on social media, and I put it in the pile of past experiences.
The Show Must Go On
But that is not the way this story should end. Without self glamorizing myself, I know that, for whatever reason, I have helped a lot of people get through some challenging times. In most cases, they were difficult situations beyond the pale of “normal addiction issues.” By that, I mean they were coupled with co-existing conditions such as attempted suicide, marriage loss, career loss, inability to reintegrate into society, or want to leave altogether.
Aside from the many certifications in group therapy individual therapy, all approved by the American Society of Addiction Medicin (ASAM), and a certified Recovery Coach trainer, it was mostly my life experience and involvement with various spiritual practices that dominated my time with clients.
I was not like most counselors. I am a high school drop-out who left home on a one-way train ticket to the west coast at 18 who has never looked back. I served in the US Army, I started one of the earliest online sports media websites that today is part of the backbone of YAHOO! Sports college presence. I have multiple divorces, survived three terminal illnesses, and have lived all across the US, including a year and a half on the road following the Grateful Dead.
Not your typical Drug and Alcohol Counselor, but not entirely unlike some recovery coaches, but when you add trained Shamanic Practitioner to the mix, well, the fact that I could sit across from someone as they tell me about their problems, and then for me to recount some other way to look at it that they had likely never even considered, created success.
That is about the best way to explain why I do not know of anyone who returned to use after we worked together. That does not mean all have remained sober or adopted a harm reduction plan that changed their life, but of the ones that stayed in touch, at least for the first couple of years, none went back to their old life.
I have everything I need, but I still want more
So, what do I take away from this now that I am living the digital nomad lifestyle, moving from place to place with the only criteria being a stable internet connection, beautiful people, and a relatively low cost of living?
Nothing is impossible; it is never too much, and never listen to the opinions of others when it comes to limitations placed on you. That is the mindset that led me to be what I call a Freedom Coach.
What does this mean to anyone who would consider seeking me out to discuss their life?
I would say the same thing. Don’t believe anyone who says that they can heal you. Only you can do that. Sure, you can talk to someone, like me perhaps, but it is all about what you say regardless of what I say. I will listen to you without comparing my knowledge or life to yours. I will share with you other ways to consider things that few others will, but what you say is what counts.
You only have One Life to Be You, as my partner Juliana Tabares titled her book (onelifetobeyou.com), and she is exactly right. Perhaps look her up. Regardless of what you do, make sure it is your choice always. It is not about being selfish. It is about being accountable only to yourself. If you are doing well, then those you love will be doing well, but it must start with you—regardless of what you choose.
When they told me I had six months to live in 2011, I said, “I don’t buy your myth of death,” and walked out. It took me nearly five years to begin listening to medical advice. If you are terminal, I am not saying to do that, do what you choose, but I still made my own choices when I did begin to listen. Following the transplant, when I was told I had at least 2-5 years to live, if I did everything as they said, well, look where I am now. I do some of that, but I am also sitting on a beach as I type this, in the sun, after swimming in the ocean, during a pandemic, and taking the lowest possible amount of medications (at my doctors prescription), having never once had a setback post-transplant.
Will it go on like this forever? You are asking the wrong person. It is going right now how I want it to go right now because there is no guarantee of tomorrow. The future, just like the past, does not exist. We only have this moment, and every instant brings with it a choice of what you will do next.
Make it count.
Don’t live in the labels others place on you. Life is, and anything you say after that is your opinion of it which you can change at any time.
Move past terminal, move past addiction, move past recovery, and whatever you do, keep moving.