November 24, 2025 • 64 mins
In this revealing episode of The Next Chapter, TD Jakes opens up about the life-altering moments that shaped him — childhood trauma, losing his father as a teen, watching his mother decline from Alzheimer’s, and the near-fatal heart attack that struck while he was preaching. He breaks down how the body responds to shock, stress, grief, and unexpected change, and why emotional honesty,
adaptability, and faith are essential to survival.Jakes shares the physical and spiritual battle that followed his heart attack, what he learned about trauma from neuroscience and The Body Keeps the Score, and how buried emotions can erupt in our health, our relationships, and our leadership.
He also reflects on poverty, uprooting his family, and rebuilding his life from seven members in West Virginia to leading The Potter’s House in Dallas.Packed with wisdom, science, and spiritual grounding, this episode is a guide for anyone navigating sudden loss, anxiety, burnout, or a new beginning. TD Jakes shows that even when life breaks you, you can still rise — and rebuild what’s next with strength, clarity, and purpose.
#tdjakes #nxtchapter #healing
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sudden changes like lightning fashion across the sky. Sudden changes
like the boristrous sound of thunder, Rolling sudden changes like
the sound of the engine of a train barreling down
the track. Sudden changes like an airplane lifting off the
(00:21):
ground and to the air. Sudden changes never present themselves
with warnings. They do not always make announcements. They give
you a chance to prepare for them, whether they are
good changes or bad changes, or great changes or mediocre changes,
or microscopic changes, or massive changes so big that your
(00:44):
legs can barely stretch far enough to enter into them.
But we all will face sudden changes. I'm sorry to
tell you that there will be times that you will
stand over gravesides of that you love. I'm sorry to
tell you that you will be in the waiting room
(01:05):
of hospitals and smell the smell that only hospitals produce,
waiting on the phone to ring to find out whether
the surgery was effective or not. I'm sorry to tell
you that you can go from being the CEO to
being unemployed. I'm sorry to tell you that the son
(01:27):
you poured everything you had into may walk away and
spit in your face. I'm sorry to tell you that
the father and mother who had you could let you
down completely, but they're still your mother and father. I'm
sorry to tell you that life is full of sudden
changes and unexpected twist and turns, like getting on six
(01:51):
flags and taking a ride and not knowing where it's
going to lead and when it's going to drop and
how far it's going to drop before you see up
in motion again, That the topography of life is filled
with fluctuations and movements and things that we are not
expecting and that we didn't prepare for and that we
(02:13):
didn't know how to deal with. I'm sorry, but it's true.
The only thing that is definite about life is change.
There are some things that hit us Suddenly. You come
home and your husband has packed his clothes and left.
You come home and your wife has decided she's better single.
You go to work and find out that you've been
(02:33):
laid off no notice, no warning, no farewell speech, no
flowers to suddenly you have gone from employed to unemployed.
I don't care whether you worked in the janitor's cause
that or in c sweet. If you didn't have time
to prepare, to say, to adjust, to get ready for it,
sudden changes can throw off the equilibrium of your entire life.
(02:57):
Your wife leaves you, the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your child dies, the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your career, not your job, your career. You thought you
had a career, and all of a sudden, they shut
down the stores everywhere, and the equilibrium goes out of
(03:19):
your life. The house note can't be paid, the insurance
can't be paid, You have to put the property up
for sale. You have to drop the price because you're
in trouble, and the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your appetite goes out of your life, your ability and
agility to be able to act as if nothing is wrong,
(03:39):
because God forbid that anybody knows that we have a problem.
We are more concerned about our image than our reality.
We are more concerned about our reputation than we are
the realization of what we need to do to make
things get better in our lives. Trying to convince our friends,
(04:02):
how are you? I'm fine, but I'm sepastic, and I'm
jerking and i'm moving, and still it's more important to
me that I impress you with my calmness than I
do with my progress. Don't believe spring, it will turn
(04:28):
into summer. Don't believe summer because it's going to change
into autumn. Don't believe autumn because autumn is going to
turn into winter. It's going to keep changing. And the
only thing that stable has got to be you that
has the flexibility, that has the ampdextrious ability to adjust
(04:50):
to situations, that has the proclivity to be able to
change with.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
The times and the currents and.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
The seasons and still keep your identity and not lose
yourself to what you see around you. This podcast is
not trying to show you how to stop the change.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Is here to tell you.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
How to not let the change stop you, because if
you're not careful, it will stop you. And if you
are not ready, it will shake you to your core
and knock you down to your knees, and it will
knock you to your knees while your children are watching
to see how you handle sudden changes. I'm sorry to
(05:35):
tell you this that you're not just mom and dad
or CEO or CEO or executive. You are a living, walking, talking,
squawking model of how do you handle things when they
go crazy? And how do you handle things when they
are great, And how do you handle things when they
are amazing? How do you deal with it on the
(05:58):
inside when the brain and pound sudden, unfamiliar changes, The
kind of changes that are traumatic, traumatic events, emotional events,
The kinds of changes that cause you to cry when
nobody's looking.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
The kinds of changes.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
That makes food lose its scent and its taste, and
fruit lose its essence. The kind of shocking news that
makes you wonder about everything and everybody and if you'll
ever be able to trust anybody with your heart again.
I'm sorry to tell you. There will be major disruptions,
(06:39):
major aggravations, major obstacles that stand up in your face
and dare you to take another step, and dare you
to move forward? And dare you to hold your head up,
and dare you to keep going, and dare you to
keep breathing, and dare you to fight on it sets
off a rapid physiological response was designed for survival. I
(07:02):
may not just in your head, but in your body.
There was an old song that you say, someone left
my cake out in the rain, and I don't think
I can take it because it took too long to
bake it. And I may not ever have this recipe again.
That last line is the scariest line I ever heard.
(07:23):
I may not ever have this recipe. I may not
ever have this opportunity. I may not ever have this person.
I may not ever have this responsibility. I may not
have this chance ever again. I know what it's like
(07:44):
to have that may not feeling, because November twenty fourth
of twenty twenty four, while standing up in front of
a crowd speaking like I'm speaking to you now, I
sat down to talk to them summarize what I had
been teaching that day, and all of a sudden, I
(08:08):
just kind of went to sleep. Little did I know
I was having a massive heart attack in front of
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
He is an internationally known preacher based here in Dallas.
This morning, during a nine am Sunday service, Bishop td
Jakes of the Potter's House, so for the health incident
during a morning prayer the Potter's House was streamy live
services one Sunday when Bishop Jake's froze mid sentence, it
started shaking. Now in the last hour we have heard
and seen from Bishop td Jakes after that still undefined
(08:39):
health incident that was seen all around the world.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
During his Sunday sermon.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Didn't know what it was, but almost massive heart attack,
he said, five minutes later, I'd have been dead of
a rival.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is where Bishop td Jake suffered that medical incident
while on stage.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Now the video of the incident is going viral.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I mean, not even in private, not even in a
corner by yourself, in front of the world. I'm having
a massive heart attack and one half of my heart
has actually stopped working all together. And the whole church
is upset, and everybody's in tears, and everybody's worried, and
everybody's in an uproar, and all of a sudden I'm
(09:22):
dealing with sudden changes. I know what it is to
find a sudden change. I'm stubborn. When I finally came
to myself and realized that people were all around me,
and they were praying and they were crying and they
were worrying. And my sister was in one ear and
my wife was in the other ear, and my son
(09:43):
was telling me don't leave him, and all of this
kind of stuff. And I had all of their emotions
on top of my emotions swirling around in my head,
and I had to deal with the possibility that I
may not ever have this recipe again. You first heard
about what had happened to me, because you've seen me preaching, teaching,
(10:07):
run across the aisle, cross over pews, and stand on
my head and do all kinds of stuff. When you
first heard about it, what went through.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
Your last So, Uh, the physician side kicks in and
we start like a computer taking off. The differential diagnoses
what makes a person a faith and Uh, there are
a lot of things we talk about singable episodes, such
something that causes a certain shock. You can have something
(10:37):
called a bagel response. But when I talked to doctor Wagner,
my first concern was that you'd had a stroke.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
I was concerned that you had a stroke.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
And when blood flow is cut off, whether it be
to the brain or to the heart, seconds matter.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
And so in my mind when I hear that.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
I slip over a kind of a mental pick trouble,
an hour glass and the sand is coming down and trauma.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
We call it the golden hour trauma.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
I know when a bleeding patient comes in, I have
a set window to stop that bleeding.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Uh.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
We say all bleeding stops eventually, And I always tell
my residence either we stopped it, or the body stops it,
it's not good. So I was concerned that you were
having a lack of blood flow to the brain. And
I didn't know whether it was a hypertensive stroke where
a blood vestable had ruptured, or whether a blood.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Clock had had had cut up.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But I knew that if you had a stroke, we
had to get thrombo khanyes or strepto kydes in the clockbuster,
we call.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
It immediately to restore blood flow. And so when.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
I met you and we talked, and you recognize me,
so I knew that you were cognitive. And so if
you recall, and you may not remember, the first thing
I did was I had already moved Heaven and the
Earth's at in the emergency room, and we cleared everything,
and we.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Took you to the cat scam.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
Yes, and I sat there and watched the images roll off.
And while we were getting everything set up, we were
also doing ekg's And so while the cat scam was
giving us information that EKG alerted us that you had
an abnormal EKG and signs of myo cardio a schemia,
no blood flow to the heart.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It's dangerous to live in your tomorrow or you're yesterday,
at the expense of losing this present moment. All of
a sudden, I realized the only thing that mattered was now,
Because tomorrow could all be gone and yesterday can never
(12:43):
be changed. The only thing I have is this present moment,
this now, this tear, this trembling hand that had gripped
the mic so hard that it would not let it go,
and this heart that had stopped beating, and these emotions
(13:07):
that were coming at me like hailstorms on a rooftop,
And all of a sudden, I realized that my life
had suddenly changed. No warning, no dream, no vision, no card,
no call, No. I had just done it. Ekg I'd
(13:29):
come back perfectly. I had done a full physical I
was fine. According to all the gadgets and machines and
what have you, I was absolutely fine. But according to
my heart, I was dying. Someone left my cake out
in the rain, and I don't think that I can
(13:50):
take it because it took too long to bake it.
And at sixty eight years old, I may not ever
have this recipe again, whether I fred or not, really,
because I lived a great life, an amazing life in advance,
(14:12):
whether I concern totally. But I was concerned for the
people I serve and the people I love, and the
people who loved me, and how they would react someone
left my cake out.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
In the rain.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Maybe you're driving down the road, or maybe you're on
a treadmill, or maybe you're on a bicycle, and deep
down inside, though your legs are moving and your face
is sweating, deep down in the back of your mind,
your body.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Is keeping score.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
On an attack that came against you physically, financially, emotionally,
or spiritually, that brought you to a place that you
had to confront the possibility that someone's left my cake
out in the rain. I console myself as they put
me from wheelchair to COT, from COT to ambulance, from
(15:05):
ambulance to emergency room, from emergency room to ICU, from
ICU rush right into surgery. I said, I may not
have it again, but then again I might. I might
be half dead, but that means I'm half alive. I
may be working with half a heart, but the other
(15:26):
heart half is still working. And it was then at
that moment I learned it it's not what you lose
that matters, it's how you work with.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
What you have. Left.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Now, you can either spend the rest of your day,
the rest of your life, crying over what you lost,
worried about what you lost, worried about who didn't stay,
worried about who walked away, or you can look at
who stayed, what you have left, what you are building,
(16:04):
what is working, and take what's left and make it right.
I want to challenge you today because it is so
difficult to allow what's left to become so volumeus that
you forget what's right. What's possible to take what's wrong
(16:27):
and make it so big that you forget what you
have left and what can still be done. It is
so easy to become so engrossed and who betrayed you,
who forsook you, who left you, who hurt you, that
you don't even begin to realize who stayed, who prayed,
who operated, who labored to make things okay. I left
(16:51):
the hospital three and a half days later with not
a stitch in my chest, not a rip in my
rib cage. Normally they would take the heart out and
shock it and clear the passageways and put it back in,
(17:12):
and I would be all scarred up. I left there
with a band aid on my wrists, because a heart attack,
as big and as serious and as difficult as it was,
it was not the end. Watch out for false endings.
(17:33):
Don't call it over just because it looks bad. It
could be possible that a sudden change is just a
gateway to your next great amazing, thirst squenching, life changing, mind, renewing,
heart regulating Your next achievement is on the other side
(18:01):
of your sudden change. So either you see it as
a wall and you run into it and bump your nose,
or you see it as a door and you push
past it to see what is that thing on the
other side. It must be something amazing to make it
(18:24):
possible for me to push through to see why the
obstacle is placed in front of the opportunity. Wherever there
is an opportunity, there will be obstacles. Tough times they
(18:45):
don't last, but tough people they do. Which one are
You lost a child before me and after me? That
means I was born in between two dead babies, and
(19:05):
I survived and I lived. The trauma from having lost
a baby before and after caused her to cling to
me in a way that most mothers wouldn't cling to
a child. Because she now discovers the vulnerability that there
can be sudden change, and that sudden change creates sudden
anxiety and a deeper appreciation, and a fretfulness and sometimes
(19:29):
a worry as to what do I need to do
to make sure that everything turns out all right? It
causes us to need help with things. It caused her
to need help with things. It caused her to handle
me differently because all of a sudden, her vulnerability has
been pierced by the death of the first child named Marionette.
(19:49):
And now she's holding on to me for dear life,
and the child after me is lost and holding on
to it. What are you holding on to just because
you're afraid of los it because you've had losses in
the past. And how does that affect how you deal
with circumstances situations? How does it affect how you handle people?
(20:09):
How does it affect how you handle relationships? How does
it affect how you date? How does it affect how
you interact with staff? How does it affect you on
the inside, not just when you're at work, but when
you lay down at night, when you're driving to work.
How many scores is the body keeping as you're dealing
with these ghosts that are gone but not gone, these
(20:32):
feelings that are there but not there, This anxiety that
exists in your life and nobody can see it, and
nobody knows it, and we don't talk about it, and
yet we have to deal with the effects of it
because we all have sudden changes. Sudden changes just come
without warning. It doesn't ring the doorbell, it doesn't walk
up the steps, It doesn't need itself up to you.
(20:55):
It doesn't walk its way up to you. No, no, no,
You just look up and it's standing in your living
room and you're in a crisis, or the house burned down,
or you're in a flood or the fires in California,
or you're in a crisis, and everybody's moved to the roof.
Sudden changes come into your life in the loss of
a child or the loss of a loved one, or
(21:16):
the loss of a spouse, or the loss of an opportunity,
and all of a sudden you're holding on to whatever
you can find to hold on to. In her case,
it was me, and she was holding on to me
for dear life because of the child she lost before
and the child she lost afterwards. What have you lost instead?
Of just telling me what you have gained, Let's start
(21:38):
thinking about what you have lost and the impact of
that loss on what you have left, and how it
changes how you value, how you handle, how you deal with,
how you portray, how you connect, how you appreciate what
you have left. Because I guarantee you, if you go bankrupt,
it's going to affect how you handle money. If you
(21:58):
lose your car, it's going to affect how you handle
your car payments. If you lose your house, it's going
to affect your willingness to even try to get another
mortgage to get up on your feet again. All of
these decisions are altered and moving and spasting because there's
been a sudden change, and there's been a shattering of
how you do things. There's been a breaking away of
(22:21):
how you do things, and all of a sudden you
may need to stop a while and find your center,
to begin to center yourself and calm yourself and gradually
let the message soak into your heart and into your spirit.
I'm going to be okay in spite of the change.
When you know that you're going to be okay in
(22:41):
spite of the change, it changes your reflex, your confidence,
your stability, your maturity, your wisdom begins to develop, and
all of a sudden, you begin to understand that life
is not a certainty. It's not guaranteed that everything is
going to fall into place all the time order for
it to be. It's not guaranteed that everything is going
(23:03):
to fall into place as you had imagined it. When
I was about ten years old, about nineteen sixty seven,
I found out my father had kidney failure. Now, my
father was the Hulk. He was the houg He could
have played the Hulk in the movie. Big, broad shoulders,
big chest, chested, barreling chest, biceps, triceps, He was huge,
hunk of a man. I literally have seen my father
(23:26):
pick up the backhand of a car and said it
on the road.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
He was a he man.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
He was all of that. He was strong, and all
of a sudden, my father gets kidney failure. He didn't
know that his high pretension was out of control. He
didn't go to the doctor like he should. He didn't
take care of himself, and he lost not just his kidneys,
he lost his normal. And anytime you lose your normal,
(23:50):
there's gonna be peripheral damage that breaks out in your life.
Because we so desperately need certainty and it is so
hard to find because certainty. In order to have absolute certainty,
you have to be able to control not only yourself,
but the behavior of others, the weather, the circumstances, the economy.
(24:11):
There's so many things to handle that you have to
stop and say, wait a minute. I can't handle all
of that. I can only handle how I react to it.
And I'll tell you something. As a son, at about
ten years old, I did not react very well to
my superhero having kidney failure, and I had to learn
(24:31):
how to run a kidney machine while my friends were
learning how to ride a bicycle. By the time I
was sixteen years old, my father was dead, and that
was a sudden change. It is grief for him, absolutely,
but it was also grief for me, and I am
(24:52):
wondering if my life will ever be the same. I
am grieving over the questions I didn't get answered. I'm
grieving over the the relationships. We didn't get to have,
the games, we didn't get to go to the concerts.
He didn't get to attend the thoughts and father son
conversations that I hope that we would have. Now they
(25:12):
are going down into the grave with his casket, and
we're not just burying him, We're bearing everything.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I had in mind.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It was things like this that led to my mother
having Alzheimer's. School teacher ended up the Equal Employment Opportunities
representative for the state of West Virginia, ended up walking
down the street looking for a car she left in
(25:44):
the parking lot and forgotten where it was. First we
passed it, all we played it. Awfu was simple. She
had other things on her mind, and then it became
so obvious that we could not ignore it. Her body
kept score. One of fourteen other siblings, raised in Alabama
(26:08):
with an uncle that had run for his life to
flee being killed in the night, did all kinds of
school work that started when she was four years old,
and graduated from high school at fifteen, went on to
college at Tuskegee and did four years of college in
three with two majors. She had been amazing and done
(26:34):
amazing things, and did her student teaching, and traveled around
the world, been to Germany, did all kinds of wonderful things.
But all the while she was doing them, her body
was keeping schore. She had five children, three of them lived.
She survived that she endured it, but her body was
(26:55):
keeping score. Her husband had kidney failure, and she drove
him twice a week back and forth to Cleveland, about
five hours away, and still kept her job and kept
everything going at the same time. And she did it
like batwoman, She did it like superwoman. She did it
(27:15):
like she had roller skates on her feet. She did it,
but her body was keeping score. And the score was
written in Alzheimer's and the Alzheimer's was written in the
audacity of the loss of memory, of a mind so
(27:40):
massive and a heart so broken that little by little
she started to fade away. I don't know what your
story is, and I don't know what you've been through,
and I don't know if you've experienced loss in your life,
But if you live long enough, you will experience some
loss in your life. When you experience that loss in
(28:02):
your life, how you manage it, how you respond to it,
and for God's sake, don't bury it and try to
act like you're okay, and try to be the hero
for everybody, and put on your cape and your boots
and run out there and stand out on the roof
and see if you can fly, because you can't fly.
You're not Superman after all. You have to stop and
deal with it and confront it and face it and
(28:25):
feel it and heal it so that you can be
the person that you need to be because you never
saw this coming. Is there anybody who's listening at me
right now who's dealing with something that was so traumatic,
so painful, so difficult, so overwhelming, so vulnerable that it
has hit you in such a way that you are
(28:46):
not sure of yourself or your environment, or your friends
or your people, and you are not sure that you
will ever be the same again. The reason I'm talking
to you through this podcast is to navigate you through
the current and the trouble water that it fluctuates in
(29:08):
our lives. And we find ourselves in situations that we
can't easily talk about or don't even have the language
to articulate because we are feeling with sudden changes. People
ask you how are you doing today, and you say fine,
because you know they don't really want to hear how
you are really doing today. You know it's too complicated
(29:31):
for them, you know it's too difficult for them, and
so you just say to them, I'm fine, but deep
down inside you're not okay. So through ministry, through podcasts,
through books, through counseling, through therapy, and a myriad of
other things, support, friends, somebody you can trust in your life,
you begin to work your way toward normal. You begin
(29:52):
to get yourself to a place that you are not
spastic on the floor. If you don't do that, you'll
be spastic in the bottom of of a liquor bottle.
You'll be spastic in the bottom of a drugs case.
You'll be spastic in the bottom of some forbidden, self
destructive habit that you are doing to anesthetize the pain
(30:14):
that you won't deal with. Because, as the doctor said
so clearly, the body always keeps score, not always the mind,
not always the emotions. Just because you got emotionally better
doesn't mean you got physically better. Doesn't mean that the
cortison is gone down and the swelling has left, and
(30:36):
your joints are back to normal. And after a while,
what started out on your heart ends up in your
heart and affects your body and affects your knees, and
all of a sudden, what started out as a small
thing confined to a small, relatively small space in your
thought life is affecting every area of or life. Today
(31:01):
we're talking about sudden changes. Have you had any. By
the time I had gotten a little older, I had
opened a small church in a storefront. I started out
with only seven members. I think that God had given
me an opportunity to help other people. But here's the secret.
(31:23):
Most people who are in the business of helping other
people start out with helping themselves, and with the overflow
of the current of ministering, healing, counseling themselves, they begin
to look for answers for other people. It is the
trauma that starts in the life of the counselor and
the physician that causes them to persevere through the classes
(31:46):
and take the courses and ask the right questions and
have the passion on the inside to make sure that
things get better, to make sure that things are acclimated
in such a way, to make sure that somebody cares
for them. Because every time you care for someone who
is shattered, you are caring for yourself. You have to
have gone through some things. I started out in a
(32:08):
little church with only seven members, but that didn't bother me.
I wasn't trying to be big. I was trying to
be better. I was trying to be there for other
people going through things like I had gone through, so
that I could help them to deal with sudden changes.
It wasn't just the change of having a storefront church.
I had nothing to compare it with only seven members.
(32:29):
Before that, I had none. What the real problem was is,
little by little, it was eating into the finances I
was making working on another job. I was pouring everything
into the church. So the lights went out and the
phone went out, and I was on a downward trajectory
to nothingness and not sure if I could get back
(32:51):
up again. I remember catching the bus and getting on
the bus and saying to myself, I'm going downtown to
Big Appalachian Park Company not to cut my power off.
And they smiled and said, we're sorry, there's nothing we
can do for you. And I walked out of the
store with visible tears running down my face because I
(33:13):
was at my wits end. If I'm talking to somebody
today who's ever been in that situation, whether it was
for a high dollar amount or a low dollar amount,
and you've gotten to the breaking point, and you're standing
on the edge of a cliff and you are starting
to wonder if you will ever be well, and what
do you say to your wife when you get home,
(33:33):
and how do you bring your kids into the house.
We came home with the children and the house was dark,
and we decided to play a game who could get
to the bed first without stumping their toe. We didn't
want them to know that the power was off, so
we turned it into a game. But while they giggled
in their bed, we worried in Orange because we were
(33:55):
dealing with a sudden change. That as long as I
had my job before the plant had shut down, I
was in pretty good shape. They didn't want us they
we're about to shut down. They didn't want us that
we were in the middle of a paradigm shift. They
didn't tell us that the industry age was giving away
to the information age and that the plants all over
(34:17):
West Virginia were shutting down. No, they didn't go into
that kind of detail. They told us you were laid off,
and the whole world shook up under my feet. You
have to understand that I am encouraging my little seven members,
while deep down inside I was discouraged myself. And the
(34:38):
body always keep score. Years later, I made the decision
while the crazy, the tempestuous decision to leave what was
already a difficult situation and starting to get better. It
was starting to get better, It was starting to improve,
it was starting to change. I moved to Dallas, Texas
(35:01):
with fifty families to start what would become the Potter's
House that ended up with thirty thousand members, which was
mind boggling.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And now I'm stressed.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The other way. I know what it is to be
stressed for not having enough. I know what it is
to be stressed at a funeral. I know what it
is to be stressed at a graveside. I know what
it is to be stressed dealing with bills. I know
what it is to be stressed with not enough. But
now I'm stressed with too much. And suddenly I realized
stress doesn't always mean Anxiety doesn't always come from nervousness,
(35:38):
doesn't always come from things going bad. It can also
come from things going right. The fear that it won't last,
the fear that you're not good enough, the fear that
you can't handle it, the fear of imposter syndrome. I'm
not sure it's not worse than the fear of losing.
The fear that comes with gain mean also makes you
(36:01):
doubt yourself, makes you wonder do you belong in the
room you just got in, and all of a sudden
you're dealing with sudden change. One moment, I'm in a
food line, one moment, I'm getting stamps, one moment we're
getting wick, and the next moment I'm exploding with people
(36:21):
and books and movies and films and doing all of
these amazing things. But it really didn't feel as good
as I thought it would feel, because success doesn't feel
like you think success would feel like, not when it
comes on the back of anxiety and the back of losing,
and the back of wondering will this last. And that's
(36:46):
not just to fool about a job or a vocation.
It's true about a relationship. After several failed relationships, you
enter into the new relationship, maybe one foot at a time,
holding back a little bit of yourself because you wonder
will this last. You meet a new friend. You've got
a friendship and you're starting to confide in each other
(37:08):
and talk to each other, but you wonder will this last.
There's as much anxiety to the far North as there
is to the far South, there's an anxiety of wondering
do I have what it takes to deal with what
I got to deal with, And then to have fifty
families counting on you on top of your own family
(37:31):
counting on you. We are weighted down not only by
the pressure that we place on ourselves, but the pressure
of those who believe in us. Though it is well intentioned,
can also create great anxiety because suddenly they're counting on
you to make something happen that you talk real big about,
(37:52):
but you're not sure that you can actually make it happen.
And if you don't make it happen, not only do
you endanger your family In my case, I endangered fifty
other families in the process. So good is not as
good as you thought it was. The great it's not
as great a feeling as she thought it would be.
And managing resources is not as wonderful as you thought
(38:15):
it would be because you had pierced the veil of
understanding that this could all go away. And what do
I do if the change that's good makes another change
that's bad. What do you do when fall turns to winter?
(38:42):
What do you do when sunshine turns to rain? What
do you do if pleasure turns to pain? What do
you do if everything that you have dreamed of turns
into a nightmare and you have to start all over again.
(39:02):
These are the feelings and the anxieties and the proclivities
that exist in people who are dealing with sudden changes,
and how do you cope with those sudden changes? I
believe in number one, you have to have dare devil
friends who surround yourself with people who are used to
living on the edge, who understand that it's okay to
(39:23):
be on the edge, that just because you're on the
edge doesn't mean that you've fallen off the cliff. You
got to be with risk takers. You got to be
with people who have experienced at taking a chance. Don't
get around a bunch of people who are naysayers and
doubters and fearful, because if whatever you feed will live,
you need to be around people that are feeding you
(39:44):
with ideas and faith and feeding you with the reality
that it's okay to make a mistake, and it's okay
for things to drop, and it's okay for things to fluctuate.
If the stock market fluctuates, if the government fluctuates, if
relationship fluctuates. Whatever you're building is going to fluctuate, but
(40:05):
do not allow the fluctuate to indicate to you that
you have suddenly lost what you had. Just because you
hit a bump in the road doesn't mean that the
car has stopped. When the brain encounter sudden unfamiliar changes,
such as a traumatic event, shocking news, or a major disruption,
it has to figure out it works to figure out
(40:27):
how to solve the problem. Our brains are the first
computer hard drive computers that were ever invented by God
to kind of figure out how to work this out
and how to resolve it. And it is so desperate
to fix it that if it cannot find an answer
to the problem, it will create an illusion to give
you a false answer rather than to leave you with
(40:48):
a blank page. Here's a breakdown on how the brain
and the body react. We keep trying to separate them
like they're two different species, like they don't go together,
like they're Laurel and Hearty, But know they are inexplicably
connected one to the other, and what affects one affects
the other. If the body is not well, it will
eventually affect the brain. And if the brain is not well,
(41:11):
it will affect the body. The perception of threat begins
to affect your sensory input downloading information. Your whole body tendses,
your palms begin to sweat, your breathing changes because of
the perception of threat. Not the attack of threat, but
the perception, the very idea of it, the very fear
(41:35):
of it, the very feel of the possibility that you
may not make it out of this, That something is
lurking over your head and over your mind and over
your spirit, like a cloud or dark cloud that's following
you down the highway. That is the perception of threat
that moves from your brain down into your body, and
(41:56):
you can exactly see it, but you can feel it,
and the feeling is so strong that it won't stay
in your head. It ignites the fight or fight action
down inside of all of us. The sympathetic nervous system
that responds to the circumstance to get ready for something
you weren't ready for, to give you the adrenaline that's
(42:18):
necessary for you to be able to do what you
need to do, to give you the hormonal flood that
has been on reserve in your body, the HPA access
activation that has been on a whole waiting for such
a time as this. Oh, yes, you turn into somebody else.
You turn into somebody that you have never seen before.
You turn into somebody that your family doesn't know you
(42:41):
could turn into. Because you are at war. Even though
you do not always see the enemy that you are
at war against, your mind, your brain, your mentality all
announces to you that you are going through a cognitive
explosion and impact. Your prefrontal cortex tells you something is
(43:07):
up and you've got to do something about it, and
you've got to find a way to return to a baseline,
to a calmplace, to a pair of sympathetic nervous system
that lines out differently than it does under war, under conflict,
(43:29):
under absurdity. In summary, sudden unfamiliar changes trigger a cascade
of survival mechanisms in the brain. Because we were made
to survive. We were created to endure, We were created
to adapt. We were created to adapt climate changes, weather changes,
circumstantial changes. We were created to survive. Just like the
(43:53):
monkeys that I ran into on the rock of Gibraltar,
and we got on the top of the mountain and
we noticed that there were monkeys everywhere, all on the
cars and jumping from window to window to window. But
the strange thing we didn't notice at first is that
the monkeys were born without tails. The God began to
tell us that when the monkeys first came to the mountaintop,
(44:15):
they were born with tails, but when the mountaintop turned
to ice and it got cold, their tail was the
first thing to freeze. And eventually, after several generations, they
started being born without the tail because they had frozen
their tail off. If the monkey could adapt to the
ice and the coal and still survive and still have
(44:39):
children and still have offsprings, you can survive whatever you
are facing right now. You're a migdal of sounds, the
alarm to yourself that says, do not go down without
a fight. You are Adrenaline gets somebody ready to act, to move,
to do whatever it's got to do. You get strength
you didn't know you had. You got energy that you
(45:00):
never experienced at other times and other moments in your life.
Your quarters all help sustain alertness so that you are
listening better, looking better, gazing further, a more attentive, more
alert to what's going on around you because you are aware,
like a deer walking through the forest, and all of
(45:22):
a sudden it senses or smells a lion, and all
of a sudden it looks up, and it starts looking
all around because its alertness has been alerted to the
fact that there is danger nearby. And an entirely different
reaction takes over the animal, and it drops down into
a position of movement, a fight or flight, getting ready
(45:44):
to move because it knows it is in the presence
of danger. And we live and work and breathe and
function in the presence of danger. We move in the
presence of danger. We give birth in the presence of danger.
We raise our children in the presence of danger. We
(46:05):
start businesses in the presence of danger. We teach class
in the presence of danger. The fear of rejection, the
fear of isolation, the fear of losing the job, the
fear of going bankrupt, the fear of losing the opportunity,
the fear of being laughed that we do it all
in front of all of these spectators. Oh, we don't
(46:28):
do it at all. And we sit back and say,
I would have, I could have, I should have, I
ought to have done I didn't do it. Thank God,
we have the aid of our prefrontal cortex. Our activity drops,
making thoughtful decisions harder, and all of a sudden, we
(46:49):
have to begin to try to neutralize ourselves and bring
back balance. Balance is the thing that we need. Eventually,
the brain works to re established balance and the best
of circumstances, we calm down. Our breathing goes down, our
pulse rate goes down, our blood pressure goes down, our
(47:09):
mind begins to function more normally, so that we are
prepared to make more sound and absolute and powerful and
forceful and impactful decisions because we have dealt with the
chronic circumstances in such a way that we realize that
if the circumstance does not change, I will change for
(47:31):
the circumstance. But I refuse to let the circumstance change me,
because if it changes me, it can lead to anxiety,
memory issues, burnout, depression, dis ease. It doesn't really hit
(47:53):
you till you say it slow. If you say disease,
you don't get it. But if you slow it down
and say dis ease, you realize that the root of
every disease is dis ease. Doctor Bessel van der Cooke
wrote a book worth reading, The Body keeps score, not
(48:16):
just the mind, but the body keeps scoring. I want
to show you what I mean when I say that
you feel it in your mind, but you experience it
in your body as well. And even though you escaped it,
even though you survived, and even though you went to
work tomorrow, and even though you smiled at people, and
even though you got the kids lunch ready, that doesn't
mean you're okay. Because the body keeps score. And the
(48:39):
fact that the body keeps score, Bethel van der Koork
says to us, the body keeping score doesn't mean that
you're okay. It's just storing it in your joints and yourselves,
and all of a sudden, you're experiencing swelling in your
journks and your organ and your body from all of
that cortosol that's been collected on the inside that you
(48:59):
have suppressed. So suppressing how you feel is not healing
how you feel because you have had a sudden change.
And anytime you have a sudden change, it leaves you
in a turmoil where you're trying to figure out, what
do I need to do to fix, to adjust, to
straighten things out, to get things together. Because we have
a tendency to think that we always need to do
(49:20):
something and that if we do the right thing, the
right thing will happen. But you can do the right thing,
and that doesn't guarantee that the right thing will happen,
because there are all these other variables going on around us.
We can steer the ship perfectly, but we cannot control
the storm that the ship has to sail in, and
(49:41):
we have to deal with all of that. And if
we don't deal with it, Doctor van der Kolk is
absolutely right. The body does keep score. You may not
look at the score. You may not pay attention to it.
You may ignore it. You may choose to act as
if you don't see it. You may act like it's
(50:01):
not important and that it doesn't matter. But the body,
it keeps goore. It clocks the arteries and the veins,
It swells the joints and the tissues. It leads to
diseases like Alzheimer's. It affects you in ways that are unimaginable.
And it is a collection of all the things you
(50:23):
didn't get back into balance and get rid of. Work
it out, run it out, talk it out, pray it out,
whatever you got to do to get it out. You've
got to get it out because all that stays around
inside of you and lingers is keeping score, and the
(50:44):
score will eventually come back and meet you at the
worst possible time in your life, and you won't be
ready for what is about to happen. So there you
are in a situation with no one to tell. Your
lips are sealed, your eyes are closed. It's three o'clock
in the morning, and everybody's sleep but you. Because if
(51:06):
you're like me, one of the first things to pass
away is sleep. Sleep passes away when you have no
plan for tomorrow. Sleep passes away when you're not sure
that the plan you have.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Will work.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
Sleep passes away when you find yourself in a dilemma
of a lifetime and no one to even talk to
about it. Because you must feel You must appear brave,
you must appear absolutely, you must appear certain, and you
can't let people know that you are overwhelmed. Sleep begins
to dissipate. Indigestion is affected, how your body digests food,
(51:49):
how you perceive and hear people, how you snape at
the dog and yell at the cat, And find yourself
in a situation that you are out of character. On
this very step, I endured my first and hopefully only
massive heart attack, out of nowhere, out of the blue.
I didn't even know what it was. I can't even
(52:11):
describe it to you fully what it was. All I
know is that I was sitting in that very chair
right there. My body was, but everything else in me
was in a quiet place. I was wrapped in a
cocoon of grace and kindness and quietness and peace and tranquility.
(52:36):
I was safe in the arms of my creator while
my body was slumped over in the chair. You talking
about change. The reason I want to talk about my
next chapter, and the reason I want to talk about
(52:56):
sudden changes is often your next is in the urgency
of now something you didn't see coming, something you weren't
prayed for, something you didn't take a class in, something
that you didn't hear anybody lecture on, and boom, there
it is. And you either let it break you or
(53:21):
you stand up to it and break it. And by
the grace of God and the prayers of people and
the technology that was around me, I went home with
a band aid on my wrists and nothing more. And
(53:43):
you can survive to every sudden change that comes in
your life, good or bad, up or down, right or wrong,
north or south. You can survive every chance that comes
in your life if you have the agility, the adaptable
(54:10):
agility to stop being so stubborn and saying I gotta
be mean no matter what. That's not true. The monkeys
changed on the mountain tops, the cave men changed in
the cave. The people that were raised in the African deserts,
they changed to fit the climate they were in. People
(54:33):
change all the time with wheelchairs and one arm and
no arms and no legs. Don't stand there and tell
me you gotta be who you gotta be.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (54:45):
If you need to adapt to survive, then adapt adaptability
is refusing to lose your inner sanctuary because of your
outer circumstances. Adaptability means I may have to go about
it differently, but go about it I will, I can,
(55:07):
and I must. As I talk to you today, I
talk to you from the perspective of my next chapter.
I want you to go after your next chapter. I
want you to build what you're trying to build, and
do what you're trying to do, and collaborate and coordinate
and illustrate and demonstrate and do all the amazing things
that you were meant to do, but be careful. Be
(55:33):
careful because in the process of doing all of that,
there will be sudden changes, and your schedule will become
so hectic that you're taking care of everybody else but you,
and you'll look around and there are no gauges to
tell you that your gas is low, that your oil
(55:56):
is dry, that your power is too many until it
is too late. You must listen carefully at your body
because the doctor was right. Oh yeah, he was right.
The body always keeps scoring. And no matter how bright
(56:19):
you are, rich you are poor you are, or beautiful
or smart, or how much hair you have, or how
much giftings you have, it's still keeping score. So how
do I release it? I'm glad you asked. There's a
lot of ways to release it, and you've got to
(56:39):
use them all, whether it's exercise or reading or crossword
puzzles or puzzles for the head or puzzles for the body.
To understand that the pain is not isolated to your brain,
that it gets down in your body, and if you
can get it out of your body, it will flood
out of you. While you're on the trie meal. It'll
(57:00):
flood out of you while you're moving your feet, it
will flood out of you while you're in the swimming pool.
That you have got to make sure that your body
is as active as your pain, that your body is
as active as the demands that come on your life.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
That you are.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Eating the kinds of food that nourishes you for all
the things you have to deal with day after day
and moment after moment, that you are eating the kinds
of food that replenish the body, replenish the soul, change
your mood, and change your attitude. Did you know that
your diet can change your attitude? That you have at
(57:38):
least a few friends in your life with whom you
do not have to pretend or impress, that you can
openly share your frustrations and aggravation and they will think
no less of you when it's over than they did
when it started. That that's one of the ways that
you can begin to cure and heal yourself. That you
(57:58):
can count your blessings and not your burdens and rehearsing yourself.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
It's amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
How loud your burdens scream, and how your blessings whisper,
make your blessing scream so loud until you cannot hear
the burdens beneath them, and little by little you will silence, silence,
silence everything that you lay down with every night. Take
(58:29):
the last few hours, finally, and use the last few
hours before you go to bed to clear your head,
or write down your plans, or set aside your agenda,
or do like I do and listen at comedy and
make yourself laugh yourself to sleep so that you don't
(58:52):
go to bed in fight mod, in fight mode, in
flight mode, in fear mode, stress mode, that you begin
to understand that sudden change doesn't have to be sudden death,
that the loss of a loved one doesn't mean that
(59:12):
you have to lose yourself, That you can be sad
and grieve and be unhappy and shed tears and still
wipe your face and pick up your briefcase and do
what you've got to do. That you can have moments
of great triumph and great tragedy, and that you don't
(59:34):
have to walk away from your triumph because you're guilty
over your tragedy. That you can use what works to
strengthen what doesn't work. Changes will come and changes will go.
Trouble will come and trouble will go. Hard times will come,
(59:58):
and hard times will go. The only thing that remains
is tough people. Tough doesn't mean that you didn't cry.
Tough doesn't mean that you don't get frustrated. Tough doesn't
mean that you have the answer to every question. Tough
means that you will not allow the things around you
(01:00:18):
to change the things within you. Tough means I demand
that I remain a loving person even when people have
not been lovely toward me. Strong means that I'm able
to resist the temptation to get down on your level
in order to fight you off For me. It means
(01:00:39):
that I have the power to resist the temptation to
turn into funt you don't want me to be, just
to prove to you that I can fight on your level.
It means that I'm strong enough to maintain my dignity
while you throw agony all in front of me, and
(01:01:03):
I'll still stand though the wind blows and the lightning
flashes and the thunder rolls. I'll still stand until the
changes cease, and the wind calms down, and the billows
(01:01:24):
stop rolling and the waves dissipate. I'll still be standing
on this boat. Oh yes, we'll I'll rock this boat.
I'll still be standing contributing to my generation in one
(01:01:45):
form or another. I'll still be standing as me because
sudden changes.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Will not.
Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Will not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Change me.
Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
If I could get into a time machine and go
back through some space module and turn back the hands
of time, and go and talk to that little boy
who wondered if he would ever be anything other than
worried and intimidated and stressed out and afraid and feeling
like he was an impostor, and that he would never
(01:02:29):
achieve anything. If I could go back and talk to
him and tell him that he would travel around the
world and sit with princes and kings and presidents. If
I could go back and tell him that he would
stand in the gateway of opportunities that few men and
or black men have ever stood in in all of
(01:02:51):
their lives. If I could go back and tell him
that he would speak at some of the largest conferences
in the world, that he would speak to me millions
of people, that he would do it with his knees
knock it, that he would do it with his knees
shaking up against each other, that he would do it scared,
but he would do it, that he would be afrid
(01:03:13):
and still do it. If I could just go back
and tell that little boy that he had something, that
he was worth, something that he could be, something that
he could do, something that he could reach, something, If
I could go back in time, I would tell him
(01:03:33):
who he was. Because a acorn doesn't look like an
oak tree, and an apple seed doesn't look like an apple,
and an orange seed doesn't look like an orange, and
a watermelon seed does not look like a watermelon. Do
not judge in seed form what only time will take
to produce the fruit of what you really are. That's
(01:03:57):
what I would tell that young man.
Speaker 6 (01:04:04):
Hey, everybody, I want to take this time to thank
you for watching the Next Chapter podcast. If this conversation
inspired you, helped you reflect on an idea, or spark
something new inside of you, make sure to like, comment,
and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life
(01:04:27):
isn't about how you begin, it's about how you finished strong,
So start your next chapter with us right here.
Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Every week
Sudden changes like lightning fashion across the sky. Sudden changes
like the boristrous sound of thunder, Rolling sudden changes like
the sound of the engine of a train barreling down
the track. Sudden changes like an airplane lifting off the
(00:21):
ground and to the air. Sudden changes never present themselves
with warnings. They do not always make announcements. They give
you a chance to prepare for them, whether they are
good changes or bad changes, or great changes or mediocre changes,
or microscopic changes, or massive changes so big that your
(00:44):
legs can barely stretch far enough to enter into them.
But we all will face sudden changes. I'm sorry to
tell you that there will be times that you will
stand over gravesides of that you love. I'm sorry to
tell you that you will be in the waiting room
(01:05):
of hospitals and smell the smell that only hospitals produce,
waiting on the phone to ring to find out whether
the surgery was effective or not. I'm sorry to tell
you that you can go from being the CEO to
being unemployed. I'm sorry to tell you that the son
(01:27):
you poured everything you had into may walk away and
spit in your face. I'm sorry to tell you that
the father and mother who had you could let you
down completely, but they're still your mother and father. I'm
sorry to tell you that life is full of sudden
changes and unexpected twist and turns, like getting on six
(01:51):
flags and taking a ride and not knowing where it's
going to lead and when it's going to drop and
how far it's going to drop before you see up
in motion again, That the topography of life is filled
with fluctuations and movements and things that we are not
expecting and that we didn't prepare for and that we
(02:13):
didn't know how to deal with. I'm sorry, but it's true.
The only thing that is definite about life is change.
There are some things that hit us Suddenly. You come
home and your husband has packed his clothes and left.
You come home and your wife has decided she's better single.
You go to work and find out that you've been
(02:33):
laid off no notice, no warning, no farewell speech, no
flowers to suddenly you have gone from employed to unemployed.
I don't care whether you worked in the janitor's cause
that or in c sweet. If you didn't have time
to prepare, to say, to adjust, to get ready for it,
sudden changes can throw off the equilibrium of your entire life.
(02:57):
Your wife leaves you, the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your child dies, the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your career, not your job, your career. You thought you
had a career, and all of a sudden, they shut
down the stores everywhere, and the equilibrium goes out of
(03:19):
your life. The house note can't be paid, the insurance
can't be paid, You have to put the property up
for sale. You have to drop the price because you're
in trouble, and the equilibrium goes out of your life.
Your appetite goes out of your life, your ability and
agility to be able to act as if nothing is wrong,
(03:39):
because God forbid that anybody knows that we have a problem.
We are more concerned about our image than our reality.
We are more concerned about our reputation than we are
the realization of what we need to do to make
things get better in our lives. Trying to convince our friends,
(04:02):
how are you? I'm fine, but I'm sepastic, and I'm
jerking and i'm moving, and still it's more important to
me that I impress you with my calmness than I
do with my progress. Don't believe spring, it will turn
(04:28):
into summer. Don't believe summer because it's going to change
into autumn. Don't believe autumn because autumn is going to
turn into winter. It's going to keep changing. And the
only thing that stable has got to be you that
has the flexibility, that has the ampdextrious ability to adjust
(04:50):
to situations, that has the proclivity to be able to
change with.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
The times and the currents and.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
The seasons and still keep your identity and not lose
yourself to what you see around you. This podcast is
not trying to show you how to stop the change.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Is here to tell you.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
How to not let the change stop you, because if
you're not careful, it will stop you. And if you
are not ready, it will shake you to your core
and knock you down to your knees, and it will
knock you to your knees while your children are watching
to see how you handle sudden changes. I'm sorry to
(05:35):
tell you this that you're not just mom and dad
or CEO or CEO or executive. You are a living, walking, talking,
squawking model of how do you handle things when they
go crazy? And how do you handle things when they
are great, And how do you handle things when they
are amazing? How do you deal with it on the
(05:58):
inside when the brain and pound sudden, unfamiliar changes, The
kind of changes that are traumatic, traumatic events, emotional events,
The kinds of changes that cause you to cry when
nobody's looking.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
The kinds of changes.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
That makes food lose its scent and its taste, and
fruit lose its essence. The kind of shocking news that
makes you wonder about everything and everybody and if you'll
ever be able to trust anybody with your heart again.
I'm sorry to tell you. There will be major disruptions,
(06:39):
major aggravations, major obstacles that stand up in your face
and dare you to take another step, and dare you
to move forward? And dare you to hold your head up,
and dare you to keep going, and dare you to
keep breathing, and dare you to fight on it sets
off a rapid physiological response was designed for survival. I
(07:02):
may not just in your head, but in your body.
There was an old song that you say, someone left
my cake out in the rain, and I don't think
I can take it because it took too long to
bake it. And I may not ever have this recipe again.
That last line is the scariest line I ever heard.
(07:23):
I may not ever have this recipe. I may not
ever have this opportunity. I may not ever have this person.
I may not ever have this responsibility. I may not
have this chance ever again. I know what it's like
(07:44):
to have that may not feeling, because November twenty fourth
of twenty twenty four, while standing up in front of
a crowd speaking like I'm speaking to you now, I
sat down to talk to them summarize what I had
been teaching that day, and all of a sudden, I
(08:08):
just kind of went to sleep. Little did I know
I was having a massive heart attack in front of
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
He is an internationally known preacher based here in Dallas.
This morning, during a nine am Sunday service, Bishop td
Jakes of the Potter's House, so for the health incident
during a morning prayer the Potter's House was streamy live
services one Sunday when Bishop Jake's froze mid sentence, it
started shaking. Now in the last hour we have heard
and seen from Bishop td Jakes after that still undefined
(08:39):
health incident that was seen all around the world.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
During his Sunday sermon.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Didn't know what it was, but almost massive heart attack,
he said, five minutes later, I'd have been dead of
a rival.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is where Bishop td Jake suffered that medical incident
while on stage.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Now the video of the incident is going viral.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I mean, not even in private, not even in a
corner by yourself, in front of the world. I'm having
a massive heart attack and one half of my heart
has actually stopped working all together. And the whole church
is upset, and everybody's in tears, and everybody's worried, and
everybody's in an uproar, and all of a sudden I'm
(09:22):
dealing with sudden changes. I know what it is to
find a sudden change. I'm stubborn. When I finally came
to myself and realized that people were all around me,
and they were praying and they were crying and they
were worrying. And my sister was in one ear and
my wife was in the other ear, and my son
(09:43):
was telling me don't leave him, and all of this
kind of stuff. And I had all of their emotions
on top of my emotions swirling around in my head,
and I had to deal with the possibility that I
may not ever have this recipe again. You first heard
about what had happened to me, because you've seen me preaching, teaching,
(10:07):
run across the aisle, cross over pews, and stand on
my head and do all kinds of stuff. When you
first heard about it, what went through.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
Your last So, Uh, the physician side kicks in and
we start like a computer taking off. The differential diagnoses
what makes a person a faith and Uh, there are
a lot of things we talk about singable episodes, such
something that causes a certain shock. You can have something
(10:37):
called a bagel response. But when I talked to doctor Wagner,
my first concern was that you'd had a stroke.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
I was concerned that you had a stroke.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
And when blood flow is cut off, whether it be
to the brain or to the heart, seconds matter.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
And so in my mind when I hear that.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
I slip over a kind of a mental pick trouble,
an hour glass and the sand is coming down and trauma.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
We call it the golden hour trauma.
Speaker 5 (11:05):
I know when a bleeding patient comes in, I have
a set window to stop that bleeding.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Uh.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
We say all bleeding stops eventually, And I always tell
my residence either we stopped it, or the body stops it,
it's not good. So I was concerned that you were
having a lack of blood flow to the brain. And
I didn't know whether it was a hypertensive stroke where
a blood vestable had ruptured, or whether a blood.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
Clock had had had cut up.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But I knew that if you had a stroke, we
had to get thrombo khanyes or strepto kydes in the clockbuster,
we call.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
It immediately to restore blood flow. And so when.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
I met you and we talked, and you recognize me,
so I knew that you were cognitive. And so if
you recall, and you may not remember, the first thing
I did was I had already moved Heaven and the
Earth's at in the emergency room, and we cleared everything,
and we.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Took you to the cat scam.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
Yes, and I sat there and watched the images roll off.
And while we were getting everything set up, we were
also doing ekg's And so while the cat scam was
giving us information that EKG alerted us that you had
an abnormal EKG and signs of myo cardio a schemia,
no blood flow to the heart.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It's dangerous to live in your tomorrow or you're yesterday,
at the expense of losing this present moment. All of
a sudden, I realized the only thing that mattered was now,
Because tomorrow could all be gone and yesterday can never
(12:43):
be changed. The only thing I have is this present moment,
this now, this tear, this trembling hand that had gripped
the mic so hard that it would not let it go,
and this heart that had stopped beating, and these emotions
(13:07):
that were coming at me like hailstorms on a rooftop,
And all of a sudden, I realized that my life
had suddenly changed. No warning, no dream, no vision, no card,
no call, No. I had just done it. Ekg I'd
(13:29):
come back perfectly. I had done a full physical I
was fine. According to all the gadgets and machines and
what have you, I was absolutely fine. But according to
my heart, I was dying. Someone left my cake out
in the rain, and I don't think that I can
(13:50):
take it because it took too long to bake it.
And at sixty eight years old, I may not ever
have this recipe again, whether I fred or not, really,
because I lived a great life, an amazing life in advance,
(14:12):
whether I concern totally. But I was concerned for the
people I serve and the people I love, and the
people who loved me, and how they would react someone
left my cake out.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
In the rain.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Maybe you're driving down the road, or maybe you're on
a treadmill, or maybe you're on a bicycle, and deep
down inside, though your legs are moving and your face
is sweating, deep down in the back of your mind,
your body.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Is keeping score.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
On an attack that came against you physically, financially, emotionally,
or spiritually, that brought you to a place that you
had to confront the possibility that someone's left my cake
out in the rain. I console myself as they put
me from wheelchair to COT, from COT to ambulance, from
(15:05):
ambulance to emergency room, from emergency room to ICU, from
ICU rush right into surgery. I said, I may not
have it again, but then again I might. I might
be half dead, but that means I'm half alive. I
may be working with half a heart, but the other
(15:26):
heart half is still working. And it was then at
that moment I learned it it's not what you lose
that matters, it's how you work with.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
What you have. Left.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Now, you can either spend the rest of your day,
the rest of your life, crying over what you lost,
worried about what you lost, worried about who didn't stay,
worried about who walked away, or you can look at
who stayed, what you have left, what you are building,
(16:04):
what is working, and take what's left and make it right.
I want to challenge you today because it is so
difficult to allow what's left to become so volumeus that
you forget what's right. What's possible to take what's wrong
(16:27):
and make it so big that you forget what you
have left and what can still be done. It is
so easy to become so engrossed and who betrayed you,
who forsook you, who left you, who hurt you, that
you don't even begin to realize who stayed, who prayed,
who operated, who labored to make things okay. I left
(16:51):
the hospital three and a half days later with not
a stitch in my chest, not a rip in my
rib cage. Normally they would take the heart out and
shock it and clear the passageways and put it back in,
(17:12):
and I would be all scarred up. I left there
with a band aid on my wrists, because a heart attack,
as big and as serious and as difficult as it was,
it was not the end. Watch out for false endings.
(17:33):
Don't call it over just because it looks bad. It
could be possible that a sudden change is just a
gateway to your next great amazing, thirst squenching, life changing, mind, renewing,
heart regulating Your next achievement is on the other side
(18:01):
of your sudden change. So either you see it as
a wall and you run into it and bump your nose,
or you see it as a door and you push
past it to see what is that thing on the
other side. It must be something amazing to make it
(18:24):
possible for me to push through to see why the
obstacle is placed in front of the opportunity. Wherever there
is an opportunity, there will be obstacles. Tough times they
(18:45):
don't last, but tough people they do. Which one are
You lost a child before me and after me? That
means I was born in between two dead babies, and
(19:05):
I survived and I lived. The trauma from having lost
a baby before and after caused her to cling to
me in a way that most mothers wouldn't cling to
a child. Because she now discovers the vulnerability that there
can be sudden change, and that sudden change creates sudden
anxiety and a deeper appreciation, and a fretfulness and sometimes
(19:29):
a worry as to what do I need to do
to make sure that everything turns out all right? It
causes us to need help with things. It caused her
to need help with things. It caused her to handle
me differently because all of a sudden, her vulnerability has
been pierced by the death of the first child named Marionette.
(19:49):
And now she's holding on to me for dear life,
and the child after me is lost and holding on
to it. What are you holding on to just because
you're afraid of los it because you've had losses in
the past. And how does that affect how you deal
with circumstances situations? How does it affect how you handle people?
(20:09):
How does it affect how you handle relationships? How does
it affect how you date? How does it affect how
you interact with staff? How does it affect you on
the inside, not just when you're at work, but when
you lay down at night, when you're driving to work.
How many scores is the body keeping as you're dealing
with these ghosts that are gone but not gone, these
(20:32):
feelings that are there but not there, This anxiety that
exists in your life and nobody can see it, and
nobody knows it, and we don't talk about it, and
yet we have to deal with the effects of it
because we all have sudden changes. Sudden changes just come
without warning. It doesn't ring the doorbell, it doesn't walk
up the steps, It doesn't need itself up to you.
(20:55):
It doesn't walk its way up to you. No, no, no,
You just look up and it's standing in your living
room and you're in a crisis, or the house burned down,
or you're in a flood or the fires in California,
or you're in a crisis, and everybody's moved to the roof.
Sudden changes come into your life in the loss of
a child or the loss of a loved one, or
(21:16):
the loss of a spouse, or the loss of an opportunity,
and all of a sudden you're holding on to whatever
you can find to hold on to. In her case,
it was me, and she was holding on to me
for dear life because of the child she lost before
and the child she lost afterwards. What have you lost instead?
Of just telling me what you have gained, Let's start
(21:38):
thinking about what you have lost and the impact of
that loss on what you have left, and how it
changes how you value, how you handle, how you deal with,
how you portray, how you connect, how you appreciate what
you have left. Because I guarantee you, if you go bankrupt,
it's going to affect how you handle money. If you
(21:58):
lose your car, it's going to affect how you handle
your car payments. If you lose your house, it's going
to affect your willingness to even try to get another
mortgage to get up on your feet again. All of
these decisions are altered and moving and spasting because there's
been a sudden change, and there's been a shattering of
how you do things. There's been a breaking away of
(22:21):
how you do things, and all of a sudden you
may need to stop a while and find your center,
to begin to center yourself and calm yourself and gradually
let the message soak into your heart and into your spirit.
I'm going to be okay in spite of the change.
When you know that you're going to be okay in
(22:41):
spite of the change, it changes your reflex, your confidence,
your stability, your maturity, your wisdom begins to develop, and
all of a sudden, you begin to understand that life
is not a certainty. It's not guaranteed that everything is
going to fall into place all the time order for
it to be. It's not guaranteed that everything is going
(23:03):
to fall into place as you had imagined it. When
I was about ten years old, about nineteen sixty seven,
I found out my father had kidney failure. Now, my
father was the Hulk. He was the houg He could
have played the Hulk in the movie. Big, broad shoulders,
big chest, chested, barreling chest, biceps, triceps, He was huge,
hunk of a man. I literally have seen my father
(23:26):
pick up the backhand of a car and said it
on the road.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
He was a he man.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
He was all of that. He was strong, and all
of a sudden, my father gets kidney failure. He didn't
know that his high pretension was out of control. He
didn't go to the doctor like he should. He didn't
take care of himself, and he lost not just his kidneys,
he lost his normal. And anytime you lose your normal,
(23:50):
there's gonna be peripheral damage that breaks out in your life.
Because we so desperately need certainty and it is so
hard to find because certainty. In order to have absolute certainty,
you have to be able to control not only yourself,
but the behavior of others, the weather, the circumstances, the economy.
(24:11):
There's so many things to handle that you have to
stop and say, wait a minute. I can't handle all
of that. I can only handle how I react to it.
And I'll tell you something. As a son, at about
ten years old, I did not react very well to
my superhero having kidney failure, and I had to learn
(24:31):
how to run a kidney machine while my friends were
learning how to ride a bicycle. By the time I
was sixteen years old, my father was dead, and that
was a sudden change. It is grief for him, absolutely,
but it was also grief for me, and I am
(24:52):
wondering if my life will ever be the same. I
am grieving over the questions I didn't get answered. I'm
grieving over the the relationships. We didn't get to have,
the games, we didn't get to go to the concerts.
He didn't get to attend the thoughts and father son
conversations that I hope that we would have. Now they
(25:12):
are going down into the grave with his casket, and
we're not just burying him, We're bearing everything.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I had in mind.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It was things like this that led to my mother
having Alzheimer's. School teacher ended up the Equal Employment Opportunities
representative for the state of West Virginia, ended up walking
down the street looking for a car she left in
(25:44):
the parking lot and forgotten where it was. First we
passed it, all we played it. Awfu was simple. She
had other things on her mind, and then it became
so obvious that we could not ignore it. Her body
kept score. One of fourteen other siblings, raised in Alabama
(26:08):
with an uncle that had run for his life to
flee being killed in the night, did all kinds of
school work that started when she was four years old,
and graduated from high school at fifteen, went on to
college at Tuskegee and did four years of college in
three with two majors. She had been amazing and done
(26:34):
amazing things, and did her student teaching, and traveled around
the world, been to Germany, did all kinds of wonderful things.
But all the while she was doing them, her body
was keeping schore. She had five children, three of them lived.
She survived that she endured it, but her body was
(26:55):
keeping score. Her husband had kidney failure, and she drove
him twice a week back and forth to Cleveland, about
five hours away, and still kept her job and kept
everything going at the same time. And she did it
like batwoman, She did it like superwoman. She did it
(27:15):
like she had roller skates on her feet. She did it,
but her body was keeping score. And the score was
written in Alzheimer's and the Alzheimer's was written in the
audacity of the loss of memory, of a mind so
(27:40):
massive and a heart so broken that little by little
she started to fade away. I don't know what your
story is, and I don't know what you've been through,
and I don't know if you've experienced loss in your life,
But if you live long enough, you will experience some
loss in your life. When you experience that loss in
(28:02):
your life, how you manage it, how you respond to it,
and for God's sake, don't bury it and try to
act like you're okay, and try to be the hero
for everybody, and put on your cape and your boots
and run out there and stand out on the roof
and see if you can fly, because you can't fly.
You're not Superman after all. You have to stop and
deal with it and confront it and face it and
(28:25):
feel it and heal it so that you can be
the person that you need to be because you never
saw this coming. Is there anybody who's listening at me
right now who's dealing with something that was so traumatic,
so painful, so difficult, so overwhelming, so vulnerable that it
has hit you in such a way that you are
(28:46):
not sure of yourself or your environment, or your friends
or your people, and you are not sure that you
will ever be the same again. The reason I'm talking
to you through this podcast is to navigate you through
the current and the trouble water that it fluctuates in
(29:08):
our lives. And we find ourselves in situations that we
can't easily talk about or don't even have the language
to articulate because we are feeling with sudden changes. People
ask you how are you doing today, and you say fine,
because you know they don't really want to hear how
you are really doing today. You know it's too complicated
(29:31):
for them, you know it's too difficult for them, and
so you just say to them, I'm fine, but deep
down inside you're not okay. So through ministry, through podcasts,
through books, through counseling, through therapy, and a myriad of
other things, support, friends, somebody you can trust in your life,
you begin to work your way toward normal. You begin
(29:52):
to get yourself to a place that you are not
spastic on the floor. If you don't do that, you'll
be spastic in the bottom of of a liquor bottle.
You'll be spastic in the bottom of a drugs case.
You'll be spastic in the bottom of some forbidden, self
destructive habit that you are doing to anesthetize the pain
(30:14):
that you won't deal with. Because, as the doctor said
so clearly, the body always keeps score, not always the mind,
not always the emotions. Just because you got emotionally better
doesn't mean you got physically better. Doesn't mean that the
cortison is gone down and the swelling has left, and
(30:36):
your joints are back to normal. And after a while,
what started out on your heart ends up in your
heart and affects your body and affects your knees, and
all of a sudden, what started out as a small
thing confined to a small, relatively small space in your
thought life is affecting every area of or life. Today
(31:01):
we're talking about sudden changes. Have you had any. By
the time I had gotten a little older, I had
opened a small church in a storefront. I started out
with only seven members. I think that God had given
me an opportunity to help other people. But here's the secret.
(31:23):
Most people who are in the business of helping other
people start out with helping themselves, and with the overflow
of the current of ministering, healing, counseling themselves, they begin
to look for answers for other people. It is the
trauma that starts in the life of the counselor and
the physician that causes them to persevere through the classes
(31:46):
and take the courses and ask the right questions and
have the passion on the inside to make sure that
things get better, to make sure that things are acclimated
in such a way, to make sure that somebody cares
for them. Because every time you care for someone who
is shattered, you are caring for yourself. You have to
have gone through some things. I started out in a
(32:08):
little church with only seven members, but that didn't bother me.
I wasn't trying to be big. I was trying to
be better. I was trying to be there for other
people going through things like I had gone through, so
that I could help them to deal with sudden changes.
It wasn't just the change of having a storefront church.
I had nothing to compare it with only seven members.
(32:29):
Before that, I had none. What the real problem was is,
little by little, it was eating into the finances I
was making working on another job. I was pouring everything
into the church. So the lights went out and the
phone went out, and I was on a downward trajectory
to nothingness and not sure if I could get back
(32:51):
up again. I remember catching the bus and getting on
the bus and saying to myself, I'm going downtown to
Big Appalachian Park Company not to cut my power off.
And they smiled and said, we're sorry, there's nothing we
can do for you. And I walked out of the
store with visible tears running down my face because I
(33:13):
was at my wits end. If I'm talking to somebody
today who's ever been in that situation, whether it was
for a high dollar amount or a low dollar amount,
and you've gotten to the breaking point, and you're standing
on the edge of a cliff and you are starting
to wonder if you will ever be well, and what
do you say to your wife when you get home,
(33:33):
and how do you bring your kids into the house.
We came home with the children and the house was dark,
and we decided to play a game who could get
to the bed first without stumping their toe. We didn't
want them to know that the power was off, so
we turned it into a game. But while they giggled
in their bed, we worried in Orange because we were
(33:55):
dealing with a sudden change. That as long as I
had my job before the plant had shut down, I
was in pretty good shape. They didn't want us they
we're about to shut down. They didn't want us that
we were in the middle of a paradigm shift. They
didn't tell us that the industry age was giving away
to the information age and that the plants all over
(34:17):
West Virginia were shutting down. No, they didn't go into
that kind of detail. They told us you were laid off,
and the whole world shook up under my feet. You
have to understand that I am encouraging my little seven members,
while deep down inside I was discouraged myself. And the
(34:38):
body always keep score. Years later, I made the decision
while the crazy, the tempestuous decision to leave what was
already a difficult situation and starting to get better. It
was starting to get better, It was starting to improve,
it was starting to change. I moved to Dallas, Texas
(35:01):
with fifty families to start what would become the Potter's
House that ended up with thirty thousand members, which was
mind boggling.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And now I'm stressed.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
The other way. I know what it is to be
stressed for not having enough. I know what it is
to be stressed at a funeral. I know what it
is to be stressed at a graveside. I know what
it is to be stressed dealing with bills. I know
what it is to be stressed with not enough. But
now I'm stressed with too much. And suddenly I realized
stress doesn't always mean Anxiety doesn't always come from nervousness,
(35:38):
doesn't always come from things going bad. It can also
come from things going right. The fear that it won't last,
the fear that you're not good enough, the fear that
you can't handle it, the fear of imposter syndrome. I'm
not sure it's not worse than the fear of losing.
The fear that comes with gain mean also makes you
(36:01):
doubt yourself, makes you wonder do you belong in the
room you just got in, and all of a sudden
you're dealing with sudden change. One moment, I'm in a
food line, one moment, I'm getting stamps, one moment we're
getting wick, and the next moment I'm exploding with people
(36:21):
and books and movies and films and doing all of
these amazing things. But it really didn't feel as good
as I thought it would feel, because success doesn't feel
like you think success would feel like, not when it
comes on the back of anxiety and the back of losing,
and the back of wondering will this last. And that's
(36:46):
not just to fool about a job or a vocation.
It's true about a relationship. After several failed relationships, you
enter into the new relationship, maybe one foot at a time,
holding back a little bit of yourself because you wonder
will this last. You meet a new friend. You've got
a friendship and you're starting to confide in each other
(37:08):
and talk to each other, but you wonder will this last.
There's as much anxiety to the far North as there
is to the far South, there's an anxiety of wondering
do I have what it takes to deal with what
I got to deal with, And then to have fifty
families counting on you on top of your own family
(37:31):
counting on you. We are weighted down not only by
the pressure that we place on ourselves, but the pressure
of those who believe in us. Though it is well intentioned,
can also create great anxiety because suddenly they're counting on
you to make something happen that you talk real big about,
(37:52):
but you're not sure that you can actually make it happen.
And if you don't make it happen, not only do
you endanger your family In my case, I endangered fifty
other families in the process. So good is not as
good as you thought it was. The great it's not
as great a feeling as she thought it would be.
And managing resources is not as wonderful as you thought
(38:15):
it would be because you had pierced the veil of
understanding that this could all go away. And what do
I do if the change that's good makes another change
that's bad. What do you do when fall turns to winter?
(38:42):
What do you do when sunshine turns to rain? What
do you do if pleasure turns to pain? What do
you do if everything that you have dreamed of turns
into a nightmare and you have to start all over again.
(39:02):
These are the feelings and the anxieties and the proclivities
that exist in people who are dealing with sudden changes,
and how do you cope with those sudden changes? I
believe in number one, you have to have dare devil
friends who surround yourself with people who are used to
living on the edge, who understand that it's okay to
(39:23):
be on the edge, that just because you're on the
edge doesn't mean that you've fallen off the cliff. You
got to be with risk takers. You got to be
with people who have experienced at taking a chance. Don't
get around a bunch of people who are naysayers and
doubters and fearful, because if whatever you feed will live,
you need to be around people that are feeding you
(39:44):
with ideas and faith and feeding you with the reality
that it's okay to make a mistake, and it's okay
for things to drop, and it's okay for things to fluctuate.
If the stock market fluctuates, if the government fluctuates, if
relationship fluctuates. Whatever you're building is going to fluctuate, but
(40:05):
do not allow the fluctuate to indicate to you that
you have suddenly lost what you had. Just because you
hit a bump in the road doesn't mean that the
car has stopped. When the brain encounter sudden unfamiliar changes,
such as a traumatic event, shocking news, or a major disruption,
it has to figure out it works to figure out
(40:27):
how to solve the problem. Our brains are the first
computer hard drive computers that were ever invented by God
to kind of figure out how to work this out
and how to resolve it. And it is so desperate
to fix it that if it cannot find an answer
to the problem, it will create an illusion to give
you a false answer rather than to leave you with
(40:48):
a blank page. Here's a breakdown on how the brain
and the body react. We keep trying to separate them
like they're two different species, like they don't go together,
like they're Laurel and Hearty, But know they are inexplicably
connected one to the other, and what affects one affects
the other. If the body is not well, it will
eventually affect the brain. And if the brain is not well,
(41:11):
it will affect the body. The perception of threat begins
to affect your sensory input downloading information. Your whole body tendses,
your palms begin to sweat, your breathing changes because of
the perception of threat. Not the attack of threat, but
the perception, the very idea of it, the very fear
(41:35):
of it, the very feel of the possibility that you
may not make it out of this, That something is
lurking over your head and over your mind and over
your spirit, like a cloud or dark cloud that's following
you down the highway. That is the perception of threat
that moves from your brain down into your body, and
(41:56):
you can exactly see it, but you can feel it,
and the feeling is so strong that it won't stay
in your head. It ignites the fight or fight action
down inside of all of us. The sympathetic nervous system
that responds to the circumstance to get ready for something
you weren't ready for, to give you the adrenaline that's
(42:18):
necessary for you to be able to do what you
need to do, to give you the hormonal flood that
has been on reserve in your body, the HPA access
activation that has been on a whole waiting for such
a time as this. Oh, yes, you turn into somebody else.
You turn into somebody that you have never seen before.
You turn into somebody that your family doesn't know you
(42:41):
could turn into. Because you are at war. Even though
you do not always see the enemy that you are
at war against, your mind, your brain, your mentality all
announces to you that you are going through a cognitive
explosion and impact. Your prefrontal cortex tells you something is
(43:07):
up and you've got to do something about it, and
you've got to find a way to return to a baseline,
to a calmplace, to a pair of sympathetic nervous system
that lines out differently than it does under war, under conflict,
(43:29):
under absurdity. In summary, sudden unfamiliar changes trigger a cascade
of survival mechanisms in the brain. Because we were made
to survive. We were created to endure, We were created
to adapt. We were created to adapt climate changes, weather changes,
circumstantial changes. We were created to survive. Just like the
(43:53):
monkeys that I ran into on the rock of Gibraltar,
and we got on the top of the mountain and
we noticed that there were monkeys everywhere, all on the
cars and jumping from window to window to window. But
the strange thing we didn't notice at first is that
the monkeys were born without tails. The God began to
tell us that when the monkeys first came to the mountaintop,
(44:15):
they were born with tails, but when the mountaintop turned
to ice and it got cold, their tail was the
first thing to freeze. And eventually, after several generations, they
started being born without the tail because they had frozen
their tail off. If the monkey could adapt to the
ice and the coal and still survive and still have
(44:39):
children and still have offsprings, you can survive whatever you
are facing right now. You're a migdal of sounds, the
alarm to yourself that says, do not go down without
a fight. You are Adrenaline gets somebody ready to act, to move,
to do whatever it's got to do. You get strength
you didn't know you had. You got energy that you
(45:00):
never experienced at other times and other moments in your life.
Your quarters all help sustain alertness so that you are
listening better, looking better, gazing further, a more attentive, more
alert to what's going on around you because you are aware,
like a deer walking through the forest, and all of
(45:22):
a sudden it senses or smells a lion, and all
of a sudden it looks up, and it starts looking
all around because its alertness has been alerted to the
fact that there is danger nearby. And an entirely different
reaction takes over the animal, and it drops down into
a position of movement, a fight or flight, getting ready
(45:44):
to move because it knows it is in the presence
of danger. And we live and work and breathe and
function in the presence of danger. We move in the
presence of danger. We give birth in the presence of danger.
We raise our children in the presence of danger. We
(46:05):
start businesses in the presence of danger. We teach class
in the presence of danger. The fear of rejection, the
fear of isolation, the fear of losing the job, the
fear of going bankrupt, the fear of losing the opportunity,
the fear of being laughed that we do it all
in front of all of these spectators. Oh, we don't
(46:28):
do it at all. And we sit back and say,
I would have, I could have, I should have, I
ought to have done I didn't do it. Thank God,
we have the aid of our prefrontal cortex. Our activity drops,
making thoughtful decisions harder, and all of a sudden, we
(46:49):
have to begin to try to neutralize ourselves and bring
back balance. Balance is the thing that we need. Eventually,
the brain works to re established balance and the best
of circumstances, we calm down. Our breathing goes down, our
pulse rate goes down, our blood pressure goes down, our
(47:09):
mind begins to function more normally, so that we are
prepared to make more sound and absolute and powerful and
forceful and impactful decisions because we have dealt with the
chronic circumstances in such a way that we realize that
if the circumstance does not change, I will change for
(47:31):
the circumstance. But I refuse to let the circumstance change me,
because if it changes me, it can lead to anxiety,
memory issues, burnout, depression, dis ease. It doesn't really hit
(47:53):
you till you say it slow. If you say disease,
you don't get it. But if you slow it down
and say dis ease, you realize that the root of
every disease is dis ease. Doctor Bessel van der Cooke
wrote a book worth reading, The Body keeps score, not
(48:16):
just the mind, but the body keeps scoring. I want
to show you what I mean when I say that
you feel it in your mind, but you experience it
in your body as well. And even though you escaped it,
even though you survived, and even though you went to
work tomorrow, and even though you smiled at people, and
even though you got the kids lunch ready, that doesn't
mean you're okay. Because the body keeps score. And the
(48:39):
fact that the body keeps score, Bethel van der Koork
says to us, the body keeping score doesn't mean that
you're okay. It's just storing it in your joints and yourselves,
and all of a sudden, you're experiencing swelling in your
journks and your organ and your body from all of
that cortosol that's been collected on the inside that you
(48:59):
have suppressed. So suppressing how you feel is not healing
how you feel because you have had a sudden change.
And anytime you have a sudden change, it leaves you
in a turmoil where you're trying to figure out, what
do I need to do to fix, to adjust, to
straighten things out, to get things together. Because we have
a tendency to think that we always need to do
(49:20):
something and that if we do the right thing, the
right thing will happen. But you can do the right thing,
and that doesn't guarantee that the right thing will happen,
because there are all these other variables going on around us.
We can steer the ship perfectly, but we cannot control
the storm that the ship has to sail in, and
(49:41):
we have to deal with all of that. And if
we don't deal with it, Doctor van der Kolk is
absolutely right. The body does keep score. You may not
look at the score. You may not pay attention to it.
You may ignore it. You may choose to act as
if you don't see it. You may act like it's
(50:01):
not important and that it doesn't matter. But the body,
it keeps goore. It clocks the arteries and the veins,
It swells the joints and the tissues. It leads to
diseases like Alzheimer's. It affects you in ways that are unimaginable.
And it is a collection of all the things you
(50:23):
didn't get back into balance and get rid of. Work
it out, run it out, talk it out, pray it out,
whatever you got to do to get it out. You've
got to get it out because all that stays around
inside of you and lingers is keeping score, and the
(50:44):
score will eventually come back and meet you at the
worst possible time in your life, and you won't be
ready for what is about to happen. So there you
are in a situation with no one to tell. Your
lips are sealed, your eyes are closed. It's three o'clock
in the morning, and everybody's sleep but you. Because if
(51:06):
you're like me, one of the first things to pass
away is sleep. Sleep passes away when you have no
plan for tomorrow. Sleep passes away when you're not sure
that the plan you have.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Will work.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
Sleep passes away when you find yourself in a dilemma
of a lifetime and no one to even talk to
about it. Because you must feel You must appear brave,
you must appear absolutely, you must appear certain, and you
can't let people know that you are overwhelmed. Sleep begins
to dissipate. Indigestion is affected, how your body digests food,
(51:49):
how you perceive and hear people, how you snape at
the dog and yell at the cat, And find yourself
in a situation that you are out of character. On
this very step, I endured my first and hopefully only
massive heart attack, out of nowhere, out of the blue.
I didn't even know what it was. I can't even
(52:11):
describe it to you fully what it was. All I
know is that I was sitting in that very chair
right there. My body was, but everything else in me
was in a quiet place. I was wrapped in a
cocoon of grace and kindness and quietness and peace and tranquility.
(52:36):
I was safe in the arms of my creator while
my body was slumped over in the chair. You talking
about change. The reason I want to talk about my
next chapter, and the reason I want to talk about
(52:56):
sudden changes is often your next is in the urgency
of now something you didn't see coming, something you weren't
prayed for, something you didn't take a class in, something
that you didn't hear anybody lecture on, and boom, there
it is. And you either let it break you or
(53:21):
you stand up to it and break it. And by
the grace of God and the prayers of people and
the technology that was around me, I went home with
a band aid on my wrists and nothing more. And
(53:43):
you can survive to every sudden change that comes in
your life, good or bad, up or down, right or wrong,
north or south. You can survive every chance that comes
in your life if you have the agility, the adaptable
(54:10):
agility to stop being so stubborn and saying I gotta
be mean no matter what. That's not true. The monkeys
changed on the mountain tops, the cave men changed in
the cave. The people that were raised in the African deserts,
they changed to fit the climate they were in. People
(54:33):
change all the time with wheelchairs and one arm and
no arms and no legs. Don't stand there and tell
me you gotta be who you gotta be.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (54:45):
If you need to adapt to survive, then adapt adaptability
is refusing to lose your inner sanctuary because of your
outer circumstances. Adaptability means I may have to go about
it differently, but go about it I will, I can,
(55:07):
and I must. As I talk to you today, I
talk to you from the perspective of my next chapter.
I want you to go after your next chapter. I
want you to build what you're trying to build, and
do what you're trying to do, and collaborate and coordinate
and illustrate and demonstrate and do all the amazing things
that you were meant to do, but be careful. Be
(55:33):
careful because in the process of doing all of that,
there will be sudden changes, and your schedule will become
so hectic that you're taking care of everybody else but you,
and you'll look around and there are no gauges to
tell you that your gas is low, that your oil
(55:56):
is dry, that your power is too many until it
is too late. You must listen carefully at your body
because the doctor was right. Oh yeah, he was right.
The body always keeps scoring. And no matter how bright
(56:19):
you are, rich you are poor you are, or beautiful
or smart, or how much hair you have, or how
much giftings you have, it's still keeping score. So how
do I release it? I'm glad you asked. There's a
lot of ways to release it, and you've got to
(56:39):
use them all, whether it's exercise or reading or crossword
puzzles or puzzles for the head or puzzles for the body.
To understand that the pain is not isolated to your brain,
that it gets down in your body, and if you
can get it out of your body, it will flood
out of you. While you're on the trie meal. It'll
(57:00):
flood out of you while you're moving your feet, it
will flood out of you while you're in the swimming pool.
That you have got to make sure that your body
is as active as your pain, that your body is
as active as the demands that come on your life.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
That you are.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Eating the kinds of food that nourishes you for all
the things you have to deal with day after day
and moment after moment, that you are eating the kinds
of food that replenish the body, replenish the soul, change
your mood, and change your attitude. Did you know that
your diet can change your attitude? That you have at
(57:38):
least a few friends in your life with whom you
do not have to pretend or impress, that you can
openly share your frustrations and aggravation and they will think
no less of you when it's over than they did
when it started. That that's one of the ways that
you can begin to cure and heal yourself. That you
(57:58):
can count your blessings and not your burdens and rehearsing yourself.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
It's amazing to me.
Speaker 1 (58:06):
How loud your burdens scream, and how your blessings whisper,
make your blessing scream so loud until you cannot hear
the burdens beneath them, and little by little you will silence, silence,
silence everything that you lay down with every night. Take
(58:29):
the last few hours, finally, and use the last few
hours before you go to bed to clear your head,
or write down your plans, or set aside your agenda,
or do like I do and listen at comedy and
make yourself laugh yourself to sleep so that you don't
(58:52):
go to bed in fight mod, in fight mode, in
flight mode, in fear mode, stress mode, that you begin
to understand that sudden change doesn't have to be sudden death,
that the loss of a loved one doesn't mean that
(59:12):
you have to lose yourself, That you can be sad
and grieve and be unhappy and shed tears and still
wipe your face and pick up your briefcase and do
what you've got to do. That you can have moments
of great triumph and great tragedy, and that you don't
(59:34):
have to walk away from your triumph because you're guilty
over your tragedy. That you can use what works to
strengthen what doesn't work. Changes will come and changes will go.
Trouble will come and trouble will go. Hard times will come,
(59:58):
and hard times will go. The only thing that remains
is tough people. Tough doesn't mean that you didn't cry.
Tough doesn't mean that you don't get frustrated. Tough doesn't
mean that you have the answer to every question. Tough
means that you will not allow the things around you
(01:00:18):
to change the things within you. Tough means I demand
that I remain a loving person even when people have
not been lovely toward me. Strong means that I'm able
to resist the temptation to get down on your level
in order to fight you off For me. It means
(01:00:39):
that I have the power to resist the temptation to
turn into funt you don't want me to be, just
to prove to you that I can fight on your level.
It means that I'm strong enough to maintain my dignity
while you throw agony all in front of me, and
(01:01:03):
I'll still stand though the wind blows and the lightning
flashes and the thunder rolls. I'll still stand until the
changes cease, and the wind calms down, and the billows
(01:01:24):
stop rolling and the waves dissipate. I'll still be standing
on this boat. Oh yes, we'll I'll rock this boat.
I'll still be standing contributing to my generation in one
(01:01:45):
form or another. I'll still be standing as me because
sudden changes.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Will not.
Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Will not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Change me.
Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
If I could get into a time machine and go
back through some space module and turn back the hands
of time, and go and talk to that little boy
who wondered if he would ever be anything other than
worried and intimidated and stressed out and afraid and feeling
like he was an impostor, and that he would never
(01:02:29):
achieve anything. If I could go back and talk to
him and tell him that he would travel around the
world and sit with princes and kings and presidents. If
I could go back and tell him that he would
stand in the gateway of opportunities that few men and
or black men have ever stood in in all of
(01:02:51):
their lives. If I could go back and tell him
that he would speak at some of the largest conferences
in the world, that he would speak to me millions
of people, that he would do it with his knees
knock it, that he would do it with his knees
shaking up against each other, that he would do it scared,
but he would do it, that he would be afrid
(01:03:13):
and still do it. If I could just go back
and tell that little boy that he had something, that
he was worth, something that he could be, something that
he could do, something that he could reach, something, If
I could go back in time, I would tell him
(01:03:33):
who he was. Because a acorn doesn't look like an
oak tree, and an apple seed doesn't look like an apple,
and an orange seed doesn't look like an orange, and
a watermelon seed does not look like a watermelon. Do
not judge in seed form what only time will take
to produce the fruit of what you really are. That's
(01:03:57):
what I would tell that young man.
Speaker 6 (01:04:04):
Hey, everybody, I want to take this time to thank
you for watching the Next Chapter podcast. If this conversation
inspired you, helped you reflect on an idea, or spark
something new inside of you, make sure to like, comment,
and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life
(01:04:27):
isn't about how you begin, it's about how you finished strong,
So start your next chapter with us right here.
Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Every week
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