October 1, 2024 • 48 mins
In this episode of The Wayfinder Show, host Luis Hernandez interviews Dr. Michael Shandler, an award-winning author, life coach, and organizational development consultant. Dr. Shandler discusses his tumultuous childhood during the apartheid era in South Africa, his mother’s escape from Nazi Austria, and his own brutal experiences in an Afrikaner boarding school. He also explores his spiritual journey, including transformative experiences with psychedelics and his personal development under various mentors. Dr. Shandler shares insights from his latest book, 'Karma and Kismet,' and his eventual reconciliation with his abusive father. The episode provides a deep dive into personal growth, spirituality, and healing.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I've never felt this sad aboutthe world as I do right now.
Really?
I really do.
I'm very concerned about theworld, but I would say that I
think that the only thing that Ican do as a person, as an
individual person is work onmyself.
If I'm working on myself, if I'mcentering, if I'm getting
(00:20):
centered, then my actions aregoing to come out of a
compassionate and more likely tocome out of a compassionate and
loving place.
Welcome to The Wayfinder Showwith Luis Hernandez, where
(00:42):
guests discuss the why and howof making changes that led them
down a more authentic path orallow them to level up in some
area of their life.
Our goal is to dig deep andprovide not only knowledge, but
actionable advice to help youget from where you are to where
you want to be.
Come join us and find the way toyour dream life.
(01:13):
Welcome back to the Wayfindershow.
I am your host, Louis Hernandez.
And today we are here with Dr.
Michael Chandler.
Dr.
Chandler is an award winningauthor, life coach, and
organizational developmentconsultant.
in his new book, that we'regoing to talk about, he talks
about his boyhood in adysfunctional family during a
part, the apartheid era in SouthAfrica.
(01:35):
and how that provided powerfulgrist for his transformational
personal journey.
Michael is a multi publishedauthor as well as a co author
with his wife, Nina Shandler, ofseveral books on health and
communication.
Dr.
Shandler also holds a master'sin counseling psychology and
family therapy and a doctorateIn leadership and organizational
(01:57):
development from UMass Amherst,Chandler has consulted to and
trained hundreds of leaders andorganizations internationally.
He is an avid cyclist and yogi ahusband of over 50 years, a
father, a grandfather of fiveincredible kids.
today he's here to talk abouthis journey and his new book,
Karma and Kismet.
(02:18):
a spiritual quest acrosscontinents, cultures, and
consciousness.
Dr.
Chandler, welcome to theWayfinder show.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Yeah.
Thank you for being here.
So let's just get right into it.
I'm curious.
I've heard, you and other,forums talking about having been
(02:38):
groomed to be an elite.
Can you talk a little bit moreabout that?
Yes.
First of all, I grew up in SouthAfrica during the beginning of
the apartheid era.
apartheid was introduced in 1948officially as a legal system.
I was born in 46.
So I was a young kid when itfirst came into being.
(03:01):
and of course, We were, thewhole society, everybody in the
society was divided up intotheir race.
And of course, white people, asyou all know, was the
privileged, was the very muchthe privileged group.
Within the white group, therewere two basic factions.
One was the perhaps morecommonly known one, the English.
(03:21):
They were, descendants of theBritish.
colonists who had settled at theCape, and the other group were
the Afrikaners, who also weredescendants, but of the Dutch.
So these two groups in thebeginning were very much in
competition in South Africa andactually went to war.
the Anglo Boer War is the famouswar that they fought.
(03:43):
It went on for about four years,at the turn of the 19th century,
the beginning of the 20thcentury, 1899 to 1902.
The British won that war, but inso doing, they created a lot of
very bad feelings with theAfrikaners.
the British incarcerated in thefirst concentration camps that
(04:05):
we know about, incarcerated thewomen and children and elders of
the Afrikaners, and they putthem in these concentration
camps, and about 27, 000 of themare recorded to have died.
this left an incredibly bitterkind of feeling with the
Afrikaners toward the English.
(04:25):
So I was born Jewish into aJewish family.
My mother was a, survivor ofHitler's Nazism in Austria.
So she carried the wounds of herescape and her escape of the
whole family with her.
My grandfather was put into aconcentration camp, in 1938,
(04:47):
which he managed to bribe hisway out of.
So there's a whole history of mymother's family's, escape from
Nazism and how they were taken,to Palestine.
It was called British MandatePalestine because the Brits were
kind of in charge.
And during the Second World War,my father was a soldier.
(05:12):
In the British Eighth Army, andat one point he was stationed in
British Mandate, Palestine.
My mother, who, as I mentioned,escaped to Palestine when she
was 16 and she was about 21 whenshe met my father at a dance in
1945.
And they were married in 1945 inTel Aviv, and I was born the
(05:33):
next year in Cape Town, SouthAfrica.
So 1946.
I mentioned all this stuff aboutapartheid and the tension
between the English andAfrikaans because it really
mattered.
I mean, it was one thing to bewhite, you had automatic
privilege because your skincolor was white, but there was a
lot of tension, and it's notmuch known really, but a lot of
(05:56):
tension between the English andAfrikaners, because I was
Jewish, there was an additionaltension on me, a lot of
antisemitism, the question waswhy, and the reason was in the
Second World War, The animositybetween the British and the
Afrikaners was so extreme thatthe Afrikaners actually sided
(06:18):
with the Germans, with theNazis, many of them did.
Wow.
So, and that carried over, I wasborn a year after the war.
So there was still very muchthat feeling of, that some, that
Afrikaners, at least some ofthem were Nazis.
That was still very much aresidue after the war.
So my mother being who she was,and, I'm being, very much
(06:41):
affected by what had happened toher.
She believed that all Afrikanerswere Nazis, and she would say,
so I'll fast forward a little inmy story.
Is this level of detail good or?
Yeah, that, that's fascinating.
That's a bit of history.
I never knew that the Afrikanerswere considered Nazis.
That just blows my mind.
(07:01):
As I say, a percentage of themduring the Second World War who,
who were very much who wereNazis.
There were even Naziorganizations that ran around
South Africa, creating all kindsof trouble, beating up soldiers
who were going to join the armyand so on.
Yes, there was a lot.
Were they, forgive my ignorancehere.
I don't know, were theyrecognized as Nazis from, the
(07:21):
larger groups in Germany and whowe all think of as the
traditional Nazis?
I don't know.
I'm not a scholar of the subjectmyself.
Sure.
So I don't know exactly whattheir relationship with the
German outfits was.
Okay.
But I can tell you that some ofthem wore blatantly wore.
Takeoffs on Nazi uniforms Naziinsignia.
Wow.
(07:42):
but that really was birthed morefrom their, despise for the
Jewish people.
Is that what you're saying?
The fact that the Nazis despisedthe Jews, was, so they followed
suit.
There was another big thing thathappened between the British and
the, Africanas, and that wasthat the Jews were identified
(08:03):
with the English side.
Okay.
They were English speaking andthey were identified sure.
But they were blamed for helpingthe British to keep the
africanas in poverty after theAnglo Bo War.
And that led to a lot of tensionbecause the Jews in South
Africa.
were very successful.
(08:23):
they had opportunity, they werehard working, and they were a
successful immigrant group forsure.
I went to this very, how shall Isay, very prim and proper
English school.
And everything was going more orless swimmingly until I hit
about age 13.
And I started to get intofights.
(08:45):
I got into one really bad fightand was almost expelled for it.
And then, a few months later, Igot 19 percent for Latin.
You have to understand thatLatin most symbolizes the
British heritage in SouthAfrica.
So if you fail Latin, it's nottoo good.
So I failed that and it was veryclear that I was going to fail.
(09:08):
I had never failed a subjectbefore.
I wasn't a great student by anymeans, but I had never failed a
subject before, but it was veryclear that I was about to fail.
So my father, I've left out alot of details about my dad.
My father was a very mercurial,abusive guy.
He was very violent and thereare plenty of details in the
(09:29):
book about his violence and whathappens.
I won't get into that now.
But I think he was in some sortof state of despair about me.
And he said, I'm going to sendhim to an Africana school in the
hinterland of the Cape province.
So he found a school for me inthe, about 300 miles from Cape
(09:50):
Town in an area where prettymuch everybody spoke Afrikaans
and very few people spokeEnglish.
And suddenly at age 13, I foundmyself living with Afrikaans
boys in a boarding house in agodforsaken place, barren desert
like place, and I wasn't used toit.
(10:10):
I'd never Cape Town, by the way,and if you don't know it, is a
very, very magnificentlybeautiful place with oceans, two
oceans, huge peninsula,wonderful fauna and flora, great
climate, etc.
And suddenly I find myselfliving in this godforsaken
place.
The only distinction that thisplace that I was now sent to,
(10:31):
which was called Oudtshoorn, oh,it's pronounced O A T,
Oudtshoorn, but spelt O U D T SH O O R N, it's a Dutch word,
means old horn.
But it's only, it's famous forone thing, and that is, it is
the world's ostrich center.
The biggest ostrich producingplace in the world.
(10:53):
And, what people don't know isthat before the First World War,
women had a kind of, an ostrichfeather frenzy that went on for
about 40 years.
The style for women was to wearthese ostrich feather hats and
boas around their necks.
and it was only with the,invention of the open car.
(11:15):
that it became sort of, well,the wind would blow the ostrich
feathers.
And so women stopped wearingthem.
They weren't convenient anymore,but for years before that
ostrich feathers were worth morethan gold by weight.
Wow.
they were the fourth largestexport, South Africa's export.
when I was 13, I was sent tothis place.
(11:37):
of which the heyday had beensome 50 years before I got
there.
So by the time I got there,there was really nothing, except
its reputation and except therewere ostriches, ostrich farms
still around, but ostrichfeathers were no longer as
popular as they were back in theheyday.
This was really the first, Iwould say, existential kind of
(11:57):
crisis in a big way that hit me,and that was that basically I
couldn't speak the language, Icouldn't understand the kids,
and all of the lessons, most,not all, most of the lessons
were in Afrikaans.
So I started to fall further andfurther behind.
Yeah.
And the kids, some of the kidswere bullies and some of them
(12:18):
were very anti Semitic.
It happened that, shortly afterI arrived there, some of the
bullies in the boarding housegot together in my room and they
trapped me.
They made a circle around me andthey trapped me.
And they put another guy in thiskind of human circle that they
formed, who was much bigger thanme.
And there was no contest.
(12:38):
I think that was the point.
And I was in this room, in thisring, I was about to get beaten
up for sure, and suddenly, Ijust don't know what came over
me, but I went I went out of mymind for a moment, and I spun,
and I punched this guy, he'smuch bigger than me, punched
(13:00):
him, and I landed right on hisjaw, and he went down like a
sack of potatoes, boom, and hewas out, and his lip was split,
and the other bullies took himout and I was really afraid.
Everybody melted away.
Nobody wanted to be seen withme.
Nobody wanted to talk to me.
The whole scene was not supposedto go down the way it did go
(13:20):
down.
A few minutes later, one of the18 year old big boys, you
grabbed me and took me to a kindof an outdoor, concrete sort of
outdoor mall, and he took arubber hose pipe and he beat me
very badly with it.
So that was the beginning of, itwas kind of survival.
(13:42):
And I was helped.
It was also the first of where Icould say that there were kind
individuals that helped me.
And I went to, it was one of theteachers in the boarding house
was designated supposedly asour, boarding house father.
And, he was a nice enough man.
I'd never had any interactionwith him.
I'd only been in the boardinghouse for maybe a month at that
(14:04):
point.
So I didn't even know him.
But I went there and I rang hisbell and, he came to the door
and immediately saw that I wasall black and blue, had welts
over my face and over my body,everything.
I took off my shirt.
I showed him and I was wearingshorts and I showed him
everything.
And he said, who did this toyou?
I told him the whole story.
So he took the entire, boardinghouse of about, probably, I
(14:28):
would say, maybe 70 or 80 boys,and he collected them all
together, and he gave them alecture in Afrikaans.
I couldn't understand it, butlater one of the friendlier
Afrikaners explained to me inEnglish what he had said.
And basically he said, We asAfrikaners have a code of honor,
and we honor people who comefrom the outside, even English,
(14:52):
and even Jews.
There was a small percentage ofthe kids in the boarding house
that took this seriously, andThey became a little warmer to
me.
They certainly didn't abuse me.
They didn't call me little Jewboy like the bullies did.
So anyway, That was the veryfirst of my sort of serious, if
you will, at least in my 13year, 13, 14, 15, 16 year old
(15:16):
life.
It was pretty serious for mesurviving in this place.
I'm curious.
going back to your father, youtalked about him being violent,
and did he have anything to dowith you being sent to the
school?
Was it a boarding school inMissoula?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
That was his idea.
Okay.
So was he just struggling withfiguring out how why did he do
(15:38):
that?
Cape Town and South Africa ingeneral, in those days, and I'm
talking, I'm talking here.
This was at the end of the 50s.
It was early 1960.
They want a lot of resources,here in the States, we're used
to a lot of resources.
You have no idea how muchresource we have here.
It's only when come from a poorplace or place with limited
(15:58):
resources that you sort of getan inkling.
Yeah.
It's like someone who's neverbeen into a supermarket goes
into a supermarket and says, Ohmy God, all this food.
This is unbelievable.
It's kind of something likethat.
We didn't have resources.
So my father was a South Africanand he thought that I should
(16:18):
learn Afrikaans for sure,because it was our second
language, and that I shouldbecome a kind of a well rounded
South African.
And since I had failed at the,in the British mode of
education, maybe I would dobetter with the Afrikaners.
So it took me about two and ahalf years to really master
Afrikaans, but I did.
and then I became quite fluent.
(16:38):
And by the time I left there, Iwas completely fluent.
So anyways, the first part of mybook, Louis is called Karma.
And it's basically about theobstacles I faced in South
Africa.
There were many more aside fromthe one that I just described.
For example, when 10 days afterhigh school, I was conscripted
into the all white South Africanarmy.
(17:00):
I didn't want to be there, butThere was no way to get out.
Anyways, I won't tell you toomuch about that.
that is a dramatic chapter inthe book as well, what happened.
Interesting.
I'm curious about the book.
I think most of us are familiarwith the term karma.
I can, really admit, I'm not asfamiliar with the term kismet.
What is it?
And why did you name your book?
(17:22):
and you could sort of say, youcould say in the sense that I
used it, you could call it badkarma if you will, or.
Okay.
Yeah, bad karma, I guess that'sthe colloquial term, that
happens to you in life thatkeeps you stuck, stuck
floundering in some way oranother, obstacles,
(17:42):
difficulties, etc.
I see.
the second part of my book isabout, and I'll just jump to
that, by way of answering thequestion, the second part of my
book is, called Seeking, andit's basically what happened to
me when circumstances, outercircumstances, which involved a
war in 1967, created a situationwhere I could leave the country.
(18:06):
and do something that felt atthat time, because I was so
deeply depressed, to be honest,deeply, deeply depressed, where
suddenly an opportunity that wasmuch, much bigger than myself,
showed itself to me.
and I grabbed it for all I wasworth.
And I took it.
And next thing I knew, I wasliving on a kibbutz in Israel.
And, being Jewish, my motherhaving such a history with the
(18:30):
place and so on, I seriously,and in those days being a
Zionist was not a bad orpejorative word.
There was a purity about itbecause it was so soon after the
Holocaust.
People were in sympathy.
I felt very idealistic about myZionism.
Then things have changeddramatically since then, In
those days, there was a purityto it, and I felt good about it.
(18:51):
I felt very, very clean, in my,going to, it was like a very
idealistic thing to go and helpon a kibbutz, this country that
had been attacked and so on andso forth.
But, there was a man on thekibbutz who was, assigned as my
kind of mentor, and he happenedto be a colonel in the Israeli
army.
(19:12):
He said, look, he said, I'd likeyou to take you to the Golan
Heights, which, as you may know,is one of the main sort of
battle, even today, literally,is the main areas where there's
all kinds of, it's very hotthere, as they say.
And so he took me up there andthere'd been big battles fought
there against the Syrians.
(19:33):
And I saw, I saw tremendousdestruction on both the Israeli
and the Syrian side.
And essentially I realized, wow,I said to myself, I dodged, I
managed to dodge the armysomewhat in South Africa.
And here I am in Israel and it'svery tempting to stay here
because there's a lot of greatthings about being here.
(19:54):
It's a great, it was a wonderfultime in 1967 for young, for to
be a young person in Israel.
Wonderful.
And adventurous and all kinds ofthings.
And it was 1967 was thebeginning of sort of the
emergence of new consciousness,if you will, people beginning to
waken up to waken.
And so it was a very excitingtime.
(20:15):
But I realized when I was on thebattlefield in on the Golan
Heights.
I can't stay here.
I've got to, there's got to besome other places I can go.
I can't go back to South Africa.
My life, it's just too, there'sno opportunity for me there.
I cannot go back and I can'tstay here in Israel.
What to do?
And then it came to me that mymother, had two brothers who,
(20:37):
like her, had been dispersed.
She'd been dispersed to SouthAfrica, and they had been
dispersed to Vancouver, Canada.
So I wrote to them, and I said,I told them my situation
straight up, and one day aletter arrived from them, torn
piece of paper with a scrawled,barely legible line on it that
said, Here's a hundred dollars.
(20:59):
We hope this will help.
Hope to see you.
And it was from my two uncles,my mother's two brothers, who
were survivors also.
Yeah.
so off I went to Vancouver and Iarrived, and I became a college
student and I arrived in themiddle of the kind of
psychedelic awakening.
All my peers, everybody was, wastaking mescaline or magic
(21:22):
mushrooms or LSD and it wasbefore ayahuasca.
it was before ecstasy.
one of my professors said to meone day, he said, I'd like to
take you on a mescaline trip.
so I went over to his house andhe, we sat down and relaxed for
a while and then he gave me thisrather large blue pill and he
(21:44):
gave me some water and I took itand he took a similar pill
himself.
And nothing happened for about20, 25 minutes.
I said like, well, this isinteresting.
I don't feel anything.
Nothing's going on here.
but then I started to feel aforce.
Suddenly I started to feel aforce that was far more powerful
than my puny little ego and mypuny little efforts to try to
(22:07):
control.
It was much more powerful thanme.
And it became a Python, aPython, and I was in its coils
and it was squeezing me.
And first I was fighting it ashard as I could.
But I soon realized that I can'tfight this.
This is much, much more powerfulthan me.
And I said, what, what is whatis the answer here?
(22:28):
And what came to me wassurrender, surrender.
Even if the snake, this pythonis going to kill you, let it,
let him kill you, let him do it,die.
And that's what happened.
And when I let go in that way,Louis, I, it was a tremendously
very, very powerful experience.
(22:51):
And I realized that I wasconnected to everything in the
universe, to other people, tonature, to everything.
I had a kind of a livingexperience of unity.
And it was, something like theytalk about in the Bible, about
being touched.
I was touched that day.
It was a very powerfulexperience and it changed my
life.
(23:11):
And I became very interested atthat point.
I began to realize, there'ssomething much more to life than
I thought up to now.
I didn't have a clue.
I was a naive kid.
I like to do all the things thatkids did.
I like to get drunk.
I like to get stoned and high,everything, but I'd never taken
a psychedelic.
And now I was in anotheruniverse.
Wow.
(23:31):
Did you go on to take more orwas it just this one experience?
No, I went on to take much more.
Many trips.
Eventually I came to, someonehanded me a tape recording of a
lecture that had been given atthe University of British
Columbia in Vancouver by RichardAlpert, who, as you may know,
(23:53):
was Timothy Leary's cohort andfellow professor at Harvard.
I didn't know that.
what topic do they, so the, theywere professors of psychology.
Okay.
And who had gotten turned on topsilocybin, ah, magic mushrooms.
Psilocybin is the activeingredient in magic mushrooms.
(24:13):
Yep.
And they had somehow managedTim, Tim had managed to get hold
of psilocybin and he had turned.
Richard Alpert on.
He said this is the greatestthing since sliced bread.
You've got to experience this.
And Alpert did.
And he reported that he learnedmore in six hours than he had in
his entire time training tobecome a psychologist.
(24:36):
So he had an amazingly powerfulexperience.
And then he, eventually theywent on, they created a research
project for the Harvardpsilocybin project.
And they were giving, in kind ofa quasi research mode, giving,
mushrooms to graduate students,but then Alpert kind of slipped
(24:58):
and he gave a dose to anundergraduate.
But out that an undergraduatehad somehow become a part of
this big experiment on campusand at Harvard.
So the admin cut a long storyshort, they kicked both Alpert
and Leary out.
Timothy Leary went on to becomethe famous kind of psychedelic
(25:20):
Pied Piper that's, everyoneknows about.
Albert went to India and he tookwith him, a bottle of very
powerful LSD.
It's called White Lightning.
And each of the pills was 305micrograms, which if you know
anything about dosages, that isa whopping dose.
Okay.
(25:41):
He gave it to Various peoplethat looked like holy men on the
way that he saw, oh, that guylooks like a yogi.
I'll give him this.
Let's see what happens with him.
See how he handles myenlightenment test.
he tried this several times andno one passed the test.
the test was, you take the LSDand basically see how you react
to it.
That was the test.
(26:01):
Just take it.
Here, if you're enlightened, asyou as a yogi are claiming to
be, then take this and we'lltest your enlightenment.
We'll see how strong yourenlightenment is.
Okay.
So anyways, Robert reports thatnone of these people that he
gave it to, none of them passed.
So he gets to the Himalayas andhe's introduced to a little old
(26:22):
man, a nondescript little oldman in a blanket with kind of
toothless, unshaven, unkempt.
And the little man begins totell him about his mother's
cancer.
His mother had died of cancertwo months before he came to
India.
And here's this little old mantelling him about his mother's
cancer in amazing detail, by theway, and enough to convince
(26:48):
Albert that this was a person ofsubstance.
And then the little old mansaid, I want some of the
medicine to the medicine thatyou gave to those other yogis.
I want some to help up and gotthe bottle and gave him one of
the pills.
And the guy was obviously in his70s.
And he said, Wow, 305micrograms.
(27:09):
This is going to be interesting.
But the old man said, No, no,no, give me more.
He took three pills.
Honestly, this would be enoughto knock the socks off even a
giant.
No, it's really, it would beenough for an elephant.
Absolutely nothing happened.
So, Albert was given the nameRamdas, which means servant of
(27:33):
God, and he was assigned tostudy with a yogi by the name of
Baba Haridas.
And to learn the various limbsof yoga, eight limbs of yoga,
there are eight differentaspects to yoga on the path that
range from basically, yamas andniyamas, which are the precepts,
if you will, the do's and don'tsall the way to the highest
(27:55):
states of consciousness and themethodology for retaining the
highest states of consciousness.
so Albert became Ram Dass.
And again, I'm going to fastforward, comes back to the US,
and he gives a talk, and I'mgiven a tape recording of this
talk, and I'm like, it reallyblows my mind.
(28:15):
it's like the hand of Godreached down and said, here,
this is your next lesson.
Here's the next thing that youneed to hear and understand.
And, so I wrote a letter to RonDuss.
someone told me that his fatherlived on a farm in New
Hampshire.
in Franklin, New Hampshire, if Iremember, yeah, Franklin, New
Hampshire.
I wrote him a letter, I toldhim, I said, I'm a young
(28:36):
immigrant.
I dropped out of, by then Idropped out of school, I'd taken
too much acid.
And school seemed really barrento me.
I wrote him an honest letter.
I said I feel like some kind ofspiritual yearning has been
awoken in me and I want to learnabout yoga and spirituality and
I don't know anything.
Can you help me?
I even asked him, I think I hadthe audacity to ask him if he
(28:58):
would come to, I was at the timeliving in Montreal, would you
come to Montreal to give this?
So he writes back and he says,yes.
Wow.
So he came to Montreal and I setup a talk for him.
We went on the radio togetherand 2000 people showed up for
the talk, more people than wecould possibly fit into the
(29:19):
hall.
So he said, well, can you see ifyou can get this all for
tomorrow night?
So the same thing happened thenext slide.
So he says to me, he says, wow,you're really good at setting up
these talks.
I really hadn't done very much,but the talks were amazingly
successful because he wasanswering a kind of, yearning
(29:39):
that a lot of us were feeling.
It wasn't just me feeling thissort of spiritual yearning.
Lots of kids would, were takingpsychedelics and other strong
drugs and things were beingawoken, awoken in them that the
culture at the time reallydidn't have a model, didn't have
an answer for.
And so I felt that increasinglythat the culture was kind of
empty.
(30:00):
So from there, Ram Dassintroduced me to his teacher to
this to the silent yogi by thename of Baba Hari Dass, who came
to live in California.
And I became a close disciple ofhis for five years, and then
five years after that moreperipherally.
And part of the book is aboutwhat happened in those five
(30:21):
years, okay, and about theformation of a community and so
on my relationship with him andhe was a very, very, he was a
silent, completely silent.
He had been silent for 20 yearswhen I met him.
And he communicated by writingon a chalkboard and he would
write things like, I'll give youjust an example.
He would say things like, if apickpocket meets a saint, he
(30:46):
only sees pockets.
Okay, so that would be like ateaching.
That would be a thing in and ofitself, like, like almost like a
Zen koan.
This would be like, he wouldtell you this, he would write it
and show it to you.
Or he would say things likeyogis in jungle need not fear
snake knows heart.
(31:11):
Michael, I'm curious, part ofyour book, it seems again with
without having read it, ittalks, you seem to talk about
the journey of reconnecting withyour father.
Yes.
A bit.
Can we.
Talk a little bit about that.
You already talked a little bitabout what it was like growing
up with him.
I share with you, you know arelationship with my father that
(31:31):
it was pretty sour and onlymaybe 10 years ago that I really
reconnect with him Maybe alittle longer than that now but
same kind of background and I'mcurious to know what that
journey has been like.
and there's some similarities inyour story and mine.
I write in vivid detail about,an incident that happened with
my father and me, which I won'tdescribe here, just tell you
(31:52):
about it, but it symbolizes thebeginning of the arc of the
story with my father and I,where he basically, sucker
punches me and my head hits achair and Begins to bleed.
And anyway, the scene isdescribed at the beginning, very
beginning of the book.
(32:13):
And it kicks things off andshows my relationship with him.
I was always tense with him.
He was violent.
I had to always be at leastuntil I was 13, very mindful of
what space he was in, what sortof mood he was in.
Yep.
Could I trust him, and where ishe really at, do I need to be
really quiet now?
(32:33):
Do I need to not be seen for awhile just in case he's, he's
predictable.
Did you have any siblings?
I had a sister and a younger,much younger brother.
Yes.
Okay.
And was he violent towards yourmother and your siblings as
well?
Oh, okay.
Here comes the second part ofthe story, Louis.
So when I was, again, I'll fastforward and just let's say that
(32:55):
it was always tense with my dad.
But when I was 18, I had justcome out of the army and, my
parents went out, I was livingat home still.
My parents went out, they wentto see a film about, The Sound
of Music was the film, and it,as you know, it's about Austria.
(33:16):
It takes place in Austria,around the Second World War
time, and my mother had neverseen any footage of her home
country since she'd come to livein South Africa, and she was
very upset by it, by seeing thisfilm, and they came back into
the house, and I'll just, Iwon't go into all the details,
(33:37):
but my father beat my mother upand I ran into their section of
the house and I intervened andmy father, I got into a really
pretty bad fight.
Sure.
And, my father, the family brokeup at that point.
My father left and my motherblamed me.
So I was alienated from both myfather and my mother for
(34:01):
different reasons.
And, I was extremely unhappy.
And then I had a separation frommy father, real complete cutoff
for 16 years.
During this time, I wentoverseas and I, I told, I
mentioned to you about going toIsrael and then out to Vancouver
and Canada and so on.
(34:23):
And As the kismet part of thebook would have it and kismet
means fate meant to be inHebrew.
It's the shared meant to be,God's grace.
Unspoken meaning, but that'swhat kismet means.
(34:45):
It's a Middle Eastern concept,and it's found in Turkish,
Arabic and in Hebrew.
It's all of the Middle Easternreligions, and tribes have a
version of it, and it reallymeans a just portion.
So it's similar to karma in away, but it's different.
There's an element that youdon't understand why things are
(35:06):
coming to you.
they just arrive.
And then only later may you,understand of like, wow, that
was kind of unseen hand here.
So, what I'm about to tell you,it fits into the kismet side of
the third part of my book, whichis about the kismet in my life.
And let me say it this way soyou can really understand it.
(35:30):
I mentioned that I dropped outof college.
I had less than two years ofcollege, but I'd written some
books they seem kind of youthfullooking back at them now, but at
the time, I was pretty proud ofthem.
And one day I was, we'd come tolive in Amherst, my wife and I
and our two kids I was astruggling writer.
I wasn't, making any money,really worried about how am I
(35:52):
going to make ends meet I've gota young family and the money
isn't exactly flowing in.
And, one day I'm walking in withmy dog, in a cemetery close by
to my house, and I run into thisold guy, he's also got a dog,
and he says, I'm your next doorneighbor, and he introduces
himself, and it turns out thathe's a Princeton University
(36:13):
professor, and he says, what areyou up to?
What are you doing?
I tell him, well, I'm a writer,and I wrote this in this book,
And I founded, co founded a yogacommunity in Vancouver.
so he says, I'd like to see oneof your books.
So I brought him the book that Iwas most proud of, which was
called the marriage and familybook.
And I brought him the book andhe took it and he read it.
(36:35):
And we met a few days later,again in the cemetery.
And he says, I really liked yourbook.
He says, have you thought aboutgoing back to school?
And I said, I'm 33 years old.
I can't go back to school.
And he says, I'm not talkingabout undergraduate school.
I'm talking about graduateschool.
I said I'd have less than twoyears of college.
He says, I'm going to give youthe number of the Dean at the
(36:55):
University of Massachusetts, andI'm going to call her myself,
but I want you to call her andlet's just see what happens.
So to cut a long story short, Iwas given admission to the
University of Massachusetts intothe graduate school, and I got a
master's and got a doctoratewithout having an undergraduate
degree.
Oh, really?
Wow.
(37:15):
Wow.
Yeah, that's right.
Amazing.
Yes.
So, I was great school too, thatI, on the day that I literally
got the signature on mydissertation, I was now a Dr.
Chandler I said, my dad wouldjust absolutely, he would be
shocked and amazed.
Here's his son, the one that hesent into the interland of South
(37:37):
Africa, South Africa, because hefailed Latin.
And here's his son, who's now adoctor.
Yeah.
A master's and a doctorate.
Did he ever, is, did he live to.
Learn that.
I will tell you.
Yeah.
I called South Africa.
I called his business and theysaid, sorry, your father's in
the United States.
(37:57):
He's not here.
He's in the United States on abusiness trip.
Now this in itself, just thatinformation was completely mind
blowing.
My father rarely ever left SouthAfrica.
So again, cut a long storyshort.
I called him, we arranged tomeet in New York city and we
met.
And we had this meeting andfinally, eventually his wife
(38:18):
said, okay.
and she got along with my wifeand my kids and they all went
off and my dad and I were leftalone for the first time in 16
years.
And there had been a lot oftension between us, believe me,
violent tension.
I said to him, I said, dad, I'mcarrying around a lot of baggage
about the past.
And he didn't skip a beat.
And He says, if you want to havea relationship with me, it will
(38:39):
have to begin on this dayforward.
He says, I'm not interested indoing a postmortem of the past.
But to myself, I said, Well, Ihad a doctorate in psychology.
Like, whoa, I'm gonna have toset aside all my training, which
is basically says, you canprocess your stuff with a
person.
And I realized I'm going to haveto do this inside myself if I
(39:01):
want peace here.
So I made the deal with him.
And we went forward 15 years.
And I don't want to tell youwhat happened at the end, Louis,
because it's very, verydramatic, but that's all I want
to say is we had in pretty goodyears, really quite good years,
and with a very, very dramaticand positive ending.
(39:22):
Excellent.
Okay.
And it's in the book, and thereason I'm not trying to be
funny about the ending, I justwant to kind of, it's pretty
sacred, really, and it should beread.
Excellent.
Yeah, all the more reason toread it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
So that's basically the arc withmy dad.
It's what happened with us.
Yeah.
I think you teased us to want togo and read the book.
(39:42):
Let's put Wayfinder 4.
Okay.
All right.
What do you want to know about abook that I recommend?
Well, may I sort of breakprotocol and recommend three
books?
Sure.
Because, okay, the first one is,The Power of Now, which you may
certainly be aware of.
(40:04):
The second book is, Loving WhatIs, Byron Kane, and the third
book is Still Here, and this isperhaps for, people that are
more in my sort of age wherethey're thinking about what's
next, not necessarily on thisplane, but Still Here by Ram
Dass is a wonderful book.
It's still here?
(40:26):
One's attitude.
Still here.
Still here by Ram Dass.
Okay.
Thank you.
What about, is there a hack or ashortcut that you can recommend
to people to help them just dobetter in life that hopefully
doesn't involve the little bluepill?
(40:48):
I'll tell you something that, aquestion that was given to me by
one of my mentors at a crucialpoint in my development and it
had to do when I was workingwith other people, with people,
with teams, with leaders.
The question was.
what's the desired result ofthis interaction?
(41:09):
What's the desired result here?
what are you really aiming for?
What do you really want in thisinteraction?
And get clear about that.
And then once you're clear onthe desired result you want,
work backwards to where you are.
Excellent.
(41:29):
What about a piece of advice foryour younger self?
I could have used a lot ofadvice.
I tell you, the one piece ofadvice if given to me in a
loving way, if I were told thatI didn't have to do anything, I
didn't have to prove anythingthat I, just of myself was
(41:50):
lovable.
You are lovable.
If I could have known that, ifthat could have been transmitted
to me by a caring mentor oradult, it would have meant a
tremendous amount because I hadthe opposite belief.
I believe that because of allof, what everything that had
happened to me and how I dealtwith all these things, that I
was anything but lovable.
(42:12):
So that's what I, if I had to,if you had to say, in
retrospect, if you could havesaid something to your younger
self, well, that would have beenpretty, pretty cool.
Yeah.
To know that, to really knowthat and take it in.
Yeah.
And me, by the way, it took me,took me many, many, many years
to believe that, to actuallybelieve it, given, given my
(42:32):
background.
Dr.
Chandler, what about a bigopportunity that you see out
there in the world right now?
Out there in the world.
Oh God, boy, maybe you'repursuing.
I've never felt this sad aboutthe world as I do right now,
really.
I really do.
I'm very concerned about theworld, but I would say that, I
(42:55):
think that the only thing that Ican do as a person, as an
individual person is work onmyself.
If I'm working on myself, if I'mcentering, if I'm getting
centered, then my actions aregoing to come out of a
compassionate and more likely tocome out of a compassionate and
loving place.
(43:15):
And since I want more love inthe world, and since I believe
that love and cooperation arethe answer, and I've spent, my
entire adult life working withteaching people how to basically
collaborate and cooperatetogether in teams and so on.
I think that working on oneselfand really taking
responsibility, I mean, if I'mhaving a fight with my wife,
(43:38):
it's very, very hard to stepback and say, wait a minute,
what am I putting out here?
How am I increasing the tensionhere in this simple interaction
with her?
Yeah.
To really to step back and stillstep into myself and take
responsibility for where you arenow.
What is your body telling you?
Work, work with yourself.
(43:58):
Get centered.
Do whatever it takes to getcentered.
If you can't, leave temporarilyuntil you go for a walk in
nature.
Do something to change thesubject.
Let some time pass.
Come back.
Try again.
I love that.
I'll say, I think working onourselves is something that we
(44:19):
can control.
Yes, and by focusing on that,they're that's something I think
a lot of the concern for examplethat You have often and that we
all get comes from focusing onthings that we can't control,
right?
And so then when we do work onourselves that takes away a lot
of concern, right?
Yes, and I would also argue thatyou gave a lot more a bigger
(44:42):
answer there Well, you talkedabout love and collaboration I
would argue based on yourresponse that collaboration is a
big opportunity I think we havea opportunity in this world for
just a lot more collaboration,right?
Absolutely And you know, Louiswas so amazing what I've seen,
not only in the United States,I've seen this everywhere in the
world, many different countries.
(45:02):
People, even at high levels,really are not very good at it.
They have a lot to learn.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
That's a whole nother topic onitself.
I'm very fortunate to get a lotof great authors on this show
and some of them send me theirbooks, some of them don't, but I
don't have the chance to readthem all.
At first when I started gettingauthors, I was trying to read
the book beforehand.
(45:23):
Now I just, the bandwidth isn'tthere, but yours is one I'm
going to order and I'm going toread May I send you a copy?
If you give me your address,I'll be happy to send you a
copy.
Oh, I would love to.
Thank you.
Yeah, but I would love to, haveyou back on once I read it,
because I think your story isfascinating.
And I think, there's a lot therethat's very deep and I'd love to
(45:43):
have a deeper conversation.
I think you'd enjoy the book.
Honestly, I'm not just sayingthat.
Thank you.
So Dr.
Chandler, if people want to getthis book or want to know any
more about you, how could theyfind you?
Okay, they can find me at,michaelshandler.
com is my website, andeverything they need to get in
touch with me is there, and if Imay, this is what my book looks
(46:07):
like.
Okay.
Excellent.
And it's available on Amazon andeverything as well, right?
Available on Amazon, BarnesNoble, books a million.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Michael, yeah, like I said, it'sreally been a pleasure having
you here.
You got quite the story.
I really enjoyed it.
We may have to have a longerform episode in the future,
(46:30):
perhaps after I read it and loveto, have a deeper discussion on
it.
Once we're off recording, willyou give me your address so I
can send you?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much, Dr.
Chandler.
We hope you've enjoyed TheWayfinder Show.
If you got value from thisepisode, please take a few
seconds to leave us a 5 starrating and review.
(46:52):
This will allow us to help morepeople find their way to live
more authentic and excitinglives.
We'll catch you on the nextepisode.
I've never felt this sad aboutthe world as I do right now.
Really?
I really do.
I'm very concerned about theworld, but I would say that I
think that the only thing that Ican do as a person, as an
individual person is work onmyself.
If I'm working on myself, if I'mcentering, if I'm getting
(00:20):
centered, then my actions aregoing to come out of a
compassionate and more likely tocome out of a compassionate and
loving place.
Welcome to The Wayfinder Showwith Luis Hernandez, where
(00:42):
guests discuss the why and howof making changes that led them
down a more authentic path orallow them to level up in some
area of their life.
Our goal is to dig deep andprovide not only knowledge, but
actionable advice to help youget from where you are to where
you want to be.
Come join us and find the way toyour dream life.
(01:13):
Welcome back to the Wayfindershow.
I am your host, Louis Hernandez.
And today we are here with Dr.
Michael Chandler.
Dr.
Chandler is an award winningauthor, life coach, and
organizational developmentconsultant.
in his new book, that we'regoing to talk about, he talks
about his boyhood in adysfunctional family during a
part, the apartheid era in SouthAfrica.
(01:35):
and how that provided powerfulgrist for his transformational
personal journey.
Michael is a multi publishedauthor as well as a co author
with his wife, Nina Shandler, ofseveral books on health and
communication.
Dr.
Shandler also holds a master'sin counseling psychology and
family therapy and a doctorateIn leadership and organizational
(01:57):
development from UMass Amherst,Chandler has consulted to and
trained hundreds of leaders andorganizations internationally.
He is an avid cyclist and yogi ahusband of over 50 years, a
father, a grandfather of fiveincredible kids.
today he's here to talk abouthis journey and his new book,
Karma and Kismet.
(02:18):
a spiritual quest acrosscontinents, cultures, and
consciousness.
Dr.
Chandler, welcome to theWayfinder show.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Yeah.
Thank you for being here.
So let's just get right into it.
I'm curious.
I've heard, you and other,forums talking about having been
(02:38):
groomed to be an elite.
Can you talk a little bit moreabout that?
Yes.
First of all, I grew up in SouthAfrica during the beginning of
the apartheid era.
apartheid was introduced in 1948officially as a legal system.
I was born in 46.
So I was a young kid when itfirst came into being.
(03:01):
and of course, We were, thewhole society, everybody in the
society was divided up intotheir race.
And of course, white people, asyou all know, was the
privileged, was the very muchthe privileged group.
Within the white group, therewere two basic factions.
One was the perhaps morecommonly known one, the English.
(03:21):
They were, descendants of theBritish.
colonists who had settled at theCape, and the other group were
the Afrikaners, who also weredescendants, but of the Dutch.
So these two groups in thebeginning were very much in
competition in South Africa andactually went to war.
the Anglo Boer War is the famouswar that they fought.
(03:43):
It went on for about four years,at the turn of the 19th century,
the beginning of the 20thcentury, 1899 to 1902.
The British won that war, but inso doing, they created a lot of
very bad feelings with theAfrikaners.
the British incarcerated in thefirst concentration camps that
(04:05):
we know about, incarcerated thewomen and children and elders of
the Afrikaners, and they putthem in these concentration
camps, and about 27, 000 of themare recorded to have died.
this left an incredibly bitterkind of feeling with the
Afrikaners toward the English.
(04:25):
So I was born Jewish into aJewish family.
My mother was a, survivor ofHitler's Nazism in Austria.
So she carried the wounds of herescape and her escape of the
whole family with her.
My grandfather was put into aconcentration camp, in 1938,
(04:47):
which he managed to bribe hisway out of.
So there's a whole history of mymother's family's, escape from
Nazism and how they were taken,to Palestine.
It was called British MandatePalestine because the Brits were
kind of in charge.
And during the Second World War,my father was a soldier.
(05:12):
In the British Eighth Army, andat one point he was stationed in
British Mandate, Palestine.
My mother, who, as I mentioned,escaped to Palestine when she
was 16 and she was about 21 whenshe met my father at a dance in
1945.
And they were married in 1945 inTel Aviv, and I was born the
(05:33):
next year in Cape Town, SouthAfrica.
So 1946.
I mentioned all this stuff aboutapartheid and the tension
between the English andAfrikaans because it really
mattered.
I mean, it was one thing to bewhite, you had automatic
privilege because your skincolor was white, but there was a
lot of tension, and it's notmuch known really, but a lot of
(05:56):
tension between the English andAfrikaners, because I was
Jewish, there was an additionaltension on me, a lot of
antisemitism, the question waswhy, and the reason was in the
Second World War, The animositybetween the British and the
Afrikaners was so extreme thatthe Afrikaners actually sided
(06:18):
with the Germans, with theNazis, many of them did.
Wow.
So, and that carried over, I wasborn a year after the war.
So there was still very muchthat feeling of, that some, that
Afrikaners, at least some ofthem were Nazis.
That was still very much aresidue after the war.
So my mother being who she was,and, I'm being, very much
(06:41):
affected by what had happened toher.
She believed that all Afrikanerswere Nazis, and she would say,
so I'll fast forward a little inmy story.
Is this level of detail good or?
Yeah, that, that's fascinating.
That's a bit of history.
I never knew that the Afrikanerswere considered Nazis.
That just blows my mind.
(07:01):
As I say, a percentage of themduring the Second World War who,
who were very much who wereNazis.
There were even Naziorganizations that ran around
South Africa, creating all kindsof trouble, beating up soldiers
who were going to join the armyand so on.
Yes, there was a lot.
Were they, forgive my ignorancehere.
I don't know, were theyrecognized as Nazis from, the
(07:21):
larger groups in Germany and whowe all think of as the
traditional Nazis?
I don't know.
I'm not a scholar of the subjectmyself.
Sure.
So I don't know exactly whattheir relationship with the
German outfits was.
Okay.
But I can tell you that some ofthem wore blatantly wore.
Takeoffs on Nazi uniforms Naziinsignia.
Wow.
(07:42):
but that really was birthed morefrom their, despise for the
Jewish people.
Is that what you're saying?
The fact that the Nazis despisedthe Jews, was, so they followed
suit.
There was another big thing thathappened between the British and
the, Africanas, and that wasthat the Jews were identified
(08:03):
with the English side.
Okay.
They were English speaking andthey were identified sure.
But they were blamed for helpingthe British to keep the
africanas in poverty after theAnglo Bo War.
And that led to a lot of tensionbecause the Jews in South
Africa.
were very successful.
(08:23):
they had opportunity, they werehard working, and they were a
successful immigrant group forsure.
I went to this very, how shall Isay, very prim and proper
English school.
And everything was going more orless swimmingly until I hit
about age 13.
And I started to get intofights.
(08:45):
I got into one really bad fightand was almost expelled for it.
And then, a few months later, Igot 19 percent for Latin.
You have to understand thatLatin most symbolizes the
British heritage in SouthAfrica.
So if you fail Latin, it's nottoo good.
So I failed that and it was veryclear that I was going to fail.
(09:08):
I had never failed a subjectbefore.
I wasn't a great student by anymeans, but I had never failed a
subject before, but it was veryclear that I was about to fail.
So my father, I've left out alot of details about my dad.
My father was a very mercurial,abusive guy.
He was very violent and thereare plenty of details in the
(09:29):
book about his violence and whathappens.
I won't get into that now.
But I think he was in some sortof state of despair about me.
And he said, I'm going to sendhim to an Africana school in the
hinterland of the Cape province.
So he found a school for me inthe, about 300 miles from Cape
(09:50):
Town in an area where prettymuch everybody spoke Afrikaans
and very few people spokeEnglish.
And suddenly at age 13, I foundmyself living with Afrikaans
boys in a boarding house in agodforsaken place, barren desert
like place, and I wasn't used toit.
(10:10):
I'd never Cape Town, by the way,and if you don't know it, is a
very, very magnificentlybeautiful place with oceans, two
oceans, huge peninsula,wonderful fauna and flora, great
climate, etc.
And suddenly I find myselfliving in this godforsaken
place.
The only distinction that thisplace that I was now sent to,
(10:31):
which was called Oudtshoorn, oh,it's pronounced O A T,
Oudtshoorn, but spelt O U D T SH O O R N, it's a Dutch word,
means old horn.
But it's only, it's famous forone thing, and that is, it is
the world's ostrich center.
The biggest ostrich producingplace in the world.
(10:53):
And, what people don't know isthat before the First World War,
women had a kind of, an ostrichfeather frenzy that went on for
about 40 years.
The style for women was to wearthese ostrich feather hats and
boas around their necks.
and it was only with the,invention of the open car.
(11:15):
that it became sort of, well,the wind would blow the ostrich
feathers.
And so women stopped wearingthem.
They weren't convenient anymore,but for years before that
ostrich feathers were worth morethan gold by weight.
Wow.
they were the fourth largestexport, South Africa's export.
when I was 13, I was sent tothis place.
(11:37):
of which the heyday had beensome 50 years before I got
there.
So by the time I got there,there was really nothing, except
its reputation and except therewere ostriches, ostrich farms
still around, but ostrichfeathers were no longer as
popular as they were back in theheyday.
This was really the first, Iwould say, existential kind of
(11:57):
crisis in a big way that hit me,and that was that basically I
couldn't speak the language, Icouldn't understand the kids,
and all of the lessons, most,not all, most of the lessons
were in Afrikaans.
So I started to fall further andfurther behind.
Yeah.
And the kids, some of the kidswere bullies and some of them
(12:18):
were very anti Semitic.
It happened that, shortly afterI arrived there, some of the
bullies in the boarding housegot together in my room and they
trapped me.
They made a circle around me andthey trapped me.
And they put another guy in thiskind of human circle that they
formed, who was much bigger thanme.
And there was no contest.
(12:38):
I think that was the point.
And I was in this room, in thisring, I was about to get beaten
up for sure, and suddenly, Ijust don't know what came over
me, but I went I went out of mymind for a moment, and I spun,
and I punched this guy, he'smuch bigger than me, punched
(13:00):
him, and I landed right on hisjaw, and he went down like a
sack of potatoes, boom, and hewas out, and his lip was split,
and the other bullies took himout and I was really afraid.
Everybody melted away.
Nobody wanted to be seen withme.
Nobody wanted to talk to me.
The whole scene was not supposedto go down the way it did go
(13:20):
down.
A few minutes later, one of the18 year old big boys, you
grabbed me and took me to a kindof an outdoor, concrete sort of
outdoor mall, and he took arubber hose pipe and he beat me
very badly with it.
So that was the beginning of, itwas kind of survival.
(13:42):
And I was helped.
It was also the first of where Icould say that there were kind
individuals that helped me.
And I went to, it was one of theteachers in the boarding house
was designated supposedly asour, boarding house father.
And, he was a nice enough man.
I'd never had any interactionwith him.
I'd only been in the boardinghouse for maybe a month at that
(14:04):
point.
So I didn't even know him.
But I went there and I rang hisbell and, he came to the door
and immediately saw that I wasall black and blue, had welts
over my face and over my body,everything.
I took off my shirt.
I showed him and I was wearingshorts and I showed him
everything.
And he said, who did this toyou?
I told him the whole story.
So he took the entire, boardinghouse of about, probably, I
(14:28):
would say, maybe 70 or 80 boys,and he collected them all
together, and he gave them alecture in Afrikaans.
I couldn't understand it, butlater one of the friendlier
Afrikaners explained to me inEnglish what he had said.
And basically he said, We asAfrikaners have a code of honor,
and we honor people who comefrom the outside, even English,
(14:52):
and even Jews.
There was a small percentage ofthe kids in the boarding house
that took this seriously, andThey became a little warmer to
me.
They certainly didn't abuse me.
They didn't call me little Jewboy like the bullies did.
So anyway, That was the veryfirst of my sort of serious, if
you will, at least in my 13year, 13, 14, 15, 16 year old
(15:16):
life.
It was pretty serious for mesurviving in this place.
I'm curious.
going back to your father, youtalked about him being violent,
and did he have anything to dowith you being sent to the
school?
Was it a boarding school inMissoula?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
That was his idea.
Okay.
So was he just struggling withfiguring out how why did he do
(15:38):
that?
Cape Town and South Africa ingeneral, in those days, and I'm
talking, I'm talking here.
This was at the end of the 50s.
It was early 1960.
They want a lot of resources,here in the States, we're used
to a lot of resources.
You have no idea how muchresource we have here.
It's only when come from a poorplace or place with limited
(15:58):
resources that you sort of getan inkling.
Yeah.
It's like someone who's neverbeen into a supermarket goes
into a supermarket and says, Ohmy God, all this food.
This is unbelievable.
It's kind of something likethat.
We didn't have resources.
So my father was a South Africanand he thought that I should
(16:18):
learn Afrikaans for sure,because it was our second
language, and that I shouldbecome a kind of a well rounded
South African.
And since I had failed at the,in the British mode of
education, maybe I would dobetter with the Afrikaners.
So it took me about two and ahalf years to really master
Afrikaans, but I did.
and then I became quite fluent.
(16:38):
And by the time I left there, Iwas completely fluent.
So anyways, the first part of mybook, Louis is called Karma.
And it's basically about theobstacles I faced in South
Africa.
There were many more aside fromthe one that I just described.
For example, when 10 days afterhigh school, I was conscripted
into the all white South Africanarmy.
(17:00):
I didn't want to be there, butThere was no way to get out.
Anyways, I won't tell you toomuch about that.
that is a dramatic chapter inthe book as well, what happened.
Interesting.
I'm curious about the book.
I think most of us are familiarwith the term karma.
I can, really admit, I'm not asfamiliar with the term kismet.
What is it?
And why did you name your book?
(17:22):
and you could sort of say, youcould say in the sense that I
used it, you could call it badkarma if you will, or.
Okay.
Yeah, bad karma, I guess that'sthe colloquial term, that
happens to you in life thatkeeps you stuck, stuck
floundering in some way oranother, obstacles,
(17:42):
difficulties, etc.
I see.
the second part of my book isabout, and I'll just jump to
that, by way of answering thequestion, the second part of my
book is, called Seeking, andit's basically what happened to
me when circumstances, outercircumstances, which involved a
war in 1967, created a situationwhere I could leave the country.
(18:06):
and do something that felt atthat time, because I was so
deeply depressed, to be honest,deeply, deeply depressed, where
suddenly an opportunity that wasmuch, much bigger than myself,
showed itself to me.
and I grabbed it for all I wasworth.
And I took it.
And next thing I knew, I wasliving on a kibbutz in Israel.
And, being Jewish, my motherhaving such a history with the
(18:30):
place and so on, I seriously,and in those days being a
Zionist was not a bad orpejorative word.
There was a purity about itbecause it was so soon after the
Holocaust.
People were in sympathy.
I felt very idealistic about myZionism.
Then things have changeddramatically since then, In
those days, there was a purityto it, and I felt good about it.
(18:51):
I felt very, very clean, in my,going to, it was like a very
idealistic thing to go and helpon a kibbutz, this country that
had been attacked and so on andso forth.
But, there was a man on thekibbutz who was, assigned as my
kind of mentor, and he happenedto be a colonel in the Israeli
army.
(19:12):
He said, look, he said, I'd likeyou to take you to the Golan
Heights, which, as you may know,is one of the main sort of
battle, even today, literally,is the main areas where there's
all kinds of, it's very hotthere, as they say.
And so he took me up there andthere'd been big battles fought
there against the Syrians.
(19:33):
And I saw, I saw tremendousdestruction on both the Israeli
and the Syrian side.
And essentially I realized, wow,I said to myself, I dodged, I
managed to dodge the armysomewhat in South Africa.
And here I am in Israel and it'svery tempting to stay here
because there's a lot of greatthings about being here.
(19:54):
It's a great, it was a wonderfultime in 1967 for young, for to
be a young person in Israel.
Wonderful.
And adventurous and all kinds ofthings.
And it was 1967 was thebeginning of sort of the
emergence of new consciousness,if you will, people beginning to
waken up to waken.
And so it was a very excitingtime.
(20:15):
But I realized when I was on thebattlefield in on the Golan
Heights.
I can't stay here.
I've got to, there's got to besome other places I can go.
I can't go back to South Africa.
My life, it's just too, there'sno opportunity for me there.
I cannot go back and I can'tstay here in Israel.
What to do?
And then it came to me that mymother, had two brothers who,
(20:37):
like her, had been dispersed.
She'd been dispersed to SouthAfrica, and they had been
dispersed to Vancouver, Canada.
So I wrote to them, and I said,I told them my situation
straight up, and one day aletter arrived from them, torn
piece of paper with a scrawled,barely legible line on it that
said, Here's a hundred dollars.
(20:59):
We hope this will help.
Hope to see you.
And it was from my two uncles,my mother's two brothers, who
were survivors also.
Yeah.
so off I went to Vancouver and Iarrived, and I became a college
student and I arrived in themiddle of the kind of
psychedelic awakening.
All my peers, everybody was, wastaking mescaline or magic
(21:22):
mushrooms or LSD and it wasbefore ayahuasca.
it was before ecstasy.
one of my professors said to meone day, he said, I'd like to
take you on a mescaline trip.
so I went over to his house andhe, we sat down and relaxed for
a while and then he gave me thisrather large blue pill and he
(21:44):
gave me some water and I took itand he took a similar pill
himself.
And nothing happened for about20, 25 minutes.
I said like, well, this isinteresting.
I don't feel anything.
Nothing's going on here.
but then I started to feel aforce.
Suddenly I started to feel aforce that was far more powerful
than my puny little ego and mypuny little efforts to try to
(22:07):
control.
It was much more powerful thanme.
And it became a Python, aPython, and I was in its coils
and it was squeezing me.
And first I was fighting it ashard as I could.
But I soon realized that I can'tfight this.
This is much, much more powerfulthan me.
And I said, what, what is whatis the answer here?
(22:28):
And what came to me wassurrender, surrender.
Even if the snake, this pythonis going to kill you, let it,
let him kill you, let him do it,die.
And that's what happened.
And when I let go in that way,Louis, I, it was a tremendously
very, very powerful experience.
(22:51):
And I realized that I wasconnected to everything in the
universe, to other people, tonature, to everything.
I had a kind of a livingexperience of unity.
And it was, something like theytalk about in the Bible, about
being touched.
I was touched that day.
It was a very powerfulexperience and it changed my
life.
(23:11):
And I became very interested atthat point.
I began to realize, there'ssomething much more to life than
I thought up to now.
I didn't have a clue.
I was a naive kid.
I like to do all the things thatkids did.
I like to get drunk.
I like to get stoned and high,everything, but I'd never taken
a psychedelic.
And now I was in anotheruniverse.
Wow.
(23:31):
Did you go on to take more orwas it just this one experience?
No, I went on to take much more.
Many trips.
Eventually I came to, someonehanded me a tape recording of a
lecture that had been given atthe University of British
Columbia in Vancouver by RichardAlpert, who, as you may know,
(23:53):
was Timothy Leary's cohort andfellow professor at Harvard.
I didn't know that.
what topic do they, so the, theywere professors of psychology.
Okay.
And who had gotten turned on topsilocybin, ah, magic mushrooms.
Psilocybin is the activeingredient in magic mushrooms.
(24:13):
Yep.
And they had somehow managedTim, Tim had managed to get hold
of psilocybin and he had turned.
Richard Alpert on.
He said this is the greatestthing since sliced bread.
You've got to experience this.
And Alpert did.
And he reported that he learnedmore in six hours than he had in
his entire time training tobecome a psychologist.
(24:36):
So he had an amazingly powerfulexperience.
And then he, eventually theywent on, they created a research
project for the Harvardpsilocybin project.
And they were giving, in kind ofa quasi research mode, giving,
mushrooms to graduate students,but then Alpert kind of slipped
(24:58):
and he gave a dose to anundergraduate.
But out that an undergraduatehad somehow become a part of
this big experiment on campusand at Harvard.
So the admin cut a long storyshort, they kicked both Alpert
and Leary out.
Timothy Leary went on to becomethe famous kind of psychedelic
(25:20):
Pied Piper that's, everyoneknows about.
Albert went to India and he tookwith him, a bottle of very
powerful LSD.
It's called White Lightning.
And each of the pills was 305micrograms, which if you know
anything about dosages, that isa whopping dose.
Okay.
(25:41):
He gave it to Various peoplethat looked like holy men on the
way that he saw, oh, that guylooks like a yogi.
I'll give him this.
Let's see what happens with him.
See how he handles myenlightenment test.
he tried this several times andno one passed the test.
the test was, you take the LSDand basically see how you react
to it.
That was the test.
(26:01):
Just take it.
Here, if you're enlightened, asyou as a yogi are claiming to
be, then take this and we'lltest your enlightenment.
We'll see how strong yourenlightenment is.
Okay.
So anyways, Robert reports thatnone of these people that he
gave it to, none of them passed.
So he gets to the Himalayas andhe's introduced to a little old
(26:22):
man, a nondescript little oldman in a blanket with kind of
toothless, unshaven, unkempt.
And the little man begins totell him about his mother's
cancer.
His mother had died of cancertwo months before he came to
India.
And here's this little old mantelling him about his mother's
cancer in amazing detail, by theway, and enough to convince
(26:48):
Albert that this was a person ofsubstance.
And then the little old mansaid, I want some of the
medicine to the medicine thatyou gave to those other yogis.
I want some to help up and gotthe bottle and gave him one of
the pills.
And the guy was obviously in his70s.
And he said, Wow, 305micrograms.
(27:09):
This is going to be interesting.
But the old man said, No, no,no, give me more.
He took three pills.
Honestly, this would be enoughto knock the socks off even a
giant.
No, it's really, it would beenough for an elephant.
Absolutely nothing happened.
So, Albert was given the nameRamdas, which means servant of
(27:33):
God, and he was assigned tostudy with a yogi by the name of
Baba Haridas.
And to learn the various limbsof yoga, eight limbs of yoga,
there are eight differentaspects to yoga on the path that
range from basically, yamas andniyamas, which are the precepts,
if you will, the do's and don'tsall the way to the highest
(27:55):
states of consciousness and themethodology for retaining the
highest states of consciousness.
so Albert became Ram Dass.
And again, I'm going to fastforward, comes back to the US,
and he gives a talk, and I'mgiven a tape recording of this
talk, and I'm like, it reallyblows my mind.
(28:15):
it's like the hand of Godreached down and said, here,
this is your next lesson.
Here's the next thing that youneed to hear and understand.
And, so I wrote a letter to RonDuss.
someone told me that his fatherlived on a farm in New
Hampshire.
in Franklin, New Hampshire, if Iremember, yeah, Franklin, New
Hampshire.
I wrote him a letter, I toldhim, I said, I'm a young
(28:36):
immigrant.
I dropped out of, by then Idropped out of school, I'd taken
too much acid.
And school seemed really barrento me.
I wrote him an honest letter.
I said I feel like some kind ofspiritual yearning has been
awoken in me and I want to learnabout yoga and spirituality and
I don't know anything.
Can you help me?
I even asked him, I think I hadthe audacity to ask him if he
(28:58):
would come to, I was at the timeliving in Montreal, would you
come to Montreal to give this?
So he writes back and he says,yes.
Wow.
So he came to Montreal and I setup a talk for him.
We went on the radio togetherand 2000 people showed up for
the talk, more people than wecould possibly fit into the
(29:19):
hall.
So he said, well, can you see ifyou can get this all for
tomorrow night?
So the same thing happened thenext slide.
So he says to me, he says, wow,you're really good at setting up
these talks.
I really hadn't done very much,but the talks were amazingly
successful because he wasanswering a kind of, yearning
(29:39):
that a lot of us were feeling.
It wasn't just me feeling thissort of spiritual yearning.
Lots of kids would, were takingpsychedelics and other strong
drugs and things were beingawoken, awoken in them that the
culture at the time reallydidn't have a model, didn't have
an answer for.
And so I felt that increasinglythat the culture was kind of
empty.
(30:00):
So from there, Ram Dassintroduced me to his teacher to
this to the silent yogi by thename of Baba Hari Dass, who came
to live in California.
And I became a close disciple ofhis for five years, and then
five years after that moreperipherally.
And part of the book is aboutwhat happened in those five
(30:21):
years, okay, and about theformation of a community and so
on my relationship with him andhe was a very, very, he was a
silent, completely silent.
He had been silent for 20 yearswhen I met him.
And he communicated by writingon a chalkboard and he would
write things like, I'll give youjust an example.
He would say things like, if apickpocket meets a saint, he
(30:46):
only sees pockets.
Okay, so that would be like ateaching.
That would be a thing in and ofitself, like, like almost like a
Zen koan.
This would be like, he wouldtell you this, he would write it
and show it to you.
Or he would say things likeyogis in jungle need not fear
snake knows heart.
(31:11):
Michael, I'm curious, part ofyour book, it seems again with
without having read it, ittalks, you seem to talk about
the journey of reconnecting withyour father.
Yes.
A bit.
Can we.
Talk a little bit about that.
You already talked a little bitabout what it was like growing
up with him.
I share with you, you know arelationship with my father that
(31:31):
it was pretty sour and onlymaybe 10 years ago that I really
reconnect with him Maybe alittle longer than that now but
same kind of background and I'mcurious to know what that
journey has been like.
and there's some similarities inyour story and mine.
I write in vivid detail about,an incident that happened with
my father and me, which I won'tdescribe here, just tell you
(31:52):
about it, but it symbolizes thebeginning of the arc of the
story with my father and I,where he basically, sucker
punches me and my head hits achair and Begins to bleed.
And anyway, the scene isdescribed at the beginning, very
beginning of the book.
(32:13):
And it kicks things off andshows my relationship with him.
I was always tense with him.
He was violent.
I had to always be at leastuntil I was 13, very mindful of
what space he was in, what sortof mood he was in.
Yep.
Could I trust him, and where ishe really at, do I need to be
really quiet now?
(32:33):
Do I need to not be seen for awhile just in case he's, he's
predictable.
Did you have any siblings?
I had a sister and a younger,much younger brother.
Yes.
Okay.
And was he violent towards yourmother and your siblings as
well?
Oh, okay.
Here comes the second part ofthe story, Louis.
So when I was, again, I'll fastforward and just let's say that
(32:55):
it was always tense with my dad.
But when I was 18, I had justcome out of the army and, my
parents went out, I was livingat home still.
My parents went out, they wentto see a film about, The Sound
of Music was the film, and it,as you know, it's about Austria.
(33:16):
It takes place in Austria,around the Second World War
time, and my mother had neverseen any footage of her home
country since she'd come to livein South Africa, and she was
very upset by it, by seeing thisfilm, and they came back into
the house, and I'll just, Iwon't go into all the details,
(33:37):
but my father beat my mother upand I ran into their section of
the house and I intervened andmy father, I got into a really
pretty bad fight.
Sure.
And, my father, the family brokeup at that point.
My father left and my motherblamed me.
So I was alienated from both myfather and my mother for
(34:01):
different reasons.
And, I was extremely unhappy.
And then I had a separation frommy father, real complete cutoff
for 16 years.
During this time, I wentoverseas and I, I told, I
mentioned to you about going toIsrael and then out to Vancouver
and Canada and so on.
(34:23):
And As the kismet part of thebook would have it and kismet
means fate meant to be inHebrew.
It's the shared meant to be,God's grace.
Unspoken meaning, but that'swhat kismet means.
(34:45):
It's a Middle Eastern concept,and it's found in Turkish,
Arabic and in Hebrew.
It's all of the Middle Easternreligions, and tribes have a
version of it, and it reallymeans a just portion.
So it's similar to karma in away, but it's different.
There's an element that youdon't understand why things are
(35:06):
coming to you.
they just arrive.
And then only later may you,understand of like, wow, that
was kind of unseen hand here.
So, what I'm about to tell you,it fits into the kismet side of
the third part of my book, whichis about the kismet in my life.
And let me say it this way soyou can really understand it.
(35:30):
I mentioned that I dropped outof college.
I had less than two years ofcollege, but I'd written some
books they seem kind of youthfullooking back at them now, but at
the time, I was pretty proud ofthem.
And one day I was, we'd come tolive in Amherst, my wife and I
and our two kids I was astruggling writer.
I wasn't, making any money,really worried about how am I
(35:52):
going to make ends meet I've gota young family and the money
isn't exactly flowing in.
And, one day I'm walking in withmy dog, in a cemetery close by
to my house, and I run into thisold guy, he's also got a dog,
and he says, I'm your next doorneighbor, and he introduces
himself, and it turns out thathe's a Princeton University
(36:13):
professor, and he says, what areyou up to?
What are you doing?
I tell him, well, I'm a writer,and I wrote this in this book,
And I founded, co founded a yogacommunity in Vancouver.
so he says, I'd like to see oneof your books.
So I brought him the book that Iwas most proud of, which was
called the marriage and familybook.
And I brought him the book andhe took it and he read it.
(36:35):
And we met a few days later,again in the cemetery.
And he says, I really liked yourbook.
He says, have you thought aboutgoing back to school?
And I said, I'm 33 years old.
I can't go back to school.
And he says, I'm not talkingabout undergraduate school.
I'm talking about graduateschool.
I said I'd have less than twoyears of college.
He says, I'm going to give youthe number of the Dean at the
(36:55):
University of Massachusetts, andI'm going to call her myself,
but I want you to call her andlet's just see what happens.
So to cut a long story short, Iwas given admission to the
University of Massachusetts intothe graduate school, and I got a
master's and got a doctoratewithout having an undergraduate
degree.
Oh, really?
Wow.
(37:15):
Wow.
Yeah, that's right.
Amazing.
Yes.
So, I was great school too, thatI, on the day that I literally
got the signature on mydissertation, I was now a Dr.
Chandler I said, my dad wouldjust absolutely, he would be
shocked and amazed.
Here's his son, the one that hesent into the interland of South
(37:37):
Africa, South Africa, because hefailed Latin.
And here's his son, who's now adoctor.
Yeah.
A master's and a doctorate.
Did he ever, is, did he live to.
Learn that.
I will tell you.
Yeah.
I called South Africa.
I called his business and theysaid, sorry, your father's in
the United States.
(37:57):
He's not here.
He's in the United States on abusiness trip.
Now this in itself, just thatinformation was completely mind
blowing.
My father rarely ever left SouthAfrica.
So again, cut a long storyshort.
I called him, we arranged tomeet in New York city and we
met.
And we had this meeting andfinally, eventually his wife
(38:18):
said, okay.
and she got along with my wifeand my kids and they all went
off and my dad and I were leftalone for the first time in 16
years.
And there had been a lot oftension between us, believe me,
violent tension.
I said to him, I said, dad, I'mcarrying around a lot of baggage
about the past.
And he didn't skip a beat.
And He says, if you want to havea relationship with me, it will
(38:39):
have to begin on this dayforward.
He says, I'm not interested indoing a postmortem of the past.
But to myself, I said, Well, Ihad a doctorate in psychology.
Like, whoa, I'm gonna have toset aside all my training, which
is basically says, you canprocess your stuff with a
person.
And I realized I'm going to haveto do this inside myself if I
(39:01):
want peace here.
So I made the deal with him.
And we went forward 15 years.
And I don't want to tell youwhat happened at the end, Louis,
because it's very, verydramatic, but that's all I want
to say is we had in pretty goodyears, really quite good years,
and with a very, very dramaticand positive ending.
(39:22):
Excellent.
Okay.
And it's in the book, and thereason I'm not trying to be
funny about the ending, I justwant to kind of, it's pretty
sacred, really, and it should beread.
Excellent.
Yeah, all the more reason toread it.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
So that's basically the arc withmy dad.
It's what happened with us.
Yeah.
I think you teased us to want togo and read the book.
(39:42):
Let's put Wayfinder 4.
Okay.
All right.
What do you want to know about abook that I recommend?
Well, may I sort of breakprotocol and recommend three
books?
Sure.
Because, okay, the first one is,The Power of Now, which you may
certainly be aware of.
(40:04):
The second book is, Loving WhatIs, Byron Kane, and the third
book is Still Here, and this isperhaps for, people that are
more in my sort of age wherethey're thinking about what's
next, not necessarily on thisplane, but Still Here by Ram
Dass is a wonderful book.
It's still here?
(40:26):
One's attitude.
Still here.
Still here by Ram Dass.
Okay.
Thank you.
What about, is there a hack or ashortcut that you can recommend
to people to help them just dobetter in life that hopefully
doesn't involve the little bluepill?
(40:48):
I'll tell you something that, aquestion that was given to me by
one of my mentors at a crucialpoint in my development and it
had to do when I was workingwith other people, with people,
with teams, with leaders.
The question was.
what's the desired result ofthis interaction?
(41:09):
What's the desired result here?
what are you really aiming for?
What do you really want in thisinteraction?
And get clear about that.
And then once you're clear onthe desired result you want,
work backwards to where you are.
Excellent.
(41:29):
What about a piece of advice foryour younger self?
I could have used a lot ofadvice.
I tell you, the one piece ofadvice if given to me in a
loving way, if I were told thatI didn't have to do anything, I
didn't have to prove anythingthat I, just of myself was
(41:50):
lovable.
You are lovable.
If I could have known that, ifthat could have been transmitted
to me by a caring mentor oradult, it would have meant a
tremendous amount because I hadthe opposite belief.
I believe that because of allof, what everything that had
happened to me and how I dealtwith all these things, that I
was anything but lovable.
(42:12):
So that's what I, if I had to,if you had to say, in
retrospect, if you could havesaid something to your younger
self, well, that would have beenpretty, pretty cool.
Yeah.
To know that, to really knowthat and take it in.
Yeah.
And me, by the way, it took me,took me many, many, many years
to believe that, to actuallybelieve it, given, given my
(42:32):
background.
Dr.
Chandler, what about a bigopportunity that you see out
there in the world right now?
Out there in the world.
Oh God, boy, maybe you'repursuing.
I've never felt this sad aboutthe world as I do right now,
really.
I really do.
I'm very concerned about theworld, but I would say that, I
(42:55):
think that the only thing that Ican do as a person, as an
individual person is work onmyself.
If I'm working on myself, if I'mcentering, if I'm getting
centered, then my actions aregoing to come out of a
compassionate and more likely tocome out of a compassionate and
loving place.
(43:15):
And since I want more love inthe world, and since I believe
that love and cooperation arethe answer, and I've spent, my
entire adult life working withteaching people how to basically
collaborate and cooperatetogether in teams and so on.
I think that working on oneselfand really taking
responsibility, I mean, if I'mhaving a fight with my wife,
(43:38):
it's very, very hard to stepback and say, wait a minute,
what am I putting out here?
How am I increasing the tensionhere in this simple interaction
with her?
Yeah.
To really to step back and stillstep into myself and take
responsibility for where you arenow.
What is your body telling you?
Work, work with yourself.
(43:58):
Get centered.
Do whatever it takes to getcentered.
If you can't, leave temporarilyuntil you go for a walk in
nature.
Do something to change thesubject.
Let some time pass.
Come back.
Try again.
I love that.
I'll say, I think working onourselves is something that we
(44:19):
can control.
Yes, and by focusing on that,they're that's something I think
a lot of the concern for examplethat You have often and that we
all get comes from focusing onthings that we can't control,
right?
And so then when we do work onourselves that takes away a lot
of concern, right?
Yes, and I would also argue thatyou gave a lot more a bigger
(44:42):
answer there Well, you talkedabout love and collaboration I
would argue based on yourresponse that collaboration is a
big opportunity I think we havea opportunity in this world for
just a lot more collaboration,right?
Absolutely And you know, Louiswas so amazing what I've seen,
not only in the United States,I've seen this everywhere in the
world, many different countries.
(45:02):
People, even at high levels,really are not very good at it.
They have a lot to learn.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
That's a whole nother topic onitself.
I'm very fortunate to get a lotof great authors on this show
and some of them send me theirbooks, some of them don't, but I
don't have the chance to readthem all.
At first when I started gettingauthors, I was trying to read
the book beforehand.
(45:23):
Now I just, the bandwidth isn'tthere, but yours is one I'm
going to order and I'm going toread May I send you a copy?
If you give me your address,I'll be happy to send you a
copy.
Oh, I would love to.
Thank you.
Yeah, but I would love to, haveyou back on once I read it,
because I think your story isfascinating.
And I think, there's a lot therethat's very deep and I'd love to
(45:43):
have a deeper conversation.
I think you'd enjoy the book.
Honestly, I'm not just sayingthat.
Thank you.
So Dr.
Chandler, if people want to getthis book or want to know any
more about you, how could theyfind you?
Okay, they can find me at,michaelshandler.
com is my website, andeverything they need to get in
touch with me is there, and if Imay, this is what my book looks
(46:07):
like.
Okay.
Excellent.
And it's available on Amazon andeverything as well, right?
Available on Amazon, BarnesNoble, books a million.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Michael, yeah, like I said, it'sreally been a pleasure having
you here.
You got quite the story.
I really enjoyed it.
We may have to have a longerform episode in the future,
(46:30):
perhaps after I read it and loveto, have a deeper discussion on
it.
Once we're off recording, willyou give me your address so I
can send you?
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much, Dr.
Chandler.
We hope you've enjoyed TheWayfinder Show.
If you got value from thisepisode, please take a few
seconds to leave us a 5 starrating and review.
(46:52):
This will allow us to help morepeople find their way to live
more authentic and excitinglives.
We'll catch you on the nextepisode.
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