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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Adam, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Adam Gussow: Yes.  My name is Adam Gussow, and I’m an Associate Professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi; and I’m a harmonica player.

Toni: Well thank you, Adam.  Now, we’re going to be talking about the word inspiration, so when you think about that, who do you inspire and how you do that?

Adam: Well, I can tell you who inspire, I think, because I get emails from them, and it’s a sort of strange thing.  I seem to have stumbled into a way of inspiring blues harmonica players or blues harmonica students or people who’ve always wanted to learn how to play the harmonica and play blues on it.  Around the world, I get emails every day from people who’ve seen by now what amounts to more than 200 instructional videos, free videos that are on YouTube.

When this all started … almost exactly three years ago it started because I was just surfing the web one day, and I went to YouTube, and I found that somebody had posted something of me.  And I thought “That’s interesting, this person is controlling my image.  Let me check out and see what else is out there on YouTube” and discovered that there were an awful lot of really bad harmonica playing and one guy who was pretty good who was offering some instruction and nothing else.  And I had been a pro harmonica player for a number of years, recorded with a duo called Satan and Adam, and had also been a teacher for a long time and thought “You know, people deserve better.”

So I got a camera — I didn’t really know how to do the whole thing_- and I set it up on a little tripod, and I uploaded it as Gussow Lesson 000.  I thought “I’ll do something different.  I will pretend as though I’m going to actually upload at least 100 of these,” that’s why I’ll give it three zeros, “and I’ll just talk on camera and say this is what I’m going to do.”

I have to be honest; it was out of entirely mixed motives.  It was to want to teach, it was to want to show off, it was to want to share, it was to want to inspire, it was to … I called it “Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed!”  I wanted to almost get back at some of my fellow professionals who weren’t sharing this stuff.

And you know, it’s okay.  It’s possible to actually begin with mixed motives and then put something out in the world and realize that what you’ve done is give people something that they receive as a gift.  And that’s what started to happen is that people started to email me from day one and say “Hey, this is great!  Are you going to do more of these?”

And I thought “Wow!  Well, yeah, okay,” and I did 40 videos in 40 days and developed, you know, got 100 people to subscribe, and then it just kept on snowballing.  People said “You know, Adam, we’d really like to send you money,” and I said “Okay, well, I’ll get a P.O. box.”  And they said “Oh no, that’s very old fashioned, you need to update yourself and get PayPal.”  One thing led to another.  I got a Paypal account, and they sent money in!  I thought “Wait a minute, from around the world people are sending me money for me doing videos?”  So again, mixed motives; the profit motive enters.

But here’s what I get these days, three years down the line – I get emails from people in Iraq and Pakistan and California and Alaska, and I get some letters from people who say “I’ve just stumbled across your videos, and I’ve always wanted to learn how to play, thank you so much.”  I get videos from people … emails from people who say “25 years ago, I really took this instrument seriously, and then I just lost interest.  I stumbled across one of your videos, and I’m playing again.  I don’t know how to thank you.”

Occasionally they say “Where can we send money?”  But I mean the point is, those kind of letters … and I realized that something that I had that wasn’t even of great interest to me three years ago, my own ability to play the harmonica, was sleeping.  My own hunger to get back and really learn.  And the moment I began to give it away was the moment it began to reawaken in me.

And so all of these spiritual truths, you know … to give is to receive.  We can talk about the Interfaith Church where I learned some of this stuff, but all of these truths turned out to be true and, I mean, I guess that’s a long answer to a great question, but that’s one of the ways that I inspire.

Let me tell you one thing that people invoke when they talk about what they like about my teaching style, and this surprised me, is I resolved that … the player who inspired me was a guy who always was willing to make mistakes because he was always trying to improve.  And so in my videos, one thing I did from the beginning was I was a little awkward in moments or, if I made a mistake, I didn’t try to edit that out.  I’d say “I guess that was a clam …”  “Okay, let me try that again.” … and again and again, people who email me say that’s the most refreshing thing.  “You make me feel like it’s okay to make mistakes.  You make me feel like it’s okay not to be perfect.”

So again, you know, sort of shedding the shell of perfection and just allowing myself to be authentic and to be more or less who I really am as a teacher; somebody with considerable skill — obviously that comes through — but also somebody willing to say “This is how the process really works.  You want to learn how to play?  You’re going to make a lot of these mistakes.  I make them, you’ll make them, but it’s okay, and you’ve got to keep on going.”  And so that’s how I inspire people.

Toni: It sounds as though there’s a lot more going on there than … and I don’t mean to demean this at all — but than just teaching the harmonica.  It sounds like there is a whole lot more going on in those videos in addition to that.

Adam: Yeah.

Toni: I would wonder then, how do you think putting those videos out, and I understand being a teacher as well, how do you help other people to explore their own potential?

Adam: Well, one thing I’ve ended up doing is creating a website, and I do many things on the website including sell some harmonica lessons through videos, but I’ve also used my training as somebody with a PhD in English and somebody who knows how literary criticism works, I’ve used my training to kind of … the way that they used to rank books, top 10 books, I’ve ranked harmonica players, or I’ve given people a top 10 list and a second 10 list.

So one of the way I inspire people is to say “You know what?  If you want to learn how to play the instrument, here are some steps.  And one of the things you need to do is you need to really have good stuff coming into your ears.  You need to really be listening to the good stuff, so I’m going to center you.  Here are 20 players that you ought to be listening to who are the heart and soul of blues harmonica.”  That’s one of the ways is to say “Listen to the good stuff.”

I also … some of my lessons are about spiritual principles.  That was one that people actually liked a lot.  There was one in particular that was very unlike what other people were doing when they taught harmonica.  I said “To be a good blues harmonica player or improviser, you have to be a warrior, a lover, and a painter” and then I went through those three things.

“You’re a warrior to the extent that you should do what warriors do before they go into battle and take your instruments seriously.  Don’t play old flatted-out harps.  Take yourself seriously.  It’s a discipline to go into the woodshed and to practice.”  I said “You’re a lover because you have to learn how to listen as well as how to play, and good music making is about leaving space, right, not just playing.  That’s the way being a lover is about communication.  It’s about listening to your audience.  And then you’re a painter because good soloing is about” … this is sort of a parallel with the lover, but it’s about “knowing how to create mass and volume.  Also by leaving space, create meaning by leaving space.”

And so that’s one of the ways I inspire people was to say it’s not just about this hole and that reed and this custom harmonica, but it’s really about larger principles that can go into any discipline that you might have and that these can undergird what you’re doing.

Toni: So what inspires you, Adam?

Adam: What inspires me?  My son.  I’ve got a four-year-old, and the challenge of watching him grow and realizing that he has some of the same crazed intensity that I must have had that drove my mother nuts, and trying to let all that be there and heal and try not to tell him … try not to overly shape him while at the same time providing boundaries.  I would say that’s one thing is just the life process of my own son.

I was inspired at a particular period in my life.  As a former marathoner, I was in a period where I was actually smoking occasionally and had a kind of mild heart attack which shook me to my core, would be fair to say, back in the year 2000.  It happened shortly after I began to go to the first and only church service that I’ve ever attended which was a very unusual place in Manhattan, actually, across the street from Carnegie Hall.  It was called the Interfaith Fellowship.  It was a bunch of … it was just all kinds of people, and we read a book called A Course In Miracles which I’m sure some of your listeners would be familiar with.

Toni: Yes.

Adam: And I did a lot of reading after that heart thing.  I read … well, here are some people I read.  I read every book that I could find in the new age spirituality section of the book store.  I read Pema Chodron When Things Fall Apart:  Heart Advice For Difficult Times. I find Pema Chodron, the Tibetan Buddhist way — although I’ve never taken it in a formal way — I found her incredibly inspiring for her ability to say “Sometimes you just need to sit with yourself in those moments when everything has messed up.”  That was good for me.

Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart; and then the two ministers at the Interfaith Fellowship, Diane Burke and John Mundy, were incredibly helpful in that really difficult time when I fell apart and picked myself back up and began to kind of pay a lot more attention to my heart and found myself a part of a community.

I can also tell you that I was terrifically inspired by the handful of workshops that I took at a place called The Omega Institute which, again, I suspect some of your listeners may have heard of, kind of a place in the Hudson River Valley.  A workshop, for example, with Marianne Williamson who foremost, I guess, exemplar of … or proponent of The Course In Miracles.

And that was terrific to watch powerful, spiritually enlightened people lay some of their own stuff out there and say they had to work with it, too, and are still working with it.  That was all … in terms of forgiveness for myself, that was a good thing.  And one more thing that also inspired me …

Toni: Sure.

Adam: Musicians, as somebody who was a musician trying to learn his craft.  In fact, I really would be negligent if I didn’t name the one single musician who has inspired me the most which is the man who I have played with for 23 years, a man named Sterling Magee who is an African American rhythm and blues guitar player who was playing on the streets of Harlem back in 1986 when I first came across him.  He was calling himself Mr. Satan at that point, as was everybody in Harlem, and I played with him.

He let me play, and we began a … he plays guitar and percussion; I play harmonica.  And we became an act after three or four years of playing on the street and ended up playing festivals and club gigs all over the country.  He was an incredibly – he still is – but I mean then he was an incredibly powerful musician and also a good man who was always telling me to clean up my mouth.  He didn’t like certain words that, you know, young musicians might use.  So he taught me all about respect but also about the art of really reaching down into myself as a musician and always doing the thing that frightened me a little bit; always being willing to find my edge and then just kind of leap past it – that inspired me.

Toni: Finding that edge and leaping past it – is that part of what you do as far as exploring your own potential?

Adam: Yeah, it’s something I’m doing right now, actually.  I’m making a foray into production and producing an event in North Mississippi in May, which means I’m dealing with musicians from the standpoint of the guy who’s going to be paying them which is all very new to me, because I’m used to sort of making the deal from the other side.

Toni: Right, right.

Adam: It’s hard to lowball somebody when you’ve been there, so I’m trying to put my ideals into action.  Yeah, you know, there’s certain spiritual principles that I really explored deeply during that period in the early 2000s and that has stuck with me ever since, and I would say one of them … you know, it came up in so many different texts, but one of them is “brave people aren’t people who were never afraid,” you know?  There are people who are afraid who acknowledge that fear and then take a deep breath and step out beyond it, and I find that – in fact, I’m feeling it right now.  I find that a very moving principle.

Toni: I had someone say to me just today on another interview that fear is just unfinished business.

Adam: Okay, that works for me.

Toni: And I thought “Yeah, all right; that’s a nice way to put that as well.”  You had mentioned in a comment that you said you do in your teaching with the harmonica and also, but I’m hearing it as kind of a theme in your interview, but I want you to clarify this for the people who are listening – you said “leaving a space.”  Define what that means for the people who will be listening and reading your interview.  What does it mean from your perspective to “leave a space?”

Adam: Oh, to leave a space.  Well, it means – and this is especially important I think for people who are possessed by visions, you know, transformative visions and they want to share those visions with the world.  It’s really important in order to bring people along.  I think good ministers … I live in Mississippi and good Bible belt ministers know this but, you know, even if you rise to a thunderous pitch, I think it’s really important also to give people a space in which they can step forward towards you.

So that’s what it means to leave a space.  It means … well, it means to listen, and it means to really listen if you can.  It’s hard to remain that present so that you’re always able to listen even as you’re putting a vision out there, but it means being … I think, wasn’t it Daniel Goleman’s book about emotional intelligence?  It means also having a little emotional intelligence.

I had a student … I teach at Ole Miss, and I had a student who was my age who is an educational professional in Mississippi who had actually not done very well on an exam, and I had to speak with her about it.  And I had gone back and looked at her transcript, her sort of record, and realized that she had been taking courses for 20 years towards her PhD.  She was respected in her field; she just hadn’t done well on this exam because she had misunderstood something.

But as I began to talk … I wanted to tell her that I really admired that it had taken her 20 years but, as I began, as I sort of paged through the couple of pages of her transcript, I realized that there was a pain that was kind of clouding her eyes, and that she … For her, that was a burden that when she had taken off five years to have a kid or three years because she’d had a divorce and things were going bad for her, and I realized I may have intended to praise her but that what she was getting was her own unfinished business.

And I had to be present enough to see that pain and then to reframe what I was presenting by accentuating “I can’t tell you how impressed I am that you’ve persisted in this; that you’ve persisted in this and we’re going to get you through.”  So that’s what I mean about space is you have to know how to pause.

Toni: It’s almost … what I’m hearing in this interview is that it’s leaving the space but also respecting that space and being able to readjust that space when necessary.

Adam: Yes.

Toni: And that’s what I’ve heard from you in this interview; not only what you do for others, but also what you’ve learned.  Because you spoke very eloquently about your own challenges and how you must have been in a space for a couple of years, and you not only were helped through that space but it sounds like you were listening very intently to others and learning while you were in that space that allows you to do what you’re doing today.

What an awesome gift that you’re giving today to the Get Inspired! Project by giving us this interview.  And for that, Adam, we cannot thank you enough.  We will post a link or two or however you want people to be able to find you, listen to your music, or maybe learn how to play the harmonica.

Adam: Yeah, why not?

Toni: You know, sure!  So we thank you so very much, Adam, for coming to the table today.

Adam: It’s been my pleasure, Toni.

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For more information about Adam Gussow:  www.youtube.com/user/KudzuRunner, www.modernbluesharmonica.com, www.hillcountryharmonica.com

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Karl, for agreeing to be part of our Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Karl Gruber: Hi, I’m Karl Gruber.  I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I just like to inspire people myself.  I do that through my running and my writing and speaking, and I have a website now that I try to do that through.

Toni: Well that’s fantastic!  Well, let’s go back and drill that down a little bit.  When you think about that word inspiration, who do you inspire and how do you go about that?

Karl: Well, you know, my personal motto is “ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things,” and I did that through running a marathon a week for 52 straight weeks to raise money for leukemia research and awareness.

Toni: Wow.

Karl: The funny thing is, even though I’ve been a runner for years, I’ve never been real fast, and I’ve never been an elite runner.  But my thought was that I could accomplish this, and I’m a middle-of-the-pack runner.  And the way I look at it is if Karl Gruber can run 26.2 miles once a week for 52 straight weeks, then anybody can go on and accomplish their own dreams and goals.  At the time I did that, people said “Oh, that’s impossible.”  Well, I went on to become the ninth man in the world to accomplish that.

Toni: That’s amazing!  So you ran 26 miles every week.

Karl: Don’t forget the 0.2.

Toni: Oh, oh, okay!

Karl: Believe me, when you’re out there, that 0.2 is important.  I did one marathon a week for 52 straight weeks.  I did that from May 5, 1996 through April 27, 1997, and I did it for the Leukemia Society’s team and marathon training group.  And the whole time I was on the road, I did radio and television interviews to raise money and awareness along the road.  And it was an amazing year and amazing from every angle of the spectrum — from astoundingly exciting to incredibly lonely and defeating and ultimately victorious — and I met fabulous people along the years … along the road, I should say.

I ended up writing and publishing a book about the year; so I had do that.  There was just so much inside of me from that whole year of incredible running and meeting people.

Toni: And so, the people that you inspire are, one, I would imagine the foundation that you ran for, and then others that have learned about not only your accomplishment but the motivation behind that must have been an amazing inspiration to people.  When you inspire people like that, Karl, how do you think that it also then helps them to explore their potential?

Karl: Well … and that’s a great question because, you know, I actually — it’s not a surprise — I actually work full-time in a running specialty store, so I run into a lot of people.  We sell my book there.  A lot of people come in, believe it or not, in a running specialty store are not runners and even just people I meet casually when I’m talking or they just find out what I did, you know.  I tell them “You don’t have to be a runner; you don’t have to be a walker.  You just have to have dreams and goals.”

The biggest thing in the world is 95% of the people say when they think of their biggest dreams and goals they’ll say “Oh, I’ll never do that,” or they get to the end of their life and one of the worst things, I think, that anybody could say at the end of their life is “I woulda, I coulda, I shoulda” … and it doesn’t have to be that way.

You honestly … you have to take your biggest dreams and goals and believe you can accomplish it and have faith that you can, and then put the time and the effort and work into it to accomplish it.  Whether it’s making a quilt to honor AIDS patients or skydiving or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or running 52 five-kilometer races in 52 weeks; just believe you can do it.  You really can.  That’s where my motivation and inspiration from people is.

Toni: Well, that’s amazing.  You can hear the passion and enthusiasm in your voice.  When you think about the word inspiration for you, what inspires you?  What do you need to be inspired?

Karl: Well, you always have to have some goal or dream out there.  I can see how so many people … I mean, I have a regular job, too.  You go to work in the morning and then you eat lunch and then you come back home and you sit, and you’ve got a football game on, and you drink a beer.  And then you do it over and over, and weeks and months and years pass by.

It’s easy to become uninspired, but I always try to have a great goal out there.  For me, it was running the 52 marathons as a runner.  And again, you don’t have to be a runner to be inspired.  But for me, I always have at least one to three marathons a year laid out weeks or months ahead of me so that it focuses me and motivates me to train so I can get to the finish line.  I like to eat, so I have to do that to maintain my weight.

But also, as I mentioned, I wanted to get my book out there.  So writing my book was inspiring me to try to inspire others, and now I just created a website, which I’ve had this idea for 10 years and I just launched it.  It’s called the Positive Possibility Power Thinking Institute, and the website address is www.3PTI.com.  It was a no-brainer, really.  That website, working on it, really motivates me and inspires me to touch the people of the world and get the information out to them about being … well, I just call it 3P thinking — positive possibility power thinking — and I love it.  It’s great.

Toni: When you are … if you ever reach that point where you are, you know, “I have to fill myself back up” or “I’m in the need, I need to be inspired,” are there things you reach for, things you look for that are outside of what you’ve already spoken about?

Karl: Yeah, you know, again, that’s another great question because, just like anybody … I mean, as much as … and I told you I believe before we got on the interview here that I’m a disciple of what I call positive thinking.  It started with Norman Vincent Peale, and there’s Napoleon Hill, and Robert Schuler, etc., etc., all those wonderful people.  But like anybody, it’s a day-to-day struggle to fight your ego and the crazy junk of every day — personality conflicts with your coworkers, etc. — and it’s hard to stay on line, so it’s really a lifetime mission of staying on it.

For me, I honestly always come back to another book.  Like right now, I’ve actually got it sitting here next to me, Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now – Seven Steps to Living Your Full Potential. I’m always reading a book, and if I’m depressed or down about something, I pick it up and I read that.

But I’d say right now in my life, the biggest influence is something called A Course In Miracles — which was a channeled work that was given to a lady in New York in the early seventies — and some people call it the Christian vedanta.  It’s written in Christian tone, and it’s just … if you want to know what truth is and forgiveness and love.  Every morning I meditate before I go for a run, and I usually go through one of the lessons in The Course of Miracles.   So if nobody’s ever heard of it, just go to the acim.org website, A Course in Miracles website.  It’s awesome.

Toni: Well thank you for that.  Now let me ask you, when you are continuously exploring your own potential, what do you do?  What do you reach for?

Karl: Oh boy, can you be a little more explicit about that?  I’m not sure I understand that.

Toni: Absolutely.  You have a way about you of being inspired and what you need to stay inspired, but what do you do to explore your own potential so that you can keep moving forward, so that you can keep doing the work that you’re doing, you can keep getting up and staying positive?  What do you do to maintain and then explore your own potential going forward?

Karl: You know, I’m still working on that.  I think we all are.  Again, really, it is a lifetime job.  I’m going to go back to my running.  I certainly realize that probably the majority of people who listen to this are not runners.  But for me, I’m 58 years old now, and I’m in fantastic shape for a guy my age. I weigh the same I did in high school.

I find that keeping myself in good health allows me not to be distracted by some type of ailment or injury.  A lot of people now have diabetes or obesity or high tension, stress, and by keeping myself healthy it allows me to enjoy a better life and also be able to have clarity to focus on things.  And really it sounds … I mean, that may sound too simple to some people, but at least for Karl Gruber, that’s what works for me.

Just quickly, if you even look at icons like Anthony Robbins, Tony Robbins; I mean, that guy is a famous motivator and life coach.  The same thing, he preaches that.  You gotta be healthy.  You gotta be in shape in order to accomplish your greatest dreams and goals.

Toni: Karl, did you always come to the table this way?  There’s certain people that I ask this question, and you’re going to be one of them.  You know, have you always come to the table in such a positive manner?

Karl: You know, I guess I’ve always had kind of a happy-go-lucky attitude, one of the lucky things that I was graced with when I was born.  And it’s not always true.  But when I come to, like, certain people who are grumpy or challenge you in a certain way or a certain situation, a lot of ways I’ve been able to be like water off a duck.  I allow it to roll off me and not change me or unfocus me.

But when I was younger, honestly, I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.  My self-image wasn’t the greatest.  You go along in life and you mature a little bit and understand.  You become a little more focused on what you want.  I guess ever since I was a little boy, I did have a little bit of this.

Toni: Well, that’s fantastic … go ahead …

Karl: Nobody’s has ever asked me that before.

Toni: Well there’s always the first, right?

Karl: There you go.

Toni: Karl, you have been very inspiring in this interview, from what you did for the Foundation that you ran for and what you’ve accomplished, the fact that you positioned it in a way that it wasn’t easy, that it was hard and, at times, lonely I think was very honest.  I would think that that would be incredibly inspiring for those who are just trying to get up in the morning and make it through the day.

Karl: Thank you.

Toni: Sharing your perspective of how you inspired others and continue to do so, plus what you need, that’s what this Project is all about, and your interview was infused with enthusiasm and passion and for that, we thank you.  And thank you for being part of the Get Inspired! Project.

Karl: I appreciate it, and really my enthusiasm is as genuine.  I really want to make the world a better place and be happy myself.  If anybody is interested in my book, Running For Their Lives, it’s from Xlibris Publishing.  You can find my book either on Amazon or Borders or BarnesandNoble.com.  You can order it right from Xlibris, and my website is www.3PTI.com.

Toni: Well thank you very much for that, Karl, and we will put the links at the bottom of the interview as well on how people can get a hold of you.  We thank you very, very much for taking part of this interview today.  Take care of yourself.

Karl: Thank you, Toni.  It was a blast.

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For more information about Karl Gruber:  www.3pti.com, karl@3pti.com

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Violette, for joining us today on this interview and giving up your time.  Before we begin with the questions, can you please introduce yourself?

Violette Ruffley: I’m Violette Ruffley and living in Clyde, North Carolina, which is such an exquisite area.

Toni: And what do you do, Violette?

Violette: Well, I’m a retired RN.  I had worked in psychiatry and basically psychosocial problems — rape treatment center, care partner for AIDS patients — and most of my time really was in mental health.

Toni: With the work that you’ve done over your lifetime, Violette, and the work that you’re doing now, and you think about the word “inspiration”, who do you think you inspire and how do you think you might do that?

Violette: Well it comes as a surprise that I might be an inspiration to anyone.  However, at this time and point in my life, it’s sort of … I’m almost 83, and I think “Good grief, what am I here for?”  And if indeed I can be an inspiration to anyone, then it really makes one’s life worthwhile and it’s a form of validation.

Toni: When you are doing the work that you do, how do you think that that inspiration comes through you to people that you touch every day?

Violette: I would hope I come from a center of love and that this is projected out to the people I touch.  I am a chaplain with hospice ,and the niche that I have really fallen into that is the one I really love and am most comfortable with is doing vigils the last hours of life; and that has been quite a wonderful experience.

Toni: When you are doing the vigils, can you give me and also the people who are reading this blog or listening to you … can you help me understand what that means exactly, what you’re doing?

Violette: Well, these are the patients who have been diagnosed as terminal.  However, they are now really, for lack of a better word, actively dying; and they are in their last hours.  I do hands-on healing, and when I am with the patient, I put my hands on them.  And even though they are perhaps unconscious or highly medicated with morphine, they still can hear because that is the last sense to leave.  And so I’m able to speak to them, to encourage them, to tell them that this is the moment that they will have relief and that they are so loved and that they are going to be peaceful and happy and moving toward the light.

Toni: And that certainly brings a whole different level of definition to the word inspiration for this project.  With the work that you do and almost, really, with this type of work can take away two of the questions that I would ask you, but let me try to understand.  Is the family there as well when you do this type of work?

Violette: Sometimes; and sometimes it’s giving them a respite so that they can go home and eat and rest for a while and then come back.  The last experience I had, the patient’s brother was there, and I did not say very much while he was there.  And once he left the room, then I felt really comfortable being able to encourage the patient to go ahead and go to the light.

I was told afterward that his regular volunteer had told him he could go, and that his brother had told him it was alright, he could go, and yet he struggled breathing; and it is a struggle.  Their breath is very labored.  But within really minutes of when I told him he could leave, he did go.

And when the nurse came back in the room, she took my chair and she was checking to see his breath sounds, and I was standing at the end of the bed.  During that entire time I was with him, his eyes were almost closed.  At the instant that he took his last breath, his eyes just flew open, and I felt the presence of angels in the room.  It was an inspiration to me, and it always is.  I feel tremendous energy surrounding me.

Toni: Wow, that’s beautiful.  Do you train others to do this type of work that you do, and the way that you do it, Violette?

Violette: Well, I do another type of work which is based actually originally from A Course In Miracles, and this is called attitudinal healing which Dr. Jerry Jampolsky presented after he experienced reading the course; it had changed his life.  He has started centers and introduced people to attitudinal healing principles, and these are the principles that I facilitate.

Toni: Can you help us understand what that is?

Violette: Well, the lovely part of principles, first of all, it’s based on the very first principle which is the essence of your being is love and that thing goes through the 12 principles.  For instance, dealing with death.  Since love is eternal, death need not be viewed as fearful.  I like to take at least …

If I may digress … Normally I present a principle per week; however, there are two principles which really involve more time – the one which deals with forgiveness, and then the principle I just mentioned about death, because I ask people to visualize how they want their own death to be handled.  Western culture has a tendency to be very fearful of acknowledging one’s own mortality, and people step back from it.

I don’t know where this comes from, but if you think about even the process of making a person up to look proper in a coffin to really give them life appearance, and people will even comment and say “Oh, he looks just as good as he did in real life.”  So there is that fear, and my sense is that we need to learn how to die before we can live.

Toni: Wow … that’s really incredible.  And is that all part of that process and the teaching that comes with the attitudinal healing?

Violette: Yes, but there is a great deal more to it, and the principles of attitudinal healing place a responsibility of your thoughts and your actions and your beliefs squarely on your own shoulders.  There is nothing outside of us; it’s all within.  Whether it’s looking for happiness or projecting victimhood out on life situations, it draws it all back to the self.

Toni: That is so important.  So you are a facilitator and help others with these principles?

Violette: Yes.

Toni: I see.

Violette: However, believe it or not, it’s very difficult to get people to sign up for the class.  People don’t want to acknowledge that they have a problem; they’re really in denial.

Toni: Based on the experiences that you’ve had and the experiences that you are giving families with the other part of your work that you do, I can’t imagine why people wouldn’t want to learn that from you, so I’m really happy for the awareness that you’re bringing to this through the Get Inspired! Project as well.  I want to ask you, though, before we run out of time here, Violette, what inspires you?  When you’re seeking inspiration to fill yourself up, what do you seek?

Violette: Really I have to touch nature.  I have to see growing things, the sun shining, even the rain.  Birds.  Birds are very meaningful to me.  A beautiful tree, a flower … these are my joys.

Toni: Are there certain moments when you know that you’re in a state that you need to again fill yourself up to be inspired and are there — outside of what you just mentioned, nature and experiencing that and seeing the beauty in that — are there other resources that you reach for or tools that you might use to stay inspired to do the immense work that you do?

Violette: I probably play a real avoidance game in terms of I do not have a television nor a radio.  I do not read newspapers.  To me, it’s the same news with a different date and different names and different locations.  I do walk away from doom and gloom, and I seek those that are living in joy and living in the now moment.

Toni: Have you always been that way?

Violette: No.  No; in truth, I would say that probably from puberty on until I was in my 50s, I was at one level of depression greater or lesser.  And in truth, when I was introduced to A Course In Miracles, it did change my life because I always perceived myself as a victim.

Toni: And so you went through that course, and that is where the learning began for you to move out of that gloom and doom?

Violette: Yes.  The day I read the lesson that said you are not a victim of the world you see — well, it took me about a week to get through that – “What do you mean I’m not a victim, of course I’m a victim!”  Oh, it took a while to really see that I had choices but simply did not take them.

Toni: Gosh, Violette, I tell you, you really have … this has been a wonderful interview.  It’s been a very gentle interview, and it’s just been a very powerful interview, and I’m so lucky to meet people like you and to be able to share people like you with the numbers of people that are coming to the Get Inspired! Project.  And I know that you’ve given me something to think about in this interview, and I know that you will give others something to think about.

Violette: May I just add one thing?

Toni: Absolutely!

Violette: I look around and know that there are people who are doing big things, magnificent things; however, it’s my feeling that those of us who are the little ones, who can, if nothing more, offer a smile at a moment that someone needs it or a kind word when someone needs it, can really make a very great difference.

Toni: And you’ve done that today, and you will do that for the people who are reading this and listening to you.

Violette: Thank you.

Toni: Thank you so much for this today, Violette, and it was a pleasure to talk to you and thank you for your time, and take care.

Violette: Thank you for permitting me to share.

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