My Story
I spent over 30 years in the ministry when I recognized that my life had fallen apart.
In 2020, I was divorced, had poor health, and I was alone for the first time in my life.
I was forced to abandon the identities that made up my old life. Minister, role model, someone who had it together. These false identities became painfully obvious to everyone around me.
In my shame, I resolved to rebuild a life that was honest, authentic and transparent. I had nothing to lose. So I spent a few years peeling off old mindsets and ways of living that had been accepted without scrutiny over my early life. I examined everything I thought about and believed until I landed on the bedrock of my identity.
I was a man, a father, a thinker, and I loved to joke around. From this bedrock, I researched what made a life worth living. What gives us purpose?
And Ancient Wisdom was there to guide me. Step-by-step, I began the process of redesigning and rebuilding the life I wanted to live. I’m still doing this.
And now I’m sharing what I’ve learned with you!
Big John’s Values
From the bedrock of my identity, I discovered some non-negotiable values for my life.
Be Insatiably Curious
- Never Stop Learning
- Never Stop Growing
Be Honest
- Honesty Starts With Yourself
- Doubts are OK
- If you don’t know the answer, that’s OK too
Be Wholistic
- Our lives are interconnected.
- A change in one area of life affects all the other areas
Be Compassionate
- Our main purpose in life is to become more loving
- All our life pursuits should serve this intention in one way or another
What do I do?
I have spent a lifetime studying texts from Ancient Wisdom literature. It’s my heartfelt belief that these ideas and texts from ancient wisdom belongs to all of us, and should be accessible to all of us.
It’s our human inheritance.
What is Ancient Wisdom?
Human beings have been passing wisdom down from generation to generation for as long as we’ve been around. Our advancing technologies -such as language, writing, computing, and such – have given us better ways to pass on wisdom, but the messages themselves continue to revolve around the same topics.
Those topics include ideas like this:
There is a divine realm – the ideas of the nature of this divine realm certainly differ, but there’s an overlapping truth here. We can learn to communicate with this divine realm and find inner peace in doing that.
Human beings can and should improve themselves in mind and body – Socrates once said, “An unexamined life is not worth living”. By that, he was saying that we’re meant for more than mere existence. We should know what our purpose is and live to fulfill it. In order to do that, we must tackle the task of shaping and guiding our minds and bodies toward that pursuit.
Humans live our best lives when we help others – Humans are social creatures by nature and though we have a degree of selfishness built into us, we find contentment and happiness when we help those around us. We don’t have to know everything before we help others. One of the sages of Judaism taught us that we don’t need to know the whole alphabet. If we know AB, and our neighbor knows only A, we should teach them B. It’s really that simple. If we can help in some way, we should.
I draw from ancient philosophical and faith traditions from both Eastern and Western traditions.
Some of those sources are:
- Literature from the Ancient Near East
- Homeric Writings
- The Tanach (Hebrew Bible) and Talmud
- Kabbalistic Writings
- Writings of Plato & Aristotle
- The Bible
- The Tao Te Ching
- The Upanishads
- The Bhagavad Gita
- The Dhammapada
- The Quran
- The writings of the Islamic Poets (Rumi, Ghazali & others)
- Christian Contemplative Writings
- and modern writings that deal with this literature