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Gregory Eckel has spent the last 20 years developing and refining his unique approach to chronic neurological conditions. In addition to his experience in clinical practice using a combination of Naturopathic and Chinese Medicine, he has a deep personal connection with chronic neurological disease since his wife Sarieah passed of... Read More
Tim Shields is an author, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. Beyond his passion for music, travel, and creativity—when it comes to writing, his interest exists at the intersection of consciousness, energy, healing, transformation, and human potential. Best ‘unknown’ as Dr. Joe Dispenza's former editor, for six years he learned under... Read More
- The power of the Dream and the power of Gratitude/Intention Journal – a simple exercise I do every day which became the foundation for my first book.
- The central question that each of our lives is trying to answer
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Belief, Consciousness, Energy, Meditation, Mind, Mindset, Plant Medicine, Transformation, WritingGreg Eckel, ND, LAc
Welcome back, everybody, to the Bioenergetics Summit. I’m your host, Dr. Greg Eckel. Today, I have Tim Shields, an author, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach on board. And we’re talking about the power of directed consciousness to create your reality. A bit about Tim, he has written, beyond his passion for music and travel and creativity, when it comes to writing, his interest exists at the intersection of consciousness, energy, healing, transformation, and human potential, which is near and dear to all of us listening and viewing this summit. He’s best unknown as Dr. Joe’s former editor. For six years, he learned under Dr. Joe Dispenza, while helping him express his ideas in the written form, which included helping him edit his critically acclaimed book “Becoming Supernatural: “How Common People Are Doing The Uncommon.” Tim is the author of “A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment” and the upcoming book “The Path of Least Resistance,” a new model of self-actualization, and as explained to my 17-year-old self, of which Dr. Joe is writing the forward. Tim, welcome aboard.
Tim Shields
Thanks, it’s so great to be with you. These are my favorite conversations to have.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I love it, I’ve been excited since we talked many moons ago on having you come onto the Bioenergetics Summit. And I want just start out with, because it is really super fascinating, how did you get started writing, and did you always want to be a writer?
Tim Shields
Yeah, I mean, somehow, I decided at 17 years old, I wanted to be a writer. And at the same time, I started asking to be used as an instrument of peace, and you and I, I’m gonna get right in there, but you and I share a little love with the “Grateful Dead.” And I was probably 16 or 17. I did some mushrooms at a “Grateful Dead” concert, and I really, now we call it plant medicine, then we were just parting, but it really did kind of alter my consciousness in a way. And I would say it sort of shifted my timeline to the track that I’m on, and I was actually thinking the other day, “What is the timeline?” And I think it’s something that happens internally with such a powerful, emotional quotient that it alters our path and alters our reality. I mean, prior to that, I don’t know, I just had some good teachers, and they were very encouraging of what I was doing and writing. And I was always interested in somehow consciousness and transformation, and in my journals, at 18, I was writing about the next evolution as a spiritual evolution, ’cause we have to go in, before we go, “We’ve gone out.” The transformation is within.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Okay, so definitely, we do share that beginning path of the kind of lifting of the veil. How did you become Dr. Joe Dispenza’s editor?
Tim Shields
Well, I went to my first workshop in 2010, and there was probably 75 to a hundred people, which now he sells out 2000, he just had 7,000 people in Basel, which is insane. And I just really connected with the information. And at one point, my sister was standing up, and he was like, “You, I wanna see you.” And she’s like, “Oh my God, what did I do?” And he’s like, “What’s going on?” And she told him she hurt her back sleigh riding with her kid. And he’s like, “Well, let’s go find a room. “I’ll do an adjustment on you,” ’cause he was originally a chiropractor. And as it turns out, before I was born, my family lived one town over from his in New Jersey. And I was like, “You went to Alfonso’s pizza?” “I went to Alfonso pizza.” So we just connected, he invited us to be his guest at dinner that night. And I was trying to put out my first book then. And he’s like, “I think I can find you this literary agent.”
He couldn’t find her, but we just stayed connected. And I would go to a workshop once a year, and every time I see him, I’d be like, “We’d great collaborators.” And then there’s a whole backstory of manifesting how that actually came into being. But it all came out of my first advanced workshop I went to, and I was meditating on a mentor and a full-time job. So I was always freelancing so I could finish my book. And as soon as I landed in Seattle, somebody reached out from LinkedIn, I’m gonna make this long story short, I got that job, it lasted exactly six months. At the end of six months, I got laid off, and I was like, “Sweet, “I’m gonna work on more drafts of my book all winter.” And I literally walked out of the building after this six month thing. And I said, “All right, “what amazing things about to happen to me?” And within five minutes, I kid you not, Dr. Joe’s assistant reached out, and she’s like, “Dr. Joe’s in the middle east, “but he’d like to talk to you “about helping him edit his blogs.” And I was like, “Let’s do this.”
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Awesome, so you’ve been utilizing the tools of the quantum from an early age, and now you’re writing about them, even with your new book “The Path of Least Resistance.” That leads right in here, Tim, let’s talk about creation and what we’re doing. So what is the book all about?
Tim Shields
Well, I think it’s actually now gonna be called “The Path of Least Resistance: “A Memoir From the Future,” it’s a little more marketable, and the whole book, I’m talking to my 17-year-old self. And in the very beginning, I asked my 17-year-old self to suspend the concept of time, because time is a human construct. So if I can teach him these things when he’s 17, it’s gonna change our current timeline and our future timeline. So really, I’m just kind of talking about all of the things that I’ve learned. And I also created this new model of self-actualization that I call the Circlotron. So, basically, I was working with somebody during lockdown in Texas, and there are two pillars of how this book came in. There was nothing to do but work, and go down to the Guadalupe River. So one day I was going down to the Guadalupe River, and I was talking with this woman about self-actualization, and it exists at the top of a triangle in Maslow’s hi hierarchy of needs. And I was just walking down to the river, and I was like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense,” because the tip of a triangle is a pinnacle state, and it means that you’ve reached this “aha,” but really, self-actualization is a dynamic state. So this kind of image of just concentric circles popped into my head.
And I started thinking about it, writing down a little bit about it. And then, probably three or four months later, I was in Dana Point working with somebody, and I was walking through the Harbor one day, and the song “Eyes of the World” by the “Grateful Dead” came on, which is my favorite song, and I call things like that a quantum string. And it’s like, when something like that shows up, it takes you back to an inciting incident. And for me, when I hear that song, it takes me right back to the 17-year-old self. It collapses time, and then there’s this string, this song’s played a role throughout my whole life. And just for the first time, I was like, “What would I tell my 17-year-old self?” I started talking to my 17-year-old self, and I said, “Chill the fuck out.” So those are the two pillars of how this book came to be.
And then I wound up here in Palm Springs in the desert, and I’m living with a friend, and as soon as I got here, he was like, “Your job is to finish your next book here.” And I was like, “Okay, I don’t have one yet.” And then a whole bunch of serendipities and synchronicities happened. And I connected with his literary agent, and I gave him a couple samples, he chose one, it was the one that I liked the best, and I just started moving into it. And there’s this amazing, high-desert palm oysters here, it’s Indian land, it’s sacred land. And I mean, I would just go for walks there and ask myself the question, and the ideas just came in from there, and yeah, I’d get to the end of a chapter, and I’m like, “Oh,” start to get a little anxious, and I’m like, “I don’t know where this is going,” but then, boom, the idea would come in. And I think of, when you have a vision, a lot of people just have the vision, but you have to move into it. And I liken it to, when you start moving in that direction, it’s like a boring machine, and matter starts conforming to your will. And then that’s where the serendipities, the synchronicities, everything else starts showing up.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Interesting, so in that component, the “Chill the F out” as the second pillar, is that a recurring theme that’s coming up for you now, as you’re implanting or teaching the 17-year-old in the timeline that is kind of made up, so we can get, let’s just go for it. So how is that showing up for you now?
Tim Shields
Well, I mean, I had this dream since I was a young kid, and I just felt like I had something to say. And in my first book “A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment,” I liken it to, the dream is like shooting a grappling hook out into the future. And if you’re strong enough and focused enough, and you stay on that line, you’re gonna get to the top of that mountain, you’re gonna get to that dream. Of course, there’s a lot of elements on the mountain, and the environment is always trying to push you off of that dream, people, environment, jobs, I was stuck in corporate America for years, and I’m like, “How is this ever gonna happen?” I believed in trusting in the process, but I was not totally trusting in the process, but I think that greater belief at the soul level keeps you on that line. And again, it’s just magic and serendipity and synchronicity started happening. I came outta college, and then I was chasing all these .com IPO and all this other stuff.
And then at one time point, in my mid thirties, I was like, “Oh wow, “I used to always ask to be used as an instrument piece.” And I started asking that again, and then boom, I hooked up with Dr. Joe. And he sort of fell behind on his book deal. And he was like, “Hey, what would you think about “helping me edit “Becoming Supernatural?” And I was like, “Watch how fast I quit my job.” So I quit my nine to five, which was the dream, I had been dreaming that for years. And I jumped into the unknown. And I think a lot of the way my life has unfolded is because I’ve had the courage to jump into the unknown, despite the fact that beneath it, I was inheriting my mother’s fear and my dad’s survivors guilt from World War II and all this stuff. So I think, you know, I don’t know, it’s I just did the opposite of what the fear was telling me to do, which is not easy, but-
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
That is not easy. So what kind of recommendations do you have for folks getting into that, getting into the unknown, to stay the course, or are there certain techniques that you do? Is there meditations, is there movements? I know it’s different for everybody, but I’m wondering in the Tim Shields background, and what have you drawn on there?
Tim Shields
Well, at one point, I was almost finished with my book, and I was living at a friend’s place on the Oregon Coast, and I was running along the beach one day, and then just this mission statement landed in my head in completion, and it’s “I translate light, frequency, and energy into story, “so as to lead others to their truth.” So I think it’s very important to be very clear on what you want to do in the world. So that’s like the umbrella statement. And then I have a professional one that’s like, I help artists visionaries and global changemakers articulate and amplify their message to the economy of words. So I’m very clear on what I’m doing in the world, but the catalyst of my first book was my mom passing away. I had a decade of sick parents, and people were going on vacations, and I was going home to New Jersey to see my parents. So my mom passed away book ending this decade. And I was like, “It’s my time.” And I always knew if I wanted to do big things.
If I wanted to write about big things, I had to have big experiences, and I had volunteered orphanage, took off in Tanzania and done all this stuff, but I went all in, and I bought a one-way ticket to India, which was absolutely terrifying. I landed in New Delhi without even a Lonely Planet or anything. The first two days, I was like, “I’ve made a huge mistake, what am I doing?” Terrified, but a little while before that, a friend of my sister’s sort of an energy healer person, she was like, “All right, you’re a writer. “Yeah, okay, I want you to do this exercise. “I want you to write down five things you’re grateful for “and five things you wanna create. “And you’re gonna find that the things you create today “are gonna become the things you’re grateful for “in the future.” And I mean, this has been a practice of mine since October, 2010.
And it’s actually the gratitude and intention journal is actually a structural element of my book, because literally, I took off to find the story, and I was writing down like, “Alright, I wanna be of service.” And then the next thing you know, I was volunteering for a guy who has won the equivalent of two Nobel Prizes, India’s most important environmental lawyer, sued the state of India to create a green zone around the Taj Mahal. All of these things were just happening and manifesting. And I really believe reality is actually malleable, it’s malleable. I’m starting to learn on almost a nanosecond and nanosecond basis on who we are being. It’s mirrored and reflected back to us. And I’ve gotten in the habit, when something happens that is not what I wanted or created, I just say, “All right, show me what’s better.” And that change of energy creates a ripple that changes everything, everything.
I mean, I have countless examples of that happening. We don’t have the time to go into that here, but yeah, I mean, everything is about energy and your state of being, and who you are being and your energy level is going to be reflected back to you. And for years, I was depressed, and I was stuck, and antidepressants and shit. And it was just like, I don’t know how I got out of that. I think really when I became the butterfly was when I actually started engaging in the self-actualization process of becoming a writer, instead of just thinking about becoming a writer. It’s also, if you want to get somewhere, there is the thought, but then there is this state of becoming, and you have to sit with that, which is uncomfortable, but it’s transformative.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
That unknowing, it’s the dichotomy of our brains, of the way we’re wired in one fashion of wanting safety and the known, versus, that that’s not life, it’s a screen or a picture, it’s over there. And it’s with that becoming in your beingness is where you’re wild, life comes alive, or some folks I’ve heard kind of talk it giddy with excitement on how the day unfolds, because it’s an unknown, we don’t know. But on one level, it’s super uncomfortable, because we don’t know. And then sometimes, it doesn’t happen the way we think it would or should or the way that we willed it or our picture of it. And I think it’s being okay that, I mean, on the vastness of the whole thing, it’s a little bit, it’s definitely, I can’t rock it, it’s so immense, so magnificent, just so ornate, and beyond just this little nog in a mind. So I just have to surrender into that. There’s one way, in your book, you wrote, for every life or at least in every artist’s life, you’re answering one central question. Do you write in the book on how to help people find that?
Tim Shields
Well, I don’t think I do. I actually haven’t looked at it in quite a while, because I pulled it back, there’s two chapters, I’m like, “These need to be written,” but I think the central question to my life, and I think it’s actually the central question to a lot of people’s lives, is, “Am I actually powerful enough to create, “manifest, and actualize the dream?” That’s the question, and that’s the journey. And I’m working with energy for life, helping with some of the articulation of the ideas and stuff like that. And I really think that manifesting comes down to what we call the GIST, which is gratitude, intention, surrender, and trust, and the gratitude intention part I’ve been doing in my journals, but there’s this surrender and trust part as well. And surrender, I think, is an active state of allowance. Some people are like, “Okay, I created it. “I don’t have to do anything,” but no, you have to be moving forward in that direction.
And then, trust is, it’s like walking through a door that was opened specifically for you, but you don’t know what’s on the other side, but it was open for you, so let’s do this. And it’s probably the easiest concept to understand and the hardest to master. But I think if you take everything from a much higher level, and let’s call this physical dimension, a learning ground for our evolution, our spiritual and energetic evolution, if you can stay in that, at our age, maybe a 20-year-old, could be crushed by something, but we have the richness and time and perspective to see that how all of these things connected that didn’t make sense in the moment to get us to where we are.
And I just trust that it’s always leading me to something better, because that is the process of the universe, it’s continuously creating greater and greater order. And if I can connect myself into these patterns of energy and information, then it is going to bring me into this greater order. And I mean, there was a long time where I was just fighting to find people to write for or jobs in the freelance world. And I don’t know, something shifted in my energy, and all of the great projects I’ve had, they just come to me, I don’t do anything. It’s an energy. It’s everything I write about, I write about consciousness, it’s my passion. I only have my own consciousness to study. But I believe, as a writer or whatever, I’m a mirror of the universal, and vice versa.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Let’s go on that. So for folks that are maybe unsettled or not liking what the universe is mirroring back to them, how would you recommend for somebody to get into action around? What do you do to change that reality? So, I guess another way would be, what’s the key to manifesting or creating a reality or your reality?
Tim Shields
I think it’s the exact opposite of what people think, which would be hustle, do more, whatever. I think you have to become still, and you have to become quiet, and you sit with yourself. And manifesting is about moving into the energy of your future. So, like Dr. Joe would say, “The thought sends the signal out, “the feeling pulls it back.” And I mean, almost daily, I meditate, and it’s completely changed my life. I mean, if I didn’t wind up meditating, I don’t know who or what I would be doing. It might be messy, let’s put it that way. But I do a lot of writing exercises and stuff like that. I was just traveling through Europe for two months, and there were all these massive expansions and contractions, I think of solo travel, it’s probably why I’m addicted to solo travels, if this is the spectrum of the totality of your life experiences in six months, it’s compressed into this box.
And if the state of energy is expansion, if all this energy is being compressed to this, there’s a lot more faster contractions and expansions. And I saw things that I would not have seen otherwise. And at one point, I unlocked a lot of things within myself. And at one point, I was kind of like, “Why am I so unhappy?” I’m living the dream right now, literally, traveling the world, getting to write about, getting paid to do it. And part of it is ’cause the ego is always futurecasting. But I actually sat down one day, and I did this quadrant exercise. And in the first quadrant, I wrote, “What are my limiting thoughts?” And in the second quadrant, I rewrote those as an unlimited thought. And then the quadrant below it, I called it “Celebrate the wins,” and I wrote all these amazing things that are happening in my life. And then next to it is, “What do those wins feel like?” And that is where you wanna be. Because if you can get heart, the heart energy into that, the heart energy is the amplifier, and it comes back to gratitude.
I think gratitude is the amplifying energy, and intention should be created on the back of gratitude. I was writing about it yesterday, like, “Gratitude is being in a loving, comforting, safe embrace.” It’s like, “You have everything you need, “everything’s great.” And when you can really move into that, it is an expansive feeling, that is where you wanna create from.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I love it, so yes, intentions on the after wake of gratitude, of an expansive state. I like how you did that, that exercise with the ‘getting into the emotion and celebrating the wins,’ ’cause so many people don’t celebrate the wins. They’re just moving to that future cast of ‘tomorrow never comes’ type of deal. Do you have any rituals or ways to pause to celebrate the wins, or how do you use, does it just come naturally to you?
Tim Shields
No, I mean, nobody beat me up, I beat myself up. No, I mean, that is why I had to do that. I was like, “Whoa, pump the brakes. “I’m traveling around the world, “I’m working with people “at the highest level of consciousness.” I always wanted to create this gratitude intention journal. I’m getting to do it with energy for life. And I was like, “Geez, lighten up, loosen up.” I gotta tell the middle-aged guy, my future has to tell the middle-aged guy, “Lighten up, it’s all good.” But the ego, it’s like, “When I have this, I’m gonna be happy.” No, no, happiness, creation, everything only happens in this one eternal present moment. I think we’re going to learn in the next maybe 20 years or something a very different idea of time. Time is not linear, but it’s a whole other conversation for a whole other time. That’s what I’m trying to figure out right on that whiteboard, a new way, paradigm.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I love it, yeah. Well, so in closing, any last remarks, thoughts, anything to put folks into action? So I’m trying to end each interview with an action item for folks or a seed planting. So I’m wondering if that sparks anything for you here.
Tim Shields
My two go-tos are meditation and the gratitude and intention journal, and it’s just a little bit of energy in a certain direction can have massive effects on your life. I mean, I’ve created so many things out of that gratitude and intention journal, and it’s almost like, sometimes, the more bigger and more outlandish they are, the faster they come, because I have no connection to them. It’s always the things that you want so bad that it’s almost like that wanting is creating an energy of lack. But when I just put these crazy things in there, sometimes, they happen like that. I mean, when I was traveling, and on this trip too, on the book, my first book, it’s like, I would write things down, and it was coming to me that day.
And that’s a whole different thing, because when you’re out of your environment, your senses are way more lit up, and you are absorbing more information. And I also think your energy is probably higher, although I was younger, so I was probably hung over a little bit, to bring your energy down. But yeah, I mean, at all times, I mean, the other thing I would say is just be very cognizant and aware of your energy, because your energy is what is reflected back to you at all times, so.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Tim Shields, thank you so much.
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