Day 6 at Date With Destiny

Day 6 - integration day, completion and celebration.

I had my most profound experience during the Earliest Memories exercise. I've never been able to access a lot of my early childhood memories. During this guided meditation today I unexpectedly received a vision in which I saw my birth. I even held the baby.

I have completed my Date With Destiny today (Saturday). Throughout the week Tony Robbins made me cry numerous times with his inspirational stories. Later in the week the participants made me cry with their breakthrough stories. Today I made me cry by having this vision.

Life will never be the same again. Life is changing.

My soundtrack songs for today:
Flowers of the Forest, Mike Oldfield.
One, Mary J. Blige and U2.
Life, Haddaway.

Days 4 and 5 at Date With Destiny

Day 4:

Say yes to life more often.

Get some sleep after the night ends instead of staying up to update Facebook status and write new blog post.

My soundtrack song for today: Spy Dytynko Spy, Dunai.

Day 5:

Paraphrase of biblical passage "As you seek so shall you find" is "As you seek so shall it find you".

Most people decide too soon what something means. We decide too soon what a relationship means.

There were days and days this week that Tony made cry. Today it was the participants, with their breakthrough stories, who made me cry. The buggers.

Soundtrack theme song for today: Don't Stop Believing, Journey.

Day 3 at Date With Destiny

Some of today's lessons - No often means Yes, in the language of women. Understanding that is important to understanding women, but there will still be conflict and confusion in relationships.

Inside all of is is an animal and a spirit. They both must be fed.

Dance first, eat later.

The skill of forgetting when properly employed can eliminate a lot of pain.

What a day today was. Tony exercised a few interventions and there is something I realized after one of them. The answer to the question "why did I come to this event". I had a few results I wanted that I have written down somewhere, and those results are still important, but the real reason I came was to feed myself with the energy that was in the room tonight.

My soundtrack song for today: Let It Be, performed by Jennifer Hudson.

Day 2 at Date With Destiny

Inspiring quote for today: "If you don't quit you don't fail". This quote gives me a new tool to use in answering some soul searching questions about running my business for the next quarter to a year.

Our team motto (Team 6):
"Change is easy, change is fun,
My new life has just begun."

Lesson learned at Day 2: my old primary question was "What am I missing?" My new primary question is "How can I appreciate even more of the love and abundance of God that is already within me?"

My soundtrack song for today: Blessed Be Your Name", written by Matt Redman".

Day 1 at Date With Destiny

"This is not the place to calm down. This is not the place to settle down. This is Date With Destiny."

That bastard Tony - he made me cry on the first day with the boy on the tricycle story.

It was so cool to learn that the couple from Tony's Breakthrough program were here today. It is so cool to think that they are in my Date With Destiny.

Lesson learned today: There is a price associated with making Significance and Certainty be my top two driving forces. What would happen if I made Love and Growth be my top two driving forces instead? I don't have the answer to that question but I think it is a good question to have.

My soundtrack song for today: Living on a Prayer, Bon Jovi.

Aerial Tramway Adventure

6:57am "Wake up at dawn, it's a brand new day, so many places to visit, things to do".

Today's mission: take a ride on the aerial tramway. But breakfast first.

8:07am I had the complementary breakfast at the hotel here.

What next? I inquired at the front desk about how to get to the Aerial Tramway. The lady at the counter started giving me a data dump of driving directions. I told her that I don't have a car and asked if I could get there by transit or taxi. She gave me a business card for a cab company. I suppose my next step will be to call the cab company from my room.

The Aerial Tramway - it is described as the "world's most spectacular aerial ride" according to the literature I've found in my hotel room. The Mountain Station is located at an elevation of 8,516 feet and has 54 miles of hiking trails.

I've called the Aerial Tramways information line and learned that the round trip fare for the tramway is $23.25. It is a 10 minute ride up to the top of the mountain and trams depart every half hour. There are two restaurants at the Mountain Station. There is also an area where they show movies about the tramway. All of this sounds reasonable to me. The catch is that the taxi fare is $55 one way only. It could cost me over $100 just to get there and back! Perhaps I'll look into a car rental instead.



2:42pm It's almost three o'clock before I get to the park where the tramway is located. I've rented a car for the purpose of making this side trip, having that decided that the cost would be about the same or less than what it would cost to take a taxi, plus it would give me a bit more flexibility. It will give me a bit more logistics to work out as well since I will eventually have to drop off the car and still get to my hotel from the drop off point.

Joe, the guy from the car rental agency, gave me a map so I had no trouble finding the park even without GPS. As I drove in on the long road that led to the parking lot for the tram car signs warned that this was private property that was monitored by TV, that the climb was steep and to turn off air conditioning. The climb may have been steep but it was deceptively so. I drove past a sign that claimed an altitude of 1,000 feet. Several minutes later I drove past another sign that claimed 2,000 feet. The intervening road felt mostly flat to drive on and the only physical sensation that I had of any ascent was the feeling of pressurization in my ears, like being on a plane.
















3:01pm I'm at the top now at Mountain Station, elevation 8,516 feet. It is cool up here and there is snow on the ground. The trip up the mountain on the aerial tramway took eleven minutes and it seemed like a short ride. We climbed from about 2,000 feet to over 8,000. We are not quite at the top though; the peak of the mountain is actually over 10,000 feet high.

4:29pm I step out on the deck and take a few more pictures from the other of the station. The cold temperature discourages me from undertaking even a short hike. I thought I was overdressed for the Palm Springs weather but I am actually under-dressed for the mountain top weather.

The battery in my iPhone is down to 50% so I question the wisdom of relying on it as my primary camera on future travels.

9:34pm I'm back from my Aerial Tramway Adventure. I had a late lunch while I was at the Mountain Station. After I finished lunch I stopped in at the theater room and watched the two documentaries about the park and about the building of the tramway. By the time I finished watching the movies it was dark already and I decided to head back down. The descent - in the dark - was a whole different way to experience the ride.



Would I recommend this adventure to travelers to Palm Springs? I would. I would recommend making a day trip rather than a half-day trip as I did, and take some time to explore the hiking trails. I also recommend dressing for the weather at the top of the mountain; it can be much cooler up there than it is down in the valley.

A Fiji reunion

I have been feeling under the weather this week and I left Toronto hoping that 30,000 feet of altitude would be enough to get me above the weather.

My first flight was Toronto to Dallas. I had a one hour stopover on Dallas which was really no time at all. Enough to find the departure gate, buy some water and snacks, try to access a wi-fi network, and then the boarding call comes.

I'm about to get on the plane when I hear someone call my name. Now what is the chance that I would bump into someone I know here? Surprisingly high, since I can't be the only one traveling to Palm Springs for Date With Destiny. The more I network and get around the higher the chances of bumping into someone I know as I travel around the world.

Christine L., whom I met in Fiji, is on the same plane. I also meet a few other people on the plane who are bound for Date With Destiny.

And who did I see when I arrived at the airport in Palm Springs but Annette F., my buddy from Fiji who helped me put together the class roster! Annette has rented a car here and she was kind enough to give me a ride from the airport to my hotel. I also learned that Glenda and Wilfredo are here also, and noticed on Facebook (which I can access on my iPhone thanks to free wi-fi access at my hotel) that Tracey L. is coming too. This is going to be like a little Fiji reunion!

I'm looking forward to seeing them all again, and I'm not feeling so under the weather anymore.