Death: A Different Perspective with Lisa Jones

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Death: A Different Perspective with Lisa Jones

No Regrets, Exploring Death

I am honored to have Lisa Jones. She has a podcast called Exploring Death and has a very unique perspective that came about after the death of her 37-year-old husband. She shared a death experience on the night that her husband passed away. She saw the other side, it opened her eyes to a whole new world and she wants to explore death from every facet. I find this fascinating. Outside the media world, Lisa lives in beautiful Maui, Hawaii. You’ll often find her teaching yoga, meditating on the beach, and spending time with loved ones around her. She’s the author of Art of Living Happy and is known as The Millionaire Medium. Welcome, Lisa. It’s an honor to have you.

Thank you, Art. I am thrilled to be here.

Let’s learn a little bit about your background, where you grew up, how you grew up, who were your major influences in your life and we’ll go from there.

I was born in Colorado, in Denver. I was adopted as a baby. I’ve reconnected with my birth mother, which has been a huge, and wonderful gift that I had no idea would come into my life. It’s such a blessing to me, especially given that both my adoptive parents have passed away. It’s like I have a whole new family as in a second generation it feels like. I was born there and my parents were both social workers. My father was a university professor at the University of Denver. My mom worked at Lutheran Social Services or something. She helped bring babies over from Manila and things like that. She’d bring orphan children over and adopt them out. I grew up a tomboy. I had a brother. All the neighbors that we lived in this mountain community were all boys. I grew up playing on Honda 50ccs, those little motorbikes. I had a horse, two ponies and played touch football and baseball. That’s what I did growing up.

My son is a therapist in Boulder. He lives in Sugarloaf, 8,000 feet up where they get snow in May.

I grew up in Conifer, which is in the foothills of Colorado. We had a lot of snow days back then.

Who is the major influencer when you were young?

It was my mother. I remember going to church as a little girl. The minister said, “You must love God above all else,” and in my mind, I said, “Nope, I love my mom more than God.” I looked at her as my savior. She’s the one that picked me up out of the crib after twelve days of waiting to be adopted. Now that she passed away several years ago and realizing what a huge influence she was, how much she supported me in my life and in everything I did. She was always there for me.

When you have that support and someone to lean on, I didn’t have that. My parents did very little as far as educating or supporting their children. It wasn’t that they didn’t love us. It was that they didn’t have the skill set.

I was going to say it feels like they weren’t equipped. That’s what I’m reading. They didn’t know how.

For me, it was a lot of consternation because when I was nine, what happened was we moved from a very urban area to a very rural area. My nearest neighbors were two, three, four miles away. They were 90 years old. I had played baseball all my life. All of a sudden I had nothing. Everyone I wanted to play with in school was not good. We were shunned because we were from outside. We were city folks moving to the country and all that stuff. I went to the hilltop and had a conversation with God. I heard a voice that said, “Everything’s going to be okay.” It catapulted my life. This is not about me. This is about you.

How old were you when that happened?

I was nine.

I was about six when I was at a YMCA Summer Camp and one of the counselors was bouncing a ball off of my head. I was like, “Stop. Leave me alone.” He was bullying is what it felt like. I ran into the YMCA place and he was chasing me. I ran into the ladies’ locker room. I thought he was going to follow me. I jumped into a locker and closed the door. I was safe. Unfortunately, it was the end of the day. There was nobody else in the ladies’ locker room. I was stuck in a locker. I started pounding and pounding. I eventually got my right leg shoved out between the door and the frame of the locker. I ended up with bruises from my ankles all the way up to my mid-thigh, both inside and outside my leg with no avail of opening the door. Finally, I had gone to a Sunday school class with a friend the week before. They said, “If you ever need help, ask God.” I put my little hands together. I bowed my head. I said, “Dear God, please help me.” Right then, I looked down and saw there was a little something that I touched with my hand and the door opened up. From that moment on, I knew I had a direct connection with God.

It has a major influence on our lives when we make that connection through to the challenge. It’s a challenge that happened to you. When we’re challenged, we see tremendous growth. When we see that growth, it builds faith in us and faith that everything’s always going to be okay. That’s what I garnered from my experience. I’ve learned that everything was going to be okay.

I got the same feeling. I literally felt from that moment forward, I was always connected. It’s a direct connection with God. It’s been with me ever since.

Where’d you go to college?

I went to the University of Denver where my dad was teaching and mainly because it was such a great deal. We only have to pay 10% of tuition. He quit after one semester of me being there. I was like, “What?” Tuition went up and everything. I was given a scholarship for getting an accounting degree. It all worked out. In retrospect, I wanted to go to the American University in DC because financially, it would’ve made more sense to go to the University of Denver. That’s what I did.

Did you meet your husband there?

No, I graduated and went to San Francisco. I had taken a friend out there to law school the year before and fell in love with it. I interviewed with all, at that point, the big eight accounting firms. I ended up getting offers from all of them. I decided which one to work for by who had the best view out of all these skyscrapers in San Francisco. It turned out it was Price Waterhouse. When I moved there, I said, “I’m not going to date anybody. I’m here for my career. I’m going to put my head down. I’ll be the youngest partner ever in Price Waterhouse history.” On the very first day, in walked the team that I’d be working with. Ian was the third person that walked in. As soon as I saw him, in my mind I heard this voice say, “Now there’s a man I could marry.” Two years later, we got married.

Do you want to talk about how you lost your husband?

Ian and I got married. It was crazy about everything. What brought us together, a few weeks after I met him, there was an earthquake in San Francisco. A bunch of people ended up at my house, including him. The next day, he and I walked over to get his car. The whole city was shut down. That was the big earthquake back in 1989. He said, “Can I start courting you?” He did. I said, “Okay.” Two years to the day, he proposed. There was a huge fire that burned down 3,000 homes, which his house was right on the edge. It did not end up burning. Our friends were all a bit nervous about our wedding when after meeting in an earthquake and having a firestorm happen the day we were engaged, the wedding went off fine. However, his father came to visit us, we had moved out to Washington DC with his work with Price Waterhouse. His father had a heart attack and passed away.

We had all of these crazy things happen. I got pregnant and our first child was born with her esophagus not attached to her stomach. She needed several hours of surgery. Fortunately, she had a 50/50 chance of living. She lived. She’s doing well. Fortunately, our son was born with no problems. That was about the first thing that happened. When the kids were one and three, my husband got diagnosed with lymphoma cancer, which was absolutely devastating and shocking. Yet the doctors were very reassuring saying, “It’s not too bad. Just some radiation then you’ll be fine.” It turned out that he had two different types of lymphoma. He ended up doing a stem cell transplant. He went into remission for a little while, but it came back. There was one of those knowing moments when I first met him and said, “There’s a man I’m going to marry.”

When the doctor said the cancer was back, I had this knowing that he was going to die. It was two years of intense treatment. Our insurance company wouldn’t pay for treatment in New York, which is we were living in Connecticut. That’s where he’d had it before. They had us go to Seattle. We lived in a hotel for eight or nine months while he underwent two more stem cell transplants. Near the end, they didn’t even tell us anything. They just said, “You’re going home tomorrow.” They wanted us off of their registry so we weren’t a death statistic. We went home. It was in February when he finally took a nose dive. He woke up one morning, unable to speak, and the doctor said, “Let’s call hospice.” I called them in. They arrived and said, “It’s probably going to be two or three weeks.” His brother and best friend arrived. It was the first time I was not alone caring for him. That evening, the kids went to his mom’s house. I kissed him on his forehead and went to lay down. I prayed to God and the angels.

I said, “Please help us. Please help me. I can’t do this for two more weeks. There’s no way out. What can we do?” I laid down. The next thing I know all I can say is I woke up in heaven. I woke up in a place that is nothing like this Earth. It was not a dream. It’s more real than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I can feel the feeling of being there. As I talk about it, it always brings me to tears because it’s so beautiful, so loving and so joyous. There were all of these amazing beings that were coming together. They didn’t look like angels per se. It was individual beings coming together and like a town square. There was a big announcement that was happening. “The grand mystery and sharp is about to arrive.” There were trumpet’s going and banners. It was just the most crystal clear blue sky. It was an open air area, almost like a fountain in the middle. A giant door started to open and everybody turned their attention, looked and started. “Here he is.” They started cheering. You could tell that he was stepping forward.

Right at that moment, there was a knock on my bedroom door. I was in my daughter’s room. “Wake up, Lisa. Wake up,” it was his brother. He said, “Ian just took his last breath.” It was almost like a trap door opened. I landed in my body. I opened my eyes. I jumped out of bed. I was so happy because I saw where he was going to be. Before that, I was terrified. I was raised quite religiously and truly believe that if you weren’t baptized, you would go to hell. He wasn’t baptized. I did a ton of research to see if he had been. He refused to be baptized. Having this image or this experience and seeing him arrive there was amazing to me.

To get confirmation that morning, after the mortuary came, took his body and all that stuff. I had to go tell the children, which was awful because we thought we’re going to have two more weeks. As I was blow drying my hair, trying to get my act together and think about what I was going to tell the kids, all of a sudden Ian’s voice was right in my ear. He said, “Lisa, I love you, but it’s so awesome here.” I practically dropped my blow dryer. That was the beginning of my mediumship. That’s why I call myself The Millionaire Medium. The other thing I didn’t realize, he had $1 million life insurance policy that was through his work that was part of the whole thing. Suddenly, I found myself in one night becoming a millionaire and a medium.

I’ve got a whole bunch of questions because I lost my wife in 2006 to ovarian cancer. I took care the whole time that she was sick. I never had any hospice care other than the last time she went in the hospital. They told us it was nearing the end. They said they wanted her to go into hospice. She had told me she didn’t want to go into hospice. She wanted to come home. The doctor talked me out of it and said, “No. She needs to be in a hospice.” She had a C. diff infection because her immune system was shut. Her brain was shut from three years of chemo and all that. They said, “She’s going to pass in a matter of hours and all that so take her home.” I picked her up out of hospice, put her in the car, drove her out to the ranch, put her in our bed and she was a fighter. She fought for a few days. Finally, one evening, Friday, September 16th, 2006, I laid down next to her and said, “It’s okay to go,” because she had fought so hard. Her breaths didn’t held and she went. My next question is going to be, have you ever read the book Heaven by Randy Alcorn?

I don’t think I have.

It is a very difficult read. You’re the second person I’ve talked to about this book.

I will have to check it out. I’m all about those types of books.

It’s a very difficult read. It is extremely difficult. It is a biblical explanation of heaven based on biblical fact. No one knows, even Randy Alcorn. What he did in his book was he took the Bible and dissected it on death and heaven. He wrote this book. It’s an interesting read. He says in the book that we don’t know who is there when we get there and we don’t know if it’s beautiful. The Bible says it’s beautiful, so we’ll assume that. It’s a fascinating read. It’s extremely difficult. It’s not a small book.

I speak to a lot of near-death experience people. It’s interesting to hear about their experience too. It’s a wide variety of experiences that people have. I’m the first one to say I don’t know, but if it’s anything like what I experienced, I can’t wait to go.

I was a Marine in Vietnam. I’ve been around death in a lot of different situations. I don’t fear it. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so old.

It’s wonderful not to fear death. It really helps you live life more fully when you’re not afraid of death.

There’s truth in that. We could talk about fear because I write a lot about fear because fear is what stops us from doing anything. I write also about the use of our expectations. How when we expect that in the positive that it catapults us forward in every single facet of our life. After Ian passed and you started doing your medium work, how are you able to help people?

The week before he died, he told me that he regretted his life’s work. He was a tax attorney for a large corporation. He said, “I wished I had helped more people.” He wanted to become a doctor, but his dad wanted him to be an attorney like he was. That broke my heart, his regret. That’s one of my biggest messages about exploring death is to not have regrets at the end of your life. He was 44 when he died. I was 37. It was seven more years. As I was approaching my 44th birthday, I was working at a hedge fund as an accountant. All of a sudden I had this jolt of like, “I’m going to live longer than he did. I’m still pushing numbers around pieces of paper and I’m not helping more people.” It was fascinating as soon as I made that decision to stop doing that because meanwhile, in the background, I had been working more and more with the mediumship and friends. I slowly started telling people. You have to understand, I was my own biggest skeptic. I’m like, “What is happening? This is insane. I must be losing my mind. I’m hearing voices.” As an accountant, this was not the direction I saw my career going.

Accountants are very meticulous in their thought processes, how they manipulate numbers and all kinds of things.

I like it to tick, tie and to balance at the end of the day so I can go home and sleep at night. When you open yourself up to spirit and all of a sudden, all these energies and voices are coming through. What happened was slowly I started telling friends and they were asking me to do readings for them. When I finally quit my hedge fund job and all of these amazing, miraculous things happened where next thing I know, I’m standing on stage in front of 140 people and channeling people that have passed away. I’d have people come up on stage, I’d put my hands on them and then just all of this information started coming out, validating the information that I have no idea where it’s coming from. It gave people a sense of closure, a sense of peace, a sense of connection with their loved ones. The following year I did another show and 500 people showed up. They sold out the theater, which freaked me out. They raised the lights. I stepped back and I said, “I need to go off the stage and get myself together because this is like too much for me.”

Where was that at?

That was in Ridgefield, Connecticut at the Ridgefield Playhouse. That was wild. In fact, I didn’t know enough about how to ground myself and all the spiritual things that mediums do, to be able to hold that container, that energy because I was an accountant. This is all crazy new stuff for me. After that happened, I backed away a little bit. I wrote my book Art of Living Happy: After the Loss of a Loved One. I was in talks to start doing a TV show and that’s when my mom died. It crushed me. She was my biggest support and my best friend. It was astonishing. She was in Hawaii for a month on vacation and I’d come out to visit her. We had a great time. A week later, she left me a message on my phone and said, “I don’t want to leave tomorrow. I love it here so much.” About an hour later, she collapsed with a stroke. I flew back out. Within five days, she passed away.

I wanted to address two things that stuck out in my mind when we were talking. Ian regretting having been a tax attorney for a large corporation, not helping people. When you live to the expectations of others, you end up regretting. What was transformational about it is when you realize that you changed and realized that you didn’t want to live to the expectations of others. You wanted to live to the gifts that God has given you. Magic happens when you do that.

There is no way I could have predicted getting on stage and all that, how all of those pieces flowed together. That’s the magic that I feel since my mom died years ago. I had shut down. I’m finally starting to open up to again because I was almost debilitated. I realize it was almost a co-dependent relationship because she was like my sounding board, “You can do it.” Without her, I felt very on my own and lost in many ways. It’s all coming back together and truly the Exploring Death podcast that I’m doing, this is my gift. I love talking to people about death. It sounds crazy, but I’m here to shine a light on death. I truly believe that’s what I’m here to do.

What do they say two things we can be guaranteed?

Taxes and death, that’s been my job. I can’t get away from it. God does have a sense of humor.

He’s got a tremendous sense of humor. If he didn’t, I’m in deep trouble. That brings me back to something I was thinking before too because you said that Ian wasn’t baptized, you were concerned about him not going to heaven and all that. Seeing him, it’s cool to me because I believe that God loves everybody, that he doesn’t have any prejudices against this. He wants to love us. He welcomes us with open arms no matter who we are and what we’ve done, even the worst of us.

It’s hard for people to hear that, but I absolutely agree with you.

It’s a personal belief that I have. With that being said, after Ian died and you became a medium and all that, where has it led you other than on the stage and how’d you end up in Hawaii?

I came here for the very first time when I was sixteen with my mom and my stepdad. I absolutely fell in love with it. I looked at her at that point and said, “Who lives here?” Where do you go on vacation when you live here? This is the ultimate of the ultimate. It’s always been in my mind that at some point I wanted to move here. In fact, right after my husband died, that was the plan. I was going to take my two kids, they were eight and ten at that point. The following year I was going to move to Hawaii. I was seriously looking into that. However, things happen and I ended up meeting my second husband. We got married. It was a match made in heaven. I am convinced that my husband and his father who had passed away, and another mutual friend of ours that were all up in heaven, they moved all the pieces so that he and I would come together.

It was a beautiful marriage. Once the kids went off to college and I said, “Let’s go to Hawaii.” He said, “I don’t want to move there.” My spirituality has continued to grow. I wasn’t a medium. I was but it was seven years before I started doing this work. He was a golf pro. We went in separate directions. At that point, I said, “I have to go to Hawaii. I feel called.” He said, “I understand.” We’re still the best of friends, but our marriage ended. I got here years ago. It’s been one magical moment after another. I hang out with Ram Dass and that’s been amazing. I swim with the dolphins, whales and do beach yoga every day. I have so many friends. My whole life I’ve never had as many friends as I do, like-minded, loving, supportive people.

I love the water. I may be in different forms than being in Hawaii. I’ve always had boats and stuff like that. I find the water very relaxing, as you could imagine, with a podcast called Shower Epiphanies.

The water here is so healing. Every morning I go down, I do my yoga, and I call it my baptism. I get into the water, get in, float and let the water hold me. It’s such a blessing to be here.

I was baptized off on Newport Beach in the Pacific Ocean by Chuck Smith, the Founder of Calvary Chapel back in the day. If I start telling you the dates, back in 1968. Everything was changing so much then in the late ‘60s because the world was becoming different. Vietnam had changed it. I went to Vietnam in ‘65. I was there in ‘65 and ‘66, right after I graduated at a high school. I was a seventeen-year-old Marine.

I can’t even imagine my seventeen-year-old having to go and face that.

It was one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I always tell people I live my life in reverse because when I was young, I could do whatever I wanted to, never had anybody to tell me no. After having that conversation with God on the hill, I started to form and begin to become aware that I needed discipline and structure. If you want discipline and structure, you go in the Marines. I had been signed up in the Air Force, guaranteed to go into computers. I turned around. My brother’s best friend was the Marine recruiter in the little town down the road from where we grew up. He saw me coming out of the Air Force Recruiter’s Office. He said, “What are you doing in there?” I said, “I signed up to go in the Air Force, guaranteed computers.” He started in on me, on my ego. “What? Are you kidding me? You’re a tough guy.”

I tore the paper up, went in and signed up to the Marine Corps. No guaranteed anything except a tough time. Vietnam for me was a very big growth experience because when I was there, we were coming back on patrol. I ran into an orphanage and met a little nine-year-old girl when I came around the side of a hut. She looked up at me. I went, “That’s me at nine years old.” I didn’t even know it was an orphanage. When we got back to our main compound, the chaplain was there. I asked him, “Did you know what that wired compound was?” He said, “That’s a Catholic orphanage there.” I said, “I want to help that little girl.” He was a Catholic chaplain. He would go out there. He knew who she was. I started supporting her.

When I came back home, I tried to adopt her and bring her back with me. I was an eighteen-year-old Marine. The Marine Corps isn’t going to let a single guy bring a child back. In 1968 in the Tet Offensive, the compound was overrun. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese killed all the kids. That’s what I was told. I started sending money to her. That was a major growth thing for me. Out of that tragedy, I knew that I was put on this earth to help people. That started my journey of getting a degree in psychology and doing all these things with psychology that I’m doing.

My whole body is tingling. That’s always true to me. It’s like God saying, “That is true.” What a blessing that you’ve been to so many people.

I think that’s what we’re all put on Earth for. Most of us live in that space of fear and they don’t explore it. Whenever I go to New York or San Francisco, the good thing about San Francisco is the people there are so friendly.

As opposed to New York, it’s a little more impersonal there.

I always seem to be able to master that and make new friends, meet new people, spread my ideas and all that stuff. That’s why God puts us here.

I agree with you about fear. I recommend to anybody not to have regrets. Think about where you are in your life, think about your deathbed, what you’re doing right now and what do you want to change? What do you want to do differently? You don’t want to get to the end of your life and have regrets especially the expectation of other people, let that go. You need to live yourself.

That’s why you have to have strong core expectations. My belief is that we have these epiphanies in our head all the time. That epiphany is a precursor to an expectation because it only becomes an expectation or it only becomes a reality when we move it out of that space of epiphany, the expectation to a movement to where we start taking action. That’s why I tell people, “Move. Start doing. Quit talking about it. Throw the fear out of the window and just do it. What have you got to lose?” That’s how I’ve lived my life. I’m not afraid to do. I’ve done more different things in my lifetime. I’ve been in the entertainment industry. I’ve played semi-pro ball or had tryouts with the Dodgers and the Angels. I’ve owned my own construction business. It wasn’t until I met my late wife that things changed for me because I started living the expectation of being a parent, a husband and all of those good things.

When she passed, all that went out the window. My first three years after she passed away, I had no idea what life was like for you, it was brutal for me. I acted like a total jerk. I was drinking. I was doing stuff I had never done before in my life, stuff just not good. My kids came and gave me an epiphany across the side of the head and said, “Mom said to watch you because if you started acting like this, we’ll get you out of it.” I went out on the lawn that night on the ranch and laid, looking back into the sky and asked God what was going to become of me again. He said, “I’ve given you all the tools, get up and use them.” I did it. I started writing. I started thinking differently. I was rejuvenated. How we handle these things in our lives, you’ve got to give yourself time to grieve. There also comes a time when you have to start moving forward and start being who you’re meant to be.” Do you practice a particular meditation and yoga?

Vinyasa is the type of yoga I do. It’s a breathing-moving meditation. As far as meditation, it’s across the board. I do a lot of breathing and silence. For a while, I was doing an hour every morning, I’m doing about 30 minutes. I’m listening to some tones that alter your brain waves. You go into like beta and theta, and all sorts of things. I’m all about finding at least 20 to 60 minutes a day of sitting down and quieting the mind in whatever way would work for me. Do you remember back in the day when we had the computers and we used to defrag them? I’m defragging. I would line them all up again. This is my accounting brain. I loved watching my computer defrag. I feel like that’s what meditation is. It’s to be awake and to let your mind reorganize, get rid of everything it doesn’t need to, and come back to a place of stillness. I find it so helpful.

A question I like to ask, what is the difference between meditation and prayer?

I would say meditation is more silence or trying “to silence the mind,” which is always busy. Prayer is for me connecting, more like connecting to God directly. To me, they’re different things.

I don’t see any difference in them. For me, meditation and prayer are pretty close together. I pray silently. There’s a connection between both of them. It’s a state of mind. Both prayer and meditation are a state of mind. When you couldn’t calm your mind enough to shut out your surroundings and focus. When I’m working with people, one of the things I like to do is take them outside because the first step in expectation therapy is identifying. I like to go outside, lay on the hill, lay in the grass, it doesn’t really matter. You can do it anywhere if you can do it that way. Go out and shed everything out of your mind. Start focusing on what you want out of life, where you want to go with it. Once you could start identifying that, then you can move forward. It can be very transformational. You can’t change something if you don’t know what to change or what you want to change it to.

It’s like a direction. You’re going to end up somewhere, so you might as well have an idea of where you’re wanting to go rather than ending up somewhere.

Some people get in their car and drive. They don’t know where they’re going. They usually end up back where they came from.

They end up going home because they couldn’t figure out where else to go. I got in my car in South Carolina after Connecticut we moved. My ex-husband and I moved to South Carolina instead of Hawaii. It was a compromise.

Where in South Carolina?

In Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which is beautiful but my soul was dying there. I couldn’t breathe there.

When I came back from Vietnam, I was stationed at Parris Island.

Are you familiar with the Lowcountry?

Actually, it’s probably my fifth or sixth favorite city in the world is Savannah, Georgia.

It’s beautiful. It was funny because I got in my car from South Carolina and that was literally driving way, leaving my husband. It was awful. It was a terrible experience and yet I was driving my car all the way across to LA to put it on a boat to ship it to Maui. Halfway across the country, I was in Missouri. I was crying out to God and saying, “Did I make the right choice? I was driving, so I didn’t close my eyes. I was tearing up and crying. All of a sudden, I saw in front of me a giant truck. I got closer and closer because this traffic started to slow down. It said, “Best choice, the right choice.” I had to start laughing because I was like, “Thank you.” I was able to get my phone and take a picture of it. I now have it framed. A dear friend of mine just sent it to me and framed it for me because I was going through a rough time. You have to ask for those signs. They’re there. I got a literal sign.

Exploring Death: The biggest thing that anyone can do is follow their own wishes, desires, and wants. Doing it for anybody else is a recipe for disaster because you’re going to have regrets at the end of your life.

That’s the way God works, though.

That’s what I was talking about, that sense of humor. In Missouri and I specifically said, “Did I make the right choice?” There it is.

You made the right choice.

I am so happy. I still am unsure what’s happening next, but that’s part of the fun of it. All of the expectations, I have none. That’s what I was going through is realizing I have nothing. My children are grown. They are amazing, wonderful, self-sufficient contributing members of society. I’m so happy. I don’t have the mother role. I don’t have the wife role. I don’t have a job role. I don’t go to a job where I’m told what to do. I don’t even own a house anymore. I rent a condo. I have zero expectation.

I’ll bet you if we explored it, that you would be surprised what your core expectations are. I bet I can tell you what one of them is. I’ll bet you that one of your core expectations is happiness.

Yes, and beauty. I buy myself flowers every week. I have to have beauty around me. Not that I don’t have beauty around me in Maui every day.

A lot of therapists tell their clients, “Live without expectation.” It’s impossible. You can’t live without expectation because every single thing we do is based on an expectation. We do not take any action unless it’s based on an expectation. I want you to think about it because I challenged people to come up with one thing that you do that is not based on an expectation. They’re so basic to us because when I’m speaking at a large audience and people, I could see the faces frowning when you mention the word expectation. I was, “Those of you who do not think about what you have expectations,” I said, “Take your left hand and put it over your nostrils, your right hand over your mouth, and clamp down, and tell me you don’t have expectations.”

We have so many expectations every single day that’s part of the problem because we are so inundated with them that they become automatic. Once you start focusing on your expectations and truly what you want when your core expectations are in alignment with your wants, needs and desires, it changes your life. We have social expectations. We have relationship expectations. Wives want their husbands to take out the trash and they expect them to be good boys. There are a lot of social expectations. I’m talking about the expectations that lie deep with the inside of us that make us who we are. I believe that God planted the seed of expectation in every single one of us at birth, at conception. When we start learning how to manage those expectations and do it with passion. I’m living proof of it. It becomes a beautiful way to live.

God planted in me death and taxes, so I’m doing it too.

No, I don’t think God planted death and taxes to you. God gave you a great intellect and a great heart. He wants you to be happy.

I will accept that. You’re right. I know that accounting definitely came from my father. He wanted me to do something productive in college.

That was one of the things that I was going to talk because I was reading some research about you, that you had mentioned in it. I can’t remember if it was that you didn’t want to be an accountant but your family.

From the time I was in eighth grade, my dad had pretty much planned out what my career path was going to be. I went along with it because I didn’t even think I had any say over it. I’ve been doing some work about the adoption. As an adopted person, I truly felt as if I didn’t do what my family wanted me that they would give me away. That was like a deep subconscious belief that was buried within my psyche. It’s only recently that I’ve unearthed that because who in eighth grade lets their dads say what you’re going to do when you grow up. I would tell my friend’s parents that. They were like, “You know what you’re going to do.”

There are more people that tell their children what they’re going to do. That’s why we have so many disappointed kids that go get Master’s degrees, Ph.D.’s. All of a sudden they realized, “I did it for my parents. I didn’t do it for me.”

My whole body is just chilling with that statement. To me, the biggest thing that anyone can do is follow their own wishes and desires because doing it for anybody else is a recipe for disaster. You’re going to have regrets at the end of your life.

That’s where the core expectations come in. You’ve got to have the strength of your core expectations to move you through the bombardment that you’re going to get. That’s why I’d like to start to teach children how to expect.

That’s what our society needs. We need to train the children to live their own life and not to be bombarded by society, by teachers, ministers, parents and computers. That’s why it’s so sad. I was at the grocery store and there were two little children. They each had their own screen as the mom is doing the shopping. I was like, “What is happening to this world?” Even when I go to the beach and everybody is looking at their screen rather than engaging with one another, I don’t get it.

It’s going to become more and more prevalent.

It’s an addiction.

Mom and dad don’t want the kid fuss and they stick an iPhone in front of them. Let them play on the iPhone. A year old, year and a half, two years old, some of them get into stuff that gets them in trouble.

I want to say a precarious time, although I’m sure every generation has thought that of the future generations. It means that something different is going to be happening than what we experienced. I don’t know what that means. It feels like we’re getting further and further apart rather than coming closer and closer together.

When you look at the political spectrum, the relationship spectrum and all those different layers of society have been affected by the internet. We could do a whole topic on that. I wanted you enough time to give the audience all your pertinent information, where they can get ahold of you, what you’ve got coming up, and anything you want to share with us.

You can certainly go to MillionaireMedium.com. That’s my general platform. My latest venture that I’m focused on is my Exploring Death Podcast, which you can find on every platform. I’m loving that experience of talking to people about death from all walks of life. I’ve spoken to parents who’ve lost children. I have spoken to mediums and near death experiences. I’ve spoken to attorneys about getting your affairs in order, ER doctors and their experiences. I find it fascinating and the more that people are able to embrace the idea of death and not be afraid of it. It truly does enhance your life. I’m also doing hospice work, which is so rewarding to sit with people that are taking their last breaths. It’s amazing and yet it’s so funny because I’ll have friends of mine like, “I could never do that. It freaks me out.”

I want people to sit with that and ask themselves why they feel that way because it’s as natural as birth is. For me, it’s a transition into another world. There’s nothing gross about it. It’s like I saw Ian being welcomed into heaven. That’s what’s happening, is when a baby is being born into this earth, we’ve got a doctor, maybe the parents and grandparents in the room. It’s a very small, dark, dim room. It’s not as grand as an entrance as Ian had in this beautiful palatial palace, so look forward to it, everyone. Don’t be afraid. Get excited. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram and all those good places. Millionaire Medium is probably the place that it’s got all the links and stuff.

Lisa, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for being here. We’ll do this again. I’ve got a list of subject matter that we should discuss. It’s absolutely been a pleasure.

Thanks so much, Art. It’s been fantastic.

I always make new friends. Shower Epiphany world out there, it’s been a pleasure. You can get ahold of me at ExpectationTherapy.com and all my information is on there. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. I love you. We will talk to you later.

Important Links:

• Exploring Death
• Price Waterhouse
• Heaven
• Art of Living Happy: After the Loss of a Loved One
• Ram Dass
• Calvary Chapel
• Twitter – Lisa Jones
• Instagram – Lisa Jones
• https://MillionaireMedium.com
• https://YouTu.be/TPpOLqaspcA

 About Lisa Jones

Lisa Jones, the host of Exploring Death has a unique perspective on death as at the age of 37 she shared a death experience on the night that her husband died. She saw the other side and it opened her eyes to a whole new world and now wants to explore death from every facet.

Outside of the media world, Lisa lives in beautiful Maui, Hawaii. You’ll often find her teaching yoga, meditating on the beach and spending time with loved ones around her. She is the author of Art of Living Happy and is known as the Millionaire Medium in business circles.

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