In this Episode
- [02:29]Dr. Joe Vitale shares his journey to success with setbacks, including poverty and homelessness. He recounts how persistence and internet marketing helped him.
- [07:12]Dr. Joe discovers Ho’oponopono, a Hawaiian healing system he wrote about in his book Zero Limits.
- [13:07]Dr. Joe talks about his experience writing a book that became a bestseller before it was even published.
- [17:16]Stephan and Dr. Joe describe a miracle and the importance of being in the present moment to empower oneself in expecting miracles.
- [25:20]Stephan and Dr. Joe emphasize using Ho’oponopono for healing grief.
- [35:07]Dr. Joe discusses the concept of awakening and its connection to individual divinity and reveals his mantra.
- [40:29]Stephan and Dr. Joe explain the impact of Debbie Ford’s book “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers” on their lives, with Stephan feeling more integrated and whole and Dr. Joe finding the book helped him confront and release limiting beliefs.
- [48:40]Dr. Joe highlights his realization that the devil is not a supernatural being but one’s own mind.
- [51:50]Dr. Joe invites listeners to learn more and grow through his books, courses, and coaching services.
Joe, it’s so great to have you on the show.
I’ve been looking forward to the moment. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you.
I would love to start with your origin story because it is compelling and mind-blowing. Please share your little superhero origin story to start us off.
I almost hate that question because I keep having to edit it to make it shorter because it’s such a long story. The short version is that I wanted to be an author as a kid. When I was a teenager, I went through a bunch of different fantasies, and one of them was the decision to be an author. But I am in no way, shape, or form an overnight success.
While I was moving in the direction of being an author, I was learning how to write. I was writing and sending out articles, even as a teenager. I went homeless. I went to ten years of poverty. I went on to a long journey of struggle.
While going for my dream, my first book was in 1984, and then I didn’t have another book for ten years. During that time, I was still working, persisting, writing, and holding the dream. But again, there’s no overnight success in it, not in my lifeline story, because it took decades to get to a point where I started to gain momentum in Houston in the 1990s.
I had a couple of books out by then. I was learning how to do marketing. People were seeing that I was doing marketing. They hired me to do marketing for them, so I started to taste a bit of success.
I was also fortunate because the internet was starting to buzz around that time in the mid-1990s, and I wrote one of the first books on internet marketing. It was called Cyber Writing: How to Promote Your Product or Service Online (Without Being Flamed). Flamed was the big word back then. It was the version of being criticized, condemned, and satirical. You didn’t want to be flamed. That was what people were having when they were trying to do marketing.
I ended up being one of the first internet marketers. I was a very skeptical internet marketer. I was one of those who said early on that you can’t make money in cyberspace. It shows you what kind of a futurist I am because I looked around and thought, “You’re not going to make any money here on the internet.” People are just flaming each other and complaining and not really making money. Of course, I was proven wrong because I made money on the internet and taught people how to make money on the internet.
Our free will allows us to say yes or no to the gifts the universe and the divine offer us. Share on XAs I kept growing and going and writing, I was invited to be in a movie nobody knew would do anything. I did it because it was a promotional thing to do. It was a new thing for me, and I had also learned by then to say yes to opportunities, even when you don’t know how to take advantage of them. Just say yes and figure it out as you get to it.
I was invited to be in the movie, and I said “Yes,” of course, that movie ended up being The Secret. Now, 16 or 17 years later, I’m still benefiting from being in that movie because it’s made history and traveled around the world several times. It’s still going around the planet. New people are still discovering it; when they do, they discover me.
My journey didn’t stop there, though, because my ever-thirsty quest for knowledge kept me curious, and I discovered this Hawaiian healing system that blew my mind. I’ve written several books about it. The very first one was called Zero Limits. Zero Limits has awakened other parts of the planet.
You have my good fortune in being in the movie The Secret, which takes me to a large part of the planet. Then, I reached the planet I didn’t reach through Ho’oponopono, the Hawaiian healing method I wrote about in Zero Limits. Then, of course, there are people who have known me since I was doing internet marketing, and I’ve hit that part of the planet.
I’ve had at least three great lives, all overlapping and yet going in different directions, and all mine and I’m not done. I’m 70, and I’m a musician now. I got 15 albums out. I do have my own movie in production. I have other things on the agenda that I want to do.
Along the way, going from a kid who wanted to write a book, I’ve written 90 books, and I’ve got another one coming out next year and more in my head. There’s my currently shortened life path story.
That’s amazing. How did you get hooked up to Ho’oponopono? I love Ho’oponopono. I believe that you can call in Archangel Gabriel to help relay the message of Ho’oponopono to someone who may never want to talk to you again or seemingly so and communicate with their soul through the help of Gabriel. You could heal a rift that you have with somebody who’s already passed, I believe, using Ho’oponopono. How did you come across this?
Well, first of all, Ho’oponopono is not only amazing, but it is also miracle-inducing, mind-blowing, and heartening. It is the most incredible, simple method I ever came across in my life. Again, much like being around when the internet or the movie The Secret came around at me of the things I was there for, I’m very fortunate to meet the man teaching Ho’oponopono. He liked me enough, and we had enough rapport that he and I wrote the first book, bringing it to the world called Zero Limits.
How did I hear about it? The short story there is I had heard a story about a therapist who helped heal an entire ward of mentally ill criminals, and he did it with an unusual method where he didn’t work with them directly. He worked on himself. When I first heard the story, I thought, “Yeah, that’s an urban legend. That’s not real.”
Ho’oponopono is a miracle-inducing, mind-blowing, and heartening method.
I have a pretty open mind. I do believe in magic. I believe in miracles, but that one didn’t ring true, so I dismissed it. I heard the story again almost a year later, and I thought I meant, “This therapist does what at a what? And he gets these criminals that have a mental illness to get better? What in the world’s going on?”
Then it dawned on me that if there’s any truth to this story, then that method needs to be brought to the masses. I need to know what that method is to help heal me in anything going on in my life or anything I would encounter in the future. But more importantly, I needed to bring it to the world.
Suddenly, I’m on a mission. I’m on a quest. You have to remember that it was just 2003 or so, and there wasn’t anything on the internet. I didn’t even know the therapist’s name. This was a vague urban legend story that somebody made up. No facts were associated with it, but I started my quest and even hired a private investigator to look for this therapist.
We did find him. At the time, he was in Calabasas, California, and I called him up. I was living in Texas then, and I just got on the phone and called the guy. He didn’t know me at all, but he was very kind. We spoke for about 45 minutes. His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. He told me the story was true. He was the therapist at that hospital.
I said, “What were you doing?” He said, “I was doing something called Ho’oponopono.” “What in the world is that?” He told me it was a Hawaiian healing system. I said, “Well, how does it work?”
He says, “Well, my only job is to clean.” I’m like, “Clean what? Are you cleaning the windows in the hospital? What are you doing?” Then, he did his best to explain what was almost incomprehensible to me, but he was doing a weekend workshop that weekend or the following. I don’t remember how soon, but it was close. I got on a plane, flew out there, and attended the event. I met him.
The most popular basic formula of Ho’oponopono is the four phrases: I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, and thank you.
I learned the basics of Ho’oponopono. The most popular basic formula is the four phrases that you would know. The four phrases are: I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you. That’s it. “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
It was taught that you feel whatever you consider wrong, the problem, the upset, the illness, whatever is off for you, you feel it. Then you’re saying these four phrases inside yourself. You don’t say them out loud, and you don’t say them to another person. You say them inside yourself to your connection, to what he called ‘the divine.’ I’ve since called the great something. Joseph Campbell called it ‘the great mystery.’ That’s God, that’s Allah, that’s Buddha, that’s Gaia, that’s the universe. Napoleon Hill called it ‘infinite intelligence.’
We got all kinds of words for this energy field that’s intelligent. You say those four phrases to it, and the request is not to change what you’re looking at. It’s to change how you’re looking. It’s to change you. This ended up being profound. I ended up writing three books. As I mentioned, there’s another book coming out, and it is all about teaching Ho’oponopono.
I did three live events with Dr. Hew Len, Zero Limits one, two, and three, and there’s video footage on YouTube. We sell the workshop access and all of that. I heard a story, and I confirmed it was true. Then, I went on the quest to learn about it and bring it to the world.
Amazing. That reminds me of The Alchemist and how he kept getting this recurring dream, and it was revealed to him that it was his legend. I don’t want to spoil the plot line for our listeners who haven’t read the book yet. I find some synergy there or coincidences with that book. Have you read the book?
Oh, yes. It’s considered one of the classics of spiritual literature. I encourage people to read it. It’s one of the top 10. When people list books that changed their lives, The Alchemist is one of those that comes up.
You know that it took only 12 days for Apollo to write that.
Zero Limits, my first book on Ho’oponopono, took me 14 days, and I’m still in awe of it because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve written 90 books. Zero Limits is the only book I’ve reread that I wrote. It’s because it felt like it came from another source. It was certainly me. I was writing it, but I was so focused, so inspired, and so in the flow that I felt like I was kind of a stenographer for the divine. The book was coming in, and I was recording it.
When I was done, it was really two weeks later. If you want to hear a more amazing story, before I turned that manuscript in to the publisher, the book became a number one bestseller on Amazon. Now, stop and think about that. I just finished the book. It’s not published. The publisher doesn’t even have it yet, and the book’s a number-one bestseller on Amazon.
Now, how in the world does that miracle happen? First, I wrote an article about Zero Limits, and that was way before the book. That’s how I even got a book deal. I wrote this article, and I did it freely. I passed it out to the internet, and everybody passed it around. Jack Canfield wrote to me once, saying, “20 different people sent your article to me.”
You talk about viral marketing. That article about Ho’oponopono, which was really introducing Ho’oponopono to the world, was lit on fire, and people were sending it all over the place. When I got the book deal because of that article, the publisher was smart enough to list the book on Amazon for pre-orders. The book wasn’t written. The book wasn’t published, but they listed it on Amazon for pre-orders.
All those people who saw the article that I wrote that everybody was distributing to everybody else went and preordered the book. The book was a bestseller before I finished writing it and turned it into the publisher.
This is the kind of miracle. I was going to say magic, but it’s bigger than that, the miracles that were taking place around this, and I really felt like my writing the book, my meeting Dr. Hew Len, all of it was guided. Guided by what I’ll call the great something.
Say YES to unexpected opportunities, and figure out the rest later. Share on XNot just guided, but kind of predetermined or divinely orchestrated and arranged, probably before you were even born. I would guess that that was like a soul contract or some sort of divine assignment.
Yes, we have free will. What I tell people is we have free will. We all get these kinds of offers, so to speak, from the universe, from the divine, and we’re okay to say we’re allowed to say no. When I learned about Ho’oponopono, I could have just put up a wall and just said, that stuff’s nonsense. I don’t want to read about that.
Then, I went through, and I met Dr. Hew Len. He and I were going to write the book. I could have said I was too busy, but I knew I was following that inner guidance you know well, saying, “Do this.” I wanted to do it without knowing it was going anywhere.
I didn’t know that this would end up being a movement. I didn’t know I would do three events with Dr. Hew Len. I didn’t know that I’d have my own movie in production about Zero Limits starting in a couple of weeks. I didn’t know, but I did know I was being nudged to follow through on learning about Ho’oponopono, writing about it, and bringing it to whoever wanted to hear about it. All I did was say yes.
You’ve got that sign above you that says expect miracles.
Right. It’s also on my shirt, which you may or may not be able to see because so many people out there expect crap. We’ve seen the bumper stickers where they say they were expecting various versions of crap. I’m like, “Come on, let’s put out a different mindset here. You get what you expect. Let’s expect miracles.” That’s how I talk. That’s how I end the emails that I send out to people. That’s on my shirt. That’s on the background here above my books.
I learned a definition for a miracle that is just, I think, amazing. I got it from the Kabbalah center, and it’s just really profound. I’m sure they got it from ancient texts, and it goes like this: a miracle isn’t defined as when the impossible becomes possible. A miracle is removing the illusionary veils that don’t allow us to see the light in every experience and moment.
That’s beautiful. When people ask me what a miracle is, since I’m broadcasting the phrase, expect miracles to the world, I’ll say there are two kinds of miracles. There’s the kind that everybody’s looking for.
That’s where there’s a sudden manifestation, and a solution to a problem or something you’ve been longing for just appears. It shows up most miraculously. It’s much like me getting a phone call for the movie The Secret, meeting Dr. Hew Len, or being in the right place with the internet coming along. Even though skeptical, I turned it into something long-term, prosperity-wise.
The future that you’re longing for or worried about is not here. It’s this vague thing in your head and the past that you’re either complaining about or you’re longing to go back to.
The first miracle is the one everybody wants. That’s where you’ve been praying for something, and then there it is. It feels like, “Oh my god, there’s a miracle.”
The second miracle is the important one. The second miracle is ‘right now.’ The second miracle is realizing that the future that you’re longing for or worried about is not here. It’s this vague thing in your head and the past that you’re either complaining about or you’re longing to go back to. It doesn’t exist either. It’s gone. The future and the past are vague thoughts, visuals, and images.
The real power and the only thing that is concrete is this moment. The more we can be in this moment and realize, “My god, this is a miracle. This moment is a miracle.” Then, we are empowered to the extent of changing the past out of this moment and creating a future out of this moment. But we have to be in the moment to do it.
Many of us were fantasizing about the future or complaining about the past, and we were not in the moment. The real miracle to me is right now.
I learned something from a channeler. He’s got a popular YouTube channel called Sam the Illusionist. It’s got a hundred and whatever thousand subscribers, and in this channeling, whoever it was, archangels, arcturians, or whatever, we’re explaining that the present moment that we think is the present moment is actually in the past.
To experience the present moment, you need to shut off the five senses and go within. Go inside. We’re living in an echo, which ties in with how we’re talking a little bit about The Alchemist, Maktub, which is Arabic for it is written. It is written in the Quran. It might seem contrary or contradictory to free will.
If you have infinite timelines that you can choose from where the script has already been written for the movie, but there is an infinite number of scripts to choose from, that’s where your free will is in making a vibrational choice to resonate at a frequency of a new, better script that you’re now going to get invited into. You’re going to jump to a new timeline. That’s my understanding of how this works.
Suppose you want to get into the present moment instead of being in this past echo, validated by quantum physics. Ian Mitchell has explained to me that scientific studies validate that there’s a lag, a delay and that we’re experiencing reality.
That was profound for me, and I remember that a lot. I’m receiving information about whatever’s happening in the outside world. But it’s in the past, and I need to stay connected with the present moment, which is actually in my sacred heart center, and that means going inside, and that’s where infinity is. Infinity is not out there where the universe goes to its outer reaches because there is an edge to the universe. Infinity is where there is no edge inside.
Clean the memory that are in your subconscious and unconscious mind, and even the collective unconscious.
This reminds me of one of the great teachings that I got from Dr. Hew Len about Ho’oponopono. He said, “In any one moment, you’re either coming from memory, or you’re coming from inspiration.” He went on to say that 99.99999%, you can go on pretty far with that. We’re coming from memory. What that means is we’re doing what we did before.
Part of it is because the brain, as brain science is illuminating for us, is lazy. It looks for shortcuts, and it looks for hacks. If it did something before and you’re in either the same situation, or what appears to be the same situation, or even close to the same situation, the brain goes, well, that worked before, let’s do it here. Most of us, virtually all of us, are doing that.
The great goal of Ho’oponopono is to clean the memory and to clean all of what Dr. Hew Len called data, the beliefs, the past, the storehouse of memories that are in the subconscious and unconscious and even the collective unconscious. Ho’oponopono was to help clean all of that.
What are we doing when we clean all of that? We’re getting to a point where we are open to receiving inspiration. I felt when writing Zero Limits, and most of the time when I was with Dr. Hew Len, I was an open vessel. When the idea for the book came, I was available.
When the book started to write itself, I didn’t bring in all the other ways I’ve written books before. I allowed it to come through because I was cleaning to clear myself to be a pathway for the divine.
Again, Dr. Hew Len says you’re either coming from memory, or you’re coming from inspiration. I’ve been all over the world talking about Ho’oponopono. I’ve been on stage. I was in Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Poland, Italy, and all these different places, and I often will tell people because they’ll get excited and enthused about Ho’oponopono and its possibilities. But as I’m on stage looking out, they’re filtering what I’m saying through their existing belief system based on memory.
Their memory is a belief system that helps them get through the day. It’s helping them survive, which we all want to do. We can congratulate ourselves because if you’re watching or listening to this, you’re surviving. Your body’s mind system is working. However, it doesn’t allow for the new. It doesn’t allow for inspiration. It doesn’t allow for the whisper of God, or the great something, to tell you the next steps.
I’m always telling people that I know you’re going to applaud, you’re going to read my books, you’re going to be enthused, you’re going to want to tell the world about Zero Limits and Ho’oponopono. Yet, at the same time, you’re not living it until you practice on yourself and do your best to clean up what’s between you and the miracle of right now.
Beautiful stuff. Ho’oponopono is also helpful with grief. I didn’t know this until I read the book Ho’oponopono: Your Path to True Forgiveness. Have you read that book? Are you familiar with it?
Yeah, I read all the books that come out on Ho’oponopono. Unless it’s slipped through the cracks or in a different language, I’ve probably read it.
You’re surviving. Your body’s mind system is working.
In the first chapter of the introduction, the author, Matt, explains how his daughter, six or seven-eight years old, lost a best friend in school. She passed. The grief was unbearable. She was just not coping. It was hard for a six-year-old kid trying to cope with their best friend suddenly not being on the planet anymore.
Matt used the Ho’oponopono prayer and process to help his daughter go through the grieving process and make peace with this seeming loss. Everything is an illusion except for love. Loss is, therefore, an illusion too. But telling somebody that when they’re amid the grief will not be well received. The whole Ho’oponopono process that he used with her was very healing, and she bounced back very quickly, or it would have been debilitating.
Two of her other best friends who didn’t go through that process years later are still struggling with eating disorders and things like that because the last time the friend saw her, this one girl that passed, it was at lunch, and she wasn’t feeling well. She went home, and she never came back.
I’m sorry to hear that. Let’s be clear about something. A lot of people make this fundamental mistake with Ho’oponopono. It’s the big mistake where they think, “This is good, and I know somebody who’s hurting. I need to go give it to them.” They want to share a method, and you can’t blame them. We all want to do that. If we find a good movie or good restaurant or something, we get excited. We want to tell the rest of the world.
But in Ho’oponopono, there is no rest of the world. In Ho’oponopono, there’s only you. What you see out there, whether it is a grieving child, or there’s a war going on in Ukraine, or there is some sort of economic collapse in another country, or you’re worried about your family, friends, neighbors, boss, or worried about your finances, any of that stuff, all of that is experienced in inside you.
When people learn Ho’oponopono, how it was taught to me, how I practice it, and how I write about it, it means they go inside themselves and clean up their perceptions of what is contributing to what they are seeing. The difference here is that I don’t have kids, but if I had a child and it experienced death, and I saw it hurt, I would be feeling something, probably hurt too, if it’s my child. I would be feeling something.
Most people go to the child and say, “Hey, here’s what you need to do and here’s what you can do and here’s how we can resolve this.” In Ho’oponopono, you do it inside yourself. If you see the child hurting, you don’t go to the child. You go to the hurting in you. As you feel hurt about this apparition, this illusion, this thing on the outside of you, you have to remember the only place you feel it is in you. If you’re feeling off, or you’re feeling sad, or you’re feeling grieving or wanting to help, all of that’s in you.
As you feel it, this is where the prayer and the petition kick in. You now turn to your source, your inner connection to divinity, and say, “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, and I love you.” All of that is a shorthand, as I explain in my various books, for saying something to the effect of, “I’m sorry for being unconscious of how I helped contribute to this perception and this situation. Please forgive me and my ancestors or anybody involved who would contribute in my way with their beliefs and be unconscious. Thank you for resolving the situation cleaning up the beliefs in me, known and unknown, conscious and unconscious. I love you for my life, for the process, for this miracle of now.”
In Ho’oponopono, there’s only you. There’a no rest of the world.
We talked about the story of Dr. Hew Len being the therapist at that mental hospital for the criminally insane. He was able to help them because he didn’t work with them. He worked with himself. All the other doctors, social workers, and therapists who had gone to the hospital tried to work with the people directly, but they did not. Those patients were sedated or shackled every day.
When Dr. Hew Len went there, he noticed how he felt inside himself about what he was experiencing. He then turns within to do Ho’oponopono on himself. As he achieves some level of clarity and peace and moves towards accepting what’s going on, the patients reflect his clarity. As he heals, they heal. This is the big difference and the big mistake that I see most people make when they hear about Ho’oponopono.
Wow, thank you for that clarification. That is helpful. One thing that pops up for me while you’re describing all this is a quote I learned from a Kabbalah Facebook group. And it’s a quote from the Baal Shem Tov, a very righteous, holy rabbi from hundreds of years ago, and it goes like this.
“Nothing is by chance: every single event or experience in a person’s life is predetermined and purposeful. So if a person chances to witness the degradation of his fellow, he must realize that he, too, suffers from the same lack in one form or another. Otherwise, why would Divine Providence have caused him to see his fellow’s failing? Obviously, to open his eyes to something, he must correct himself. So even if one is your enemy, and justifiably so, even if his moral and spiritual downfall is one of his own making – it could have happened without your having been made aware of it. That you have witnessed it has nothing to do with him: it is a message to you, enjoining you to deal with a similar negative element—be it in the subtlest of forms—within yourself.”
There are two new books out right now arguing for and against free will. I just posted an Instagram video about both because I got both of them, and I wanted to point out, as I often say, that life is an optical illusion. You get what you believe. If you want to believe in free will, there’s a book called Free Agents, and it’s how evolution has created free will in all of us.
It’s a powerful book, it’s a detailed book, it’s a well-researched book, a reputable publisher kind of book. There’s another book called Determined. Determined argues very convincingly, with a lot of evidence, with detail, and with a major publisher, a reputable publisher, that you don’t have free will.
I sit here going, “Well, which is it? Do you have free will, or don’t you have free will?” As I said in my Instagram video, William James, the father of psychology as we know it, said he didn’t know if there was free will, but he would act as if there was free will. His first decision as a free-will individual was to believe in free will. I thought that was empowering.
Dr. Hew Len and Ho’oponopono said you have more of a free won’t than a free will. What that means is you are getting inspiration all the time. It’s coming through, being filtered through your memories, being filtered through your beliefs. But once it hits your consciousness, you can say, “Yes, I’ll do that, or no, I won’t do that.” It’s almost like you have free won’t, not free will.
Then, as I’ve said all of this, I want to point out that you know what Dr. Hew Len would call what I just said. BS, it’s all head stuff. It’s all mental stuff. It’s all taking us away from the moment. It’s taking us away from the miracle. It’s great if you have coffee with somebody and just want to argue about whether you have free will.
You have more of a free won’t than a free will.
At the end of the day, you’re not going to solve the equation, and you’ll choose something. Whether you chose it consciously or unconsciously, you won’t even know if you will look at all of this as entertainment. Then it’s probably a little bit better for your well-being, but for Dr. Hew Len, I go back to the very first conversation over the phone where he said, “My only job is to clean,” and I kind of feel the same. “My only job is to clean. What am I cleaning? Whatever’s in the way of me being here now.”
Where do you see Ho’oponopono unfolding in the human population and the collective consciousness? What’s your big vision for the planet now? I’ll share mine in a sentence, and that is: I want the entire world to cleave to the creator.
For me, I believe we’re all here to awaken. I didn’t always think that or know that, but now I believe that. We’re here to awaken and to awaken to what? To awaken to our individual divinity. We are not God but aspects of God, and we have connections to that divine all-encompassing power.
We think as little, itsy bitsy, egoic humans, and so we think small, we risk very small, and we live pretty much in a scared way. We’re afraid of the dark all the time, consciously or unconsciously. We’re afraid of what’s around the corner of the next moment or the future.
Awakening is awakening to the miracle of now, the power that we can tap into, and the potential for us to have, do, or be virtually anything. I used to say, “Imagine,” but now I would say, “Anything we can receive, anything we can receive. We’re all here to awaken.”
Nice. I like it. I noticed your necklace, or you have two necklaces. Are those mala beads?
Both of them are gifts. This string of rubies was given to me 20 years ago, and I’ve always worn them. This is a traditional mala, and these are all rudraksha seeds. This was handmade for me based on my birth chart and the number of ridges each of these rudraksha seeds should have in it.
The traditional model, like a rosary, has 108 beads. Most of the time, you’re touching one, and you’re doing a prayer. In the Catholic religion, which is how I grew up. You’d be doing Hail Marys and the famous one, which I can’t think of right now.
The Lord’s Prayer. That one. But because I left the Catholics, I became more of a transcendentalist and then went more into the Hindu, spiritual and Buddhist kind of religions. All of these are reminders, and as I touch them, this won’t surprise you. I’m saying, “I love you, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
Now they’re my Ho’oponopono beads, and since I’ve been practicing Ho’oponopono since around 2004 or 2005, the statements are the background audio in my head. I used to say background tape, but that dated me quite a bit. We’ll say it’s the digital in my brain. If you see me ever fidgeting with my mala, I treat it as a prayer. I’m touching it as a reminder.
We think as little egoic humans, and so we think small, we risk very small, and we live pretty much in a scared way.
I’ve worn the beads for a long time; it’s my brand. People expect me to wear them. When I was on Larry King, the first or second time, I don’t think I had beads on. Afterward, people said, “Where are your beads?” I thought, “Oh, they’re expecting me to wear them.” It’s become part of the brand.
That’s awesome. Did you get a mantra? I got a mantra from Amma, the hugging saint. I got the 108 Mala beads necklace at that event. Did you get a mantra? Or do you say a mantra other than the whole Ho’oponopono?
It’s a great question. Debbie Ford, a great author of many books, including The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, had gotten me a mala from the woman you just mentioned and sent it to me. Debbie’s gone now. It was a very long time ago.
My mantra is, “I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.” There are other words that I will use as reminders. Most people don’t know that Dr. Hew Len gave me a spiritual name at one point.
I knew that the people practicing Ho’oponopono kind of had a spiritual name. I was a disciple of a controversial guru in the 70s and 80s, and he gave me a different name on the cover of my first book. After that, I went back to my regular name, Joe Vitale. I went to Dr. Hew Len and said, “Well, I know you’re naming different people. If the divine gives you a name for me, I will accept it.” After days or weeks, he came back with Ao Akua.
I often sign my blog posts with that. Nobody ever asked me about it, but I’m doing that. I asked Dr. Hew Len what it meant. He says it means, in Hawaiian, the parting of the clouds to see God. I immediately liked it because I thought, “Well, that’s really what I’m all about.” We part the thoughts so we can see the divine behind them.
My personal mission is to pay attention to my thinking. My thinking is like clouds, but they’re just going by. Let’s part the clouds. What’s there? The divine, which I’ve called the whiteboard and the thoughts are the writing on the whiteboard. That would be another mantra for me, Ao Akua. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that publicly, so you have an exclusive.
Nice. I’ll call all the mainstream media. That’s awesome.
Right, news alert.
You mentioned Debbie Ford and her book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, which is amazing. I finally finished it just a couple of months ago. I had a run-in with the neighbor at the house we were previously at. She had done all this damage to the landscaping of our place, and she felt justified because the construction crew needed to get to her backyard, and her brother’s ex-wife owned the house we were renting. She just lied to us and manipulated us and then ran this construction equipment through our yard and everything.
Then I yelled at her, which is very uncharacteristic of me, but that made me acutely aware of my shadow, and I had been nudged to read Debbie’s book for months. I got a lot of information from the above, and I only got 10 or 15 pages into that book in six months. I’m like, okay, I got it. I needed to do this, and the coincidences were amazingly off the charts.
In order to overcome our pasts and create our futures, we have to become empowered in the present. Share on XAt one point, I’m halfway through the book and really tired. My eyes get tired from reading. It’s Irlen syndrome. I went to a page well into the back half of the book. On that very page, there’s this thing from Debbie saying this pivotal moment in my life: I’m in the car. It’s North Miami Beach. I’m like, “Hey, wait a minute. I live in North Miami Beach, and she’s explaining further that I’m in traffic in front of Aventura Mall.” My jaw had dropped because that was two and a half blocks from where I lived.
I know Debbie was helping me on the other side to integrate my shadow. Finally, after getting so many nudges and months of prodding and procrastinating, things healed. Then, finally, I started doing the processes, the visualizations, and the exercises she has in the book, too.
I’m like, “Wow, this is real. This is legit.” Those disowned parts of me are now integrated into my heart and loved unconditionally. I’m not judging so much about other people, and the universe isn’t sticking a bunch of mirrors in front of me of people that trigger me because the trigger isn’t there anymore. It’s just I’m everything. I’m fractal. I’m the ocean and a single drop. It’s cool. I love her. I love her work and that book in particular.
That book changed my life, and I was fortunate enough to know Debbie, and I loved her. I loved her. She had her own dark side, which she was very open to in her books, which is one of the reasons she awakened to the reality that not only did she have it, but all of us did. I thought it was very important because too many people get into the follow the white light and forget that there’s a shadow behind them. That shadow they don’t want to admit, they don’t want to look at it, but they got to admit it, they got to look at it, and then they can integrate it, and then they can be even more powerful.
Instead of being disillusioned with deceiving oneself, you end up reading something like The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, and you have the awakening that this is you. “This is you. You can own those loose parts, integrate them, and become even more powerful and whole.” Debbie did a great thing for all of us by writing that book; she wrote many other books, and I’m very grateful for it.
What happened to you, specifically when you read that book?
I read the book decades ago. I don’t know what I will be able to tell you exactly. But I will tell you this. People often say, “I’m doing Ho’oponopono, but I don’t know when there’s a change, or I’m doing belief work, which could be any number of things.” There are all kinds of modalities out there, and I think it’s important that we look for our limiting beliefs and delete them.
People will often say, “how do I know when I get rid of the limiting beliefs?” Here’s the rule of thumb for me. You not only don’t have the problem anymore, you don’t even remember it. It’s gone. When you asked me about what the takeaway was, what the insight or the awakening was when I read Debbie Ford’s The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, I don’t remember right now.
Part of it is because that was a long time ago when I read it, and part of it was when you do have that awakening about something you were dragging through your life, and it’s gone. It’s very difficult to bring back a memory of it. It’s gone.
I tell people that’s how you know when you don’t have the problem anymore. If you’re still worried about the problem, still scared of the problem, or still focused on the problem, you still have the problem. If you don’t remember the problem, you’re past it. You’re healed on that particular issue.
One of the side benefits of journaling every day, writing a gratitude journal to God, is that it’s also a place where I can park those things when I forget them. By design, we forget things we were meant to forget, and we remember the things we were meant to remember. Having the story and the details there to share in a presentation in a book or a blog post is really helpful. People love the storytelling and hearing that story arc. Facts tell, but stories sell.
That’s true. My most recent book, as you and I are talking, is Unexpected Kindness. I didn’t expect to write it, and I didn’t remember everything that ended up being in the book, not at first. But when Bob Proctor died, he was the grandfatherly fellow in The Secret. He deeply influenced me, and we’re turning points in my life because of Bob Proctor. When he died, I found myself the next morning writing a story about how he had helped me.
I didn’t think too much about it. I thought it was from my healing, and it was just a record of what took place. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with it. The next morning, I remembered somebody else and wrote about him. Then, the next morning, I remembered somebody else. For the next 30 days, every morning, I remembered somebody I had temporarily forgotten who would help me when I was broke and unknown and when there was no real evidence that I would achieve anything, but they helped.
The book became Unexpected Kindness, and as you pointed out, it’s a kind of journal, but in my case, I made it available to the world. It’s on Amazon and all those places you would get a book or an audio.
Unexpected Kindness caused me to remember the kindness of strangers who did not know they were influencing this guy, me, to move in a direction that in many ways. They go from homelessness and poverty to this level of fame and fortune, if you will. That’s miraculous. I mean, I say it, it’s miraculous.
You can only access the miracle of the present by clearing the emotional, mental, and spiritual obstacles that stand in your way. Share on XBut I didn’t do it alone. My guardian angels were there, me saying yes, all the lucky breaks were there, and all these people practiced unexpected kindness. They were there. By writing it down, I now have it forever.
It’s beautiful. It’s like you write the books for yourself, and they just happen to change the world, too.
I think that’s the formula. You write it for yourself because it’s something you believe in, something you’re motivated to share, and if everything’s in alignment, it could touch a whole group of people. You never know how many.
In Napoleon Hill’s lifetime, he wrote all those books, and Think and Grow Rich was a bestseller and touched many lives. But many more books have been sold since he died in 1970. Some books that weren’t even published in his lifetime are being published.
If you haven’t read Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill, it was not published in his lifetime. It was published afterward. It’s one of the greatest books ever written in history. I’m sure he wrote it for himself, but he had an eye towards this and can help people, but whatever. His advisors were too cautious and didn’t allow it to be published during his life.
Even his family, after he passed, were too cautious about it affecting his reputation and the family’s, so they held onto it for many years without publishing it.
Don Green is the president of The Napoleon Hill Foundation. He’s the one who pushed to get it published. I interviewed him. I have my own podcast called Zero Limits Living, and I interviewed him not too long ago. He told the story about how people were so resistant and reluctant, yet Outwitting the Devil may outlive Think and Grow Rich and all his other classic books. I’m glad it’s out there and came up for us. Let’s tell people to read Outwitting the Devil.
If you could synopsize one key point in less than a minute, it’d be about the drift, but you tell me, what would you say about Outwitting the Devil?
I’d say really easily. Outwitting the Devil is a manual on how to outwit the devil after you realize the devil is your own mind. That’s the wallop. When I started reading Outwitting the Devil, I thought he was talking about a devil in the traditional pitchfork and red-skinned Satan version of an image, and it just made me uncomfortable, and I just didn’t get it.
I kept hearing people say you have to read Outwitting the Devil. I went back to it, and I started reading it, and then it dawned on me. Oh my god, my hands were sweating when I realized that the devil was my own mind. He was talking about how to outwit your own mind.
It’s part of your mind. It’s the evil inclination. It’s the opponent. What Napoleon wrote about in there of the drift, like the complacency, is okay. I don’t need to do that. I don’t need to make good with that person. They’ll forget it’s fine. That kind of slow-burn kind of being asleep is where the opponent wins. It’s my understanding.
Outwitting the Devil is worth the read.
Awesome. Where do our listeners go to learn more and grow more from your amazing teachings and wisdom?
Well, thank you. I’m not hiding. I’m all over the internet. My main site is MrFire.com. Instagram and Facebook, and those places as Dr. Joe Vitale. I have a massive $3 promotional offer where people can get a lot of my material for $3. I think it’s zerolimitsmethod.com. Then, finally, I’ve written a lot of books, but if you go to Amazon and type in Joe Vitale or Dr. Joe Vitale, they’ll come up.
We talked a lot about Zero Limits and Ho’oponopono. I think the book people would want to read is the very first one, Zero Limits. Ten years later, I wrote At Zero. Recently, I wrote The Fifth Phrase. Then, Zero Limits Living. They’re all on Amazon.
Awesome. Joe, you’re a light in the world. Thank you so much. Thank you for revealing your light in this episode, too.
Thank you for the invitation. I’m honored.
Thank you, listener, for listening and go be a light in the world for others, and we’ll catch you in the next episode next week. Take care.
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