Read an Excerpt
Free Your Mind and the Best Will Follow
A Step by Step Guide to Living Your Dreams
By Myrtle D. Russell
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Myrtle D. Russell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-5390-0
Chapter One
Traveling Wounded
My mother was a single mom who gave birth to eleven children, one of whom we never knew and she never talked about. I heard from an aunt that it was a girl who died shortly after she was born. The rest of us all grew up under the same roof—two girls and eight boys. There are only seven of us living now. One younger brother preceded my mother's death, and my two oldest brothers died two years after she died. Wounded.
My younger brother died from complications of AIDS at the age of thirty-two. Somewhat of a loner, he never had much to do with the family after he graduated from high school. He went to college, graduated, fell in love with the church, and spent most of his time at church functions and chauffeuring ministers around the country. When he returned home the summer of 1995, his belongings in a couple of large black bags and a suitcase, we knew something had to be wrong. He rarely came home, and when he did, he never stayed for long.
A few days after he returned, he shared with me that he was HIV positive. I told the rest of the family and immediately began lining things up to get him the medical attention he needed. My mom was a natural caregiver, so I knew she had his personal care covered. I later asked him why he chose to tell me instead of someone else in the family, like Mama. His reply was: "I knew you could handle it." We all pitched in, and things worked out. He died at home in March 1996. Wounded.
My oldest brother was sixty-one years old when he died. He was the big brother I looked up to as a little girl; the one who encouraged me to read, the one who introduced me to Jet and Ebony magazines and black newspapers, and the one who did his best to protect me whenever he was around. He spent a lot of his earlier years in trouble with the law. He died in a tragic fire in 2006 in a rundown building with boarded-up windows and no fire escape. You know the type—the ones that house what some would call "undesirable tenants;" the buildings that should never pass city and state inspection codes, but they always do as long as no one complains, particularly the tenants.
I will never forget that early morning call in June; it was around three thirty in the morning. It was the kind of call that no one wants to get because you know it can never be good news at that time of morning. It was a call to tell me that the building where he stayed was on fire, and he didn't make it out. I didn't want to believe what I was hearing, and as I got dressed, I prayed that it wasn't true. It was the weekend he was supposed to spend with me. We had been together all day and had plans for later that night, but he decided he was going back home to hang out at his old stomping ground, the Crossing, as it was infamously called. Earlier in the day, he had received some pictures of a family reunion he had attended in Michigan. He was excited about the pictures because he was in a few of them with some "good-looking chicks," as he would call them, and I think he wanted to get back to the Crossing to show them off to his buddies.
I entered the hospital examination room shortly after four o'clock that morning and looked down at his lifeless body. He was partially covered with ashes from a fire whose cause was questionable, and no answers were offered. "If only you had stayed with me, this wouldn't have happened," I said to him. But it was too late. I had to make peace with the thought that he had done what he wanted to do. Wounded.
My second-oldest brother died two months later. This brother was different, the kind you could never actually get close to, and you never knew what to expect from him. He died in surroundings similar to those of my oldest brother. He lived in a building that served as a shanty motel for people who had fallen on hard times—another building that should never have passed city inspection as an inhabitable dwelling. And yet for its tenants, it served a purpose.
This time it was an evening phone call in August, and a younger brother was the bearer of the bad news. He told me that our brother had been found dead and I needed to get to the motel as quickly as possible. When we arrived, we were told by the undertaker that his body had begun to decompose, so we never got a chance to see him. Story has it that he had not been seen in two or three days, so one of his neighbors decided to check on him. When the neighbor went to his door, he was met with the foul odor of death. He alerted the landlord, who in turn called the police.
As we stood outside the motel among a crowd of curious onlookers, I couldn't believe it. How could two brothers, the first two siblings I ever knew, be gone in a two-month time span? Mama had died two years earlier, so I couldn't defer any of this unnerving madness to her. I couldn't make sense of it either—the way they died and why they chose to live where they lived. It was one of the saddest and scariest times of my life. Scary partly because their deaths meant that I was now the oldest sibling, and for the first time, I thought about my own mortality. I had become the oldest child much too soon, or so I thought. It was also scary because it was a loss that came with a big responsibility, as neither of my brothers had insurance. But my younger siblings and I did what all people have to do when death comes calling: we faced the music. It wasn't easy, but with help from extended family and friends, and a lot of prayer, we made it through. Wounded.
What do I mean by the term traveling wounded? Many of us are living with unresolved childhood issues that prevent us from fully expressing who we really are and keep us from living the lives we deserve to live. For some of us, the wounds are so deep that we've stopped dreaming. For others, the dreams have become nightmares. They haunt us so badly that at night we find it hard to close our eyes and slow our racing minds, forcing us to become addicts of one kind or another. For a handful of us, falling asleep might actually be easier if we were assured that we would never wake up. Yes, we are emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually wounded. The wounds have made us so vulnerable that no matter how hard we try to forget the incidents and circumstances that led to the issues that caused the wounds, they keep tormenting us wherever we are. And they will continue to torment us until they either destroy us or we decide to heal ourselves. Free your mind, and the best will follow!
I'll share an example of one of my wounds that almost manifest into a life-threatening disease. It was the spring of 1980. I'd been living in Yonkers, New York, for almost a year. I was a full-time college student working the graveyard shift full-time as a nurse's aide, and was married to a brilliant man who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. He was so much like my father, but more on that later. Together we had two beautiful children.
On this particular evening, after coming home from school, cooking, serving dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, checking homework, and getting the kids settled in for bed, I sat down in my favorite living-room chair and nodded off. It was my only break before heading out to work, which was, on average, a forty-five-minute drive to upper Westchester County.
After about a good hour of sleep, I went to get up from the chair, and my legs wouldn't move. I remember looking across the room to my husband to ask him for help, but one look quickly reminded me that he was already out of it. His addictions forced him to come home loaded every day. He would make his stops in route to get whatever mind altering drugs his money or credit would buy. Now, as I mentioned, he was brilliant man. He could rebuild the engine of a car and make stereo equipment and cameras do things unheard of. Anything mechanical, he could fix it. Shortly after moving to New York in 1979, he landed a job building PC boards for a small company that grew to become a large corporation (unfortunately, without him). He could do more fully loaded than the average person could do cold sober. Brilliant but wounded.
Anyway, nervous, puzzled, and not knowing what to do, I just sat there in the chair and tried to recall what could possibly be causing my legs not to move. I knew they had been hurting lately, but I figured it had to do with all the walking I did while on my clinical nursing rotation at one of the busiest hospitals in New York, Albert Einstein Medical Hospital in the Bronx. It was fast-paced and something I was not used to. Each day I left that hospital in pain; pain that helped me decide that once I completed my clinicals, I would not be working in any hospital. That clinical rotation also had me questioning whether I really wanted to be a nurse (but that's another story).
As I sat there in the chair, still puzzled and somewhat afraid now, I looked down at my legs and noticed patches of tiny red bumps on both shins. I wondered if they had something to do with my not being able to move. At that point, I was really getting nervous and started to pray (or, I should say, beg) to God to please not let it be something life threatening or crippling, to please let me get up and walk. I sat a while longer, begging, before trying once again to get up. This time my legs did move, and I got up and went to work, begging God all the way to please make this all go away. My husband never knew what happened. Wounded.
The next morning I called a doctor and made an appointment to have things checked out. Over a three- to four-week time span, I went through a battery of tests, along with a biopsy of one of the patches. Once the results were in, I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis.
As my niece Sakea would say, "What the heck" was sarcoidosis? I had never heard of the disease (and I was in nursing school). The doctor gave me a general explanation and noted that it was a fairly new and rare diagnosis. He told me what I could expect and what he could do to treat it. What he said that day went in one ear and out the other. I was not accepting the diagnosis.
I left his office angry. Having sarcoidosis (or any disease, for that matter) was the last thing I wanted to hear. I had more important things to deal with: my children, school, work, and a husband who also had to be watched. His addiction was taking over. I couldn't even trust him to babysit, and I had to learn that the hard way. After going to the Laundromat one night, I returned home to the stench of burning food and a kitchen that was filling up with smoke. He had put eggs on the stove to boil, hit the bottle too hard, and dropped off to sleep. The kids were also asleep. A few minutes longer, and things could have turned tragic. Wounded.
Nope, I didn't have time for sarcoidosis. Life was already crazy enough, and I was angry about it. I was angry enough to realize that I was dealing with way too much stress—angry enough to know that if things were going to change, I had to make some changes. And so I did the best I could at the time, wounded of course. I ended a dead-end marriage and the spots eventually disappeared from my legs. That was more than thirty years ago, and I never saw that doctor or any other doctor for sarcoidosis again. And guess what? I'm not claiming it now either.
When I eliminated the madness, I eliminated the symptoms. Was it easy? No. But it wasn't easy dealing with the distress that caused the symptoms either. I'm a firm believer that when it comes to suffering, oftentimes it's "mind over matter." When we change our minds, what matters changes. Free your mind, and the best will follow!
Life Isn't Always Fair
Life isn't always fair. Sometimes we can do our best and still come up with the short end of the stick.
Just ask Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Rwandan refugee who tells her story in her book Left to Tell. Immaculée's life was transformed dramatically during the 1994 Rwandan genocide when she and seven other women spent ninety-one days huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor's house. She entered that bathroom a vibrant, 115-pound university student with a loving family. She left to find that most of her family had been brutally murdered. She weighed only sixty-five pounds. Wounded.
In 1998, Immaculée immigrated to the United States where she worked at the United Nations. During that time, she shared her story with coworkers and friends who were so impacted that they insisted she write it down in book form. Three days after finishing her manuscript, she met bestselling author Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, and the rest is history.
Today, Immaculée is a writer and speaks around the world on peace, faith, and forgiveness. Free your mind and the best will follow!
Life wasn't fair for Tererai Trent, Oprah Winfrey's all-time favorite guest during her twenty-five-year run of the Oprah Show, where she interviewed more than thirty thousand guests. In Oprah's words, "Her story encapsulates the essence of every lesson we've shared over the past twenty-five years: hope, your thoughts create your reality, gratitude ... it doesn't matter where you come from. She proves you can keep reaching for your dreams, that one person can make a difference in the world, and above all, you have the power. It doesn't matter where you come from." ( oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trents-Inspiring-Education)
As told on the Oprah Show, as a young girl in rural Zimbabwe, Tererai lived without running water and electricity. Although she was desperate to learn, she only attended two terms of school before she was forced to marry at age eleven. She had three children by age eighteen, and her husband repeatedly beat her for wanting an education. Wounded.
In 1991, Tererai met a woman from Heifer International and told her what her greatest dream was: to move to America and get her PhD. The woman looked at Tererai and said, "If you desire those things, it is achievable." Tererai's mother later encouraged her to write down her dreams, so Tererai wrote them on a piece of paper, placed them in a tin box, and buried them under a rock.
By 1998, her dream started to come true. Tererai moved to Oklahoma with her husband and five children. Just three years later, she earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural education. In 2003, the same year her husband was deported for abuse, Tererai earned her master's degree. After every achievement, Tererai returned home to Zimbabwe, unearthed her tin of dreams, and checked off each goal she had accomplished, one by one. As destiny would have it, through a sizable donation from Oprah, Tererai was able to build her own school in her old village in Zimbabwe.
Tererai has since earned her PhD (another dream she wrote down on paper and buried) and is happily remarried. Free your mind, and the best will follow!
Or ask the once homeless teen turned pop star Arnel Pineda if life was fair. Pineda was born in 1967 in the Philippines to proud parents who recognized his talent and entered him in many singing contests at an early age.
Pineda's mother died when he was thirteen. Her illness left the family devastated and deeply in debt, forcing his father to give up the family's apartment. He turned to relatives, asking them to take care of Pineda and his siblings. It was during this time that Pineda dropped out of school and decided to strike out on his own. Wounded. Sleeping on the streets, or wherever he could in Manila, Pineda earned money by taking on odd jobs like collecting and selling scrap metal until his friends finally convinced him to sing for food.
After several years of struggling, Pineda began singing with Filipino bands, jumping from band to band and living from paycheck to paycheck. And then something happened that would change Pineda's life forever. One of his shows at Manila's Hard Rock Café was uploaded to YouTube. The rest is history.
In 2007, the rock-and-roll group Journey, who had sold eighty million records and released multiplatinum albums, was in search of a lead singer. Lead guitarist Neal Schon came across Pineda's YouTube video. The group contacted and auditioned this talented young Filipino man with the soulful tenor voice. There was no doubt among the members that they had found their new lead singer.
Was life fair for Arnel Pineda? He, like others with similar circumstances, would probably say that it wasn't. But he didn't accept the hand that he was dealt. Instead, he chose to use his gift of singing, and that gift has served him well. Free your mind, and the best will follow!
So what's your issue? What's holding you back? What keeps you from living your dreams? Have you just stopped dreaming? Whatever your issues are, you can bet that your thinking played a major role in the outcome. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Our minds produce thoughts, and it is what we do with our thoughts that determines our destiny.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Free Your Mind and the Best Will Follow by Myrtle D. Russell Copyright © 2012 by Myrtle D. Russell. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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