The Resilient Heart: Reclaiming Your Life Against All Odds

In your life, there are going to be storms.

Storms that will shake you to the very core of your bones and make you really take a deep look at what you are. You're either in a storm.

Or one's coming at you.

Or it's leaving.

That lull.

That lull between storms, we often like to think, oh, that's the sweet spot. That's where I want to be friends. That's so human of you. No, that is the lull between storms.

I want to share with you a storm that occurred to me.

To see how it can apply to you. Okay. A number of years ago, as a matter of fact, seven years ago, was my last speaking engagement because I had gone on. I had invented myself as a trader psychologist. And I was training at elite institutions in China, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and Europe.

It just seemed the good times were going to roll on forever. It was blue sky, and then I landed in Beijing. The first day was great. It was clear and stuff like that. The next day, I'm sitting there on the 25th floor.

Of a hotel and there is a fog bank coming toward me. But this is no fog. This is smog. I'm on the 25th floor. It engulfs the hotel, including me on the 25th floor. It turns out the lights in Beijing. That, friend, is what I breathed for two weeks as I was teaching and lecturing. And it started getting me almost immediately. I started having a very serious congestive problem. I was just coughing a lot. It was tough. When I got back to the States, it took me two months to get over this condition with my bronchitis and stuff like that. But in less than a year, I was diagnosed with cardiac sarcoidosis, which is basically the immune system being triggered by pollution to attack the heart. And it just doesn't make it. It makes the heart leather. Okay? It's not like it's. You can pick it up and stuff like that. It is leather.

And I fell through this. And before I knew it, I had not just entered that. I had gone into heart failure to the point where I was incapable of walking. My wife would have to steer me around all my appointments in a wheelchair. And I wasn't thinking very well. And I was put on something called rocket fuel.

It forced a leathering heart to beat. That's among the many other different drugs I was on at the same time. Understand, I maintained my practice. I'm on zoom. I could sit there not being able to walk. I could walk two or three feet before I'd sit down. That went on. But the problem is, is that I would also build up fluid in my body that I'd have to go to the hospital and then have to drain. When they drained, it ended up causing gout, severe gout, a number of times. I'm in the hospital at Christmas and I have fallen off the side of the cliff. They're looking at me. They don't know if I'm going to live or not. I'm sitting there.

And I have this vision.

And I'm looking at a door. It appears. It's a big door. And it opened very, very slowly as I watched it. And I said, oh my God.

This is the door between life and death. Is this my time right here in this intensive care heart unit?

I said to that door, I said, if. If it is my time, I am ready, but it is not my choice.

There was silence. You could hear the silence. And out of that door came these words. It is not your time. You have more work to do. And it was gone. I'm back in the hotel, in the room, all cranked up. And then my daughter comes to us. And by this time they've already told us that my chance of living was very slight because I had an eight month wait to get a heart. But my daughter comes and she has great tidings. She's pregnant with our. With their first child, with our granddaughter. I wanted so bad to see that child, to hold that child and welcome her to the journey of life that all of us go through. But there I was wondering, am I going to live?

Well, the truth is, what fell apart at this first place is they decided somehow that I no longer met criterion. And they said, we're not going to give you a heart. The best you can do is one of these LVAD machines that are an external pump. I call it a bomb vest.

Doing that would give me about five years of life.

So we wouldn't be here today if I had accepted that. What we did, we ended up getting referred to Duke Medical center in North Carolina. They are the largest heart transplant organization in the world. They looked at me and says, we don't understand why they didn't give you a heart. You have perfect plumbing. You just got a bad case of sarcoidosis. And they said, oh, and by the way, it's not going to take eight months.

This is going to take anywhere between two days.

To maybe two weeks. But Covid hit.

And suddenly nobody, nobody could come into the hospital, including my wife, who was my emotional support person. And we had to wait and it delayed because everybody shut down, including the harvesting of hearts. So, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And then they called and said, we have heart. We go through the operation. And it's a long operation. It's like seven and a half hours. And I woke up in what is known as medical psychosis. I thought everybody around me was a Russian spy.

And they were out to get me. That. And that's why you need an emotional support person, because I'm incapable of clear thought. And it lasted for four days, but all that's gone. I'm now in recovery, and a doctor comes to me and says, randy.

Your attitude about your recovery, the ability of you walking and walking to get the heart used to one another in the body is the difference between life and death for you. And I want to tell you, that was marching orders for me. I started walking around that little place. I was within five miles walking around a little place, and I finally. I ended up getting out in seven days. It usually takes a person that goes through a heart transplant that anywhere from two weeks to two months to be able to get out of the hospital. But we're going home. Everything was okay. It's beautiful. We go. I live in a rural subdivision where everybody's got property, and I live on a street that. It's a private road. There's no reason for a person to show up on that road unless they had business there. We're turning down that road, and the road is lined with cars. There are people.

Waving me with COVID masses and just welcoming me home from this very perilous journey that I'd been on for two years.

I was just. I was stunned. Me. These people are. They went out of their ways to be there and to welcome me, and they weren't going to see me. I don't have an immune system. I didn't get out of the house for four or five months. There's this whole sort of stuff like that. But what I want you to hear.

Is my wife looked at me and says, randy, do you see how much you're loved? In addition to that, I had over 30,000 people praying for me. That's some total strangers, some people we know, some all over the place. I felt enormous support. And what I vowed when I was in that hospital, as I was facing this, is I teach people how to build an empowered mind, to engage uncertainty, the uncertainty of saying, I want to win. But the truth is, I have no idea if I am or not. But this is on a massive scale. And what I realized, I had to do the same thing for me that I teach people. I had to find the discipline of a ruler. I had to find the courage of a warrior to face the situation. I had to find the self soothing, the self compassion of a caregiver to be able to bolster me, to be able to build me up. And I also needed the clarity of thought of a sage. These are things I teach people how to have when they engage uncertainty. I pull that up and it was severely challenged. But I came out alive. And the truth is, if I can do this, anybody can. I'm a knucklehead. And I can promise you that. The same way that I was able to grasp that, to be able to build something and to be able to show myself how powerful that I could be in the world, that is for you too. My story is not about me. It is about the potential that dwells in you right now. Your job is to learn how to tap into it, to grow it so that it becomes what I call the resonant programs in the mind.

What happens? You join the journey.

And you welcome the storms. They're your teacher. They teach you to get past all that crazy ego stuff and to find a much higher way of being in the world. Friends, this is something for you. This is something that you can bring forward, open up this journey and build this kind of mind that can engage this kind of stuff, this kind of adversity. It's right there in front of you. I invite you to seize the day. I invite you to claim who you really can be. Thank you.