Soulful Warriors: Unmasking a Soldier's Expedition from Battlefields to Enlightenment

KATHLEEN: Today I have John Lawyer with us.

KATHLEEN: From the desert combat zones to a battle within, John Lawyer transformed from soldier to spiritual seeker. He acts as one of several guides for Kishar, a nonprofit online spiritual community for people to share their journey and explore their own unique spiritual path.

KATHLEEN: John is an omnist and believes in the validity of great human thought from around the world and across time. He offers individual spiritual coaching and guidance services as part of the Kishar spiritual community. Welcome, John.

JOHN: Thank you, Kathleen. I appreciate it.

KATHLEEN: Tell our audience a little bit about you and what your journey of an awakening spirit has been.

JOHN: It wasn't a linear path. I joined the army straight out of high school, before 911 happened. I spent the next 12 out of 15 years at war in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. Came home and was looking to kind of find myself and heal and I still wasn't on a spiritual path.

JOHN: I spent seven years wondering. I had this moment of understanding, or clarity or whatever you wanna call it. The world just made more sense to me.

JOHN: I've kind of felt a oneness of everything and, I knew what my purpose was. Since I hadn't been on a spiritual path, it was a bit confusing as far as exactly what had happened and how to talk about it, how to tell people about it. That's the journey I've been on for about two years now. A little over two years.

KATHLEEN: Ok, you're gonna go a little bit further in depth than that. Trust me on that after our conversation about what you went through about being over there in Afghanistan. I believe it was for 11 years without coming home to the States and what you went through.

KATHLEEN: I want people to understand the core of you and what you went through. The journey that you had when you came back to the States and started your healing, so to speak.

JOHN: Yeah, absolutely.

JOHN: It's always good to get more in depth. Thank you. when I first enlisted and I was a soldier and 911 happened, I went to Kuwait, supported our soldiers that were in Afghanistan at the time.

JOHN: Eventually we invaded Iraq. I was at a place in Camp Doha that was attacked with, ballistic missiles and things like that. We lived through that and we didn't know if the, the patriot missiles were going to shoot them down or not, as they were coming in. Stuff like that can be pretty traumatic.

JOHN: There was a lot of other things that happened during my time in deployment to Kuwait as a soldier. I transitioned from soldier to a civilian, but I was still doing the same work as I was as a soldier and went to Iraq with my wife and I spent 18 months there.

JOHN: Same thing you have to worry about IDS. You have to worry about, rocket attacks. I was a counterintelligence, special agent in the army. I was dealing with counterintelligence and counterterrorism, in my job and you deal with some pretty horrific stuff.

JOHN: You see humans at war. You're part of this machine of war. It's something that gets to you, especially in a cumulative sort of way. I think it can get to you in the short term. But then it starts to have this long term effect since you're in it all the time.

JOHN: I was working 80 to 110 hours a week, seven days a week. All the time at work in my job. I came home, from Iraq, a year or so to try to do some things in the civilian world and that didn't work out.

JOHN: I decided to go back to work because it's what I knew. You do what, and I told myself I was never gonna go back, but I did and I ended up in Afghanistan for, 6.5 years consecutively in Kandahar. Looking back, I don't know how I did it. I don't know how I spent six straight years there. My job there was more demanding than ever than, than I'd ever had.

JOHN: That's saying something because my job was pretty demanding prior to that. Our unit was our operations tempo, which means like how busy we were. It was constant. Our job was to protect Kandar Airfield, which at the time was the busiest, single runway on planet Earth.

JOHN: It had planes coming in and out every 30 seconds. Our job was to protect it, keep the airfield running and protect the people on it and the aircraft. To do that, we collected intelligence. We had to go out and catch bad guys and, and do things like that.

JOHN: An asymmetric warfare takes an extremist to catch an extremist. You have to have the mindset, get in their head. That's a pretty dark place to be. You also start to see that the people that you're fighting are just people. They're just humans.

JOHN: I think at that time and as time wore on, that got to me because the people, we would send our guys into someone's home in the middle of the night and they would take this man away from his wife and children and they were crying and they would be, terrified and, and especially in a country like Afghanistan when you take the man out of the house, they don't have anything. They're left with nothing and then we would send him to prison.

JOHN: I saw the humanity of it. I also saw the, like I said, they were just trying to put food on their table, they were just trying to live their lives and that took its toll. The US Western military industrial complex is this big giant machine that is extremely good at what it does.

JOHN: I was a part of that but and I have great respect for some of the things that the US does around the world and the, the good that it does. But that doesn't mean that we don't do things that are bad and evil and dark.

JOHN: I came home and finally decided to hang the spurs up as it is. In doing that, I didn't really know what to do because people don't talk about it much but, you get addicted to war.

JOHN: I was addicted to war. I went to the VA and asked for help. They said, are you addicted to drugs or alcohol? They asked that question every time one goes in, even if you tell them no. But I said, I'm not addicted to drugs and alcohol. I'm addicted to war.

JOHN: I got paired with a therapist in the VA who was a Eastern, medicine kind of Eastern faith practitioner, counselor. That's pretty rare in the VA. She taught me mindfulness and she taught me some other things and it was helpful. But at the time, I wasn't healthy enough. I wasn't even able to kind of wrap my head around what she was teaching me.

JOHN: I think that probably helped me later on, even if I didn't know it. I was lost for the next seven years. I call it, my time, people used to ask me well, what's Afghanistan like? I would say it's like the swamp of sadnessfrom the never ending story, it's this place where you can think if you're not careful, you get lost in it.

JOHN: I am proud of myself for not getting lost, completely, not thinking completely and finding a path where I could keep moving. I didn't see much light if any, even inside. But as I healed for these seven years, I started to get more distant from it.

JOHN: Time does heal wounds and then I had this moment of clarity or understanding. I was in bed one night and my wife was asleep and like I said, things just made sense. I saw my light and my wholeness and, it was a very warm, very peaceful, very calm, thing and that's what led me to this path that I'm on now.

KATHLEEN: Did you receive a message or was it an all encompassing feeling to move you into a new direction?

JOHN: It's a great question. I'd say it's a little bit of both.

JOHN: I think it was this new direction that I was on and I felt that I have an understanding as part of it was a message that my purpose. I knew what my purpose or higher purpose of Darma was. It was to go and see if I could talk to people, help them, help themselves find that they do have light inside. They can make it heal from trauma or figure out a way to move on from it.

JOHN: I wanted to share my journey with people and have them share theirs with me. I had this idea that regardless of your religion or your spiritual philosophy or your creed or whatever, it doesn't matter we're all saying the same thing.

JOHN: It's all pointing in the same direction. So why don't we all get together and ask questions about it and talk about it and change even be willing to change. What we think the answer is as we learn.

KATHLEEN: Are you working with vets or are you working with a variety of people?

JOHN: I work with a variety of people and I'm happy to work with vets. I think it's a noble cause and I there's a lot of people out there doing it.

JOHN: I am kind of agnostic as to who I talk to and help because I think it's come one come all. Come as you are situation. We all have so much in common, even if we don't see it. We break down our tribalistic barriers and we can see each other, right?

KATHLEEN: What did you start to do when this calling came in? Here you are counterintelligence and now you're on the spiritual path. What happened from the time that you felt the calling and you became aware that you there was something more than what you thought you were to where you started moving and created your organization. There's a big, that's a big gap that you haven't filled in yet.

JOHN: I love that question. It's been an interesting two years for me.

JOHN: The first thing I did was how do I talk to people about this? Because, like I said, I was on a spiritual path. I didn't know the vocabulary of the spiritual community. I didn't know the nomenclature and all of that. I said, oh, I'm gonna go, I'll go read. I think I read 60 books in four months.

JOHN: I read everything. I would read a book on Hinduism and read a book on Buddhism and then an Abrahamic book and then a philosophy or self help.

JOHN: I keep rotating through genres and reading different books. I went online and talked to people like, on Reddit and had conversations. I couldn't have even told you the definition of ego from a spiritual perspective probably two years ago.

JOHN: But having had my understanding, I was working backwards, I had this understanding this moment. I had to work backwards to figure out how to work with it. Every day I would also intentionally in an aware manner, I would do something to work towards starting my spiritual community and launching it. I did something every single day to work towards that as well.

KATHLEEN: We are talking with John Lawyer about the transition from, when he had his wake up call or message from God or his higher self or whatever you wanna call it to starting his new organization.

KATHLEEN: My question that I have as you're reading the books because when I used to read all those books, when I was in my twenties, I didn't know how to talk about any of that. It was a feeling because to me. Eastern philosophy is more about the feeling and the bigger element of who you are, where Western philosophy is more that hands on type, the way I experienced it all those years ago. When you were reading your books, were you able to identify the experiences that you were having?

KATHLEEN: You were the experiences that you were having in Kuwait or Afghanistan, were you able to take a bigger picture of all of that? It was a new perspective coming in, I think is what I'm trying to ask.

JOHN: I think I understand. Yes, I think my perspective from being in war zones and deserts was definitely helpful in understanding where I had come to and where I was going and where I was in my spiritual path. I really subscribe to the idea of loving kindness and all that.

JOHN: When you look at like the dao and the balance of everything in the universe and there's light, there's dark and then there's the gray in the middle and the line in the middle. The darkness is ok. We don't talk about it a lot. We don't necessarily acknowledge it a lot.

JOHN: A lot of people who I found walk a spiritual path now probably have seen that darkness and probably experienced that pain and suffering that puts life in context a lot of times. I think that experience greatly contextualizes where I'm at today. I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't gone through that.

JOHN: I don't begrudge the universe or, anything I accept it. I think that overcoming trauma isn't about letting go of it and detaching from it. That's part of it, but it's also acceptance of it that it's still always just gonna be there.

KATHLEEN: It's part of who you are. There's no getting around that. We all have trauma, we're all post traumatic in some form or another. COVID caused post traumatic for people being isolated. A lot of people are unaware that they have trauma in their life because they bury it or they dig it deep down. But you walked it.

KATHLEEN: You walked in fear. You walked in terror every single day practically over there with bombs coming at you and artillery fire coming at you. That is beyond what most of us could ever begin to comprehend, let alone come back and survive from. That's why when I think when you talk about where you, that the darkness, we all have darkness, we all do.

KATHLEEN: There's always something inside of us that needs more light. The way I see you is that you're a walking embodiment of what we do on a spiritual side. You walked it in a different way, physically walked it where we sit here and we're fighting our own personal demons on the inside. You're sitting here fighting demons literally on the outside.

KATHLEEN: That doesn't mean you don't have your inner demons. I'm saying, I think of things and look at things differently to be able to walk, literally walk and be in that kind of emotion almost nonstop, even though you're addicted to it and endorphin release and serotonin release and all that. It still has to do something to your own psyche on the inside.

JOHN: Yeah. I think that it does. That's a good point to talk about. When you're there was a lot of fear. I like that you brought the word fear up because I was afraid. I was brave. But I was afraid. When I was in Kuwait before we invaded Iraq, I had to go back home to get new orders, new paperwork.

JOHN: They made me fly home for two weeks and get new paperwork and fly back. It was almost worse for me because I knew that Saddam was gonna launch ballistic missiles, scud type missiles at Camp Doha.

JOHN: There were 13 generals there for the invasion. I was fine when I was there but going home, I had to go get back on a bus and go to Atlanta Airport and then fly back to Kuwait knowing that I was going back to a place that was gonna get attacked with these devastating weapons.

JOHN: I had to be brave and, but I was very afraid and then there's been a lot of other experiences. We had a ground attack in Afghanistan once where they penetrated the wire of the basement one night. No one knew how big the opposing force was or from which direction it was happening.

JOHN: It was confusion, fog of war as they call it. They made us all go get in a concrete bunker and then we were all sitting there. I'm sitting here afraid, standing here, afraid.

JOHN: I left the bunker and they yelled at me. I went back inside to my desk and sat down and started talking to the rest of the base to try to see what was going on because that's part of my job. I think that you have to walk out of the fear, right? You have to like fear is healthy. I mean, the mind and the ego have kept us alive for thousands of years. So fear has a purpose.

JOHN: You have to decide to look past it. I do think physiologically too though that there are certain types of trauma that we live. There's different levels of trauma and I think all of our traumas are valuable and valid.

JOHN: At some point sometimes when you live this, this low grade trauma, combined with spikes of high grade trauma, physiologically changes your Amygdala and your brain. I had to learn that I'm probably never going to be the same physiologically as well. That's important to add in this context to the spiritual side of things.

KATHLEEN: When you were in that, I'm sure that you were praying to God or the universe or Allah, whoever it was, that you were putting a lot of your faith that you were going to be taking care of.

KATHLEEN: I would think you would have to because I can't imagine not being in a situation where our natural instinct is to protect our bodies. That's our natural instinct. That's what the ego wants us to do. When we feel out of control, we pray generally.

KATHLEEN: When you're in this, I'm thinking you've got to be going through that because I know that you also said when you came back to the VA that you had hypnosis done. I'm sure that might have helped to release some of that trauma that you were experiencing as well.

KATHLEEN: I want to know a little bit more about - what did you do? Yes, you're brave and no doubt about that. What did you do when you were living in that kind of fear when you're sitting in a cement bunker?

KATHLEEN: There's things that are going through your head. You have your training as a soldier that you're working with, but there's something more, something else had to push you to be able to move through that fear. Do you know what that was for you?

JOHN: I do and I've only recently figured that out. I love that question because I didn't even know that a couple of years ago when I had my understanding, but I've been thinking about it recently and I think that our higher purpose changes throughout our lives and it's different from where we are in our journey.

JOHN: I didn't know it then. I was completely ingratiated in my job, I was completely dedicated to it. It was almost a religion for me, to accomplish the mission to be successful, to protect people. I doubt I realized now that was my Dharma then that was my hard purpose. I was whole.

JOHN: You talk about like the Swatara and if you look at the BBA right, and you're living your purpose in your day to day, that's the ultimate, right? I was. I didn't even know it. I think that's what got me through is that I was this true believer in what I was doing.

JOHN: I was fully and wholly dedicated to it, which is why I could work 110 hours a week, seven days a week for six years. Then the years before that and all that combined, that's what got me through the fear. That's what got me through the pain and suffering of it all was just that. There was a brotherhood and a sisterhood as well from the people that I fought with and served with and was there with.

JOHN: All that combined, comes down to the fact that I lived my hard purpose and didn't even realize it at that point. At that point, it's changed since then.

KATHLEEN: When you started moving into this new calling of yours, what did that look like? What kind of head stuff went through you? Again, it's a big change from being a soldier to being a spiritual seeker, guider, guidance person, wrong words. I'm sorry. But you know what I mean?

JOHN: Totally. Yeah, I think that it was that first year.

JOHN: It was 2021 the fall of 2021 fall of 2022. It was very peaceful for me. It was warm. I didn't really care about much in a way. I was kind of chill. I was fortunate enough to have some time in my life where I could spend reading and studying and trying to figure out who I was and what this meant and how it was all going to shake out.

JOHN: It was a very inviting experience. I wouldn't change anything for that. I had always been this expert in my field and I was not necessarily the most important person but when I walked in the room, people listen.

JOHN: To not have had that identity when I came home, I found myself oh, this is good. You know, I kind of know who I am. I know where I'm going and I can live the present moment and be appreciative of today. I can let go of my past. I can not worry too much about the future, all that stuff they tell you and all those spiritual books.

JOHN: I felt it. I lived it. It was appreciation of a lot of different things. Gratitude played a lot in that I can be appreciative of the things that I have. The time that I have.

JOHN: The possessions that I have. The health that I have. The people and relationships that I have. Stop arguing with people on the internet, stop talking about politics. I completely changed. I was a progressive liberal and now I still have some of those beliefs but I don't care anymore.

JOHN: If I go to my neighbor here in Texas and I talk to them, we probably have 90% in common regardless of what our background is. If we're humans of that 90% connection and then humanity, then why are we so involved and wrapped up in the 10%? Stuff like that.

KATHLEEN: I get it. It's us against them. I mean, war, that's another one? I'm better than you. You've got a different religion. You have different color skin, whatever it is, it's an us against them mentality that we are working on evolving. You walked and lived first hand in that type of conflict only to see a bigger picture that we're not in that type of a conflict because in essence, we're all the same.

KATHLEEN: You even talked about it when you went into the homes and arrested the husbands. He just wants to take care of his family. He wants to be free that type of thing.

KATHLEEN: It's not that he's a bad guy necessarily anymore than you're a bad guy. It's whatever it is we do, what we need to do to take care of ourselves and our family because that's what we do.

KATHLEEN: We are talking with John Lawyer today. As we left the show, we were talking about how you can talk to anybody because we're all the same regardless of what you experienced over there and the us against them and all that crap that we do in our world.

KATHLEEN: What I want to talk about now is, tell us a little bit more about the organization that you created. What it's looking like? Where do you want it to go? How is it growing? What you need to help make it grow a little bit more?

JOHN: Sure.

JOHN: The community is called the Kishar spiritual community. We named the Kishar. It's the Sumerian goddess of mother Earth, like Gaia or mother Earth. It also represents the line on the horizon, which represents the journey that we're all on whether we know it or not. The journey is really a powerful thing for me and my own and hearing about others.

JOHN: I think that in our current technological age, there's still space that we can create for an authentic, meaningful community where people can come together and have peace and calm, have authentic conversation. A place that's not Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or anywhere else.

JOHN: It's a place where people can share what's on their mind. Listen to what is on other people's mind. And like I said, have a community. That's what I wanted to create. I spent a couple of years working on it with my wife and a friend of ours that we met in Afghanistan who lives in Bosnia.

JOHN: That's what we did. We created it. It's got all those places where you can talk to each other. It's got daily meditation, prompts guided meditations. We have weekly spiritual round tables where you can have a spiritual discussion lightly. I lightly moderate it, throw it around the table, see what people have to say.

JOHN: It's an inviting place. It's also got, I believe that it's not just the spiritual journey that we're on, it's how do we live in the real world while we're on this path. It's about those daily building blocks of life that ground us and center us whether it's sleep or health and wellness.

JOHN: Working on our mind, relationships, even finances, things like that. We have courses available to members for all of that on just how to get back to the basics and give yourself more space and time to be spiritual.

JOHN: That's really something that doesn't get talked about enough. That's a big part of our path and journey if we want to get the most out of our lives here on this spinning rock that we're all on. That's what we've done.

JOHN: We also have an accompanying YouTube channel that's got advice and helpful videos on various parts of the spiritual journey. I talk about books that I've read that are related spirituality, philosophy, religion. We're not looking for anybody specific.

JOHN: We're looking for anybody that's wants to, to walk this path or thinks that they might want to walk it or might need a little help. Part of what we do is one of the things I went and did during the last couple of years. I went and became a certified professional coach to do spiritual guidance and coaching.

JOHN: The nice thing about us is, we're a nonprofit. We do have a monthly subscription. There's a free trial to our membership, but all that money goes back to the members. We don't take salary and all of the individual coaching sessions, if people get those, all those funds go back into the community as well.

JOHN: It's being paid forward. The message is if you're looking to find what you want to do where you wanna go, what you are, there's a place for that. If you already know there's also a place for that.

JOHN: That's the message. Is it strictly an online community or do you actually have a brick and mortar for people to come in in your local area?

JOHN: Right now it's just online. Eventually we'd like to expand. We are planning physical in person retreats for spiritual getaways as well. As people can connect on a human level and things like that. We'd like to make that a regular part as we grow.

JOHN: We just launched last month in October and went live. We're still getting into that point where we grow and achieve critical mass and all of that. That's part of it. That's the direction we're headed.

KATHLEEN: It sounds amazing. You're right about the fact that we don't bring enough spiritual aspects into our lives. We've gotten very technological, in my opinion, where people are self-absorbed, they're into their phones, they're into social media and think that they have 10,000 friends and they're gonna be there when something happens to them when they're not.

KATHLEEN: That's the part that I think is the most deceiving of the world that we live in is that the younger generation really doesn't know what a human connection is to a degree that I'm used to or what you may be used to.

KATHLEEN: I truly believe that we learn more from each other by being in each other's energy. Yes. Being on YouTube and having zoom conversations that helps. But there's something about the physical touch, physical contact, being in that energy where there's an exchange where you're reading the body language or you're reading everything about that person and not what's on the words.

KATHLEEN: That's why email has always been one of those challenging, destructive type things is even if you're not thinking it, you don't know how somebody's gonna interpret it if they're having a bad day.

KATHLEEN: But when you're in another human's energy field, you can feel what's going on with them where there's a little bit more sensitivity or compassion and you're not some jerk doing whatever I decide you're doing at that moment because I'm more aware of you as a human.

KATHLEEN: I know for me and I'm guilty of this a lot, but I really focus in on trying to make eye contact with people and acknowledging that they're there and being nice to them and saying hi because you don't know what a a smile or a kind word is going to do for somebody. We don't know people well enough anymore. I want to be a light. I want to be a light for people.

KATHLEEN: And I think what you're doing is, is remarkable. I think it's, it's the video that you have. I'm gonna just tell the audience this the video that I watched when I, before I interviewed you teleported me someplace that I don't know where I went.

KATHLEEN: All I know is I was sitting at my fireplace, I was watching your video and I was on my knees because I was warming my butt because my back got too hot and all of a sudden I came back and I, where am I? Where did this guy teleport me to? People don't do that to me. I do that for people but they don't do it to me.

KATHLEEN: What you did in and how you talked and that video was amazing what you put together as far as really understanding the core of you and then how grounded and how much work you did on yourself to be able to bring that groundedness in and focus and dialed in to where you're a laser beam, is how I saw it. You knew how to dial in and kudos to you for what you did. Especially with the trauma that you have been through and what you have witnessed. I have a lot of friends that are vets and they are not like you at all. They're working on it. They're trying to be there, but they bury stuff and you embraced it. That's a real gift that you gave to yourself and to your community that you embraced whatever that was inside of you. That embracement brought this magnificent being out to the world.

KATHLEEN: I don't have anything to ask at this point. If you want to comment or say whatever. I wanted the people to understand that the light that you hold and the energy that you hold is immense.

JOHN: Thank you so much for that. It means a lot. It really does because it's not easy to always go out and put yourself out there and share. To get feedback like that, it's very meaningful for me. It really is really touching. So, thank you so much.

KATHLEEN: Oh, you're welcome. I figured you're doing all this amazing work and you're still working on yourself because that's a never ending thing. All we're gonna do is constantly evolve and grow and shift and change and do the zigzag on our journey of life. That's what we do, going up the hill and coming down the hill doesn't matter. You're always on a zigzag.

KATHLEEN: That's right. I remember when I had a dream several years ago where I finally got to the top of the hill. I'm climbing this mountain my whole life. I'm, yeah, I'm finally at the top and I start heading down and I'm zigzagging going down even worse. It was rockier going down than it was going up.

KATHLEEN: I laughed because in the dream, it was where you're starting out at the top of this hill and where you're going are two different places. I have watched this journey unfold. I still haven't got a clue totally where I'm going yet. But it doesn't matter. I'm guided. I'm following what my intuition tells me to do.

KATHLEEN: So here I am and to be able to do the show and meet people like you and people that are really doing some good works in the world, is encouraging and hopeful for people. It doesn't matter what we have gone through, what your journey is, what my journey is, we all know what pain is. We all know what suffering is. We know what hurt is. We know what death is, we know what all of that is.

KATHLEEN: We don't share that because for some reason, our society says we're supposed to bury it. That burial is what makes us crazy. That's why our world is crazy today. To be able to open and share the human side of us is what's gonna heal this world and going to ascend us into that next vibrational frequency that we are headed towards.

JOHN: Yeah, 100%. That's one thing I love about your show is, is you have this almost infectious confidence that I really enjoy. It's a calm confidence. I like that about your show. I definitely appreciate it.

KATHLEEN: Thank you. It took a lot of time to get here. Believe it or not, I didn't have a voice when I was in my twenties. I didn't know how to speak, literally. I did not know how to speak. I was told that I had nothing to say. My family said you don't have nothing to say and we don't want to hear it. So I didn't speak. I learned to speak.

KATHLEEN: I learned to find who I was. I think that was when I finally started embracing who I am and how I feel and that I do matter and I am worthy and I am deserving because I've always been protected by the creator. I've always been protected and guided. Bt I had to bring that in and really embrace that, that I'm part of the whole thing.

KATHLEEN: I do matter because if I didn't matter, I wouldn't be in matter. That was something I learned not too long ago is you always matter because you are matter. We are physical matter. That means you matter.

KATHLEEN: We were talking with John Lawyer and I want to say thank you for the words that you said. I had to take those in for a minute because I'm really good at letting it wash over and it's no, I need to take it into.

KATHLEEN: So yes, as I believe in the philosophy of this show is I'm walking the same path with you no matter what, I'm always working on myself 24/7 as well. Tell our listeners how they can get a hold of you..

JOHN: Sure.

JOHN: If you're, if you're looking to, to look into our community visit us at kisha dot org. That's Kishar Dot Org.

JOHN: You can visit us at kisha dot org. That's Kishar Dot Org and that's where our home page is and you can become a member. If you're looking for individual guidance or coaching, we can help with that. We also have a YouTube, which is at peace on your journey and that's our YouTube.

JOHN: Either one of those places you can find us and at the bottom of our home page has all of our socials and links, including links to our YouTube. If you want to take a leap or a chance and go check it out, do it, go be part of a community.

JOHN: Let's start talking, let's have a conversation, let's have a discussion and maybe you'll find some warmth and some light where we can share our journeys and pass with one another.

KATHLEEN: What would be one thing you would offer our audience? What would be the one thing that you would suggest that they do to move closer into their dream?

JOHN: I would say the first thing that people can do is know that the most important thing they can do is to take care of themselves before anything else. Because you can't be any good to yourself.

JOHN: You can't be good to any of your other relationships or anyone else in the world or the world itself if you don't take care of yourself. When you do that, you lift yourself up, you lift the world around you. That's the the advice I would start with.

KATHLEEN: That sounds perfect because that's exactly what you did for yourself. You took care of you and look where you are now. You're building an empire and don't even know it yet.

KATHLEEN: Thank you.

JOHN: You're welcome.

KATHLEEN: I wan t to thank you very much John for being here with us today. It was very insightful. Your story is remarkable.

KATHLEEN: Your journey is incredible and it doesn't matter who you are in life, whatever your journey is, we're all walking a life where we all have the same thoughts and feelings. Different experiences, but we have the same thing. We're all spiritual beings having a human experience. What a gift that you did and thank you for your service to our country.

KATHLEEN: That goes without saying is thank you for whatever you've done for us because that was a huge sacrifice on many levels for you to do that for us.

JOHN: Absolutely.