Wizard Training Camp

I just finished another Peak Potentials course, entitled Wizard Training Camp. What a ride! Peak Potentials isn't keen about us giving out the details of the course, so I can't share the meaning of the two of us standing in front of a stack of bent rebar, but trust me when I say that there really is a lot of personal meaning in that stack!

The setting is the Glacier Valley Farm campground located in the beautiful Squamish Valley in British Columbia, Canada. The campground itself is quite lovely, and has chickens and pigs for onsite recycling of our table scraps. The campground personnel provided the cooking for the camp as well, and it was quite good, with a wide variety of different entrees for lunch and dinner.

By the way, did you know that it's cold in the Squamish Valley, even in August? Well, I can now confirm that it is. I brought a sleeping bag rated for 30 degrees and I was still freezing at night, so I wound up sleeping in my clothes and fleece jacket.

Darn that Weather Channel website! I need to stop trusting that thing! It said that the lows would be in the 50's. If their data was really accurate, then why was I seeing my breath every night between 9 pm and 9 am!?

Our group was the largest camp Peak Potentials has ever held, with about 450 attendees. Since the campground only has five showers, sinks and toilet stalls each for both the mens' and womens' facilities, that was a real challenge in personal hygiene. Many of us opted for only one or two showers during the 5 day camp experience to keep the bathroom lines down. For me, brushing teeth daily is a must, so the twice daily line up at the sinks for brushing was worth the wait. Luckily, Peaks did get in quite a few Port-a-Potties, so the wait time during breaks wasn't too bad.

Back to the reason for the camp: the training is a great way to learn how to manage your thinking in order to manifest your highest good more and more of the time. Since none of us is perfect, I can't say all of the time, but with practice it can be most of the time. The exercises were designed to get you to catch what you are thinking in the moment, evaluate it, and then change it if it isn't working for you. With all of that practice, you can't help but get better at catching yourself and manifesting something better instead.

The exercises were lots of fun, even as they were challenging. Some of them were challenging physically, but all of them were challenging mentally and emotionally. They are designed to make you examine how you look at the world around you, what thoughts empower or dis-empower you, what holds you back from expressing your gifts fully, and how to shift your thinking immediately when you catch yourself getting stuck in negative thinking.

Here are two great examples of how well that training worked from the journey back home. When I got to the airport, I couldn't find my passport. I kept thinking, it's got to be here somewhere, but as I started to exhaust the possibilities and was on my second round of looking in every nook and cranny of everything I brought with me, I began to panic. I caught myself doing that and said, "Okay, lesson learned - keep track of important documents. Now that I have that lesson, my passport will be waiting for me at the Lost and Found." Sure enough, it was.

Then, when I got up to the check-in counter, I was trying to get on the early flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles (via Phoenix). As I checked in at the kiosk, I noticed that I was upgraded to first class. Okay, that's very nice, but I'd still rather get on the early flight than fly first class. When I went to the counter, the gentleman informed me that I could indeed get on the early flight to Phoenix, but the early flight to L.A. was already overbooked, so I couldn't get on that segment.

Instead of getting angry that I didn't get what I asked for, I recognized that here is a valuable lesson in clarity - I had to admit that I was only thinking about the first leg as I was considering the switch. Instead of sulking about the lesson, I switched to being gratefully enthusiastic that I got to fly first class from Vancouver to L.A., despite it not being the early flight that I had wanted.

As a result of allowing myself to be enthusiastic with what happened, I was rewarded with a great couple of hours chatting with several other members of the group who were also on my later flight from Vancouver to Phoenix. I have to admit that previously I might have buried my head in a book ignoring them because I was upset about my circumstances and wallowing in my victimhood. This feels so much better! I am a Wizard! :-)