T.D. Jakes On 1- Year Anniversary Of Massive Heart Attack, Sudden Changes | NXT Chapter

Sudden changes, like lightning, passing across this guy. Sudden changes, like the boisterous sound of thunder, rolling sudden changes, like the sound of the engine of a train barreling down the track. Sudden changes, like an airplane lifting off the ground. And to the air, sudden changes never present themselves with warnings. They do not always make announcements. They give you a chance to prepare for them. Whether they are good changes or bad changes, or great changes, or mediocre changes, or microscopic changes, or massive changes, so be that your legs can barely stretch far enough to enter into them. But we all will face sudden changes. I'm sorry to tell you that there will be times that you will stand over grave size of people that you love. I'm sorry to tell you that you will be in the waiting room of hospitals, and smell, the smell that only hospitals produce, the waiting on the phone to ring, to find out whether the surgery was effective or not. I'm sorry to tell you that you can go from being the CEO to being unemployed. I am sorry to tell you that the son you poured everything you had into may walk away and spit in your face. I'm sorry to tell you that the father and mother who had you could let you down completely, but they're still your mother and father. I'm sorry to tell you that life is full of sudden changes and unexpected twists and turns, like getting on six flags and taking a ride, and not knowing where it's going to lead, and when it's going to drop, and how far it's going to drop before you see upward motion again that the topography of life is feel with fluctuations and movements and things that we are not expecting and that we didn't prepare for, and that we didn't know how to deal with. I'm sorry, but it's true. The only thing that is definite about life is change. There are some things that hit us suddenly. You come home and your husband is packed to close and left. You come home and your wife is to say that she's better single. You go to work and find out that you've been laid off. No notice, no warning, no farewell speech, no flowers. Just suddenly you have gone from employed to unemployed. I don't care whether you work in the janitor's closet or in the seat suite. If you didn't have time to prepare to say to adjust to get ready for it, sudden changes can throw off the equilibrium of your entire life. Your wife leaves you, the equilibrium goes out of your life. Your child dies. The equilibrium goes out of your life. Your career, not your job, your career, or you thought you had a career, and all of a sudden they shut down the store and it's everywhere. And the equilibrium goes out of your life. The house note can't be paid. The insurance can't be paid. You have to put the property up for sale. You have to drop the price because you're in trouble. And the equilibrium goes out of your life. Your appetite goes out of your life. Your ability and agility to be able to act as if nothing is wrong because God forbid that anybody know that we have a problem. We are more concerned about our image than our reality. We are more concerned about our reputation than we are the realization of what we need to do to make things get better in our lives, trying to convince our friends. How are you? I'm fine, but I'm spastic and I'm jerking and I'm moving. And still it's more important to me that I impress you with my calmness than I do with my progress. Don't believe spring. It will turn into summer. Don't believe summer because it's going to change into autumn. Don't believe autumn because autumn is going to turn into winter. It's going to keep changing. And the only thing that stable has got to be you that has the flexibility that has the impedextrous ability to adjust to situations that has the proclivity to be able to change with the times and the currents and the seasons and still keep your identity and not lose yourself to what you see around you. This podcast is not trying to show you how to stop the change. It's here to tell you how to not let the change stop you because if you're not careful, it will stop you. And if you are not ready, it will shake you to your core and knock you down to your knees. And it will knock you to your knees while your children are watching to see how you handle sudden changes. I'm sorry to tell you this, that you're not just a mom and dad or CEO or CEO or executive. You are a living, walking, talking, squawking model of how do you handle things when they go crazy and how do you handle things when they are great and how do you handle things when they are amazing? How do you deal with it on the inside? When the brain encounters sudden, unfamiliar changes, the kind of changes that are traumatic. Traumatic events, emotional events, the kinds of changes that cause you to cry when nobody's looking the kinds of changes that makes food lose its scent. And it's taste and fruit. Lose is essence, the kind of shocking news that makes you wonder about everything and everybody. And if you'll ever be able to trust anybody with your heart again, I'm sorry to tell you, there will be major disruptions, major aggravations, major obstacles that stand up in your face and dare you to take another step and dare you to move forward and dare you to hold your head up and dare you to keep going and dare you to keep breathing and dare you to fight on. It sets off a rapid physiological response designed for survival. I mean, not just in your head, but in your body. There was also, you see, someone left my cake out in the rain and I don't think I can take it because it took too long to bake it and I may not ever have this recipe again. That last line is the scariest line I ever heard. I may not ever have this recipe. I may not ever have this opportunity. I may not ever have this person. I may not ever have this responsibility. I may not have this chance ever again. I know what it's like to have that may not feeling because November 24th of 2024, while standing up in front of a crowd speaking like I'm speaking to you now, I sat down to talk to them just to summarize what I had been teaching that day. And all of a sudden, I just kind of went to sleep. Little did I know I was having a massive heart attack in front of the world. He is an internationally known preacher based here in Dallas this morning during a nine AM Sunday service Bishop T.D. Jakes of the Pothers House suffered a health incident during a morning prayer. The Pothers House was streaming live services one son named when Bishop Jakes froze mid sentence and started shaking. Now in the last hour, we have heard and seen from Bishop T.D. Jakes after that still undefined health incident that was seen all around the world during his Sunday sermon. Didn't know what it was, but almost a massive heart attack. He said five minutes later, I'd have been dead on a rifle. This is where Bishop T.D. Jakes suffered that medical incident while on stage. Now the video of the incident is going viral. I mean, not even in private, not even in a corner by yourself. In front of the world, I'm having a massive heart attack and one half of my heart has actually stopped working all together and the whole church is upset and everybody's in tears and everybody's worried and everybody's in an uproar and all of a sudden I'm dealing with sudden changes. I know what it is to find a sudden change. I'm stubborn when I finally came to myself and realized that people were all around me and they were praying and they were crying and they were worrying and my sister was in one year and my wife was in the other year and my son was telling me don't leave him and all of this kind of stuff and I had all of their emotions on top of my emotions swirling around in my head and I had to deal with the possibility that I may not ever have this recipe again. You first heard about what had happened to me because you've seen me preach and teach and run across the island, cross over pews and stand on my head and do all kinds of stuff when you first heard about it. What went through your life? So the physician side kicks in and we start like a computer taking off differential diagnoses. What makes a person a saint? And there are a lot of things we talk about sinkable episodes. A set something that causes a certain shock. You can have something called a bagel response but when I talked to Dr. Wagner my first concern was that you had a stroke. I was concerned that you had a stroke and when blood flow is cut off whether it be to the brain or to the heart seconds matter. And so in my mind when I hear that I slip over a mental picture of an hourglass and the sand is coming down. In trauma we call it the golden hour trauma. I know when a bleeding patient comes in I have a set window to stop that bleeding. We say all bleeding stops eventually and I always tell my residents either we stop it or the body stops it and it's not good. So I was concerned that you were having a lack of blood flow to the brain. I didn't know whether it was a hypertensive stroke where blood vessel had ruptured or whether a blood clot had cut off. But I knew that if you had a stroke we had to get thromboconase or streptoconase in the clot cluster we called it immediately to restore blood flow. And so when I met you and we talked and you recognized me. Yes. And I knew that you were cognitive. Yes. And so if you recall and you may not remember the first thing I did was I had already moved heaven and earths in the emergency room and we cleared everything and we took you to the CAT scanner. Yes. And I sat there and watched the images roll off. And while we were getting everything set up we were also doing EKGs. Yes. And so while the CAT scan was giving us information that EKG alerted us that you had an abnormal EKG and signs of myocardial ischemia, no blood flow to the heart. It's dangerous to live in your tomorrow or your yesterday at the expense of losing this present moment. All of a sudden I realized the only thing that mattered was now because tomorrow could all be gone. And yesterday can never be changed. The only thing I have is this present moment, this now, this tear, this trembling hand that had gripped the mic so hard that it would not let it go. And this heart that had stopped beating and these emotions that were coming at me like hell storms on a rooftop. And all of a sudden I realized that my life had suddenly changed. No warning, no dream, no vision, no card, no call, I had just done an EKG, I'd come back perfectly. I'd done a full physical, I was fine according to all the gadgets and machines and what have you, I was absolutely fine but according to my heart, I was dying, someone left my kick out in the rain and I don't think that I can take it because it took too long to bake it. And at 68 years old I may not ever have this recipe. Again, whether I fret not really because I lived a great life and amazing life in advance, whether I concerned totally but I was concerned for the people I served and the people I love and the people who love me and how they would react. Someone left my kick out in the rain. Maybe you're driving down the road or maybe you're on a treadmill or maybe you're on a bicycle and deep down inside though your legs are moving and your face is sweating, deep down in the back of your mind, your body is keeping score on an attack that came against you physically, financially, emotionally or spiritually that brought you to a place that you had to confront the possibility that someone's left my kick out in the rain. I consoled myself as they put me from wheelchair to cart from cart to ambulance, from ambulance to emergency room, from ICU rush right into surgery. I said I may not have it again, but then again I might. I might be half dead, but that means I'm half alive. I may be working with half a heart but the other heart is still working. And then if we're staying at that moment, I learned that it's not what you lose that matters is how you work with what you have left. Now you can either spend the rest of your day, the rest of your life crying over what you lost, worried about what you lost, worried about who didn't stay, worried about who walked away or you can look at who stayed, what you have left, what you are building, what is working. And take what's left and make it right. I want to challenge you today because it is so difficult to allow what's left to become so voluminous that you forget it. What's right, what's possible to take what's wrong and make it so big that you forget what you have left and what can still be done. It is so easy to become so engrossed and who betrayed you, who forcikied, who left you, who hurt you, that you don't even begin to realize who stayed, who prayed, who operated, who labored to make things okay. I left the hospital three and a half days later with not a stitch in my chest, not a riff in my ribcage. Normally they would take the heart out and shock it and clear the passageways and put it back in and I would be all scarred up. I left there with a band-aid on my wrist because the heart attack is big and it's serious and it's difficult as it was. It was not the end. Watch out. Watch out for false endings. Don't call it over just because it looks bad. It could be possible that a sudden change is just a gateway to your next great, amazing, thirst-quenching, life-changing, mind-renewing, heart-regulating. Your next achievement is on the other side of your sudden change. So either you see it as a wall and you run into it and bump your nose or you see it as a door and you push past it to see. What is that thing on the other side? It must be something amazing to bake it possible for me to push through to see why the obstacle is placed in front of the opportunity. Wherever there is an opportunity, there will be obstacles. Tough times, they don't last, but tough people, they do. Which one? Are you? Mom had lost the child before me and after me. That means I was born in between two dead babies and I survived and I lived. The trauma from having lost the baby before and after caused her to cling to me in a way that most mothers wouldn't cling to a child. That's what I'm saying. In a way that most mothers wouldn't cling to a child because she now discovers the vulnerability that there can be sudden change and that sudden change creates sudden anxiety and a deeper appreciation and a fretfulness and it's sometimes a worry as to what do I need to do to make sure that everything turns out all right. It causes us to need help with things. It causes, it caused her to need help with things. It caused her to handle me differently because all of a sudden her vulnerability has been pierced by the death of the first child named MaryNet and now she's holding on to me for dear life and the child after me is lost and she's holding on to it. What are you holding on to just because you're afraid of losing it because you've had losses in the past and how does that affect how you deal with circumstances, situations, how does it affect how you handle people, how does it affect how you handle relationships, how does it affect how you date, how does it affect how you interact with staff, how does it affect you on the inside, not just when you lay down at night, when you're driving to work, how many scores is the body keeping as you're dealing with these ghosts that are gone but not these feelings that are there but not there. This anxiety that exists in your life and nobody can see it and nobody knows it and we don't talk about it and yet we have to deal with the effects of it because we all have sudden changes. Sudden changes just come without warning. It doesn't ring the doorbell, it doesn't walk up the steps, it doesn't ease itself up to you, it doesn't walk its way up to you, no, no, no, you just look up and it's standing in your living room and you're in a crisis or the house burned down or you're in a flood or there's fires in California or you're in a crisis and everybody's moved to the roof. Sudden changes come into your life in the loss of a child or the loss of a loved one or the loss of a spouse or the loss of an opportunity and all of a sudden you're holding on to whatever you can find to hold on to in her case it was me and she was holding on to me for dear life because of the child she lost before and the child she lost afterwards. What have you lost? Instead of just telling me what you have gained, let's start thinking about what you have lost and the impact of that loss on what you have left and how it changes how you value, how you handle, how you deal with, how you portray, how you connect, how you appreciate what you have left because I guarantee you if you go bankrupt it's gonna affect how you handle money. If you lose your car, it's gonna affect how you handle your car payments. If you lose your house, it's gonna affect your willingness to even try to get another mortgage to get up on your feet again. All of these decisions are altered and moving and spastic because there's been a sudden change and there's been a shattering of how you do things. There's been a breaking away of how you do things and all of a sudden you may need to stop a while and find your center to begin to center yourself and calm yourself and gradually let the message so key into your heart and into your spirit. I'm going to be okay in spite of the change. When you know that you're gonna be okay in spite of the change it changes your reflex, your confidence, your stability, your maturity, your wisdom begins to develop and all of a sudden you begin to understand that life is not a certainty, it's not guaranteed that everything is going to fall into place all the time in order for it to be. It's not guaranteed that everything is gonna fall into place as you had imagined it. When I was about 10 years old, about 1967, I found out my father had kidney failure. Now my father was the Hulk. He was the Hulk. He could have played the Hulk in the movie. Big broad shoulders, big chest, chested burling chest, biceps, triceps, he was huge, hunk of a man. I literally have seen my father pick up the back end of a car and set it on the road. He was a he-man. He was all of that, he was strong and all of a sudden my father gets kidney failure. He didn't know that his hypertension was out of control. He didn't go to the doctor like he should. He didn't take care of himself and he lost not just his kidneys, he lost his normal. And anytime you lose your normal, there's gonna be peripheral damage that breaks out in your life because we so desperately need certainty and it is so hard to find because certainty in order to have absolute certainty, you have to be able to control not only yourself but the behavior of others, the weather, the circumstances, the economy. There's so many things to handle that you have to stop and say, wait a minute, I can't handle all of that. I can only handle how I react to it. And I'll tell you something as a son at about 10 years old, I did not react very well to my superhero having kidney failure and I had to learn how to run a kidney machine while my friends were learning how to ride a bicycle. By the time I was 16 years old, my father was dead. And that was a sudden change. It is grief for him, absolutely. But it was also grief for me and I am wondering if my life will ever be the same. I am grieving over the questions I didn't get answered. I'm grieving over the relationships we didn't get to have. The games we didn't get to go to, the concerts he didn't get to attend. The thoughts and father-son conversations that I hope that we would have now they are going down into the grave with his casket and we're not just burying him, we're burying everything I had in my. It was things like this that led. To my mother having Alzheimer's, school teacher, ended up the equal employment opportunities represented for the state of West Virginia, ended up walking down the street, looking for a car she'd left in the parking lot and forgotten where it was. First we passed it all, we played it off, it's simple. It's she had other things on her mind and then it became so obvious that we could not ignore it. Her body had kept scoring. One of 14 other siblings raised in Alabama with an uncle that had run for his life to flee being killed in the night. Did all kinds of school work that started when she was four years old and graduated from high school at 15, went on to college at Tuskegee and did four years of college in three with two majors. She had been amazing and done amazing things and did her student teaching and traveled around the world, been to Germany, did all kinds of wonderful things but all the while she was doing them, her body was keeping school. She had five children three of them lived. She survived it, she endured it but her body was keeping score. Her husband had kidney failure and she drove him twice a week back and forth to Cleveland about five hours away and still kept her job and kept everything going at the same time and she did it like bad woman, she did it like super woman. She did it like she had roller skates on her feet. She did it but her body was keeping score and the score was written in Alzheimer's and the Alzheimer's was written in the audacity of the loss of memory, of a mind so massive and a heart so broken. That little by little, she started to fade away. I don't know what your story is and I don't know what you've been to it. I don't know if you've experienced loss in your life but if you live long enough, you will experience some loss in your life. When you experience that loss in your life, how you manage it, how you respond to it and for God's sake don't bury it and try to act like you're okay and try to be the hero for everybody and put on your cape and your boots and run out there and stand out on the roof and see if you can fly because you can't fly. You're not super mad after all. You have to stop and deal with it and confront it and face it and feel it and heal it so that you can be the person that you need to be because you never saw this coming. Is there anybody who's listening at me right now who's dealing with something that was so traumatic, so painful, so difficult, so overwhelming, so vulnerable that it has hit you in such a way that you are not sure of yourself or your environment or your friends or your people and you are not sure that you will ever be the same again. The reason I'm talking to you through this podcast is to navigate you through the current and the trouble water that afflicts you in our lives and we find ourselves in situations that we can't easily talk about or don't even have the language to articulate because we are dealing with sudden changes. People ask you, how are you doing today? And you say fine because you know they don't really want to hear how you are really doing today. You know it's too complicated for them. You know it's too difficult for them and so you just say to them, I'm fine, but deep down inside, you're not okay. So through ministry, through podcasts, through books, through counseling, through therapy, and a mirror of other things, support friends, somebody you can trust in your life, you begin to work your way toward normal. You begin to get yourself to a place that you are not spastic on the floor. If you don't do that, you'll be spastic in the bottom of a liquor bottle. You'll be spastic in the bottom of a drug case. You'll be spastic in the bottom of some forbidden, self-destructive habit that you are going to anesthesize, the pain that you won't deal with because as the doctor said, so clearly the body always keeps score. Not always the mind, not always the emotions. Just because you got emotionally better, doesn't mean you got physically better, doesn't mean that the cortisol has gone down and the swelling has left and your joints are back to normal. And after a while, what started out on your heart ends up in your heart and affects your body and affects your knees and all of a sudden what started out as a small thing confined to a small, relatively small space in your thought life is affecting every area of your life. Today we're talking about certain changes. Have you had any? By the time I got in a little older, I had opened a small church and a storefront. I started out with only seven members. I think that God had given me an opportunity to help other people, but here's the secret. Most people who are in the business of helping other people start out with helping themselves and with the overflow of the current of ministering, healing, counseling themselves, they begin to look for answers for other people. It is the trauma that starts in the life of the counselor and the physician that causes him to persevere through the classes and take the courses and ask the right questions and have the passion on the inside to make sure that things get better, to make sure that things are acclimated in such a way, to make sure that somebody cares for them because every time you care for someone who is shattered, you are caring for yourself. You have to have gone through some things. I started out in a little church with only seven members, but that didn't bother me. I wasn't trying to be big. I was trying to be better. I was trying to be there for other people going through things like I had gone through so that I could help them to deal with sudden changes. It wasn't just the change of having a storefront church. I had nothing to compare it with only seven members before that I had none. What the real problem was, is little by little it was eating into the finances I was making, working on another job. I was pouring everything into the church so the lights went out and the phone went out and I was on a downward trajectory to nothingness and not sure if I could get back up again. I remember catching the bus and getting on the bus and saying to myself, I'm going downtown to big Appalachian Power Company not to cut my power off. And they smiled and said, we're sorry there's nothing we can do for you. And I walked out of the store with visible tears running down my face because I was at my wits in. If I'm talking to somebody today who's ever been in that situation, whether it was for a high dollar amount or a low dollar amount and you've gotten to the breaking point and you're standing on the edge of a cliff and you are starting to wonder if you will ever be well. And what do you say to your wife when you get home? And how do you bring your kids into the house? We came home with the children and the house was dark and we decided to play a game who could get to the bed first without stumping their toe. We didn't want them to know that the power was off so we turned it into a game. But while they giggled in their bed, we worried in orange because we were dealing with a sudden change that as long as I had my job before the plant had shut down, I was in pretty good shape. They didn't want us to be about to shut down. They didn't want us that we were in the middle of a paradigm shift. They didn't tell us that the industry age was giving away to the information age and that the plants all over West Virginia were shutting down. No, they didn't go into that kind of detail. They told us you were laid off and the whole world shook up under my feet. You have to understand that I am encouraging my little seven members while deep down inside, I was discouraged myself and the body always keep school. Years later, I made the decision, wow, the crazy, the tempestuous decision to leave what was already a difficult situation and starting to get better, it was starting to get better. It was starting to improve, it was starting to change. I moved to Dallas, Texas with 50 families to start what would become the potter's house. That ended up with 30,000 members, which was mind-boggling. And now I'm stressed the other way. I know what it is to be stressed for not having enough. I know what it is to be stressed at a funeral. I know what it is to be stressed at a graveside. I know what it is to be stressed dealing with bills. I know what it is to be stressed with not enough. But now I'm stressed with too much. And certainly I realize stress doesn't always mean anxiety doesn't always come from nervousness, doesn't always come from things going bad. It can also come from things going right. The fear that it won't last, the fear that you're not good enough, the fear that you can't handle it, the fear of imposter syndrome. I'm not sure it's not worse than the fear of losing. The fear that comes with gaining also makes you doubt yourself. Makes you wonder, do you belong in the room you just got in? And all of a sudden you're dealing with sudden change. One moment I'm in a food line, one moment I'm getting stamps, one moment we're getting wicked. And the next moment I'm exploding with people and books and movies and films and doing all of these amazing things. But he really didn't feel as good as I thought it would feel because success doesn't feel like you think success would feel like not when it comes on the back of anxiety and the back of losing and the back of wondering, will this last? And that's not just to prove about a job or a vocation. It's true about a relationship. After several failed relationships, you enter into the new relationship maybe one foot at a time holding back a little bit of yourself because you wonder, will this last? You meet a new friend, you've got a friendship and you're starting to confide in each other and talk to each other, but you wonder, will this last? There's this much anxiety to the far north as there is to the far south. There's an anxiety of wondering, do I have what it takes to deal with what I got to deal with and then to have 50 families counting on you, on top of your own family counting on you? We are weighted down not only by the pressure that we place on ourselves, but the pressure of those who believe in us, though it is well intentioned, can also create great anxiety because suddenly they're counting on you to make something happen that you talk real big about, but you're not sure that you can actually make it happen. And if you don't make it happen, not only do you endanger your family, in my case, I endangered 50 other families in the process. So good is not as good as you thought it was, and great is not as great a feeling as you thought it would be, and managing resources is not as wonderful as you thought it would be because you have pierced the veil of understanding that this could all go away. And what do I do? If you change, that's good. It makes another change, that's bad. What do you do when fall turns to winter? What do you do when sunshine turns to rain? What do you do if pleasure turns to pain? What do you do if everything that you have dreamed of turns into a nightmare? And you have to start all over again. These are the feelings and the anxieties and the proclivities that exist and people who are dealing with sudden changes. And how do you cope with those sudden changes? I believe, number one, you have to have daredevil friends who surround yourself with people who are used to living on the edge, who understand that it's okay to be on the edge that just because you're on the edge doesn't mean that you fall enough to cliff. You've got to be with risk takers. You've got to be with people who have experienced and taken a chance. Don't get around a bunch of people who are naysayers and doubters and fearful because in whatever you feed will live, you need to be around people that are feeding you with ideas and faith and feeding you with the reality that it's okay to make a mistake. And it's okay for things to drop. And it's okay for things to fluctuate if the stock market fluctuates. If the government fluctuates. If relationship fluctuates, whatever you're building it's going to fluctuate. But do not allow the fluctuate to indicate to you that you have suddenly lost what you had just because you hit a bump in the road doesn't mean that the car has to stop. When the brain encounters sudden unfamiliar changes, such as a traumatic event, shocking news or a major disruption, it has to figure out. It works to figure out how to solve the problem. Our brains are the first computer, hard drive computers that were ever invented by God to kind of figure out how to work this out and how to resolve it. And it is so desperate to fix it that if it cannot find an answer to the problem, it will create an illusion to give you a false answer rather than to leave you with a blank page. Here's a breakdown of how the brain and the body react. We keep trying to separate them like they're two different species. Like they don't go together. Like they're laurel and hearty, but no they are inexplicably connected. One to the other and what affects one affects the other. If the body is not well, it will eventually affect the brain. And if the brain is not well, it will affect the body. The perception of threat begins to affect your sensory input, downloading information. Your whole body tenses, your palms begin to sweat, your breathing changes because of the perception of threat. Not the attack of threat, but the perception, the very idea of it, the very fear of it, the very feel of the possibility that you may not make it out of this that something is lurking over your head and over your mind and over your spirit like a cloud, a dark cloud that's following you down the highway. That is the perception of threat that moves from your brain down into your body. And you can't exactly see it, but you can feel it. And the feeling is so strong that it won't stay in your head. It ignites the fight or fight action down inside of all of us. The sympathetic nervous system that responds to the circumstance to get ready for something you weren't ready for, to give you the adrenaline that's necessary for you to be able to do what you need to do, to give you the hormonal flood that has been on reserve in your body, the HPA, access activation that has been on hold waiting for such a time as this. Oh yes, you turn into somebody else. You turn into somebody that you have never seen before. You turn into somebody that your family didn't know you could turn into because you are at war. Even though you do not always see the enemy that you are at war against your mind, your brain, your mentality all announces to you that you are going through a cognitive explosion and impact. Your prefrontal cortex tells you something is up and you've got to do something about it. And you've got to find a way to return to a baseline, to a complex, to a parasympathetic nervous system that lines out differently than it does under war and the conflict under absurdity. In summary, sudden unfamiliar changes trigger a cascade of survival mechanisms in the brain because we were made to survive, we were created to endure, we were created to adapt, we were created to adapt climate changes, weather changes, circumstantial changes, we were created to survive just like the monkeys that I ran into on the rocket Gibraltar and we got on the top of the mountain and we noticed that there were monkeys everywhere all on the cars and jumping from window to window to window. But the strange thing we didn't notice at first is that the monkeys were born without tails. The God began to tell us that when the monkeys first came to the mountain top, they were born with tails. But when the mountain top turned to ice and it got cold, their tail was the first thing to freeze. And eventually after several generations, they started being born without the tail because they had frozen their tail off. If the monkey could adapt to the ice and the cold and still survive and still have children and still have offspring, you can survive whatever you are facing right now. You're a meagrelyl sounds the alarm to yourself. This is do not go down without a fight. Your adrenaline gets somebody ready to act to move to do whatever it's got to do. You get strength, you didn't know you had. You got energy that you never experienced at other times and other moments in your life. Your cortisol helps sustain alertness so that you are listening better, looking better, gazing further, more attentive, more alert to what is going on around you because you are aware like a deer walking through the forest and all of a sudden it senses or smells a lion and all of a sudden it looks up and it starts looking all around because it's alertness has been alerted to the fact that there is danger nearby and an entirely different reaction takes over the animal and it drops down into a position of movement, a fight or flight getting ready to move because it knows it is in the presence of danger and we live and work and breathe and function in the presence of danger. We move in the presence of danger. We give birth in the presence of danger. We raise our children in the presence of danger. We start businesses in the presence of danger. We teach class in the presence of danger the fear of rejection the the the the fear of isolation the fear of losing the job the fear of going pregnant the fear of losing the opportunities the fear of being laughed at, we do it all in front of all of these spectators. Oh, we don't do it at all. And we sit back and say, I would have. I could have. I should have. I ought to have done. I didn't do it. Thank God we have the aid of our prefrontal cortex. Our activity drops, making thoughtful decisions harder. And all of a sudden, we have to begin to try to neutralize ourselves and bring back balance. Balance is the thing that we need. Eventually, the brain works to reestablish balance in the best of circumstances. We calm down. Our breathing goes down. Our pulse rate goes down. Our blood pressure goes down. Our mind begins to function more normally so that we are prepared to make more sound and absolute and powerful and forceful and impactful decisions. Because we have dealt with the chronic circumstances in such a way that we realize that if the circumstance does not change, I will change for the circumstance, but I refuse to let the circumstance change me. Because if it changes me, it can lead to anxiety, memory issues, burnout, depression, dis-ease. It doesn't really hit you till you say it slow. If you say disease, you don't get it. But if you slow it down and say dis-ease, you realize that the root of every disease is dis-ease. Dr. Bessel van der Koch wrote a book worth reading. The body keeps score. Not just the mind, but the body keeps score. And I want to show you what I mean when I say that. You feel it in your mind, but you experience it in your body as well. And even though you escaped and even though you survived and even though you went to work tomorrow, and even though you smiled at people, and even though you got the kids lunch ready, that doesn't mean you're okay because the body keeps score. And the fact that the body keeps score, Bessel van der Koch says to us, the body keeping score doesn't mean that you're okay. It's just storing it in your joints and your cells, and all of a sudden you're experiencing swelling in your joints, in your organ and your body, from all of that cortisol that's been collected on the inside, that you have suppressed. So suppressing how you feel is not healing how you feel because you have had a sudden change. And anytime you have a sudden change, it leaves you in a turmoil where you're trying to figure out, what do I need to do to fix, to adjust, to strain things out, to get things together, because we have a tendency to think that we always need to do something. And that if we do the right thing, the right thing will happen. But you can do the right thing, and that doesn't guarantee that the right thing will happen because there are all these other variables going on around us. We can steer the ship perfectly, but we cannot control the storm that the ship has to sail in. And we have to deal with all of that. And if we don't deal with it, Dr. van der Koch is absolutely right, the body does keep score. You may not look at the score, you may not pay attention to it. You may ignore it. You may choose to act as if you don't see it. You may act like it's not important, and that it doesn't matter, but the body. It keeps score. It clogs the arteries and the veins. It swells the joints and the tissues. It leads to diseases like Alzheimer's. It affects you in ways that are unimaginable. And it is a collection of all the things you didn't get back into balance and get rid of, work it out, run it out, talk it out, pray it out, whatever you got to do to get it out, you've got to get it out because all that stays around inside of you and lingers is keeping score. And the score will eventually come back and meet you at the worst possible time in your life. And you won't be ready for what is about to happen. So there you are in a situation with no one to tell. Your lips are sealed, your eyes are closed, it's three o'clock in the morning, and everybody's sleep with you. Because if you're like me one of the first things to pass away, it's sleep. Sleep passes away when you have no plan for tomorrow. Sleep passes away when you're not sure that the plan you have will work. Sleep passes away when you find yourself in a dilemma of a lifetime and no one to even talk to about it because you must appear brave, you must appear, absolute, you must appear certain and you can't let people know that you are overwhelmed. Sleep begins to dissipate. Indigestion is affected. How your body dies just food. How you perceive and hear people. How you snipe at the dog and yell at the cat and find yourself in a situation that you are out of character. On this very stage, I endured my first and hopefully only massive heart attack. Out and over, out of the blue, I didn't even know what it was. I can't even describe it to you fully what it was. All I know is that I was sitting in that very chair right there, my body was. But everything else in me was in a quiet place. I was I was wrapped in a cocoon of grace and kindness and quietness and peace and tranquility. I was safe in the arms of my creator while my body was slumped over in the chair. You're talking about change. The reason I want to talk about my next chapter and the reason I want to talk about certain changes is often your next is in the urgency of now, something you didn't see coming, something you weren't trained for, something you didn't take a class in, something that you didn't hear anybody lecture on, and boom, there it is. And you either let it break you or you stand up to it and break it by the grace of God and the prayers of people and the technology that was around me. I went home with a bandaid on my wrists and nothing more. And you can survive to every sudden change that comes in your life. Good or bad? Up or down, right or wrong, north or south, you can survive every change that comes in your life. If you have the agility, the adaptable agility to stop being so stubborn and saying, I got to be me, no matter what, that's not true. The monkeys changed on the mountain tops. The cavemen changed in the cave. The people that were raised in the African deserts, they changed to fit the climate they were in. People change all the time. We'll wheelchairs in one arm and no arms and no legs. Don't stand there and tell me you got to be who you got to be. No, no, no. If you need to adapt to survive, then adapt. Adaptability is refusing to lose your inner sanctuary because of your outer circumstances. Adaptability means I may have to go about it differently but go about it I will. I can and I must. As I talk to you today, I talk to you from the perspective of my next chapter. I want you to go after your next chapter. I want you to build what you're trying to build and do what you're trying to do and collaborate and coordinate and illustrate and demonstrate and do all the amazing things that you were meant to do. But be careful. Be careful. Because in the process of doing all of that, there will be certain changes and your schedule will become so hectic that you're taking care of everybody else but you and you'll look around and there are no gauges to tell you that your gas is low, that your oil is dry, that your power is diminishing until it is too late. You must listen carefully at your body because the doctor was right. Oh yeah, he was right. The body always keeps score and no matter how bright you are, rich you are, poor you are, or beautiful or smart, or how much hair you have, or how much gifting you have, is still keeping score. So how do I release it? I'm glad you asked. There's a lot of ways to release it and you've got to use them all. Whether it's exercise or reading or crossword puzzles or puzzles for the head or puzzles for the body, to understand that the pain is not isolated to your brain that it gets down in your body. And if you can get it out of your body, it will flood out of you while you're on the treadmill and it will flood out of you while you're moving your feet. It will flood out of you while you're in the swimming pool that you have got to make sure that your body is as active as your pain, that your body is as active as the demands that come on your life, that you are eating the kinds of food that nourishes you for all the things you have to deal with. Day after day and moment after moment that you are eating the kinds of food that replenish the body, replenish the soul, change your mood and change your attitude. Did you know that your diet can change your attitude? That you have at least a few friends in your life with whom you do not have to pretend or impress that you can openly share your frustrations and aggravation and they will think no less of you when it's over than they did when it started. That's one of the ways that you can begin to cure and heal yourself. That you can count your blessings and not your burdens and rehearse in yourself. It's amazing to me how loud your burden screams and how your blessings whisper. Make your blessings scream so loud until you cannot hear the burdens beneath them and little by little you will silence, silence, everything that you lay down with every night. Take the last few hours finally and use the last few hours before you go to bed to clear your head or write down your plans or set aside your agenda. Or do what I got to do and listen to comedy and make yourself laugh yourself to sleep so that you don't go to bed in fight mode, in fight mode, in flight mode, in fear mode, in stress mode that you begin to understand. The sudden change doesn't have to be sudden death. But the loss of a loved one doesn't mean that you have to lose yourself, that you can be sad and grieve and be unhappy and shed tears and still wipe your face and pick up your briefcase and do what you've got to do. That you can have moments of great triumph and great tragedy and that you don't have to walk away from your triumph because you're guilty over your tragedy, that you can use what works to strengthen what doesn't work. Changes will come and changes will go. Trouble will come and trouble will go. Hard times will come and hard times will go. The only thing that remains is tough people. Tough doesn't mean that you didn't cry, tough doesn't mean that you don't get frustrated, tough doesn't mean that you had the answer to every question. Tough means that you will not allow the things around you to change the things within you. Tough means I demand that I remain a loving person even when people have not been lovely toward me. Strong means that I'm able to resist the temptation to get down on your level and order to fight you off with me. It means that I have the power to resist the temptation, to turn into what you don't want me to be, just to prove to you that I can fight on your level. It means that I'm strong enough to maintain my dignity while you throw agony all in front of me and I'll still stand. Though the wind blows and the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I'll still stand until the changes cease and the wind calms down and the billows stop rolling and the waves dissipate. I'll still be standing on this boat. Oh yes, the wheel. I'll rock this boat. I'll still be standing contributing to my generation in one form or another. I'll still be standing as me because sudden changes will not change me. If I could get into a time machine and go back through some space module and turn back the hands of time and go and talk to that little boy who wondered if he would ever be anything other than worried and intimidated and stressed out and afraid and feeling like he was an imposter and that he would never achieve anything. If I could go back and talk to him and tell him that he would travel around the world and sit with princes and kings and presidents. If I could go back and tell him that he would stand in the gateway of opportunities that few men and or black men have ever stood in and all of their lives. If I could go back and tell him that he would speak at some of the largest conferences in the world, that he would speak to millions of people that he would do it with his knees, knocking, and he would do it with his knees shaking up against each other that he would do it scared, but he would do it that he would be afraid and still do it. If I could just go back and tell that little boy that he had something, that he was worth something, that he could be something, that he could do something, that he could reach something if I could go back in time. I would tell him who he was because the acorn doesn't look like an oak tree and an apple seed doesn't look like an apple and an orange seed doesn't look like an orange in a watermelon seed does not look like a watermelon. Do not judge in seed form what only time will take to produce the fruit of what you really are. That's what I would tell that young man. Hey everybody, I want to take this time to thank you for watching the next chapter podcast. If this conversation inspired you, helped you, reflect on an idea or spark something new inside of you. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life isn't about how you begin. It's about how you finish strong. So start your next chapter with us right here, every week.