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1106 Design, LLC

Dear Author,

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SAMPLE CHAPTERS

A Story From the Healing Table

Unlearning Beliefs That Are Holding You Back

When we are born, we are in a natural state of authenticity. Fresh out of the womb, bellowing, a baby is unafraid to ask the world to meet its needs. Being newly born is a symbol of purity and potential for growth. Somewhere along these lines, our identity and the meaning of life are overshadowed by what we take in from the world around us. In our daily practice, this can look like unconsciously adding excess sugar into our diet or obsessively comparing ourselves with others on social media, creating addictions and cravings for more of what is unhealthy. The driver of our behaviors is the consumption of the ideas, beliefs, and opinions of others without stopping to assess the information we are adopting as truths. The fear-based world comprises bad information and false conditioning that affect our actions and ultimately form our relationship with ourselves and others. 
When I say bad information, I refer to what we hold as accurate without processing it. Living without forming our own conclusions and thinking for ourselves, based on awareness and non-judgment, takes us out of the inner wisdom that I will refer to as intuition going forward. False conditioning refers to the “shoulds” of life. For many people, the fear-based world subtly seeps through the fractures of our hearts first, carving out canyons of self-doubt and insecurities. I believe this is what drove me to operate my life based on what a father “should” do, how an executive “should” lead, and how a man “should” look before I got sick.
While the fear-based world is a reality we must face, it is not an actuality we must hold onto. There is war, people hurt one another, and there are catastrophes like hurricanes that are out of our control. Distancing from the fear-based world isn’t about denying it. It is about creating powerful shifts in ourselves by finding ways to translate tragedy into purpose and meaning. That is how I healed myself, and after helping others heal themselves, I feel convinced it’s time to share my perspective with you. This book is not a how-to directive. It’s an invitation to redirect your flight path by answering questions, activating healthy rituals, and rewriting your life story to help you soar higher and heal. The quality of life, I believe, is not an extension of time but how we can use the positive and negative forces that arise for our own betterment. Those forces that cause accidents bring forth wake-up calls; even sickness and disease beg us to stop and correct. I call them existential guideposts. 

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Existential guideposts can bring us closer to authenticity, purpose, healing, and our relationship with the things we can see and not see. When we start seeing them as neutral instead of positive or negative, we can use them to transform how we live our days.
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***
John, a stressed-out sixty-three-year-old executive and former Baptist, comes to see me, expressing that he often has “weird feelings” that he describes as premonitions, telling him that something horrible is going to happen or someone terrible is going to show up. He wants to understand why he is having so many sleepless nights. On the nights he does fall asleep, he wonders why he is plagued with violent night terrors. The constant grinding of his teeth, he thinks, is causing muscle tension in his neck and shoulders. His religious background is often in the foreground of his thoughts as he pictures the judgment and ridicule he faced as a member of his church. He says he was taught to believe that God is a force waiting for him to screw up. While he now believes what he was told was a lie, he struggles to surrender to a more open spiritual exploration.
Like many, John functions highly in his work and daily life. He keeps his fears hidden behind his smile to ensure others remain undisturbed by him. Coming to see me is John’s way of practicing the act of letting go. The predictions he makes are his way of maintaining his old way of operating under his religion, scaring himself into falling in line with religious dogma.
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Letting go is the conscious release of emotional attachment to past experiences, relationships, or outcomes, allowing oneself to move forward without being burdened by previous fears, hurts, or regrets. This process often involves acceptance, forgiveness, and the willingness to embrace uncertainty, making space for personal growth and new possibilities. As described by psychologist Carl Rogers, "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change," highlighting that letting go often starts with accepting the present reality rather than resisting it.
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As John travels through life, he picks up menacing spiritual hitchhikers—the kind that holds you up at gunpoint and steals your money after you trustingly offer them a ride. The trauma ruminates in his head as if they are driving while he is duct-taped to the passenger’s seat. Though he thinks the source of his pain is in his mind, during our work together, I quietly identify the vagrants’ presence in his solar plexus, the area just above the belly button. The pressure creates a heavy weight on his chest, tethering him to his past.
What follows is spiritual surgery of the gut, carried out over several energy-healing sessions. Each time John gets up from my table, he tells me he feels lighter and more at peace than ever. His sleep improves, and he begins to have dreams instead of nightmares. One morning, he shares that he woke up laughing—a first in decades.
The hitchhikers exit his vehicle one by one, their influence dissolving as his energy shifts. Eventually, John takes back the wheel. No longer a hostage to his fears or the dogma that once chained him, he starts to steer his life in an authentic and free direction. What was once a burden weighing on his chest is now a sense of lightness—a newfound connection to himself and a spiritual openness he never thought possible.

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In John’s case, a “spiritual hitchhiker,” or “energetic vampire,” refers to an energy or entity that attaches itself to someone’s spiritual journey, draining or influencing them negatively. It’s believed in some spiritual traditions that such energies latch onto a person, especially when they are emotionally vulnerable or unprotected. This presence can create a range of blockages or distress, from brain fog to panic attacks, hindering spiritual progress and well-being, emphasizing the need for boundaries and awareness when exploring spiritual practices.
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***
The fear-based world disconnects us from our natural human ability to regenerate. To reunite with our full capacity to heal, we can begin by shedding layers of false conditioning and bad information stored in our mind, body, and soul.
Between the ages of 24 months and 5 years, a child begins engaging with the wondrous conscious awareness of the ability to ask questions. You have likely witnessed the constant curiosity of a child at this time of growth, looking up to ask, “Why?” repeatedly until they get a satisfying answer. Unless we are lucky enough to have had or to have learned to become a parent blessed with extreme patience, the “Why?’ often goes unanswered. Parents or guardians dismiss the question as a marker of the annoying “terrible twos” of childhood development. The child eventually stops wondering in response to continuously being told, “Because I said so” by the adults. While we learn valuable lessons from others, such as our parents, in this example, I believe adopting doctrines that are not intrinsically our own is unhealthy. Wisdom passed down is an extraordinary gift that we can use to understand the world around and inside of us. If we do not adapt what we learn to align with the truth of who we are and the purpose of our existence, it becomes a lie we have to play out. Generations of families operate like this. I know mine did. Carrying on in this way was making me sick. Maybe it’s gotten to you too. If so, I hope you will find it free to move through the process of letting it all go.
Abstaining from inner wonder, the child begins absorbing bad information that creates the conditioning of a false identity. In the process, intuition becomes confused with scarcity and fright, bred from hearing and believing everything around us, especially what we should fear. Over time, our attention becomes increasingly focused on what other people think, do, say, and feel, thus losing sight of our true nature. How do we know the truth about who we are?
Far too many people die having never been brought back to their two-year-old selves who questioned the world with open inquiry. They transition out of this world, wishing they had lived the life they wanted to live. I almost became one of those people. 
Accepting that you deserve moments of introspection and self-exploration is important to help extract your personal values and belief systems that feed a life lived on purpose. I invite you to ask questions again to learn and unlearn everything you need to know about who you truly are and transcend a fear-based world filled with bad information and false conditioning. You can become a well-informed luminary of your life by harnessing your intuition and using existential guideposts for your betterment. 
***
After the last session with John, following another report that he has dropped off more of the emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical parasitic strangers, he writes to me in contemplation. “Simon, I have a question. If nature always goes back to a state of order, and a cut heals, and the skin returns to normal, if lizard tails can grow back or a burned forest restores itself over time, why is it that evil, chaos, and discord seem to prevail? Why not order, peace and harmony?” 
I answer, “John, Life isn’t at all what it seems.”

1.

The Conception of Identity: The Rebirth of Your Authentic Self

In my late 40s, work consumed me. I tried hard to fulfill the joy-draining prophecy that life falls into place when we reach certain financial milestones. When I failed to get recognition for a project I led at work, I concluded that I wasn’t doing enough. When I got promoted, I concluded that I wasn’t doing enough. No matter what I earned, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. My solution to my low-self-worth problem was to funnel every drop of my energy into ascending the corporate ladder. There was a lack of honesty in who I proclaimed to be, not because I intentionally lied or faked it. Fear of external rejection prevented me from exhibiting my true identity. If I didn’t provide my family with a big house, new cars, and enough to put my kids through college, I would not be valuable to them. 
As we walk toward the adult version of ourselves, too often we allow the world to coerce us into how we show up in life. A child-like voice continues to whisper in our ears, wondering when we will stop, turn around, and hear them asking, “Do you know who you truly are?” I was gifted with unpleasant surprises from birth, before finally being forced to face my own inner and outer adversaries that had been scaring me into living a life I wasn’t actively choosing. When we pause to answer the question of our true identity long enough to find words beyond a yes or a no, we get to identify what is genuine and distinct about ourselves. Every moment I denied myself the chance to hear what was being asked of me spiritually, the time and energy I spent living out of congruence with my authentic self stood between a false “persona” and what I now know to be me in my most authentic form. Like the scene in The Lion King where Mustafa comes down from the heavens to tell his son Simba, “Remember who you are,” many of us have forgotten that we are more than what we have become. 
What has to happen for us to mend this false conditioning and cure ourselves from the belief there's something wrong with us so we can restore our truth? It took me facing many wake-up calls, a few near-death experiences, and getting sick before I finally woke up to the fact that I had to bring what I was doing into alignment with what I said I wanted. 
The reason I waited, I believe, was to be here to help you do what I resisted for so many years. Listen to your mind, body, and spirit so you can heal before you get sick like I did, or if you are sick like I was, know that it’s never too late to mend what ails you. The moment we begin paying attention can be the moment that we transcend our fear-based reality and trade it in for a life of using our pain and trauma in the service of others. It’s never too late or too soon.
How far will you go before you decide to ask “Why?” again and discover purpose and meaning in the answers?
If I hadn’t gotten sick three times, I would have considered myself lucky to have overcome the symptoms of a mystery illness that plagued me for two years, and stopped there. I would have only gone as deep as the shallow end would take me. When I was diagnosed with cancer, illness forced me to tread new, more treacherous waters, take bigger risks to heal myself, and face down emotional blockades I might have otherwise kept at bay. The morning I discovered that the cancerous lump in my throat had returned, less than a year after the doctors told me I was in remission, I realized I had been swimming with spiritual sharks that threatened to keep me in a corporate cage. If I stayed, I knew that I would continue to suffocate valuable parts of me that are now employed to help others.
I’ve had the chance to shine a light on the shadows of my life and use what I found to heal the profound emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual barriers blocking my truth. Eventually, I understood that if I stayed and committed to the process of figuring out what was making me sick, I could pick up that small child who was begging me to notice him. By doing so, I finally found the pleasure of knowing what it feels like to sit with the essence of my purpose, the being aspect of the way I now so boldly choose to live my life.
It took that child morphing into a man who was wrought with mystery illness and cancer for me to realize that I was facing a massive opportunity to rid myself of an obstruction in the form of a cancerous lump in my throat. I freed my voice, and I get to use it to help others heal and transform their existence into something genuine and heart-centered. I have found extraordinary ways to heal myself from different angles, to get to the root of what had caused me to become ill. What I first discovered in the process is that the core of my suffering was in living a life I somehow allowed to be built for me instead of building it myself. After that, I confronted the fact that anything I didn’t like, I could in fact change. Resisting the idea that I had a choice fell to the wayside, as I approached every moment as a chance to exercise the freedom to direct the course of my life.
Between the ages of three and five, children study others intensively. They begin grouping people by their physical attributes, wondering where they fit in, and asking questions about their differences. At this point in childhood, the false information and stereotypes compound over time. What about before we meet the world or even begin developing in our mother’s womb? 
Both subtle and startling moments can have the biggest impact on our identity. In my case, I discovered that some things that affected who I would become happened before conception. It wasn’t until my mother lay on her deathbed that she explained to me why one of my grandmothers never treated me lovingly. This revelation made me realize that the person I had defined as myself for nearly fifty years was a fabrication shaped by the perceptions and projections of others. 
After my twin siblings were born and before I was in utero, my mother nearly bled to death from a tubal pregnancy that did not come to fruition. With only one fallopian tube, when she became pregnant with me, her life was threatened again. Despite what my mother had been through and the risks she would face once again, my parents made a conscious decision to try for a fourth child. This time, the baby, later known as me, would survive, and thankfully, so would my mother. When I came out of the womb, parts of my identity were already being determined through the turn of events that occurred when my conception was merely a thought on the surface, but outwardly a death threat to my mother’s life.
As early as I can remember, there was always tension between my father’s mother, Grandma Ingrid, and me. On the other hand, my Mother’s Mom, Grandma Olivia, nurtured me and considered me a miracle after all my mother had endured. She even said I was a savior to her because my birth brought her happiness after her husband, my Grandfather, passed away.
My mother shared that Grandma Ingrid challenged my mother’s enthusiasm for her pregnancy. “You were denied a child once before. Why would you consider risking your life again?” She thought my parents were irresponsible for going forward with the pregnancy. Even though she wasn’t much for church, she conveniently stated that God had made it clear they should never have tried to have another baby.
To Grandmother Ingrid, I was not a risk worth taking. To Grandmother Olivia, I was a miracle baby. Thus I was born as a contradiction, thought of by my two grandmothers as both a living reminder of my mother’s perceived defiance of the Lord’s will and a symbol of new life after my grandfather’s death. Realizing this reminds me of the saying, “You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” My innocence, and maybe yours too, was compromised before I took my first breath. Even though I had been a practitioner of the healing arts for several years, it wasn’t until my mother shared this with me as a fifty-four-year-old man that I could make complete sense of how early my false sense of identity had begun to take form.
Of course, as a small child I could not make sense of these things. I had always felt internal friction from a persistent unanswered question that I kept to myself until that conversation with my Mother. 
Why didn’t Grandma Ingrid love me? 
My Mother’s answer? “Because you were born.” 
While this might seem unfair, the answer set me free. Knowing the history, I now knew that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t want to be a death threat to my mother or the messiah in the wake of my Grandfather’s death. I wanted a chance to be myself. The stamp of the rescuer eventually led to me showing up as a “fixer” in my intimate relationships, forming a belief that I could buy myself love. The feeling of being a burden unfolded into the constant consideration that something was wrong with me, leading to being a bullied kid with low self-worth who girls constantly rejected.
Grandma Olivia loved and accepted me. Grandma Ingrid didn’t. 
I concluded that love was conditional. Knowing that I had internalized that I had to earn love was what I needed to reconstruct my true identity. Often, I thought that if I could just be me, everyone would love me, but I learned to change my way of being, depending on the audience or the person I was entertaining. Instead of deep love, I was seeking broad acceptance. 
Despite knowing I hated spending time with Grandma Ingrid, as the youngest of four by six years, when my parents needed a vacation, they shipped me off to stay with her. She lived in the same house her whole life. Filled with relics of the past, when I visited, she forced me to nap on horse-hair mattresses that had a smell I can only pinpoint as musty. Dating back to when my dad was born, it’s no wonder the bed was so uncomfortable. The scent and the coils that I could feel on my back made sleeping difficult. She would plant me in front of the television when I wasn't on the mattress. 
On one of my visits, I watched an episode of the bizarre 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Sitting in front of the television on the floor, I recall watching “The Child Catcher Scene.” A creepy, pale-faced stranger wearing a top hat decorated with fake red and yellow flowers was jingling a bell, luring the children to follow him by dangling a bouquet of lollipops in his hand. “Come along, kiddie winkies,” he said as he danced toward his horse and carriage. The children walk with him, entranced by promises of free ice cream and lollipops. Arriving at what looks like a circus tent, he lures them inside. Once they walk through the door, he locks it and unveils that the tent is an illusion. Watching them kidnapped and trapped in a cage reminded me of how I felt at Grandma Ingrid’s house. Looking back on it now, it’s an appropriate metaphor for the empty promises made by the fear-based world that fool us into thinking that accumulating material things makes love and happiness more attainable.
On another occasion, when Ingrid left me in the living room to watch television by myself, she turned on a show I had no interest in watching and left the room. Naturally, I got up to change the channel and chose to watch soccer. Returning to the room, she began screaming at me for touching the television. “This is my house,” I recall these words and the homesickness and loneliness I felt at that moment. Turning off the TV, she left me alone for the night with no toys and no human connection.
These seemingly small moments left me feeling abandoned, lonely, and sure that I had done something wrong by existing. Before I turned five, my false identity was building insulation for the drywall installation. Little did I realize that surrounding my castle of insecurity was a moat infested with illness. Brick by heavy brick, layers of false narratives based on subtly damaging experiences were molded together, forming who I thought I was. 
My feelings with Grandma Ingrid were also present in other memories with different family members. I was increasingly afraid to make a mistake, because I felt like one simply by being there. Not only that, but the dynamic at home, especially between my father and us kids, was unpredictable. He often yelled at us for making mistakes.
My dad taught physics and kept a toolbox of different gadgets. One of them was a battery tester. In those days, the batteries were square, with two latches connected to whatever device they were powering. Finding the tester, I thought it looked like a night light, because it had a light bulb attached to it that would illuminate to signal that the battery was full. Living in Switzerland, our power was 220 volts, and the tester was nine volts, but I was five years old and did not remotely understand science.
Excitedly, I ran to my room to plug in the new nightlight. When I pushed it into the socket, a loud “Boom!” sounded, and the power went out in the house. Immediately, I feared my dad would come screaming at me. To avoid him, I ran and hid under the bed, hoping they wouldn’t realize I was the one who caused the problem. I can’t remember how long I stayed there, but I recall it being hours. Eventually, my sister found me. “Hey, come out of there,” she said. I resisted, telling her I was worried I would get beaten. “He’s not mad, Simon,” she said softly. 
Sitting in front of my dad after my sister coerced me to slide out from under the bed, he explained to me that he was worried that I could’ve electrocuted myself. To my surprise, he was tender and loving toward me. My fear had been implanted from prior experiences. When the nightlight blew up in my face, all I could think was that I was the cause of everything that went wrong. I thought that I would be scolded and left alone as punishment. Hiding under the bed would temporarily keep me from being blamed for, once again, screwing up.
The story of who I was before I was born created a kid who considered himself a burden, and thus began the stories I would continue to tell myself. Looking back on it, hiding under the bed after the whole house went dark was when I started storing my emotions in places that felt safe. Minor blips of memories and scenes from our lives can tell us much about who we truly are. I don’t tell you these moments to encourage living in the past; instead, I hope that you draft a new narrative of your life, knowing that you can make new associations with your past. 
[READER REFLECTION]
The Formation of Your Identity Before Conception
What expectations do you believe were placed on your existence before you were born? 
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How have those expectations impacted how you show up emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually? 
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Imagine yourself free from the expectations of others, how do you see yourself showing up emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually?
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Now is a time to reset the internal workings of your health by understanding your past, so that you can heal yourself emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. The only way to release the experiences you have attempted to forget is to adjust your perspective, renew your priorities, and learn from what has been traumatic, harmful, or seemingly useless. At the intersection of authenticity and purpose, you will transcend fear, angst, and unease and discover the total capacity of your existence. By circling back in time to make good sense of the past, you will find out who you genuinely are. 

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