The Eli Effect Podcast #4

Eli Effect, mentors, self-actualization, therapy, Father Leo, Mr. Lyons, spiritual journey, shamanism, surrender, higher power

In his talk, Eli explores how an invisible, guiding force he calls the “Eli Effect” acts like a director in his life, steering him toward key mentors and transformative experiences. He reflects on how professional teachers, supportive spiritual leaders, and clinical colleagues provided critical guidance, unconditional acceptance, and practical help to shape his career as a therapist and help him self-actualize. Ultimately, he shares how even unconventional “mentors” like LSD and cocaine taught him profound spiritual lessons about altered states of consciousness, vulnerability, loss of control, and surrendering to a higher power.

The Nature of the Eli Effect and Early Mentors

• Eli describes the “Eli Effect” as a unseen force or “director” behind the scenes of his life that guides him toward purpose.
• Mentors serve as essential guides, teachers, and support systems that help individuals figure out their life path.
• Mr. Lyons, a junior college teacher and Eli’s first therapist, challenged Eli’s motivations and helped him uncover his internal desire to be a healer.
• Eli emphasizes that people do not simply choose their mentors; rather, mentors are drawn to people naturally.

Spiritual and Fatherly Guidance

• Father Leo, a pastor at St. Victor’s, acted as a vital father figure who offered Eli unconditional acceptance, confidence, and encouragement.
• Leo previously worked as a revolutionary in Panama fighting for change, which inspired Eli’s own internal “rebel” to stand up for his beliefs.
• Mentors often step in to fill emotional voids left by parents who were unable to provide proper validation.

Professional Growth and Clinical Mentors

• In his 20s, Eli focused on obtaining his Master’s degree in social work with the core goal of self-actualizing so he could effectively lead and help others heal.
• A hospital boss named John took Eli under his wing despite their different personalities.
• A clinical supervisor named Tom supported Eli for over two years as he launched his private practice.
• Dr. Alt generously shared his office space with Eli for free and co-signed insurance forms to help kickstart Eli’s career.

Unconventional Mentors and Lessons from Substances

• Eli views substances like LSD and cocaine as unconventional mentors that taught him necessary life lessons.
• LSD introduced him to altered states and visions, laying a foundation that activated 25 years later when he began practicing shamanic journeys.
• Cocaine forced Eli to face his own ego, lose control, and experience deep humility, shame, and vulnerability.
• Overcoming addiction taught Eli that he could not control everything and ultimately led him to embrace sobriety.

Surrender and Trusting the Universe

• True personal growth requires surrendering the ego to a higher power or greater universal consciousness.
• Embracing the mantra “Thy will be done” helps Eli navigate challenging life disruptions, such as severe storms and power outages.
• Eli urges listeners to remain open, trust the universe, and allow the “Eli Effect” to direct their lives.

Oh good morning. Back talking about the Eli Effect, my new favorite book. I’m blessed. So I’m going to add some more about chapter two, how the Eli Effect affected my younger years and early 20s and that and how it was working kind of like behind the scenes. You know, it’s like a director in a movie. You watch the movie and all the other people that are helping the movie, not just the director. But we watch the director directing things. No, we watch the actors, but we don’t know what’s going on to help them do what they do. Well, that’s the same thing to me. The Eli Effect or force or energy is like the director to our lives. We just got to be more open. And today I’m going to add some more about the mentors that showed up in my life. And this is a critical thing to talk about when you’re trying to figure out what your purpose is, because the mentors are guides. They’re teachers. They’re support people. They are people that will kick your butt when you need it. And mentors come in big sizes, little sizes, weird sizes, as I’m going to explain as we move on. So my second mentor was Mr. Lyons. He was a college teacher at the junior college I was going to. And he was really instrumental in guiding me into my career. He would challenge me, why do you want to do this? You know, this is crazy. You know, you got other things you could be doing. But through his challenges and that he he clarified for me why I wanted to help people. He helped me identify that healer inside of me that not only wanted to heal me, that wanted to help other people heal. And he was my first therapist, actually, the first person I went to to start working on some issues and that my dad’s drinking and my mom’s codependency and that. So Mr. Lyons just happened to be teaching at the college I decided to go to. And the thing with mentors is and they don’t always know it. They’re just drawn to you for some reason. So it’s not just us. We don’t pick our mentors. They say they pick us. And so for some reason he saw something in me. And so on. And so on that journey I met my third mentor, Father Leo, here father. We’ll get to that in a second. And Leo was the pastor at the school I went to grade school at. Okay, St. Victor’s. I’ll call it. Okay, well, St. Victor’s. Anyway, I probably started going back to church back then. And I ran into Father Leo. I forget how that worked. But we connected. Okay, this guy, he was amazing. He had a spark to him. He was very down to earth. And he kind of was drawn to me. And my brother. Okay, it wasn’t just me. But he liked the twins. And there were times we would get together once we got to know one another, play poker. Or pinnacle and that. But it was just fun being around Leo. Leo supported and encouraged me in my dreams. He believed in me. And that’s why I say father. He was like a father figure. Because my dad really never knew how to do that. Because I don’t think his dad taught him that. So Father Leo supported and encouraged me. He filled that father figure role and void. So in some ways, he filled, completed me by our connection. We were connected. You know, he was, what was he? He was there for my mother’s funeral in 91. So he was in my life for a long time. He wasn’t at the parish back then, but he came back to do that. But Leo was always there. His unconditional acceptance, no matter what, even if I was screwing up and doing stupid things, you know, chasing women and that. His unconditional acceptance gave me confidence and a healthy sense of pride. I wanted Leo’s acceptance. I wanted his praise. It’s what we need from our dads. But a lot of times our dads don’t do that. So perfect timing. Now, where did Leo come from? Well, he was in Panama for years. He was like the Martin Luther King in Panama, a revolutionist back there, helping wake up the government and all that. And it just so happens, he comes back, I guess his job there was done, and he ends up at our parish. So Leo inspired my rebel inside. You know, he stood up for things that he believed in. And that’s what we’ve got to do. You know, we’re laying down, we got to stand up and fight for what we believe in in this country, in this world. Okay, because we need that. So going on into my 20s, my focus primarily was to get a job in social work, and to get my master’s in social work. So in my 20s, once I quit the post office, I was at 23 and a half, was to get into school, focus on, I knew where I was going. Okay, I saw the carrot, I just had to get there, the goal in that. But that was a lot of my 20s. But the Eli effect was there guiding it. It helped me become aware, going back to school, and then finally getting a job once I graduated in the profession, was to help people self-actualize, myself and others. You know, there’s the sayings, I can’t take you any further than I’ve been. And that has motivated my brother and I in our practice a long time. I’m not going to suggest something for you to do if I haven’t done it or I’m not willing to do it. So by self-actualizing, you can help people do it. It’s like golf. Okay. I took golf lessons in my 40s. But anyway, if you don’t know how to golf, how can you give lessons or if you’re not good at it? So that’s what happens with us. When we self-actualize, we help others do it. We can lead them. And during this time, three other minor mentors showed up. I had a boss named John at the hospital I worked at as a social worker. He kind of took me under his wing. We had a weird relationship, but John, you know, he wasn’t as open as me, but he and I kind of got along. Then my first clinical supervisor, a guy named Tom, took me under his wing for about two, two and a half years when I started my practice, especially to be my clinical supervisor and to support it and believe in me. And then the third guy that showed up was Dr. Alt. Now I knew Dr. Alt working at the hospital I was working at. We just hit it off. You know how this stuff happens. And he was really wanting to support my dream and, you know, wanting to start a practice. So actually when I did start seeing clients, I was using his office at the beginning for free. And he allowed me to do that. Okay. It was just like, come on, come on in. Cause he had a lot of space in that. And then when I was able to get my license, I needed somebody to co-sign my insurance form. So Dr. Alt jumped in to do that. So these mentors, they will appear in your life to move you forward, to guide you. Do they know they’re doing this? No. Do we know they’re doing that? Not now I do, but at the time I was just grateful for all this and it would really help me. But without the mentors, I think we get stuck. We get lost. So what I said in the other video, when I talked about mentors, trust it, trust the universe, trust your Eli effect, that something is guiding this whole thing. It’s not a coincidence. You know, as I look back at this, some of these mentors, especially father Leo, and then I’ll get to one of my probably all time favorites, Rabbi Joel later, uh, in these talks, but they just come along and they help you. But we got to be open to that. So they can move us forward, wake us up, challenge us like Dr. Like Mr. Lyons did. Why do you want to be a therapist and all that? He really grilled me in that, but it helped me really crystallize it in my head. Why that was important to me. So I’m going to mention two other mentors that are kind of weird. So be ready for this. Could be experiences, could be like a mentor, a teacher. And the two I want to talk about is cocaine and LSD. They were different kind of mentors in my life, right? They were there to teach me something. So in my early twenties, I was dropping a lot LSD and I just love the heck out of it. But at the time I didn’t realize what it was doing for me. You would get altered. You’d get visions. You know, you’d hallucinate sometimes. Little did I know that down the road, when I got into shamanism, that my experiences with being altered with through LSD was going to enable me to do what they call shamanic journeys into the spirit realm or non-ordinary reality is the real thing for this. So my LSD experiences was waking that up in me. And it laid dormant for 25 years until I did my first journey, probably when I was like 46. So probably 25 years, but it woke something up in me. It’s like, I really like this. So LSD was kind of like a mentor, but I didn’t know it at the time. Cocaine was a different kind of mentor. It taught me, it brought me to being vulnerable, to learn how to surrender, to become very humble. And it taught me lessons I couldn’t have found without it. I talk a lot about this and I learned this from Rabbi Joel. In this reality, duality, good, bad, right or wrong, this or that, there’s always a front side and a back side. So the back side to my cocaine experience was ugly. Okay. It was very humbling, horrible, shameful, et cetera, et cetera. But as I look back at it, once I got sober, cause that’s the key, you got to get sober and say goodbye to it. So it was really a great mentor. It taught me a lot. It taught me how to finally surrender to my higher power. Okay. When I got sober at 36, because I thought I was a higher power, you know, the ego and Joe Dispenza talks a lot about the ego, how you don’t want to eliminate it, but you don’t want to driving your life bus. You know, it helps you survive in that. But when the ego takes over, your life can be, it’s a mess. It’s, you’re going to crash and burn. So the cocaine helped me experience the loss of control. You guys, we don’t control anything here, but we think we do. And what I learned through my cocaine experiences, I had no control over it. I’d say, I’m not going to do it. I’m done, blah, blah, blah, and all that. And that night I’m calling my friend to get some more. I had no control over it until I finally surrendered and accepted. I had no control, which was very humbling. But that was one of the important things that my mentor cocaine taught me. I had to become more humble and become more vulnerable. I hated being out of control with it. But ever since then, it’s helped me to realize that. And believing in a higher power, and you can call it whatever you want. I’m not a big fan of the G word, because people think of beards and things like that. But believing in something greater, whether it’s the quantum field, consciousness, etc., etc. Eventually, you start to surrender to it. And one of my favorite mantras that has stuck with me since I got sober was, “Thy will be done.” So my “thigh” is my “thigh.” Your “thigh” could be your “thigh.” Okay? It doesn’t matter what the “thigh” is. But every time I get into a situation and I know the feeling inside, okay? I want to run or I want to try to control it. Okay? “Thigh will be done.” I don’t get it. You know, we just went through a horrendous storm here in Northwest Indiana last week. We lost power. internet. You know, houses are still, you know, getting through the trees falling and that. “Thigh will be done.” God only knows. I was talking to my cousin Michael this morning about this and we both noticed since this happened, there’s been a shift of energy for both of us, but I’m sure other people are feeling it. So whatever, whatever we experience that, “Thigh will be done.” Our job is to figure it out. What can, how can I grow from this? So when you think about mentors, they’re there to go. I’m going to guide you and teach you and wake you up. And Eli had a lot of great mentors. There’s going to be some more coming, but these were the early ones in my late teens, Mr. Conway in my twenties. All these people started showing up. It’s amazing, but you got to be open guys. You got to trust it. And the more you are open and trusted and be humble and surrender, like I had to do. And that’s why cocaine helped me so much. And LSD took me to another reality that I didn’t even know existed. not ordinary reality. Right here, right now, we just can’t see it unless you know how to journey or open your third eye and you’ll see all kinds of things that are here. So this is kind of like how the Eli Effect was affecting me underneath everything as my director to direct me to these wonderful mentors and opportunities and experiences. All right, I’ll be in touch to talk more about the Eli Effect of my younger life, early life, and that. And all I’ll ask you guys to do is spread the word about this, not only about the book. The book is amazing. I’ve been told, I wrote it, so I don’t want to say that, but it’s really been helping people. But talk about the podcast, too, because I explain it in more depth. Okay, be good. Enjoy your day. Bye-bye.