Gay Hendricks is a legend in the personal development space. We are honored to have him here to talk about his work and his new book – which is fantastic!
About Gay Hendricks
Gay Hendricks has served for more than 40 years as one of the significant contributors to relationship transformation and body-mind therapies. A New York Times Best Selling author, Dr. Hendricks’ books include Conscious Loving and The Big Leap.
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Gay grew up in central Florida with swamps and alligators during the pre-Disney era. “I remember my mother was the mayor of Leesburg, so we were prominent citizens since the turn of the last century.” Gay’s grandparents were the founders of the town. “I grew up in a town where everybody knew everybody else.”
He now resides in small Ohio town with his wife of 40 years, Katie. “We found our dream house here 20 years ago. It’s a long way from where I started.”
Gay tells the story of growing up with a glandular problem. Putting on weight faster than a normal baby should, by the end of the first year of life, he was an obese baby. “It was kind of weird because in my family, everybody else was skinny.” His family took him to different specialists because they knew something was wrong and found out he had pituitary and thyroid imbalance.
The Enlightenment Experience for Gay Hendricks
When he was 24, he had an enlightening experience that changed his life. “I weighed around 300 pounds and was in a terrible relationship that I was trying to get out of.” He was also in a job he didn’t like. “All systems were wrong in my life and I was right for a transformation. Unfortunately it happened.” Gay had an accident where he fell hard on his back and knocked himself out of consciousness for about two minutes where he saw things that he had never seen before. “I could feel all of these feelings I’d never tapped into before things I was angry and sad about.”
“I could feel layers of joy and happiness that I never let myself feel and way down at the bottom of everything though, at the center of everything, I could feel what I now call pure consciousness, which is this gift that we’re given just by virtue of being here. It’s our being, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the programming.”
At that moment, Gay realized that he could redesign his life no matter what happened in the past.
At age 24, Gay redesigned his life and lost more than a hundred pounds over the course of a year, removed himself from the troubled relationship, and found his life’s work. “All of these amazing things happened out of that one moment of opening up this creative space that I never realized I had.”
From this point forward, his life was about helping other people find that space in themselves, the place from which you can redesign your life, according to your standards and specs and how you want it to be.
“We don’t realize that we could go all the way and have our dreams come true.” Gay lives by the mantra to do what you are here to do, to bring forth your genius, which is the sacred task of human beings.
Gay Hendricks New Book: The Genius Zone
His new book, The Genius Zone, is about the giant leap. In his book, Dr. Hendricks shows you how to jump into your genius zone and how to live and make your home there. “I think it’s really the only satisfying, true home. Even if you live in a dream house, like I do it wouldn’t be home unless I was in my genius too.”
How We Inherit our Upper Limit Problem
For 30 years, Gay had been thinking about what he called the ‘upper limit problem,’ which he defines as a situation starting to get better awakening fears in us. We usually find a way to self-sabotage by creating what Gay calls an upper limit problem, “where we get sick, have an accident, create an argument or find some way to mess up that knocks us back down to where we were before.”
He recommends you accustom yourself to better and better things going on for longer and longer periods. “When I got together with Katie 40 years ago, we realized we started catching onto this upper limit problem in our relationship.”
“You can think of an upper limit problem like an allergy. You get to a certain place in your life, and it knocks you out of the space you were in.” he relates to the upper limit to a glass ceiling that you can’t see but need to move past. “Even though the original barrier may have been there from when you were a child, those moments put a crimp in our ability to access and feel the flow of our organic creative genius.”
In his book The Big Leap, Gay shows you that underneath the upper limit problem is fear because when you start to shine a little bit in the outer world, you find some way to mess it up because unconsciously, you’re afraid that you’re stealing light and love from other people.
Where Gay Hendricks Receives His Inspiration
Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Gay recognizes when Fuller was at the bottom of his rope. “He kind of bottomed out and went into a deep depression and didn’t think he was gonna make it on this planet and everything he’d done failed.”
One day at a moment of desperation, he made a new deal with the universe. He decided to use all of his design skills to create advantages for other people. And in return for dedicating his life, he wanted to be supported in a place where he didn’t have to think about money all the time. Ever since that moment, he was a living embodiment of creative expansion. Gay says he has been blessed with the same.
Understanding Creative Energy and Abundance
“Once you understand where creative energy comes from and you make your commitment to bringing that forth more every day the miracles start to happen.”
Gay says that once you dedicate yourself to creating more abundance in your life, you’ll experience a bit of a bumpy ride until the flow of positive energy happens. Experiencing his best creative flow when he is entirely giving or receiving, Gay realizes that those who don’t experience the receiving aren’t good at contributing. “I found that once you get that balance of giving and receiving you’ll find yourself in a delicious space.”
“Creativity comes when you’re doing what you most love to do in a way that makes the biggest contribution to people around you, to your community, to the world.” Grant emphasizes that you’re a genius who might serve a small niche, but it’s your genius that’s going to make a difference out there in the world.
“Genius can be seen and appreciated and when you bring forth more of that, even 10 minutes a day, I promise you you’ll never regret it.” Dr. Hendricks has been practicing.
Commit and Recommit to Your Creative Goals
Dr. Hendricks says that re-commitment is as important as commitment. “Falling off the wagon is as natural and organic as getting on the wagon in the first place.” He reminds us that making mistakes is an integral part of the process. “What happens oftentimes if you fall short, miss your goal, or wander off onto some other goal, it’s because there is an older, unconscious commitment that has power over your conscious one and the way you have.”
Breaking the Habit of Our Everyday Thoughts
Gay says, “Not being able to relax into serenity keeps our minds busily pumping out worried thoughts as a matter of habit.” His advice is to focus on your thinking and how to unhook your negative review.
We tend to crank out thousands of thoughts a day about the past, over which we have no control. Or we think negative thoughts about the future, although we have no control over it.
The art of living comes from opening up and realizing that much of your energy has been spent in your mind and your body and your life, trying to control things you have absolutely no control over. As you open that up and relax the grip of that control, you open up a space of creative, positive energy that takes you into places you can’t predict.