From Near-Death to Sacred Ground: Tom Eddington on Redefining What It Means to Be Human

Written By Andrew Cohn

At 44, Tom Eddington's life came to a screeching halt. Bacterial meningitis attacked his brain and spinal fluid, leaving him bedridden for 18 months and housebound for four years. He lost his health, income, identity, and eventually his wife. Everything he had built seemed to disappear.

Then he made a choice: look for another way.

That decision took Tom from Zen meditation in California to private meetings with the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis, and eventually to a sacred mountain in Colombia, where he experienced what he describes as extrasensory perception and the ability to move objects with his thoughts.

On this episode of Spirituality in Leadership, Andrew Cohn sits down with Tom, a former global management consultant, filmmaker, executive coach, and co-host of the State of the World Forum. Tom traces the 22-year cycles that have shaped his life, from growing up in a tent without electricity to becoming a partner at a leading consulting firm, then surviving an illness that changed how he understood being human.

Tom explains why he stopped thinking of the brain as the center of everything and began working with what he calls five bodies: physical, energetic, psychological, social, and spiritual. He also shares what he experienced with the Tairona people in Colombia, what Bhutan taught him about Gross National Happiness, and how these experiences changed the way he works with CEOs.

Listen to the full episode to hear Tom's story and explore what his experiences might reveal about leadership, consciousness, and the possibilities of being human.

Key Takeaways

  • A life-changing crisis can force us to question the identities and assumptions we take for granted.

  • Being human involves physical, emotional, social, energetic, and spiritual dimensions.

  • Spirituality can begin with curiosity about what it means to be fully human, regardless of religion.

  • Purpose can guide career, relationship, and life decisions.

  • Nature can deepen our sense of connection and challenge how we understand the world.

  • Leaders should examine what they believe and why.

  • Wealth can mean more than money and material possessions.

  • Conscious leadership begins by honestly examining how we live and what we value.

  • A fulfilling life requires looking beyond consumption, acquisition, and conventional measures of success.

In This Episode:


  • [00:00] Dynamic Intro

  • [00:40] Introduction to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast

  • [01:29] Meet Tom Eddington and his remarkable path

  • [06:31] Building a career in consulting, M&A, and "living large"

  • [08:14] Losing his identity, and losing his wife

  • [09:00] Three choices after Western medicine reached its limits

  • [10:02] The five bodies: physical, energetic, emotional, social, spiritual

  • [12:24] Meeting his Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, and a Hindu saint

  • [16:14] The three touchstones behind every major decision

  • [18:37] Richard Bolles and the "three missions in life"

  • [22:19] The documentary Under Our Skin and its impact on Lyme disease awareness

  • [23:08] Serving breakfast to people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco

  • [25:00] Becoming "untethered" after loss

  • [28:26] Ceremony with the Tairona people in Colombia

  • [30:12] Training in clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis

  • [31:00] Two and a half weeks in Bhutan for the State of the World Forum

  • [37:35] Where to find Tom's books, films, and podcasts

  • [39:18] Final thoughts

Resources and Links

Spirituality in Leadership Podcast

Tom Eddington

Andrew Cohn

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Transcript 

Tom Eddington: And then at 44, everything came to a screeching halt. I get an invitation to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama and was able to see objects 20 and 30 feet away without my eyes, to move objects, physical objects, with my thoughts. I woke up on the second day of the course realizing literally everything is possible.

We truly are facing a once in a species moment, and we're being called, each of us, as human beings, as leaders, to do an honest assessment of how are we living our lives?

Andrew Cohn: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn. Spirituality in Leadership is a platform for conversations with leaders at all levels about bringing our spiritual dimensions to our leadership, our teams, our workplaces, and all areas of our lives in order to achieve greater success and fulfillment and build and sustain healthier organizations.

If you'd like to connect with me to talk further about these topics and or about individual or team coaching, leadership workshops or team alignment, please go to my website, lighthouseteams.com. Enjoy the podcast.

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Tom Eddington. Tom is really a unique man in the experience that he's had and the way he has lived his life. Perhaps not unique, but really quite a remarkable path. He grew up in a traditional way, and he shares a lot of this, of his story in the podcast. I'm super fortunate about his sharing with us some of his experience and what had led him to a traditional experience growing up as he described it, going to school, getting a corporate job, et cetera. Although he did talk about some of the experiences that occurred in his life as a result of how he was living as a child for eight years, which he talks about in the podcast. But, and how at the age of forty-four, he contracted a very serious illness, near death, that basically removed everything that was happening in his life and needed to start over in his late forties and then what he decided to do with that awareness, with that second chance, if you will, the, his spiritual journey and some of the things that he just, were, found along the way and that found him along the way, and whether he is working with corporate clients, helping to create and produce documentaries, helping to create and host the State of the World Forum, traveling around the world.

And he talked at length about his experience in Colombia with indigenous people earlier this year and then in Bhutan. He's involved in global projects as well as corporate boardroom advising. Tom's a remarkable guy with a remarkable story. I feel fortunate that he told some of that story on the podcast, and I know that you will find it fascinating, as I did.

Welcome to the podcast, Tom Eddington. I'm so pleased to have you on the show. We've been connecting for, I guess about the last nine, twelve months or so, and you've had some travels and interesting stories which perhaps you may choose to discuss. But you're a pioneer in this space as far as I'm concerned. How you can do that without being old is a mystery to me, so I appreciate that. But thank you for being here, and I, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Tom Eddington: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Delighted to be here with you and look forward to the conversation as well.

Andrew Cohn: Yeah, cool. So your background is, you know, you've been in the corporate space, you've been in, in the movie business, you've been in the not-for-profit world and many, many, many other dimensions as well, and there does seem to be a thread of deep purpose and meaning to what you do. Those might not be the right words, but you're nodding. And so my sense is that for you, this connection between what we might call spiritual as broadly defined and leadership and work in the world is something that goes way back for you. Is that fair to say?

Tom Eddington: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Cohn: And how would you describe your operating in this space for so many years in different ways on the business side, on the nonprofit side, on the creative side? I'm sure you have stories to tell, but if we could, maybe we start at the beginning with... Not that this is going to be a two-hour recording, because it's not, but maybe we start at the beginning and what led you to be working in this space, particularly when moving from one sector of the economy or sector of work to another?

Tom Eddington: Yeah. I was asked to do a ninety-minute talk about, I guess it was almost two years ago now. And as I was preparing to my talk, I was just reflecting on my life and my life's journey, and I had a bit of insight that was unexpected to me that I had lived my life in twenty-two-year segments or cycles or iterations. Some of it conventional, some of it not so conventional, but none of it planned and it really helped me make meaning of my life in a way I hadn't thought about it before. And what was particularly useful what-- about it was I was coming to the end of my third 22-year cycle and starting to think about my next 22-year cycle of my life.

And so my, you know, my first 22 years was in some ways just like everybody else. I grew up in a family. I went to school, went on to college. It was unconventional in that my parents made some choices that were unconventional, so we found ourselves living in a tent in Michigan for an eight-year period.

Andrew Cohn: That's fairly unconventional, I would say. Okay.

Tom Eddington: No electricity, no phone, no running water, outdoor toilets, you know, all of the, the things that made life really challenging for a kid from age eight to 16. But what it did do was it really connected me deeply to nature. It connected me deeply to the land in a way that my, you know, my classmates, my neighbors, and others didn't have that experience. And I ran cross-country and track in high school and college, and so that continued to keep me connected to the land in a, in a deep way and, and to, to nature without a spiritual frame. But if one is in nature and spends time in nature, and, you know, as a kid, I would get up in the morning, and I wo- would wander off and literally be gone all day long in nature, and it just, it gave me a deep, deep relationship and connection to Gaia.

Went on to a business career starting in New York City, became a partner at a global management consulting firm, did the largest transactions and mergers and acquisitions in the financial services and IT and energy sectors, and, you know, was living large by anybody's standards.

Andrew Cohn: Oh, wait, not in a tent, you mean?

Tom Eddington: Not in a tent.

Andrew Cohn: Okay

Tom Eddington: Just checking and just, ha- having a, a life that was separated from my childhood in, in terms of separated from nature and, you know, we would do family vacations in nature and I loved hiking, but it was a very different existence. I mean, I had a number of years where I was on a plane three to five days a week traveling all over Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and it was a very rich and fulfilled life. And that was the second 22 years of my life. And then at 44, I everything came to a screeching halt. I had, I'd gotten sick. I had contracted a bacterial infection that went into my brain and in my spinal fluid. I ended up in the hospital with meningitis and was at a point where I was... to this day, I'm still surprised I didn't die. 95% of people die from bacterial meningitis and I was bedridden. I was attached to an IV pole for eighteen months, basically housebound for a, for better part of four years. And everything came to an end. My health, my income, my life as I knew it, and more profoundly, deeply than I, I realized at the time, was my identity.

My identity was my income, my role as a partner in a, in a global management consulting firm, the client work I was doing, the business transactions I was doing, being a husband and a, and a parent. And during that time period, my wife got sick and passed away, and I became a widower, and my youngest child was sick. And everything that I knew up to that point came to an end. And I spent roughly four years bedridden and not, not able to really function in the world. And when I got back on my feet to a point where my physician after eighteen months said he had done everything he could do for me from a Western medicine perspective, and I essentially had three choices.

Choice one was to accept that was my lot in life. And if zero was dead and ten was perfect health, I was a five on a really good day, which meant I just sat on the couch and didn't do anything. Option two was to take my own life, which was the leading cause of death of what I was suffering from. And option three was to look for alternatives.

And I chose option three, thank goodness. And I had to explore you know, what does it actually mean to be human? What is my mental model of what it means to be human? And I realized I had spent the, you know, previous twenty-two years of my life being valued for what was in my skull brain. That's what I got paid for. It's what my clients valued. And as a former, you know, athlete in high school and college, this frame was to transport this brain around.

And so I had to take a big step back and say, "What, what does it really mean to be human?" And in the conversations with my doctor, recognizing that Western medicine had taken me as far as it could take me.

And so I started exploring alternatives and recognizing, I mean, it, it sounds simplistic now, all these years later, to better well over two decades later, that, yes, we have a physical body, and that's important, and it's part of what it means to be human. But we've got an energetic body. We've got a psychological, emotional body. We've got a social body, and we've got a spiritual body. And four of my five bodies were undeveloped or underdeveloped, and my physical body was severely impaired. And that launched me down a journey of spirituality Not in a religious sense, but in a sense of, all right, if we're a soul having a life experience in this body, what the hell does that mean beyond the cliché that gets bandied around a lot?

Andrew Cohn: So what was your framework, if any, up until that point? Or was it, you know, "I went to a talk at the library," or, "A friend of mine told me about a lecture being happening," or just what starts you on that... What you're talking about clearly, and it's a remarkable story of, like, what was pushing you into this inquiry, and I'm just curious to know, like, how did you know where to start?

Tom Eddington: My frame of reference was I was raised a Southern Baptist, and I went to a Methodist college. My wife was a recovering Catholic, and we got married in a Presbyterian church, and that was my frame of reference. Spirituality didn't mean anything to me-

Andrew Cohn: Mm-hmm ...really?

Tom Eddington: I had no relationship with spirituality.

But I created this new frame of thinking about what does it mean to be human and then got curious. And I was living in the Bay Area at the time, and there was a Zen center around the corner from my house, so I started going to Zen meditation classes at Spirit Rock. A mindfulness meditation center was around the corner.

I started going there for teachings, doing weekend retreats, and then I went to a, a week-long retreat that had a Buddhist Rinpoche, a variety of shamans, therapists, all kinds of different modalities throughout the week, and it was like the magic factory for me. Every single day, I experienced things that defied my understanding of reality. And I came back from that experience, was introduced to Bente Rinpoche, who became my teacher, and I just set this intention, "I'm going to develop my spiritual body, whatever the hell th- that means." And shortly after meeting the Rinpoche and, and beginning studying with him, I get an invitation to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Andrew Cohn: Okay. Welcome to the party.

Tom Eddington: And so I have an encounter with, with His Holiness. It was extraordinary, as was my experiences with Rinpoche. And then fast-forward a year later, I get an invitation to meet with Pope Francis and have a profound encounter with Pope Francis, and a couple of years later, I get a phone call that there was a Hindu saint in the Bay Area, and she needed a place to stay to spend  a weekend doing a silent retreat. I offered my house, and she ended up staying in my house for six weeks, and I was of service to her for six weeks.

Andrew Cohn: Wow. Well, I must say, for someone who is new on the journey, you are very well-connected, Tom. That helps.

Tom Eddington: And so I just, I had a series of, I mean, just absolutely profound, beyond my imagination, beyond anybody I ever encountered or have encountered that had these kinds of experiences. And, you know, having several private meetings with the Oracle of Tibet over the years and getting invited back to Rome to meet with Pope Francis again before he passed. And it's been an extraordinary journey that I can't explain away, and, and part of me, I don't, I don't need to. I just recognize that there's this thing in our society here in the West we call spirituality, and it's a field that is extraordinary. It's life-changing. It's magical. And if we can allow ourselves to get out of our rational mind, our left brain, and step into another dimension of reality, it fulfills so many aspects of what it means to be human. It makes life richer. And, in the executive coaching work I've been doing now for a better part of fifteen years, I meet my clients where they are. Most of my clients are CEOs, and I, I meet them where they are, and I invite them to add this dimension if, if they don't have a spiritual practice, to bring that into their lives. And the clients I work with, it's transformed them, their organizations, their, their teams, and their relationship with their family and, and friends.

Andrew Cohn: So a few thoughts. One is I appreciate how... it seems like so much has happened for you. So in this one cycle of twenty-two years, you've had a lifetime, uh worth of- ... experiences and perhaps more. It's just magnificent. It's a remarkable story and, and you know, to be continued. And so when you talk about inviting your clients, 'cause this is-- I'm typically working in the corporate space as well, and the question always comes up is, is how?

So I invite my clients into this inquiry, and I'm curious to know how you do that because I'm sure you've learned ways. How do you attune yourself as an instrument to be attuned to your clients? But how do you invite them into this conversation, particularly if, like many people, and perhaps including yourself from some years ago, you don't have a framework. You don't even know what you're being invited into. So how can that... How is it most likely to work on a very practical level? Again, forgive me for being... I don't wanna be too solidly left brain, but I do wanna be practical for my listeners, who are, for the most part, are working in the business world, and how can we integrate these spaces?

Tom Eddington: Yeah, a couple of things. So when I got back on my feet,  I affectionately call it re-entered the world of the living after four years of not being able to function, opportunities started showing up, and I took another step back and said, "All right, I dodged a bullet. I'm still alive. I don't know how much time I'm gonna have left." But I want to do everything I possibly can to make the world a better place before I die. And so that became part of my touchstone.

Andrew Cohn: Was... It sounds like, if I could use these words, it sounds like just a super clear intention.

Tom Eddington: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Cohn: Just born by severe circumstance.

Tom Eddington: Yeah. The second intention was to do that, make the world a better place, with people I admired, I respected, I trusted, I wanted to hang out with. And the third intention was I had a hell of a lot to offer, so I always wanted to be in a position where I could teach. But I'm curious. I love to learn, and so I wanted to be in a position where I could continue to learn and grow. And those three touchstones became my filter for all of my decisions, everything  I've done with my life since then. And being open to the possibilities of opportunities were all run through that filter And, you know, what, what I found was that as the opportunities presented themselves, I wasn't satisfied just make money. I wasn't satisfied to just do another project. It had to have real meaning and purpose just because of what I had gone through, 22 years of, you know, doing good consulting work, getting paid well for it. But as the old Bacharach song goes, "Is that all there is, Alfie?" I mean, there's, there's more to life.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm. Hmm.

Tom Eddington: And when one goes through a crucible of almost losing your own life, losing four years of ability to function, and having your spouse pass away, it's a wake-up call in a very serious way that I, you know, have shared with my clients. You don't wanna have to be faced with these sorts of things to wake the hell up.

Andrew Cohn: Yeah. It's really... I mean, the image I just had the way... when you described that again is sort of a, the scorched earth kind of thing. And the land, the, the land is barren here. What do you wanna plant? You know? Right. You, you don't just wanna put anything in the soil. All of a sudden it's like, "Wow, this, this matters." Are you familiar with Richard Bolle's book, How to Find Your Mission in Life?

Tom Eddington: No.

Andrew Cohn: I think it's Richard Nelson Bolles, the guy who wrote What Color is Your Parachute?

Tom Eddington: Yep. Yeah.

Andrew Cohn: And he's a very, very religious Christian man, and he wrote this little book called How to Find Your Mission in Life and it's a little book. I remember being in an evening class where we read the book and discussed the book, and if you don't mind my sharing this with you, he introduces the book and says, "We've all got three missions in life," and I'll read them to you, and I'd love to get your... "My first mission here on Earth is one which I share with the rest of the human race, but it's no less my individual mission for the fact that it is shared, and that is to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God the one from whom my mission is derived. The mission before the mission is the rule. In religious language, my mission is to know God and enjoy Him forever and to see His hand in all His works." That's the first mission. Again, very, coming from a very, very religious background for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yep.

I've shared this with clients in different ways and said, "Is this okay? Can you be okay with this?" It's a tool that I've used. So that's the first mission. "The second mission here on Earth is also one which I share with the rest of the human race, but it is no less my individual mission for the fact that it is shared.

And that is to do what I can moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guidance of God's Spirit within me and around me." So thank you. This is exactly what you're speaking about. And now he's coming at it from, again, a very religious place. But I, what I appreciate about this is that we can talk about this from a...

The prism's got a lot of different, you know, angles to it. Yeah. He's coming from a very religious place. But in a very practical way, it's what can I do to make the world a better place? It's very broad. So how can this be a bit more specific? Hence, the third mission. "My third mission here on life is one which is uniquely mine- And that is A, to exercise that talent which I particularly came to earth to use, my greatest gift, which I most delight to use. And perhaps for you, it was that curiosity, it's that learning and the teaching piece, as you said, because, you know, for you, you had to teach. B, in those places or settings which God has caused to appeal to me the most, right? So from his framework of, of religion, it's God has created these spaces in me that light me up the most. I don't know that that needs to be a religious space or something, but does that sound fairly aligned there, fairly consistent?

Tom Eddington: Yeah. Yep.

Andrew Cohn: And C, and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world. So where is it most needed? And my sense in knowing some of the work that you've done, you've modeled a willingness to just pivot. It's like, okay, well let's, let's jump out of this river, get up on the dock, and walk up there and make a movie or something like that to the places that appeal to you the most.

Tom Eddington: It's an interesting way to live one's life. When you're just open to, as S. Warren writes in the English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the opportunity of life is to serve, to give, to love. I think there's a fourth, which is to create.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm.

Tom Eddington: And if one can live their life from I'm of service, what can I give? Can I truly love myself and, and all around me? And where can I create? It opens up the palette for life in ways that, you know, we're not trained in our education system. It's not reinforced by the general society but it's incredibly fulfilling.

One of the first things I did after I got back on my feet was there was a filmmaker making a documentary film about the intersection of money, politics, and medicine in America, and the, the-- he was using Lyme disease as a metaphor. And I had just come off of four years of a profound life-altering experience of Lyme, and I said I, you know, "I'd, I'd love to help in any way. I've never made a film before. I've never been involved in a film project, but I'll help you." And the film made a-- made the shortlist for the Academy Awards for Best Documentary Film and was financially very profitable and over the next ten years profoundly changed Lyme disease in the medical community and society at large. And the film Under Our Skin has been wildly impactful on every level. And likewise, I got invited... I was living in the Bay Area at the time. I got invited to join a small group of two or three people who went to a Catholic church in the Mission District in the city on Friday mornings. We'd start at 6 AM preparing breakfast for sixty people having a homeless experience. And we would set up plates, cutlery, et cetera, make a homemade meal for up to a hundred. We would issue tickets for sixty. And after everybody was fed, we would just sit down, or every-everybody was served, we would sit down and just listen to their experiences and help them in the span of an hour and a half over breakfast have their, their humanity restored And I would leave at nine o'clock on a S- on a Friday morning in tears because my humanity was in-- was restored, being connected- Mm-hmm ... to, to other human beings. That's something that never would have occurred to me when I was working, doing what I was doing before. Hmm. And, you know, over the last, twenty-two years, the experiences I've had, whether it's making an additional seven films or doing podcasts or coaching work I do, the business advisory work I do,  you know, working in, in settings similar to, what I described, preparing homemade meals for people having homeless experience. It's all part of enriching one's life. And- Hmm ... you know, some people would call that a spiritual life. For me, it's just living life to its fullest.

Andrew Cohn: Wow. Yeah. I hear the story about working with the homeless, and I think about... I had some brief experiences with, with Cecil Williams and the Glide Church up there. And just an incredible, incredible group. But a w- beautiful thing. And the way this lands on me, Tom, is that, I don't know if this is a good way to put it. Forgive me if it's, if it's insensitive to call it this way, but you kind of like became untethered, right? It's like, because if the land is scorched, if the earth is scorched, there's just the roots are gone. And perhaps that experience provided for you the opportunity to be so flexible and so open. Now, but of course, not everybody takes advantage of that. I have deep, deep respect for that. It's sort of like, "Okay, I got a second chance here, and I'm gonna lean into the things that matter, and I'm not gonna be encumbered.

I don't have the burden of being encumbered the way other people are encumbered by ritual, routine, and, and X number of decades of being invested in something." You know, I sometimes talk in, in... Yesterday I did a... I was invited to talk a bit about my experience connecting a number of different dimensions in my life. And I said, "Well, I was glad that I didn't... I'd, I got out of my law practice just before I made partner, because I really would've been tethered there had I made partner." And that is a very, very, very, very minor and first world description of, you know, leaving something behind. But what you went through, for goodness sake, is you've had this incredible opportunity to be untethered, and sounds like you've really made the most of it. It's quite remarkable.

Tom Eddington: Absolutely. It's untethered, unencumbered. The experiences I've had, particularly the time period when I was profoundly ill and my wife was sick and passed away, I wouldn't wish that on anybody and yet it was the best gift I've ever gotten in my life.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm. So how can you, in working with clients in the business world or even perhaps making films together, I mean, you work with people, you engage people, without them having that experience upon which you would not wish them, if that's the right use of the words. How can you convey the opportunity to step into life and work that's more purposeful? What are some ways that you can talk about your experience that people can get it without obviously not living through it?

Tom Eddington: I always start with meeting people where they are. We all have our life's path. We all have our worldview. We all have our mindset. And so I just... I meet people where they are, and then I will put some thoughts out there. I'll share some stories. I mean, stories are, it's who we are as human beings. We're storytellers, and we all love a good story. And so I will meet people where they are. I'll share a story that's pertinent, relevant to their life, their moment in their life, and that typically is enough to open the door for a deeper conversation. And I'm very open about who I am, and so I tend to attract clients that are curious, that are interested, that are... see that there's something I have to offer. And so there's self-selection that goes on. And I'm fortunate that, you know, the folks who I have a chance to work with are curious, interested, and, and are open to learning.

Andrew Cohn: And if I may ask, a bit, a little bit of a pivot, what are you learning now? 'Cause you talked about curiosity and the love of learning, so what are you learning now at this particular point in time?

Tom Eddington: Yeah, there's a, there's a couple of things, and it comes off of the last two months of being on the road. In mid-March, I traveled to Colombia, and I spent a week in ceremony with the Tairona people. It's made up of four tribes. The most commonly known tribe of the four are the Kogi, who are quite prophetic. And I was invited there to go through a, a spiritual cleansing, and then got introduced to nature, and they shared prophecies with me as part of some work I'm doing with the State of the World Forum. And to experience a people who had disappeared for 500 years and only re-emerged about 40 years ago. And to experience, to, to be in community with a group of 28 elders, the males are called mamos, the females are called sagas. They are identified by their parents at conception as being a, a future saga or mamo, and so they're delivered in the darkness, and they spend the first 11 years of their life in a cave in the darkness.

Andrew Cohn: Wow, 11 years. Mm-hmm.

Tom Eddington: And it's from that experience that they develop extrasensory perceptions, and they develop a deep, deep connection with, I'll call it a field of consciousness where everything exists, past, present, and future. And they have the ability to connect with that field of consciousness. And so spending a week with them at 9,000 feet in northeastern Colombia with no, you know, no access to the outside world and just being in nature profoundly changed my understanding of the nature of reality. And then coming off of the, off of the mountain and the week with them, as part of the State of the World Forum, we were offering a course teaching people clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, and I had some profound experiences during the course where I had on a, a mindfold, a blindfold that was hard black plastic, had black foam like s-ski goggles, that was impenetrable to light and was able to see objects 20 and 30 feet away-

Andrew Cohn: Hmm ...

Tom Eddington: Without my eyes.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm.

Tom Eddington: To move objects, physical objects with my thoughts. I woke up on the second day of the course realizing literally everything is possible. And then finishing up the course and then getting on a plane and flying to Bhutan for two and a half weeks to find a location for the 2026 State of the World Forum, and having, you know, meetings with members of the royal family, government officials, the leadership of the monastic body, and having experiences that defy my understanding of how physics works, how, how I thought reality worked. I came back, having just arrived last night back home. It will probably take me the rest of this lifetime to fully integrate the past two months, but I'm learning that how and what I thought was reality and how reality works is fundamentally different than what is possible.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm. Well, first of all, thank you for keeping this time for this conversation. I knew you were away, but I didn't know quite all what it was, and I can only imagine, like, what's it like to get on a plane from Colombia to Bhutan and the sensory experience of being on a plane after having, you know, been through what you were going through. I mean, how do you manage that sort of transition?

Tom Eddington: After being I mean, literally, you know, waking up at 4:00 AM to the donkeys braying and the roosters crowing on the mountaintop in Colombia and getting up and doing a morning two-hour meditation practice under the most amazing sky that I've ever experienced. There was a rewiring going on in my nervous system, and part of it was by the time I left my week with the elders, I could feel my whole nervous system relax. That thank God these people exist. Thank God they're doing the work that they're doing for the repair of the planet and for the benefit of, of all life on Earth. It was an extraordinary experience that just allowed me to, you know, see the outside world as I had seen it before, to see it in a very different way. And then, you know, traveling 40 hours via Taipei and San Francisco, Bangkok to get to Bhutan, and then getting in a car and spending 12 hours after 40 hours of travel with no sleep to arrive in the Gela Fund Mindfulness City and seeing how the Bhutanese live, where any place that the wind blows, they've erected prayer flags. That the mountains are, are something you don't hike, you don't climb, you don't extract from. They're sacred beings. And to be in that culture was, you know, just further stretching my understanding of, of myself, how I was living my life, but also what's, what's possible. And similar to the experience in Colombia, being in Bhutan and just feeling the deep, deep, profound appreciation I have that this culture exists, that this country exists, that they're doing what they're doing on behalf of humanity was extraordinary.

So yeah, coming back to the, to the Bangkok Airport where there's six stories and thousands of people running around trying to catch their planes or being in the Taipei Airport and, and it's like a big shopping mall as you're waking, you know, working your way to get to your gate or arriving back in the US It's a it's, it's a jarring experience on one level, but, you know, feeling like my whole system has been rewired. I'm able to just be with it all.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm. Well, I'm struck by... Thank you for that. I'm struck by, look, when you shared the story about the morning meditation under the most incredible sky, what strikes me about the way you described that is that you didn't-- First of all, it was completely experiential moment, not an instant, but a moment. There was no learning, there was no training, there was no model, there was no breathe this way, there was no techniques, tactics, strategies. No. It was just do this with us, I imagine, right? Do this with us, and this is what happens. And I would observe that from the outside, 'cause I haven't had that experience, at least yet, that clearly we're wired for that, right? Because it's not as though you went through a course of study, and that's how you could do that, you know? Or that's how you could have that experience. No, you just reconnected to something, I imagine, if I could put it this way, that's already there, that was simply awakened.

Tom Eddington: Yeah, and, and something that, you know, that just to be clear. This was something I was doing on my own. Everybody else was still asleep.

Andrew Cohn: Okay.

Tom Eddington: Okay. I just, I went out under the, you know, under the star, starlit night and just sat and meditated and connected to the earth that has never been disturbed. It's never, I mean, the, other than the ceremonies that happened in the ceremonial site where we were meeting and, you know, the gentleness of human footprints for thousands of years, there'd been no excavation, nothing done to it. And there was, there was a connection to a living, conscious entity that I had never experienced in my life. I've done lots of meditation in lots of different parts of the world, but it was unlike any place I had ever connected to the Earth before. I could feel the consciousness of Gaia. It was, it was quite extraordinary. To be able to do that every morning for two hours undisturbed was remarkable.

Andrew Cohn: Hmm. Well, and so for the second time, you've brought the name of Gaia into this, and I am curious to how that connects back to your time as a, as a boy where, you know, perhaps you are a little bit of advanced in this matter because of that experience of living in nature and waking up to the i- in the woods, if you will, for those eight years. So interesting.

Tom Eddington: Yeah.

Andrew Cohn: Yeah.

Tom Eddington: Yep.

Andrew Cohn: Wow. Well, I feel like we could go on in many different directions here. Maybe this is a good place to land the plane, if I could use the metaphor of the plane. By the way, when you shared the story about traveling and all the different airports you know, from the experience in Colombia through airports and crazy Bangkok, et cetera, perhaps Bhutan's the happiest place in the world 'cause people have finally arrived and they're off all the planes. Maybe that's a, the, the happiness feeling. But I, I really appreciate your sharing some of these stories. If people wanna learn more about your work, I know you've, you've had a podcast, you've got a, a brief ebook. Could you talk a little bit about some of those resources?

Tom Eddington: Yeah. I produced for three years the Impact Effect, which is available for free on YouTube. Folks can go to that. It's the Impact Effect Network. I've produced about almost 200 podcasts on Humanity Rising and, and that's available on the Humanity Rising YouTube channel. I've written four books. I'm just finishing up a children's book now. And there's any number of resources. Most of them are available for free on YouTube. Just people can do a YouTube search. My webmaster retired, and so I'm in search of a new resource to help me get my website up and running again.

Andrew Cohn: Okay, so if anybody's listening and you're tuned into this work and you've, and you're gifted in this space, you know, call now. Okay. Well, beautiful. Thank you, Tom. And, what is the best website if people wanna go to your website directly?

Tom Eddington: Right now, the best way for folks to reach me is on LinkedIn or on the stateoftheworld.forum website, and my Eddington Advisory website will be up hopefully shortly.

Andrew Cohn: Got it. When you find that resource. 

Tom Eddington: Yes.

Andrew Cohn: Well, thank you so much. I just feel like this is to be continued in, in many ways, on many levels. I mean, to say that this is... I say this a lot, you know. This is the beginning of a conversation to be continued, but man, there's a lot to talk about here, and, and I appreciate your, your openness, your guidance. There's something about the way that you talk about these things that just makes me wanna just sign up for every possible option, and, and that's a beautiful invitation, so thank you for that, for extending that to me and for all the listeners. And any, any kind of final thoughts you might have?

Tom Eddington: You know, the world is in a state of chaos in a way that humanity has never experienced before, and we truly are facing a once in a species moment. And, you know, we're being called, each of us as human beings, as leaders, to do an honest assessment of how are we living our lives. And I would just in- invite everybody to recognize there's, you know, there's, there's more to life than consumption. There's more to life than acquisition of m- material things. At the end of the day, you know, doesn't matter what your employment opportunities are, what you're doing, there's more to life. And, you know, certainly being in Bhutan over the last two and a half weeks and understanding they have a fundamentally different measure of wealth. They don't measure gross domestic product. They measure gross national happiness. And when you define  your wealth by how much money's in your bank account and what assets you own, it's a far cry of what it means to truly be human. And so I would encourage all of your listeners to look at, how are you defining wealth? And what, what do you value, and what do you, what do you develop- what do you value most? In all of my new coaching client relationships, the first two questions I ask are, "What do you believe, and why do you believe it?"

Andrew Cohn: Why, as in the source of that belief or the origin?

Tom Eddington: For most people, it's unexamined.

Andrew Cohn: Yes.

Tom Eddington: We never take the time to say, "What, what the hell do I believe?" "And why do, why do I believe that?"

Andrew Cohn: Yeah. Well, and to me, the word that comes up as you describe that is we're unconscious, and I know that you've spent some time with the Conscious Leadership Guild and written  books about this, et cetera. So it's a consciousness of there's more, there's options. There's choices here. You know, in response to that question about how are we living our lives, which is a question that could keep many of us, and my hand is raised, occupied for quite a while. Thank you for the invitation to consider these questions and to consider living a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Tom Eddington: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Great to be with you as always, and I look forward to another conversation.

Andrew Cohn: Thanks, Tom.

Andrew Cohn: Thank you for listening to Spirituality in Leadership. If you want to access this wealth of knowledge and insight on a regular basis, please subscribe to the show. Join the network of leaders who want to do and be better. You can go to the site spiritualityinleadership.com or your preferred podcast platform to catch all the episodes and learn more. Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Andrew Cohn
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Why Being More Human Makes You a Stronger Leader, with Zeta Smith