This is a quote from the book The Alchemist that remember wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. I used to think that purpose was something to get to, an external achievement or just some place where you'll start to get that feeling that you're on, you know, you're living into your purpose.
But then I realized it's really an unfolding or blossoming. This is your invitation to become the alchemist of your life. You decode your heaven on earth and go through the alchemical process. The alchemist is a master of himself so that he can master life. People thought alchemists were turning lead into gold, but they're really crystallizing their soul into form.
Alchemize your golden potential. Welcome to the golden life. Welcome to the Golden Life Show. My name is David Gilbert, and today I'm going to talk about my real life story straight out of the book, The Alchemist, and the path to discover your own personal legend. And this episode will help you if you feel like you have been wondering, lost, or just have a sense of no purpose in life, because it's going to show you the path ahead, how to live without the anxiety, the regret, Or depression that comes when you don't have a life of purpose.
And I lost my father suddenly at the age of 11. If you've lost a loved one suddenly, you know what it feels like to have the heart ripped out of your chest. And it caused me to seek deeper answers in life. And one of those is what makes life worth living. And it's been my path to seek answers to that question as well as why is life so painful.
So. And today, part of that answer, I believe, is to fulfill your purpose. To fulfill your potential. And early on, it just came to me that your only purpose It is to fulfill your potential because therefore you help mankind fulfill its potential. But I know for myself, it's even like, okay, that's great, but how do we do that?
But before we answer that, I want to get into the story of my tattoo sleeve. So I got my very first tattoo right at the age of 18. That was a memorial for my father on the left side. But my right side, my sleeve here, tells a special story, and it's a story of myself stepping into my personal legend. And it started off in my early 20s.
I was In a dark night of the soul. And I'm going to share more about this story in a future episode, but I was stuck in a negative mindset and I felt like I had a Freddy Cougar or a demon or a monster in my head, and that I was going to declare to the universe that I was going to overcome it by getting a tattoo.
And this was going to be originally a St. Michael tattoo, the classic of killing the demon underneath it. But I'll come back to that story later, but anyways, long story short, it took two different sessions to finish this first part of my sleeve, which for the listeners, it's a image of a knight standing confidently with this sword in this, in the ground and the shield on the floor and behind them.
It is a massive, insurmountable dragon that is a hundred times his size and off in the distance a little bit. But he's standing there. The knight is standing there confidently. And then later in life, I have a tattoo underneath my right arm of some wings. And this was because I got my pilot's license a little bit after the age of 21 because every man in my family had their pilot's license.
My father was a crop duster and he died fighting fires in Idaho. Um, the whole Gilbert family were actually crop dusters. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and live into our legacy, um, to be a private pilot. So I got a tattoo of that. And then a couple of years after that, I started the process to finish the sleeve.
And having gone through the experience of, of death and losing somebody at a young age, I decided to get a tattoo of a beautiful woman slowly turning into a skeleton. Now it turned into a full Dia de los Muertos tattoo. And for the listeners, she has red roses in her hair. She's turning into a skeleton.
Uh, there's a white rose down below, and she has her hands as if she's touching her hair. Now where the story gets interesting It's for the longest time, her hands were just slightly touching her hair, and it was just empty. It was just blank. And even the story of how we got the hand touching the hair was, we found a beautiful image online, you know, we went, the tattoo artist put it on my arm and we had it there, but the hand didn't quite look right that was in the original image.
So we weren't really sure what to do. He kind of looked around his name, Shea Bremis, uh, highly recommend him. He's out of long beach and there happened to be another tattoo artist in the room. And she was a female and he was like, Hey, would you mind helping us out? We could really use a model to help us.
Bring this tattoo together before we get started. She said, yeah, absolutely. So we go outside, we take some pictures of her, of her touching her hair in the same format that it's on the tattoo sleeve. And we go ahead and roll with it. But if you saw it before, it was just her touching her hair. There was this empty spot.
Now you see this red stone, which you're going to come to find out. It's the philosopher's stone. And it was always blank. And I was always going to go back and just have the tattoo artist have stray Shay, like fill it in black, just like finish that off and make it look like it's hair, but always look kind of random.
Like if I'm honest, like I'm sure some other people looked at it, like, what is she doing with her hands? Why is it just out in the middle of nowhere? But there came this moment. When I was sitting in my office, and I bought The Idiot's Guide to Alchemy, and I started reading this book, and as I got through the book, I learned about the three different phases of alchemy.
There's the black phase, Which is, can be represented by a dragon or more specifically the black dragon of spiritual transformation, which is a symbol of the insurmountable force of chaos, as well as suffering that lives in the universe that is within ourselves, that is with us in society, that with is, But then everybody, to acknowledge the unconscious force we all have inside of us.
I was like, that's interesting, as I'm looking at my own tattoo, seeing this huge black dragon off into the distance. And then I continue reading. And I go on to read about the second phase of alchemy. The white phase. And this phase is represented by a white rose. And this is the phase where you start to get in touch with your highest essence.
So for those who are listening and not watching, you can look at my arm or imagine I have wings underneath. You don't see the little pilot crest in the middle. All you see is wings. And I also have a white rose on the other side and that part of the sleeve and it didn't fully settle in yet. But then it talks about the final phase of alchemy, which is represented by a red rose.
And there's a lot of red roses, uh, in the hair of this tattoo. And this is the phase where the inner king and queen, which represent the inner masculine and feminine energies we all have inside of ourselves. Are purified and then come together in Sacred Union, and when they do that, they are reborn. And then also give birth to the philosopher's child.
Now, this is also known as the Philosopher's Stone. So try to imagine sitting down on a couch, reading through this book, and then looking at your arm, and then having the biggest aha realization, what the, is this, can this be real? Is this actually happening? Moment. Where I look down, I see this space where her hand that once used to just, uh, look like it was kinda touching her hair, but kinda in the middle of nowhere.
Is the perfect spot for a red philosopher stone. So this was seven years later. I finally called up Shay. Hey, Shay, I'm ready to come back and finish my tattoo. Uh, he was like, dude, I just work at a black and white studio now. Like I don't even do color. And I was like, uh, he's like, you know what, for you, I'll, I'll finish it.
I just hope it looks great. Turned out great. He did a great job. He was happy to do so. But this is me. I'm going to be following my own life path, and I can start to dissect it and share some of the moments with you. But by following this, I was walking the path of my own personal legend. And to use a quote from the book, the alchemist, it's in order to find treasure, you will have to follow the omens.
God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens he left for you. And now hindsight, I can see these omens. Now in the moment, I didn't necessarily know I was kind of blindly just following these. So when I lost my father at the age of 11, it caused me to seek deeper answers in life.
And then I could see from there, I went to art center, college of design. For advertising. And during that time I got really into physical health. I was listening to Joe Rogan back in the day when it was Death Squad with Brian Redband and slinging flesh lights. Uh, but I got really into paleo and keto and Bulletproof and CrossFit and Spartan races and all the fun stuff.
But I just go to share that because that led to me working in marketing. For health and fitness companies such as the American Council on Exercise, where I later got my personal trainer certification as well. And then I went from that into going into my own, uh, opening my own mindfulness store. Now I signed the lease January 2020.
It was always a dream of mine to open my own business. When I was a kid, my mom would ask me, what do you want to do? I said, I just want to be a business owner. And I was finally going to live into that dream. Now I had friends and family tell me. It is not a good time. And why is that? They weren't profits.
They didn't know what was coming in the year 2020, but I had a two year old at the time and I had another one in the oven. So come June ish, we were expected to have our second child. And if you have kids, especially young kids, babies and toddlers, uh, you know, it's not the best time to go into a business, especially all on your own.
But it was such a pull in me. I thought that was it. Like, this is my moment. I can wait, or I can just lean into it and go for it. So I did. But being that it was 2020 and the beginning of a worldwide pandemic when brick and mortar stores had to shut down, it was not good timing. But this was my journey where in a future episode, I'll share, you know, how the tattoo changed from St.
Michael killing the demon. So, um, I'm going to talk to you today about how to get out of the dark night of the soul. So I was ready to share everything that I learned along the way when it comes to mindfulness and mental health. But also during that process, I started doing my own inner work. I started healing my emotional wounds, right?
We don't really heal ourselves, but we do heal our emotional wounds. So, So I learned a lot about different practices from breathwork journeys to EDMR therapy to journaling to all the different things that you can do. I like to go deep into these practices. And then that later moved into spiritual, which it isn't spiritual health.
It's more just spiritual unfolding. So I can see now how this path of getting into the physical opened up the ability to go deeper into the mental, which opened up the ability to go deeper into the emotional, which opened up the ability to understand the spiritual. But also it led me to this moment now where I get to share everything that I've been learning along the way.
through coaching, through helping people in their transformations, whether it's alchemizing their, their deepest leads, their deepest traumas and turning it into gold or finding new ways to grow in partnership or how to use the most powerful tools of transformation safely to accelerate your growth and healing.
But it was only because I jumped into the store. When the timing wasn't right, that led to me also coaching on the side and then stepping into where I am now. And this story really finishes on the moment where I was walking with a dear friend named Mickey of Mana Training. And we were doing this walk from my current house to the beach, which is five blocks away.
And I was like, Hey, I used to live there after we got a block down. And then we walked two more blocks. And I was like, Hey, I also used to live there. Cause we've lived on this same street and just kind of moved further away from the beach as the place has got a little bit bigger. And then as we almost got to the beach, I saw this bucket.
And it said Monrovia, and I was like, Hey, I used to live in Monrovia. And then the moment we finally got to the beach was this moment where I realized I made it home. And it was this moment of, you know, I had a friend walking me home, but I was walking home to understand that I was just coming back to myself, that there was nothing.
Outside of myself that I was really looking for,
this is a quote from the book, The Alchemist, that remember wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. So that is the path of following the omens to uncover, discover your personal legend. And I used to think that purpose was something to get to. An external achievement or just some place where you'll start to get that feeling that you're on.
You know, you're living into your purpose, but then I realized it's really an unfolding or blossoming and that your purpose, what you think your purpose is from a logical standpoint is always going to evolve. So through the years now, I like to take the creative aspect of purpose, right? What is that abstract aspect of your purpose?
This is where you can start to take a soul perspective to understand you get to explore the mythopoetic view of your purpose, something that's bigger than what you do or how you show up in the world that will be presented to you over time. And if you just continue to follow your heart, follow your passion and trust God.
So I hope this alleviates if you feel any of that tension, if you feel any of that anxiety or maybe even regret, am I living into my purpose or not? I hope this can alleviate a little bit of that and give you more confidence. To step into that next unknown that your heart just knows it's the thing to do, but maybe everybody else is telling you it's not.
So the know if you continue to do that, if you continue to look out for the omens, the little magic moments in life, they will present them to you. And before you know it, you will find home. So if this episode inspired you, please pay it forward by just hitting that like, subscribe, or leaving a review. And then if you want to let somebody else know you appreciate them or you're thinking about them, go ahead and send them this episode if you think it will make their day a little bit better.
Thank you. And I look forward to sharing more stories with you in the next golden life episode.
