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A Moment of Clarity
Submitted by: Blayne Cameron Lannan
Olympia Washington USABorn October 31st 1966 in Butte Montana. Graduated high school in 1985. Jumped out of airplanes in the army from 85-89. BA of Psychology in 1995. Careers in counseling, probation/parole, pre-sentence investigation, sales, consulting, and life coaching. Three children. Scott age 24, Beau age 14, and Tehya age 3 1/2, and temporary custody of niece Kyleigh. Committed relationship with partner Shanna. One dog, two cats. Enjoy anything outdoors, specifically anything to do with adrenaline. Favorites are snowboarding, surfing, and skydiving.
Hello to all who read this. Thank for for the opportunity to share a very brief portion of my story. The book, “A Moment of Clarity” should be completed within the year.
Going through my life, I endured my fair share of dysfunction. By age 11 I was drinking, and by age 12 I was smoking marijuana regularly in a vain attempt at emotional pain control, through self-medication. I believed from a very early age that I was “broken.”
Somehow I made it through high school and enlisted in the US Army. I was very successful in the army because I felt like I had a purpose and place in life. I got out of the Army, went to college, got married, had a kid, and had huge aspirations of becoming an Infantry Officer in the army. All the while drinking nightly, blacking out multiple times weekly. My ex wife shares stories that I can laugh at now, because that is not who I am anymore, yet at the time was very sick behavior.
Two days following my graduation from ROTC advance camp, I got pulled over coming from a graduation party, and received my 2nd DUI in 6 years. I was removed from the ROTC program, and my dreams were shattered.
Nightly drinking turned into drinking and smoking weed. I plugged away for several years. I finished my degree and went to work for the State of Washington. I began as a counselor at a juvenile “prison” in the intensive management unit. From there I worked in an intake unit, and a mental health unit. I then began placing kids into group homes, coming out of institutions. I then became an adult parole officer, writing pre-sentence investigations, supervising violent offenders, to finally being selected to take part in a multi-agency narotics task force, helping to rid one of the worst counties in the United States of methamphetamine, and busting “crack houses.”
During this entire time I was lost. I had gotten a divorce due to my behaviors caused by substance abuse, I self-medicated to the point of passing out nightly, yet somehow I managed a 3.5 GPA in college, and a sought after position within the Department of Corrections. They sent me to the firearms academy, and I began carrying a firearm, wearing civilian clothes, trying to catch “bad guys.”
In the summer of 2002 we took down a crack house and my curiosity got the best of me. I remember driving down I-5 toward Portland, coming from Tacoma, when I first tried rock cocaine. I took one hit from a pipe, canceled plans to hang out with my son, and went back to Tacoma and used the drug all night.
Three months later I stood sobbing in my supervisors office as I lay my vest, badge, gun, etc… trying to explain what had happened. That was the single most shameful day of my life, and the guilt I felt that day, came very, very close to killing me.
I did everything imaginable to quit. I threw myself into recovery groups like NA and AA. Nothing worked. Two years into my addiction I turned myself into a police lieutenant friend with cocaine, thinking if I had the consequence of going to jail resting over my head, I would never use the drug again. Oh boy was I wrong. Three days after signing my drug court contract, I traded my Yamaha YZF-600R for $2,000 of cocaine. The following week I was placed in jail for 60 days.
The day I got out of jail I met my probation officer. He and I had been to training together. Many more shame/guilt filled days followed.
On 7-17-05, following a return trip to Sea-Tac from Alaska, I left my family stranded at the airport while I went on a two day run.
In the end, I was homeless, my truck had been stolen from me at gunpoint, and my entire family had given up on me. My ten year old son had said he never wanted to see me again, and my partner told me it would be very unlikely if I was ever going to be allowed in my daughter’s life.
I completed a 30 day treatment program. I had been to a half dozen treatment facilities before. However at this particular place in a rough part of Seattle, I saw addiction at its very worse.
I had a small awakening in treatment. Something changed within me. We were tasked with putting together three collages. The first was how we saw ourselves in the past. The second was how we saw ourselves now that we had taken the steps to get help, and the third was how we saw ourselves in the future.
I met amazing people at treatment. I know now that I had complete purpose in being there.
The day I left treatment I threw away collage #1, and 2, and hung collage #3 in my son Beau’s room.
The first couple of months were rough. I didn’t see Beau again until about 6 months after I completed treatment. I threw myself into work, and made close to $100,000 my first year. This was more than double than I had made with the state. I started cleaning up my credit. Shanna and I bought a piece of land about three blocks off the Puget Sound, and had a home built. I started repairing all the damage and wreckage from my past.
My big change came when I decided to leave the labels of “broken drug-addict, unfixable, less than”, etc. when I left treatment. I stopped identifying with any part of my old self.
Then about April 2007, after my work fixation stopped working as well, I felt myself getting restless, and irritable. I realized after some thought that I had just replaced one addiction with another. As painful as it was, I decided to start really going to work at getting to the problem of “Blayne.” I slowed down. I stopped working as much, and I began to start living in the moment.
On 7-1-07 I began what I consider to be a radical spiritual awakening/enlightenment that began as an intuition, followed by a number of synchronistic events that led me to exhaustive research into 2012, amongst other “consciousness shift” theories. I have read 25+ books by Law of Attraction/Present Moment Awareness authors, and I now see the Law of Attraction work in my life daily, and I have tangible proof.
One month later I sat on my couch and watched The Secret. My jaw dropped open as I pulled my “vision board” off my son’s wall and realized I had “gotten” everything on that board. I was using it and I didn’t even know it.
My “gross” per car average has gone through the roof. Most of my clients, when I mention “The Secret”, have heard it. The ones who “get it” I tell: “We manifested each other.” With many I share my experience, strength, and hope, especially when I have the “knowing” they were sent to me for far more than just a car. Many have turned into consulting/life-coaching clients. I have had two clients in the past two days tell me we need to have some type of Law of Attraction group here in Olympia.
Synchronistically speaking, Shanna is one semester away from her MA in Counseling Psychology, then I get to finish. In the mean time we have decided to get registered in the state, and do some life coaching/consulting, with the principles of the Law of Attraction and Present Moment Awareness at its core. My life gets a little more magical and wondrous each day, and to think… I had it all figured out a year ago.
The only thing I know for sure now is that when I am grateful, and see the abundance that is, I am attracting so many amazing things, people, events, etc. into my life, most of the time I can’t put the feeling into words.
Both of our visions is that maybe someday, if humanity could come from a place of abundance and love (which is really all there is) instead of a place of lack and fear (which only exists in our dream and domestication) then we might be able to achieve global peace.
Th very best part of all of this is we all are capable of experiencing this. No one is more special than another. We are nothing more than energy or “pure potential” just waiting to be tapped into.
Peace, light, and love
Namaste
Blayne Lannan