Jeff Rasley is a former attorney who is both an author and a public speaker. And Jeff could also be a poster child for Rebirth. He built a successful career in law and business and was a millionaire by the time he was 40. Life was great, and the sports car and Harley were fun. But in his mid-40s, Jeff began to manifest mid-life symptoms. He seemed to need something beyond family, life, career, and financial good fortune. His wife’s answer to “Is that all there is?” suggests that Jeff go trekking in the Himalayas and reconnect with his journey and more spiritual side that he had lost in pursuing success. That trek transformed Jeff’s life.
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Jeff Rasley: A Millionaire By The Age Of 40 Who Wondered, “Is That All There Is?”
I’m glad to welcome Jeff Rasley, a former attorney who is both an author and a public speaker. Jeff will be speaking to us from Indianapolis, Indiana. Jeff has many gifts. He is a BA from the University of Chicago, Magna Cum Laude of Phi Beta Kappa, and an all-academic Allstate football letter winner in swimming and football.
He earned his JD from Indiana University Law School, Cum Laude, and has been admitted to the Indiana US District and US Supreme Court Bar. Jeff could also be a poster child for Rebirth. He built a successful career in law and business and was a millionaire by the time he was 40. He was also a very involved husband and father to his two children.
Life was great and the sports car and the Harley were fun but in his mid-40s, Jeff began to manifest midlife symptoms. He seemed to need something beyond family, life, career, and financial good fortune. His wife’s answer too is that all there is was to suggest that Jeff go trekking in the Himalayas and reconnect with his adventurous and more spiritual side that he had lost in the pursuit of success. That trek transformed Jeff’s life.
I’m looking forward to talking with Jeff about the ways his pursuit of success transformed into a more spiritual and meditative approach to life, his travel experiences from a spiritual perspective, what Jeff causes philanthro-treks, the creation of the Basa Village Foundation, and 2 of his 11 books titled, You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found: A Memoir of Suffering, Grit, and Love of the Himalayas and Basa Village and ISLAND ADVENTURES: Disconnecting in the Caribbean and South Pacific. This is sure to be a fascinating and inspiring story of healing and rebirth.
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Jeff, a warm welcome to the show.
Namaste, Irene.
Namaste to you too. This is going to be a pleasure. We’re going to have a great time. You’re such an interesting guy. Let’s start by letting everyone know who you were before all these transitions took place in your life. In your early years, you were an avid adventure traveler. Please also describe your spiritual side when you were growing up and share what drew you to business and law as a career.
I grew up in a small town in Northern Indiana, Goshen, Indiana, which is not so small anymore. When I was growing up, there were about 10,000 people in the city. It was small enough that almost everybody knew each other. My family had been there for five generations, an early pioneer family. We knew everybody in the community.
Like most of my friends, I grew up in a church. It happened to be the Presbyterian church. I was sitting in the family pew with four generations because my great-grandmother lived to be 98. It had a very powerful and influential impact in terms of integrating into my value system. The golden rule that, at least at my church, Christianity promoted of loving your neighbor as yourself and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Eventually, the dogma and theology of the church I left behind, that value system stayed with me. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was helping to organize the first Walk for Hunger in Goshen. That was my first major effort at philanthropy, which means love of humanity. That was the springboard to many other philanthropic projects that I’ve been involved with over time.
What drew you to business and law as a career? You liked adventure travel too, didn’t you? Were you doing that back then?
Yeah. I dropped out of college after one semester and hitchhiked across the country.
How’d your family feel about that one?
My mom drove me to the edge of town. She had tears in her eyes as she saw me standing by State Road 15 on the South side of Goshen with my backpack and thumb out. She also knew that I was the kid that was not to be stopped once I had set my mind on something. She was not very happy about it but I wanted to get out of our small town and see the world. I thought the most interesting way to do it would be to hitchhike so that’s what I did.
It’s wonderful that she let you go that way. A lot of parents wouldn’t do that. That was great. We understand your commitment to social activism and philanthropy when you were in high school. It carried through in college. What got you to choose business and law?
My parents would say it’s because I always enjoyed arguing. From an early age, there was an expectation that I would become a lawyer. I like debate, public speaking, and theater. I had the lead in our junior class play. As a freshman in college, I had the lead in another play. I was drawn to performance. I thought being a trial lawyer would be cool and something that I could do that performative and argumentative aspect of my personality that I enjoy but at the same time, could represent people that needed help.
You were acting in high school and also helping other people with their family dramas and life dramas, weren’t you?
Yeah. When I first graduated from law school, I went to work for a legal services organization, which is a poverty law and social justice nonprofit organization. That was how I wanted to create a legal career initially and do that work but after a few years, I went to the dark side, left the legal services organization, and as a young associate, joined a large corporate firm in Downtown Indianapolis.
I learned the business side of the law there but woke up most mornings feeling almost sick to my stomach and nauseous about going into the office because it was such a toxic environment where people were constantly writing what we called CYA, Cover Your Ass memos. It was all about making money for the firm and not getting into trouble. It was this very constricted and icky approach to being a lawyer.
Also, to life in a way because a lot of that’s still going on.
Two of my best friends left the firm and started their own firm. I joined them after they had got the little firm established and going. The three of us had a delightful time, trying to create a business but also to try to do it in a more virtuous way where we put the clients first and make money second, mainly because we were desperate to get any clients but it succeeded.
After a while, my two partners left to join another middle size firm that wanted to become a big firm. I did not want to go through that again. I went through a series of joining with other friends and eventually was the senior partner in a small firm that was successful. As you described, I hit 40 and had this midlife crisis of having concentrated for so many years on building this business, the law firm but also building a family because two kids had come along.
The adventuresome side of my personality had been ignored for too long and was screaming to get out, which my wife recognized in the symptoms of a midlife crisis. I came home from the office one day and she slapped down a brochure on the dining room table in front of me about trekking the Mount Everest Base Camp trail and said, “Why don’t you go do this?”
What a good woman you have there. She cared about you. She was very okay with letting you go to do what you needed to do like your mom had let you go. That was wonderful that she did that. She was like, “I’ll hold down the fort and you go figure it out.” That’s terrific. What and who inspired you to return to the Himalayan region fourteen times after that first trek? What about you changed when you adopted that more spiritual and meditative approach to life? Tell us about that first trip and how it changed you.
The way it changed me is to experience this very different culture in Nepal and see the most magnificent mountains in the world. There was this twofold pole. I was impressed and moved by how Sir Edmund Hillary described the Sherpa people and all the different tribal ethnic groups that live up in the high Himalayas as the kindest and strongest people in the world. I found that to be true.
The people living in these small villages as solitary yak herders were amazingly strong and tough but also had a wonderful welcoming attitude toward strangers. Their traditional cultures live by the ethic of a stranger is a welcome guest in their village. I found this attractive so I wanted to go back. I also wanted to become a climber and a mountaineer, not just a trekker. I thought it would be more exciting and adventuresome to get up and climb those big peaks, rather than just hike around.
The Sherpa people and the tribal ethnic groups living in the high Himalayas are the kindest and strongest people in the world. They are solitary yak herders who are strong and tough but also have a wonderful welcoming attitude toward strangers. Click To Tweet
In Indiana, there are not exactly a lot of mountains to climb. That was one of several different adventure travel methods that I’ve experimented with. I took some courses on climbing. I went back, started joining my mountaineering groups, and did a number of mountain climbs. Over time, I eventually was leading treks and climbing expeditions and then developed this foundation, the Basa Village Foundation, to try to give back to these wonderful, kind, and strong people that had become my friends.
This is what constituted your more spiritual and meditative approach to life. Did you completely quit working and you adopted this whole new attitude? You were out of the rat race.
No. It took a while because the first time I went to Nepal was in 1995. I continued practicing law until 2010. For quite a while there, I was going off to Nepal about every other year for a while, leaving home and practicing behind for about 3 to 4 weeks. As I was doing that, I started writing articles about it. This spiritual reawakening that I was having was because these people that I was spending time with over there and getting to know had a much more grounded approach to life than most Americans, at least, living in the executive professional class that was my social milieu back in Indianapolis.
Can you describe what you would call a grounded way of life?
The people that eventually I became the closest to are called the Rai people. They live in the Himalayas below where the Sherpas live. There’s a lot of interaction between those two ethnic tribal groups. Sherpas are Buddhist. The Rai people are what we would call animists. They don’t have a formal religion. They have an approach to life. They think there is a spirit or soul in everything, not just living things but even in rocks and mountains.
They have this deep respect for the natural world because it has spirit or soul like living things do. There’s this super environmentalist attitude of care for nature but that extends towards other people. The ethic that I grew up with, love your neighbor as yourself, I was experiencing people living that, which most Christians do not.
In big cities, we’re afraid of other people. We keep our doors and car doors locked. We go around many people carrying guns for protection. There’s this very guardedness, whereas with these people, the Rai and Sherpas, they don’t lock their doors. Some houses don’t even have doors. There’s this very sense of welcoming and openness. That was part of it.
The other part of it was reacquainting with very simple things in life. When you’re trekking or climbing, what you’re focusing on is the natural world around you and taking the next step. It’s having this very simple grounded way of living for a period of time as opposed to having 150 law cases that my mind is constantly hurling around, making sure I don’t miss a deadline, and trying to accomplish the goals my clients have for me. It was a very interesting contrast there for quite a few years. Thankfully, I was financially successful so when my kids were off to college, I let go of practicing law.
You were able to follow your heart and soul to do what you needed to do. Tell us about these philanthro-treks. Do you go with groups of people? They combined visiting Nepal with culturally sensitive development work and it led to the creation of the Basa Village Foundation. Could you tell us about that part of your journey?
Nepal is the poorest country outside of Africa. There’s a handful of countries in Africa that have a lower standard of living, lower life expectancy, and all the measurable ways that you define poverty. Nepal is near the very bottom of that list. The people that go over on treks have a nearing experience and almost always come to leave healing this desire to give back. They had this wonderful experience with these wonderful, open, and friendly people. You come away wanting to give back.
Nepal is the poorest country outside of Africa. Click To Tweet
The first few times I went back, I would do little fundraisers, mostly through my church at the time. I would raise a couple of thousand dollars, buy school supplies, take clothes and stuff like that, and then give some money to a charitable foundation that I had connected with over there. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to start my own. Not just giving money to other people depending on them.
Out of beginning to lead treks and expeditions, I developed a network of like-minded people. We decided that we would start the Basa Foundation. I had connected with this one little village through the trekking company that I was employing. The owner of the trekking company, whose name is Niru Rai, had grown up in Basa Village.
When he was fourteen, he left home and was hired on as a porter with a trekking company and eventually moved up through the ranks and then started his own trekking company called Adventure Geo Treks. He kept hiring porters, guides, and cooks of people from his home, the Village of Basa. I spent weeks with these people from Basa as my porters, guides, and cooks. I got to be very close with them. We got back to Kathmandu after the first expedition I had done with Adventure Geo Treks.
Niru and our chief guide, whose name was Ganesh Rai, were all of the Rai people. Their last name is Rai. They told me that in their village, the Basa was a school that had three grades. They wanted to add a fourth and a fifth grade and hire a fourth and a fifth-grade teacher, which I consider raising $5,000, which would pay to add the 2 classrooms and would pay 2 teachers’ salaries for 3 years. I thought, “$5,000 to give 2 more grades of education to the village kids, of course.” I did and that was in 2006.
In 2007, we raised money and then organized a trekking group to go visit Basa, which was the first time I was in Basa. They saw the school and met all the villagers who were waiting for us and covered us in flowers when we arrived at the village. It was such a wonderful, inspiring experience. The first book that I’ve written is about adventures in Nepal and how I transitioned from a lawyer to an adventure mountain climber to a philanthropist with the Basa Foundation.
It’s very inspiring. You’ve written eleven books. You’ve been busy. I want to ask you about one of your books, which is your ninth one titled, ISLAND ADVENTURES: Disconnecting in the Caribbean and South Pacific. It’s an anthology of adventures on islands across the world. Please share some of the spiritual awakenings and adventures you’ve experienced, describe how you became lost and alone in a kayak at sea at night and explain what sustained you during that frightening time. I wouldn’t have been such a good candidate for that experience, I can tell you. Tell us about that. That’s amazing.
Island Adventures: Disconnecting in the Caribbean and South Pacific
In 2000, SARS struck. People were not traveling to Nepal. We were told not to go to Southeast Asian countries. I took a break from going to Nepal Plus in 1999. I had a very difficult experience there because three people died on our way out from a climbing expedition. Instead of doing mountaineering, I did solo sea kayaking adventures. I was in a little country or island nation called Palau. I was kayaking from island to island.
I got lost because, in Palau, there’s this area called the Rock Islands and there are literally thousands of little tiny islands. As it was getting dark, I had not calculated correctly how long it would take to get to the next island where I could set up a campsite because you can’t camp on these little tiny Rock Islands. It was dark and there were all these little islands so I got confused in my navigation and I missed the island where I had planned to be able to camp that night. I had a map so I thought I knew where I was going.
You didn’t realize you had missed it yet.
No. I kept paddling and paddling. I thought, “This is taking way too long. I should have been there by right before sundown and now the sun is down. It’s getting darker and darker.” I’m going along this big island but it has a sheer cliff and then a mangrove jungle so there’s no way that I can even pull my kayak up, let alone try to camp. I see this white spot in the distance on the side of the island so I paddle and I get there. It’s a half-sunken boat and there’s a little spit of sand by it. I thought, “Maybe I could camp here.”
I have a tide chart so I calculate how much space there is. I realize that by the time the tide is all the way in and it’s starting to come in, that little sand spit would be underwater. I thought about tying the kayak to one of the mangrove trees and trying to ride it out. I decided that would be too dangerous if I fall asleep and got tipped over by a wave. I decide I must have missed the turn. I need to paddle back but I have been paddling for ten hours.
You must have been exhausted.
I was exhausted and my best calculation was it was going to be two more hours to paddle back to retrace my steps to get back to where I missed the turn. I thought, “This is not possible. I don’t have the stamina to do that.” On the other hand, what choice do I have? I push the kayak back into the water, jump in, and start paddling.
Within a few minutes, I’m back out in the open sea. Some very large creature starts bumping the bottom of my kayak. There are a lot of sharks in this area so I figured this is probably a shark and this is not a good thing. I can barely see the side of the island. I’ve got a paddle keeping the side of the island within sight but not getting too far out.
There’s a reef so I have to avoid the reef. It’s pretty dicey paddling. All of a sudden, I had this moment of utter relaxation. I knew that I had the strength that I needed to keep paddling. I started chanting and was chanting out loud the mantra that is very popular in Nepal, Om Mani Padme Hum, which is a Buddhist chant. I intermixed it with different Christian hymns that I grew up in.
I’m chanting and singing this mixture of Buddhist mantras and Christian hymns. Something happened so I paddled on. I felt as if I had just gotten up. I didn’t feel tired at all. I rounded this point where the island formed like a V. I was out here and came around. The campsite is down here. The sky had been completely black and covered in clouds. I knew there was a full moon but you couldn’t even see it because the clouds were so thick.
As I rounded that point, clouds opened up. The full moon came out and lit up this bay. The water was this beautiful green lit up by the moon and the mangrove jungle on both sides. It made this beautiful and peaceful because out on the open side of the island, it was very wavy and current. I came here and the bay was perfectly glassy and placid. I paddled for another twenty minutes or so down that bay and found the dock where I was going to camp. With that opening up, it was like that curtain was drawn from this very dangerous place to this utterly peaceful and hopeful place. I set my tent up on the dock.
The last bit of the story is during the night, a blizzard blew off. Having gone through the feeling as if I might die to this wonderful, beautiful, and spiritual experience, I’m lying on the tent like a spread eagle with my hands and feet holding the tent down so that it won’t be blown off into the water lashed with rain. The storm passed and in the morning, the sun was out. It was a beautiful time to take my clothes off and jump in the ocean skinny-dip because nobody else was around.
What an adventure and a reason to be grateful for being alive. That’s a little bit of an intersection.
That’s the heart of that island adventure.
In your tenth book, which is titled You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found: A Memoir of Suffering, Grit, and Love of the Himalayas and Basa Village, you also had some harrowing adventures. We’ve talked about what’s inspired you to transition from an adventure to a committed philanthropist during that time but would you like to share some of your adventures?
You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found: A Memoir of Suffering, Grit, and Love of the Himalayas and Basa Village
The one that was the most moving happened in 1999, which was before I had that kayaking adventure. I was with a mountaineering group. I was not the leader of this group. My friend, Tom Proctor, was the leader along with our Sardar, which means your chief mountain guide, Seth. We had a very difficult trek because the weather was terrible. It was a combination of rain and snow every day.
We got to the mountain called Mera Peak and got high up on the mountain. Nobody in our group and any of the other groups could sum up because the weather was so terrible. A blizzard was up on the mountain and the snow had built really deep. Finally, we gave up and were hiking out. With the trail out from base camp, the snow had built up hip-deep. I’m 6 foot tall so hip-deep on me is pretty deep snow. For the Nepali guys who are mostly about 5’4, it’s waist-deep. We’re struggling through this deep snow.
We get to this high mountain pass called the Zatra La, which is a very steep difficult pass to hike up and over. It’s the most difficult high pass between Mera Peak and Lukla Village, which is where you go flying in and out of the high country. We’re at the Zatra La and there we look up and we see three Nepali porters who are up on this higher point in the mountain where there’s a shortcut trail. They had taken the shortcut, which is more dangerous because they were trying to get back to Lukla before their clients were so that they’d have all their gear there waiting for them.
Zatrwa La is the most difficult high pass between Mirapeak and Lukla village. Click To Tweet
There had been avalanches all the time when we were up in the mountains. This was about week number three that we’d been out there. We hear a roar of an avalanche and Seth yells, “Run.” Our group was four climbers plus Seth. Our crew of porters was behind us. We start running down Zatra La, which is a boulder field. We’re banging our shins on boulders but running for our lives. We get down to the bottom and we’re fine.
The avalanche had petered out and we got covered with what’s called spindrift, the remains of the avalanche after it’s blown out. We look up and the three Nepali porters are gone. We were worried about them but we learned later they were killed. The rest of our guys were cut off because of the avalanche. They weren’t hurt but they were trapped. Seth told us to hike on because Tom knew the way back to Lukla Village. We hiked on. Seth went back and made his way back up Zatra La and ended up having to carry one of the porters down because he did get hurt.
There were three rivers you have to cross from Zatra La to Lukla. As we crossed them, they were getting higher and higher but by the time Seth and the rest of the crew behind us got there, the rivers had gotten neck high. They crossed the first two and were completely soaked. For the third one, they had to camp out on the riverbank and by then, we were back in Lukla in a while.
You probably were very worried about all of them.
We’re very worried. We were staying up all night, waiting and hoping to see them come in and they didn’t. We started hiking back the next morning to see if we could find them. We heard Seth whistling and he is coming down the trail, helping one of the porters who had hurt his leg. Seth was carrying his backpack in the front and the porter’s doko basket on his back. He had climbed up and down Zatra La three more times to bring all the stuff down. All of them were soaking wet sleeping out that night and freezing. He came in whistling because that’s all in a day’s work to him.
One minute, you were in a tent in the Himalayas and going through all this, and then not long after, in a car in the middle of Indianapolis. That must have been a real culture shock for you. Would you like to articulate what it meant for you to fly across the world to find these beautiful people and a greater clarity of purpose than what you had? What did that do? It changed your life.
It redirected it in a way. I was wanting to create a foundation to give back to these people and in particular, the Rai people of Basa Village whom I’d become so close to. I started spending more time doing that foundation work and less time practicing law. Thankfully, I had a younger partner, who had a buyout agreement in the partnership that we eventually executed. It relieved me of the burdens of law practice so I could devote more time to the foundation and writing. Over the years, I’ve been on probably twelve different nonprofit boards. I’m 5 or 6 also so I try to do other things here locally to help my local community as well as the community of Basa.
Do people in your local community ever go philanthro-trekking with you? You recommend it as a way to deal with the midlife crisis. Has your passion for that been put on to others?
In Indianapolis, the first time I went trekking, there were two people in the entire state of Indiana that were members of the American Mountaineering Association, which was Tom, my buddy, who was in Terre Haute, and me. Since then, there were probably at least 60 or more people here in the Indianapolis area that have gone to Nepal, either with me or in other groups that I’ve helped organize. There were others in the Midwest and a group from California, Seattle, Baltimore, and Washington, DC area.
You know very well how networks work. Once somebody else enters your network, then they bring their network into it. There are two other members of our Basa Foundation that are regularly leading treks. Everything came to a stop because of COVID and Nepal is still suffering badly from COVID. We’re not sending people over. Hopefully, in 2023, we can start up again.
With all the suffering, they need you more than ever, I’m sure.
They do. During COVID, we managed to finish a project. We have to bring a medical clinic to the area. We finished creating a playground for the school. There’s a 500-foot drop-off right beside the school so eventually, the teachers and local people thought it would be nice to build a ball so they would quit losing the soccer balls we send over there.
Millionaire: During COVID, The Basa Foundation managed to finish a project to bring a medical clinic to the area.
They then added those other two class grades. You had even more kids using that playground.
There were about 200 kids in the school, grades 1 through 5.
Everyone knows the interesting and exciting books you write. What a fascinating life you’ve led. How can our audience connect with you and purchase all those wonderful books of yours?
Thanks, Irene, to let me give a marketing plug here. I have a website, which is my full name, JeffreyRasley.com. If you google my name, you’ll find it. I have an author site on Amazon, which lists all my books. I published number thirteen since we first connected. 2022 has been my most prolific year. With the pandemic, I’ve managed to get out 2 books in 1 year.
Would you like to tell us something about them?
The second to last one is called America’s Existential Crisis: Our Inherited Obligation to Native Nations. It was inspired by my visit to Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Reservation. I was shocked to see the level of poverty there, which in some ways, is even worse than in Nepal because it’s in contrast to the wealth of America around it.
It starts with a story of two of my ancestors. One was an Indian fighter who was at the massacre of Wounded Knee. He was a lieutenant in the 7th Cavalry. My other ancestor was given a beautiful beaded vest by the Potawatomi of Northern Indiana because he was such a good friend. He helped them avoid starvation during one very hard winter.
How do you know about these two ancestors? I have to ask that.
I knew the one that received the beaded vest through growing up. He was the father of my great-grandmother. There were five generations there that I was aware of. I learned about the other one when my mom was invited to West Point to attend the 100th anniversary of his graduation class. We didn’t know much about him.
He died young from a wound that he received the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. She learned about him and wrote an article about him. His military records were available. I use his account of what happened at Wounded Knee, contrast it with other accounts, and try to tell both sides of the 7th Cavalry and the Sioux Indian side of that story. I contrast his life with the life of my other ancestor, who was such a good friend to the Potawatomi.
That takes me into the history of the very fraught relations between the United States of America, particularly the Sioux Nation and some of the other Indian nations. I anticipated this big controversy that’s in the media about Indian boarding schools because I have a chapter on that too. The last book, which was published on December 1st, 2021, is a very different book. It’s called A Pickleball Soap Opera: Love, Murder, and Pickleball.
Tell us about pickleball.
Pickleball has sustained me through the pandemic. I’ve become a regular pickleball player because we’ve been able to do that. That’s been my athletic outlet during the pandemic. I decided to write a crazy fictional novel about a pickleball group that gets embroiled in an international conspiracy involving CIA spies and Al-Qaeda, the Taliban.
There’s a basketball, a soccer ball, and a baseball. What’s a pickleball?
The ball itself is a wiffle ball. You play with paddles, which are enlarged ping pong paddles on a downsized tennis court. Believe it or not, it’s America’s fastest-growing sport.
Millionaire: Pickleball is America’s fastest-growing sport.
I have to tell my grandsons about that and ask them about that. That’s interesting. We’ve been talking about healing, rebirth, and all that. You do believe in giving to others. Would you like to talk about the ways that giving to others helped us to begin to heal and anything else you’d like to say about the importance of people healing in their lives?
Intimidated isn’t the right word but you’re a goddess in that respect. I am a mere mortal compared to you. There’s a lot of psychological research that proves that people feel better about themselves when they give. Anybody that’s been involved in either serving charities or even giving to their neighbors, there’s this sense of fulfillment and a positive self-identification. You think of yourself as a better person when you do good deeds.
That’s part of it that we heal ourselves in the sense of having a more positive image of ourselves and feeling better through philanthropy. The other piece of it is regardless of self, it is for the rest of humanity and nature. At this point, we need to be concerned as much, if not more, about the natural world as we do about our species. We can’t have one without the other.
We heal ourselves by having a more positive image of ourselves. We feel better through philanthropy. Click To Tweet
We’re not treating it either very well.
In a way, there’s almost a selfish aspect to it. It serves us to serve others. We need to take care of our world. The natural world is in the most desperate straits it’s been since Homo sapiens have been roaming.
It makes a lot of sense when you talk about the Indigenous people and how they took such good care of the natural world. Along came civilization, should I say, that was not too civilized.
Certainly, industrialization. We’ve got a tiger by the tail because industrialization gives us so much like our quality of life in terms of material. The material aspect of life is so much better. On the other hand, the cost of air, water, and ground is getting to the point where we ask, “Is the cost worth it?” We have to find a new balance.
What is Jeff’s tip for finding joy in life?
We’ve pretty well covered it. Giving of yourself to others but not forgetting that childish, adventuresome, and curious aspect of our personalities and feeding that at least a little bit.
Jeff, helping to uplift others less fortunate than you inspired you to find rebirth and live a more meaningful life. I’m happy for you. For all of the people your life has touched, thank you from my heart for this fascinating and uplifting interview and your soul-stirring books that help your readers to consider how they can insert warm meaning into their lives, helping them to find deeper joy. Here’s a reminder, everyone. Make sure to follow and like us on social @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings, and bye for now.
Guest’s Links:
- Jeff Rasley’s Website
- Basa Village Foundation
- Jeff Rasley’s books: You Have to Get Lost Before You Can Be Found: A Memoir of Suffering, Grit, and Love of the Himalayas and Basa Village, ISLAND ADVENTURES: Disconnecting in the Caribbean and South Pacific, America’s Existential Crisis: Our Inherited Obligation to Native Nations, A Pickleball Soap Opera: Love, Murder, and Pickleball
- Jeff Rasley’s Amazon Author Site
Host’s Links:
- Irene Weinberg on Instagram
- Irene Weinberg on Facebook
- Irene Weinberg on Twitter
- Irene Weinberg – Grief, Rebirth + Healing Podcast on YouTube
