Hey friend,

Let me tell you a little Thanksgiving story.

It’s the story of the last six years of my life —
the most devastating and the most glorious years I’ve ever lived.
The most terrifying and the most loving.
The most stripped-down and the most revealing.

And I’m telling you this now because something profound has happened:

This past week, the six-year chapter that began in 2019 finally reached its last sentence.
It completed what I now understand as Volume I of my life — forty-seven years culminating in one powerful, humbling, soul-shaping finale.

And the moment that final line was written, the book closed…
and a new volume opened.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt the unmistakable moment when an old life ends and a new one begins, but that’s exactly where I’m standing now.

To be precise: Volume I — the first forty-seven years — didn’t truly end this week.

It ended about five weeks ago, the moment I stepped off the Camino de Santiago and returned home.

Something in me died on that trail.
Something completed itself.
Something landed.
And I could feel — unmistakably — that the last page of my old life had been written.

But here’s the strange thing no one tells you:

When one volume ends and another begins, there’s an in-between.

A no-man’s-land.
A hallway between two worlds.
A space where the old life is gone…
but the new one hasn’t started yet.

That’s where I’ve been living since I got back from Spain.

Not in Volume I anymore, but not yet inside Volume II.

Nothing felt like it was moving.
Nothing was being written.
No new scenes, no new chapters, no next steps.
Everything — jobs, opportunities, money, momentum — quietly dissolved around me.

It felt as if the pen that writes my life had gone completely still.

And every day in meditation, the only message I kept hearing was:

Wait.
Cocoon.
Don’t move.
Wait.

So I waited.

And it was excruciating.

I didn’t know what I was waiting for — only that something essential was still unfinished. Something that had to be learned, absorbed, known in my bones before the next volume of my life could begin.

And this past week… it arrived.

The one lesson.
The final piece.
The knowing that six years of fire, loss, unraveling, and revelation had been building toward.

That lesson opened the door to Volume II — the beginning of the love-based life that is now unfolding.

And I want to share it with you.

Not just because it’s the grand finale of a wild six-year story…
but because I suspect many of you will see your own reflection somewhere inside it.

Let me take you back to the beginning.

December 2019 — Peru

Six years ago, I flew into the rainforest to spend a month at the Paititi Institute with an extraordinary shaman named Roman Hanis.

No phones.
No distractions.
Just me, the jungle, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, silence, and truth.

And unlike the triumphant “I found myself!” retreat stories people love to tell…

I left shattered.

I was shown my terror, my rage, my emptiness.
I saw the fear I’d been carrying since childhood — the one I thought I had outgrown, outworked, outperformed.

It was brutal.

Brutal in a way no one warns you about.
Brutal in a way that doesn’t just break you — it erases you.

And when those thirty days were over, I didn’t fly home enlightened or transformed or reborn.

I flew home ruined.

I walked out of that retreat convinced something in me had cracked beyond repair.
I remember thinking, Just leave me on the side of the highway and let me rot. I’m hopeless. I’m done.

That was the honest truth of who I was in that moment.

But even in that state — broken, hollow, scraped clean — there were two words I couldn’t escape:

Fearless Love.

I didn’t understand them.
I didn’t trust them.
I didn’t even believe in them.

Yet they kept arriving.

They rose up in my non-ordinary states like messages from somewhere that still believed in me.
They appeared in my journal before I even realized my hand had written them.
They whispered themselves to me after ceremonies with Roman.
They echoed through every reflection, every moment of stillness, every breath.

These words wouldn’t leave me alone.

I didn’t know what they meant or why they had been given to me.
It felt like receiving a prophecy with no instructions.
A riddle I wasn’t yet wise enough to solve.
A puzzle with no picture on the box.

But now, from where I stand today, I can see it:

Those two words were the title of the story I was about to live.

They were the name of the six-year journey already unfolding.
The container, the curriculum, the map.
The theme I would end up walking through fire to understand.

Life handed me those words as a sacred puzzle…
and then sent me into the next six years to gather the missing pieces.

And this past week, I placed the final one.

When it clicked into place, it felt like hearing a safe unlock from the inside.
A door swung open.
A new volume of my life began.

Volume II.

And as I look back now — at the path, the pain, the treasure hidden inside the collapse — I know that if I ever write a book based on these six years I’m about to share with you…

There’s only one possible title:

Fearless Love.

March 2020 — The Storm Arrives

I landed back from the rainforest at the end of January 2020 — thirty days in Peru that had left me hollow in a way I didn’t yet understand.

And for a little while, life went back to “normal.”

I rebuilt myself the only way I knew how:
with performance…
with hustle…
with image…
with the old armor I had worn my entire life.

I buried the brutality of Peru like it was a bad dream and reattached myself to the same false gods that always made me feel worthy — money, momentum, status, accomplishment.

And for the first few months, it worked beautifully.

Money flowed.
Speaking gigs poured in.
I was booked out for the year — more than any year before.
I was living in a gorgeous home on the beach with my beautiful fiancée.

Everything looked perfect.
Everything looked “back.”
Tony was back.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

And then March came.

And everything changed.

For years I blamed COVID for what happened next.
But now I know COVID was just an actor in a much bigger play —
a character in the Fearless Love story,
but not the villain.

The villain was fear.
My fear.

What unfolded over the next six years wasn’t a pandemic.
It was a curriculum.

And the curriculum was simple:

Everything you think keeps you safe… must fall away.

Here’s the condensed version — the bullet-point outline of the six-year storm.
The full, unfiltered story will have to wait for the book.

My speaking business collapsed.
Every contract that made 2020 my biggest year evaporated.
The phone went silent.
I didn’t book another talk for more than two years.

Every consulting client on retainer disappeared within weeks.
I didn’t land another client for years.

Three other businesses I owned collapsed in quick succession.
I lost all my savings.
Every dollar.

My fiancée left.
I lost my home on the beach.

I moved into a tiny one-bedroom with my two kids…
and then got evicted from that too.

I started another company — raised money, built a team of eighteen, created something that felt like family.
And then that collapsed as well.
I declared personal bankruptcy.

My father — my best friend, the man who raised me — became sick.
I bathed him during his final year.
When he died, we discovered the unthinkable: the CEO we all believed was wealthy… was broke too.
No inheritance.
No safety net.
I paid for his funeral.

I spent months living in rotating 30-day Airbnbs with my kids because no one would rent to someone with an eviction and bankruptcy on their record.
Every month, I didn’t know where we would live next.

No one would hire me.
I applied for hundreds — if not thousands — of jobs.
I couldn’t buy a job.
Everyone told me the same thing:
“You’re overqualified.”
“You’re too entrepreneurial.”
“You’re a flight risk.”
I dumbed down my résumé again and again,
and still couldn’t get hired at a shoe store selling shoes for minimum wage.

I went from speaking on global stages…
to driving Uber.
To hauling furniture as a mover.
To doing whatever I could to keep food on the table.

Friends disappeared when they saw how far I had fallen.
Family relationships thinned and drifted.
Any confidence I once had — gone.
It didn’t just crack — it evaporated.

Every six months or so I'd drop into another wave of debilitating anxiety.
Not a bad day — entire months where my nervous system felt like it had been set on fire.
A quarter of every year spent trying to breathe through panic while the rest of my life collapsed around me.

And yes, during those six years there were lifelines — a speaking gig here, a consulting call there.
Once in a while, a $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 check would drop in like a miracle.
They came rarely, nothing like before the storm, but always just in time.
They kept me from sleeping in the car.
They paid for food.
They paid for shelter.

But imagine this:

You’re on a Zoom call with a Fortune 100 company about to pay you $25,000 to teach their people how to be strategic, confident, profitable — and the whole time, you’re secretly wondering whether you’ll have the gas money to get to the airport.

Imagine stepping onto a stage in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, introduced as an expert in success… while silently praying you have enough for an Uber ride back to the hotel afterward.

Imagine putting on the suit, adjusting the mic, standing under the lights — while your stomach churns violently enough that you think you might throw up.

I took beta blockers just to keep my hands from shaking.
I performed confidence while drowning inside.
I pretended to be a man who had it all together when I didn’t know if I’d make it through the week.

When I say I lost everything,
I mean everything — externally and internally.

Everything I thought made me valuable: gone.
Everything I thought made me lovable: gone.
Everything I thought made me safe: gone.
Everything I thought made me “me”: gone.

It was a surgical removal.
Not punishment.
Not cruelty.
Precision.

Because the word whispered to me in Peru wasn’t Love.​
It was Fearless Love.

Fearless came first.

I wasn’t ready for love.
I had to meet fear first.
I had to face fear without the armor, without the money, without the status, without the identity.
I had to meet fear naked.

And for six years, life made sure of it.

Everything I clung to was taken from my hands.
Everything I worshipped was peeled away.
Every false god shattered at my feet.

Only now do I see it clearly:

These six years weren’t a failure.
They were the initiation.
The purification.
The stripping.
The descent.
The curriculum I needed to understand the second word — love.

Before I could walk into Volume II,
I had to walk through the ashes of Volume I.

The 30,000-Foot View

Before I tell you what I learned, I need to tell you why I learned it.

Because what unfolded over the last six years wasn’t just for me.

I went through it for you, too.

I mean that literally.

I’ve come to understand something with a clarity that feels bone-deep now:
​my role in this life is to teach.​
It’s always been to teach.

But I wasn’t sent here to teach negotiation
or persuasion
or performance
or business strategy.

Those were training wheels — useful, necessary even — but not the thing.

I was sent here to teach about:

Love.
Trust.
Surrender.
God.
Connection.
Joy.
Truth.
Spirit.
The architecture of fear.
The passage out of it.

And you cannot teach these things from theory.
You can’t teach them from a mountaintop or a monastery.
You can’t teach them after eighty quiet years meditating on a rooftop.

You can only teach them if you’ve walked through hell
and found heaven in the same lifetime.

And that’s exactly what happened.

I’ve read the mystics.
Neville.
Dispenza.
Abraham Hicks.
ACIM.
The greats.

I’ve devoured every book, attended every workshop, practiced every technique, and tried every “manifestation formula.”
And they all say the same thing:

Here’s what becomes possible once you’re on the path of love.​
Here’s what opens after surrender.​
Here’s what flows once you’re cracked open.​
Here’s what happens after the ego dissolves.

But almost no one talks about how to get there.

How to leave the left road.
How to walk out of fear.
How to survive the crack.
How to move from the identity that chases love
to the one that can receive it.

I was one of the millions doing all the spiritual practices — meditating, visualizing, affirming, manifesting — bewildered that none of it was working.

Not because the teachings were wrong.
But because there were things I still had to learn.
Lessons that must be lived, not read.
A curriculum that must break you open
before it can rebuild you.

And that’s what the last six years were.

Not a punishment.
Not misfortune.
Not bad luck.
Not failure.

A curriculum.

A PhD in Fearless Love.

And here’s what I now know:

I was dropped into this lifetime without love.
Born into a desert of it.
Raised in a house where love was replaced with fear, anger, and survival.
I didn’t grow up learning what love was —
I grew up learning what it wasn’t.

So naturally, as an adult, I went searching under every rock:

Money.
Women.
Success.
Status.
Fame.
Highs.
Applause.
Businesses.
Achievements.

None of it was love.
All of it was substitution.

And I searched anyway, because I was placed here — I feel this now more than ever —
with a mission:

Learn what love is.
Understand it fully.
Travel the road that most people avoid.
Find the way out of fear.
And come back with the map.

That’s what the last 47 years were preparing me for.
That’s why my life unfolded the way it did.
That’s why the storm arrived the way it did.
That’s why the collapse was total.

So I could finally understand the mechanics — the actual mechanics — of moving from fear to love.

So I could teach it.

So I could hand it to you.

Because the truth is simple:

You don’t learn how to make money from a trust-fund kid.
You learn it from someone who started at zero and figured out the mechanics.

In the same way,
you don’t learn love from someone who floated through life wrapped in it.
You learn it from someone who started in the desert
and found the river.
From someone who fell into the ocean of fear
and was carried, unexpectedly,
into the ocean of love.

That’s my story.
That’s why I’m here.
That’s why you’re reading this.

And if everything I went through — every loss, every collapse, every fire — was the price of bringing you this map?

It was worth it.

Now let me show you what I learned.

The Ocean

So what did I actually learn from all of this?
And more importantly, what can I pass on to you?

The truth is, the lessons were endless. If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, you’ve already seen hundreds of them — each article, each reflection, each metaphor another breadcrumb in this six-year curriculum called Fearless Love.

But today I want to give you the North Star.
The one lesson that everything else points to.

Think of it like a soup: there are many ingredients — each one meaningful, each one necessary — but without a pot to hold them, none of it becomes anything.
Today, I want to give you the pot.
The container.
The single realization that makes all the other lessons make sense.

To explain it, I need to give you the metaphor that changed everything — the one that didn’t just land in my mind, but rearranged something in my being.
It turned an idea I understood into something I finally knew.

Here’s what it felt like:

Thrown Into the Ocean

Six years ago, when the storm began, it was as if I had been thrown into the middle of a vast, endless ocean.

No raft.
No lifejacket.
No coastline.
Just water everywhere.

And I panicked.

I flailed.
I screamed.
I begged for help.
I was sure I was going to be swallowed whole — by the waves, by the cold, by the sharks circling in my imagination.

And then… every time I reached a full panic, a ship would appear.

A job.
A loan.
A gig.
A friend with a lifeline.
A speaking opportunity.
A consulting check.

Some boat would pull up beside me, haul me aboard, and I’d breathe again.
“Thank you, ship. Thank you, ship. You saved me.”

But then, after a while…
the ship would toss me right back into the ocean.

And there I was again — panicking, screaming, begging, flailing.
Another ship would come.
Rescue me.
Give me hope.
Then throw me overboard again.

This wasn’t random. This was the curriculum.

I didn’t know it at the time.
I thought this was punishment, bad luck, karma, consequence.

Now I see it clearly:

I had to be thrown back in.
Every time.
I had to panic.
I had to flail.
I had to confront the water, the cold, the fear, and the aloneness.

This was the Fearless Love curriculum at work.

Little by little… the panic softened

Looking back, I can now trace something I couldn’t see then:

Over the years, I started panicking a little less.
Screaming a little less.
Fearing a little less.

It wasn’t because life got easier — it didn’t.
It was because teachers began appearing in my life.
Real teachers.
The ones who could translate what was happening and help me stay calm in the water.

And each time I found myself in the ocean, even though I felt alone, I could still see a ship somewhere on the horizon.
Maybe far away, maybe just a speck — but enough to keep me from fully losing hope.

Teachers came.
Lessons came.
And they helped me trust the ocean just enough to keep breathing.

But then something changed.

As I became calmer, the ships appeared less and less.

The “saviors” — the jobs, gigs, clients, opportunities — drifted further and further away.

Until, this past year, something unprecedented happened:

There were no ships at all.

No options.
No saviors.
No Plan B.
No horizon lights.
Nothing to grab, nothing to swim toward, nothing to hope for.

Just me.

And the water.

Then came the darkest 24 hours of my life

Something inside me broke open — violently.

It was a full ego death.

For 24 hours I was certain something in me was dying.
Not physically… but everything I had identified as “me.”
My mind felt like it was fracturing.
My identity was dissolving.
Every coping mechanism was collapsing.

I was convinced: I’m not going to make it. This is how I end.

And now I understand exactly what that was:

The final death of the version of me who thought survival depended on finding a ship.

And then… surrender

Because when there are no ships left to look for, you stop looking outward at all.

I had no choice left.

All the things I worshipped as saviors — money, work, clients, relationships, hustle, strategy — were gone.

And in that total helplessness, something inside me finally whispered:

I give up.

Not in defeat.
In surrender.

I stopped looking for boats.
There were none.

I stopped trying to outswim the ocean.
Impossible.

For the first time in my entire life, I looked inward — not outward — for safety.
For the first time, I looked toward the actual Source rather than the channels I’d mistaken for God.

And that’s when the metaphor hit me like lightning

The revelation:

The ocean was never trying to drown me.​
​The ocean had been holding me the entire time.

The thing I feared most was the very thing keeping me alive.

I had been begging to be saved from the ocean…
not realizing the ocean itself was what was saving me.

Every ship that came was temporary.
The ocean was permanent.
The ocean stayed.

And then came the truth that rearranged everything:

I’m not just in the ocean…
I am the ocean.

A wave doesn’t fear drowning in the water that created it.
A wave can forget its nature — but it can’t lose it.

That’s what fear had done to me:
made me forget who I am.

And then — for the first time in my life — I felt safe

Not because I had money.
Not because I had a partner.
Not because I had status.
Not because I had a plan.

For the first time in my life, I felt safe
​because I was finally resting in what had been holding me all along.

It changed everything instantly.

My perception.
My mind.
My body.
My entire way of relating to life.
The way I see people, challenges, uncertainty, the future — all of it shifted in an instant.

I had been looking for safety my entire life.
But safety wasn’t something to find — it was something to remember.

The ocean had me.
It always had.

And that was the beginning of Volume II.

A Wave Creates Its World

Here’s what clicked in me after the ocean metaphor landed:

Volume II isn’t just my new beginning — every one of us has a Volume II waiting.
A right-road life.
A love-based life.
A life we were designed for but rarely taught how to reach.

Most of us spend our years on the left road — the road of fear, scarcity, repetition, and exhaustion disguised as ambition.
Fear doesn’t move forward.
Fear spins in circles.

The entire arc of my life — especially the last six years — has been the slow unwinding of that left road… and the first real steps onto the right one.

The right road is the road of love — of possibility, alignment, ease, beauty, truth.
It’s the road your vision board is actually pointing to.

Because the things on a vision board — the house, the car, the partnership, the lifestyle — are never the real desire.
The feelings are.

I didn’t understand that until one afternoon, driving a car that was moments from breaking down through Brentwood — one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world.

I had nothing.
They had everything.
And yet… with the windows down and the wind moving through my hair, something cracked open.

I didn’t long for the mansions.
I felt the feelings they symbolized:

Warmth.
Connection.
Family at Christmas.
Laughter in big rooms.
Nature everywhere.
Peace. Safety. Beauty.
A shared life.

And it hit me like a revelation:

I didn’t desire the mansion —
I desired the feeling the mansion represented.

And in that moment — in a car worth less than the bicycles hanging in those garages — I felt abundant.
Truly abundant.

Inspired. Peaceful. Open. Connected. Alive.

I had none of what the world calls “abundance”:
no zeros in the bank, no security, no backup plan.
But I had the feeling of abundance.

That’s when it dawned on me:

Abundance has nothing to do with currency.
Abundance is a feeling —
and feelings live in the body, not the bank.

Most of us chase the things on our vision boards as if they’re the source of abundance — as if they radiate energy and we must chase their glow.
But it’s not the things that radiate.
​We are the ones who radiate.
And when we radiate, the things come to us.

Everything on your vision board — the home, the partnership, the freedom, the travel, the creative life — isn’t something you go get.
It comes toward you when you stop chasing it.
It finds you when your frequency matches what you desire.

Because here’s the truth:

What you chase runs.
Fear repels.
Need repels.
Grasping repels.

Just like a needy man repels a woman,
a needy soul repels the very life it tries to force into being.

People, places, opportunities — they all follow the same law:
They don’t move toward fear.
They move toward resonance.

Attraction isn’t about doing more.
It’s about radiating more.
And radiance isn’t effort — it’s a feeling.

That day in Brentwood, I wasn’t chasing abundance — I was experiencing it.
My whole system became a broadcast tower — a radio station tuned to love instead of fear.
And just like a radio pulls listeners through the music it sends out,
your life reorganizes itself according to the frequency you emit.

You’re not magnetic when you want.
You’re magnetic when you feel.

You don’t chase the thing.
You become the station.
And the things tune to you.

And I know this now because I’ve lived both sides.

The right road — the road of love — is built entirely on inner reality, not outer striving.
No hustle.
No begging.
No proving.
No forcing.
No desperation.
No “please say yes.”

The right road feels like a Bob Marley song — slow, warm, effortless, deeply alive.
It feels like choosing only “hell yes” opportunities.
It feels like honoring people with your gifts.
It feels like being carried rather than dragged — ease instead of performance.
It feels like the doors of your life no longer depend on you.

On the right road, you don’t build the doors, force them, or hunt for them.
They open on their own, in their own timing, and your only job is to walk through — even when you don’t understand why.
That’s what trust is.
That’s what loving the ocean looks like: letting it open the path and letting yourself be guided through it.

And here’s the truth that changed my life forever:

You cannot walk the right road if you still believe the ocean is dangerous.
You cannot surrender to a force you fear.
You cannot trust a God you think might abandon you.
You cannot rest in an ocean you believe is trying to drown you.

Before surrender comes safety.
Before trust comes knowing.
Before love comes remembering.

That’s why the ocean metaphor shattered me —
it revealed that the thing I feared most… was the thing holding me.

All my life I trusted the “ships”:
money, hustle, status, performance, women, success, strategy, force.
I treated every channel as if it were God — every paycheck, client, opportunity, relationship.
I worshipped the forms.
Clung to the forms.
Mistook the waves for the ocean.

But I never trusted the Source itself — the One the channels come from.
I bowed to the boats, never to the water.

And when I finally felt the ocean holding me, I realized:

This is what trusting God feels like.
Calm.
Quiet.
Non-negotiable.
Undeniable.
Safe.

Once that landed, surrender wasn’t a concept — it was the only thing that made sense.
Whether a job came or didn’t…
whether the check cleared or didn’t…
whether I had a home, a car, a plan, or nothing…
I was held.

And the ocean only ever moves in my favor — even when I don’t understand its direction.

Inner safety is the switch that changes everything.

Because here is the most important spiritual law I’ve learned:

Your reality is nothing but your beliefs pushed outward.
Life is the movie.
Your beliefs are the projector.

If your core belief is I am not safe,
life will mirror a world where things fall apart — not because life is cruel, but because life is obedient.

Life always matches the internal state of the one living it.

But the moment I felt safe — truly safe —
the moment I knew the ocean was with me, not against me…
my world began to rearrange.

Not because I manifested harder.
Not because I visualized longer.
Not because I hustled more.

It shifted because the projector changed.

When I knew I was held, life showed me a held world.
When I knew I was loved, life showed me a loved world.
When I knew I was safe, life showed me a safe world.

This is the right road.
This is Volume II.
This is the love story that replaces the fear story.

And the deepest truth of all — the one the storm was preparing me to teach — is this:

Until you feel loved by the ocean, you will try to extract love from the world.
And the world cannot give you what only the ocean can produce.

But once you feel held — truly held —
once you know you are safe,
once you remember you are part of the ocean itself…
the whole world begins to tell a different story:

Heaven instead of hell.
A love story instead of a survival story.
Possibility instead of punishment.

This is what I learned.
This is what I now know in my bones.
And this is what I’m here to teach.

If any part of this story moved something in you —​
if you can feel how this message could open your people, deepen your leaders, or lift your organization out of fear and into real performance — just hit reply and write Fearless Love. I’ll reach out personally. We’ll schedule a conversation. And together we’ll shape a session that brings this curriculum to your team in a way that fits your world.

Because beneath every KPI, every sales target, every leadership challenge, every conflict and every burnout-cycle… there is a root. There is a cause.
Most corporate training treats the symptoms.
But what I’m offering here — the story, the shift, the map — goes to the source.

If you want that for your people, reply with Fearless Love and we’ll begin.

With love,
Tony