The past several years have brought change in my life, both personally and professionally. Never would I have dreamed of reaching the width and depth of a successful professional chef career as I have. Nor would I have dreamt that it would come with the immense challenges that it did. Here today, I am accountable for all of it. Certainly others had hands in my life outcomes but this is part of my growth: Full acceptance of all the parts of my life and my role in them. In the period of training as a professional life coach while running restaurants, recovery and culinary education work at The Prairie Recovery Center and working through my Psychology degree, I certainly learned a few things along the way. I realized that my personal treasure was not in my restaurants’ successes nor my identity as Lance, the chef. In fact, as I developed my strength personally and spiritually, I learned that my roles as a father, son, partner, friend weren’t my identity either. Of course they are part of me, but they are not the definition of me. My successes and failures are solely based upon my choices and actions. This type of acceptance is the first pathway I found in moving towards well-being in my life.

I started traveling some years ago, and I mean really traveling. The first 18 years of traveling involved surfing, a passion that likely will never leave me… yet came close to killing me 3 times. The past few years, those surfing trips and their purpose have changed. They are no longer about risky, self-serving behavior. The trips are now part of my own personal healing. Certainly the sport itself, the tie to the energy and pull of the ocean is a dominant component in my life but something else has happened.

There is a deep spiritual and cultural component that overrides the old rewarding thrill I get from surfing a wave. This perspective changed for me on my last trip to Bali in 2015. A “tribal” friend lost his life surfing, just a few islands east from Bali. I was asked to retrieve his body from the desolate place he died. A wooden canoe, my surfboard, some food, some water and a body. There I was, alone and suffering. Suffering selfishly and suffering from knowing he had suffered here on that reef but also in his own emotional, spiritual and psychological ways for so long and so alone. Remembering he told me a few weeks before his accident on that reef, “Lance, I love you. You know that but I want to see you start following the rules of your practice like we talked about. I don’t want to see you again until you do”. I responded with “I will try”. A few weeks later, he was gone. I miss my friend but his gift was exactly what I needed. I reached for help to those that were still there. I received it in literal and figurative waves from every person I have encountered , including my lost friend.

Here I am now. The chaos and wreckage have drifted off with the tide. My heart is filled with gratitude, patience, compassion, energy and hope. I know why. My transformation started with a pod of dolphins on a July swim a mile offshore of Galveston, then some hope and new understanding where my suffering was coming from. When we have people that care for us, find just the tiniest bit of strength to get up and work a little harder on our lives, work to put others first (like my friend did for me) and peel back our internal layers to find what is really in there,…we have the ability to start transforming ourselves into what we can and always should have been. This is exactly what my personal treasure is all about: My treasure was finding the Lance that I was supposed to be and in turn, giving myself the space and love to help souls in need of compassion, encouragement and kindness.

For you CF,…immeasurable love, gratitude and honor.