About Tim Shields
(scroll down for the real me)
For nearly three decades, my focus has been on accumulating life experience through travel, which has included buying one-way tickets to India and twice each to Europe and Mexico. My longest journey, which lasted 15 months, found me all over India and Southeast Asia for exactly one year, followed by living in Berlin for the final three months. The result of my journey is the book A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment.
Since walking away from a corporate career in marketing and advertising in late 2015, I’ve made my living as an author, writing coach, editor, and literary collaborator. This has afforded me the opportunity to work with global thought leaders in the fields of science and spirituality, professional athletes, and rock stars—the common thread being they all share a passion for human potential. My most well-known work as an editor was helping the world renowned neuroscientist, researcher, lecturer, and NY Times bestselling author Dr. Joe Dispenza on his critically acclaimed book, Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon. Currently I’m collaborating with Dr. Zach Bush.
My passion is writing about the human experience through the prisms of consciousness, quantum physics, healing, transformation, human potential, and society and culture.
Now for the unbuttoned version…
The Real Me
(let’s cut the crap)
The Backstory
At 17 years old—at a Grateful Dead concert on a heroic dose of mushrooms—I pierced the veil, heard the calling, and felt the interconnected oneness of everything. In that moment of unity consciousness, I received a glimpse of who I was—and it was much bigger than I ever could have imagined.
What I discovered in that transcendental experience was not something I could learn about or research in a book, but rather—a direct, experiential discovery of my connection to a paradigm that was much greater than myself. In some circles, I suppose this might be called a ‘spiritual awakening.’
Perhaps it was just a remembering of a dimension, or a part of the fractal, where I already exist.
A few months later, on September 29th, 1991 at age 17, I first laid to pen to paper, all but declaring in blue ink my heartfelt desire to be a writer. Of course, I had no idea how I was going to get there—there being the life of the writer that existed in my dreams. I only knew that somehow, beyond time and space, my soul was intimately connected to the words, ideas, and the lives of the larger-than-life writers I admired.
But isn’t that the beauty of life? You don’t have to know the “how.” You only need to participate in the mystery’s co-creation through the dreaming process. In time, I’ve learned that the reason why some people manifest the dream and others don’t is very simple: one believes in the dream and the other is afraid of the dream. For years I was the latter. Nonetheless, with monk-like devotion, I did the only thing I knew to do.
I kept moving my pen across the page while living in curiosity.
The Dreaming Process
What I’ve learned throughout my life—and what I will continue to explore for the rest of the my life—is that creation begins in the mind. If this is indeed the truth, then external reality is simply a mirror of that reflection. When you look at it this way, it appears to me that creation occurs in three parts:
The dreaming process, which is birthed through the amplifying power of the imagination;
The action process, which is showing up and acting in alignment with the dream, and;
The manifesting process, which is allowing the mystery do its part in a way that far exceeds the perceived barriers of your limited human mind.
If you are indeed going to co-create with the energy of the universe, then you have to let the energy of the universe do its part—without trying to control or predict the outcome.
As I said in my first book, the hardest part of pursuing any art is trying to make a living while becoming an artist. For 15 years that found me in corporate America (Seattle, Washington, to be specific) laboring through unfulfilling copywriting jobs for some the world’s biggest brands.
‘Maybe this one will fulfill me,’ I would tell myself upon starting each new freelance job…
(The Dreaming Process Continued)
…Despite my humanness being so full of the fear and doubt that I would never be able to live out my dreams, I kept showing up and doing my part. I did so because at the deeper soul level, I knew the dream was possible. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been a late bloomer—because I was in suspicion of the dream, rather than in trust.
And so driven by an intangible vision, I kept experimenting with style, voice, form, and content—all the while filling journal after journal with the yearnings, dreams, desires, heartbreaks, fears, successes, losses, and general confusion that comes with the human experience.
Then in late 2015—through the marriage of intention, hard work, persistence, serendipity, and synchronicity—I received the opportunity to become Dr. Joe Dispenza’s editor. It began with editing his blogs. Then nine months later, upon asking me if I would be interested in helping him with Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon, I replied, “Watch how fucking fast I quit my job.”
I did. And I never looked back.
I will forever be grateful to Dr. Joe for giving me my first break, an opportunity which brought me into the alignment and expression of my truest, highest self.
“But What Do You Want To Write About?”
As a young man, with my eyes already locked onto a vision, when people would ask me what I wanted to write about, in passion I would clench my fists before me as if grabbing something tangible and say, “You know…life!” Even at a young age, I knew what I wanted from my future readers: I wanted them to think, act, and feel.
While I could already sense this thing inside of me growing—this guiding and directing energy that left me no choice but to exorcise and express it on paper—I did not yet have the life experience to bring words to the feelings and sensations we call the human experience, and yet somehow I instinctually knew that if I wanted to write about big things, I had to have big experiences.
I guess you could say I took that mantra to heart and embodied it, because that mantra found me traveling all over the world on one-way tickets, including Europe and Mexico twice, as well as Tanzania, India, and all over Southeast Asia. In the typical fashion of the hero’s journey, I left the known world behind in search of the story, the result of which became A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment.
That quest to find the story—which at the heart has always been the quest to discover my true self—also found me volunteering at an orphanage in Tanzania; taking commercial and improv acting classes in Seattle; working in Berlin for a global corporate behemoth; working at an Irish bar on Crete; working as an (international) school photographer’s assistant in Vietnam and China; volunteering for India’s most important environmental lawyer—who has won the equivalent of two Nobel Prizes and the fourth highest civilian award for the Republic of India; trying to create my own travel show with a friend in Europe; fronting a Seattle band when I barely knew how to play guitar; moving to Mexico first to finish my book (and the second time for love); and making a whole bunch of other bad decisions along the way that pushed me out of my comfort zone. And as always, they turned out to be great decisions.
My Work
The books I’ve written, and the books I will write, are books that contain the wisdom I wish someone had given me as a young seeker. Since they didn’t exist, I knew I had to go out into the world and call experiences to me that were full of both pain and despair, agony and ecstasy, and joy and triumph. I then had to internalize them, learn from them, transmute them, and ultimately embody them. Only then could I organize them into stories and ideas that others could relate to, learn from, and as a result, hopefully not have to live through the worst of them.
Ultimately, my passion is experiencing, teaching, and writing about transformation and human potential. As such, I seek to be a vehicle of higher expression, supported by and partnered with a team of brilliant creative titans in art and business, in order to elevate global consciousness through profitable and scalable ideas that consist of meaningful conversations, art, media, and storytelling.
