LOA Today - Your Daily Dose Of Happy

What if every person you meet, every fleeting moment, every heartbreak, every kindness, is not random at all but divine?
In this powerful conversation, Walt and Joel pull back the curtain on what they call divine encounters and reveal how the smallest moments can reshape an entire life.
Early on, Walt poses the core question behind the whole episode: Are some encounters truly divine, or is every encounter divine if we let it be?
Joel answers not with theory, but with stories.
Joel shares a lunch-time encounter with an elderly man in recovery for 50 years. At first, Joel admits he was just trying to eat in peace. Then the man says something strange: “I’m not going to fall in the Grand Canyon today because I’m not at the damn Grand Canyon.”
It sounds like nonsense until he connects it to relapse: if you don’t want to relapse, don’t go near the edge. Don’t go to the places, people, and situations that pull you toward it.
A “random” old man at lunch becomes a spiritual and practical teacher in five minutes.
Walt reflects on his own powerful encounter with Joel: an interview in 2012, when Joel was guest number 12 on a brand-new podcast.
Walt recalls thinking it was just “one good episode.” Almost a year later, he reached out, unsure Joel would even respond. That one decision turned into a long-term friendship and co-hosting partnership - a life-changing encounter neither could have predicted.
How many “one-time” meetings in your own life were actually beginnings in disguise?
Joel opens up about one of the most pivotal encounters of his life - when everything had fallen apart. He was homeless, jobless, facing felony charges, and with nowhere to go. He got into his car, turned on the radio, and at that exact moment heard someone talking about a gambling helpline. The number was toll-free, which mattered because he had no money.
That call led Joel to Rick, the man who took him in when he was broke and broken - someone who became his business partner and lifelong friend: “That one encounter was the foundation for everything that I have today.”
What are the odds he would turn on the radio at that precise moment? Walt calls it exactly what it is: law of attraction in action.
Both men talk openly about loss - Walt’s beloved cat, Joel’s son TJ, and friendships that ended without clear explanation. They refuse to sugarcoat trauma, yet they lean into one core idea: You can’t control what happens, but you can learn to shape your response.
Walt admits there was a time he laughed at the idea that you could choose your reaction. Now, he sees every encounter as a chance to practice that choice to respond with appreciation instead of fear.
Joel describes using gratitude as his emotional reset button: listing what’s right in his life, what didn’t happen “today” that once did - homelessness, jail, devastating loss. Even his “worst days” become part of a larger, divine tapestry.
Walt finally asks the question many listeners are thinking: “Have you ever had an encounter that just really wasn’t worthwhile?”
Joel’s answer is striking: On the surface, yes. In reality, probably no.
He recalls a 12-year-old boy he once casually helped at the gym. Years later, that boy, now a strong young man, approached Joel and said: “You changed my life, I never missed a day in the gym after that.”
For Joel, it was a forgettable three-minute interaction. For that boy, it was a turning point.
So the real invitation from this conversation is simple and deeply challenging:
What if you treated every encounter - every person, every moment, every loss, every kindness - as divine, before you know how the story ends?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/divine-encounters
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When Jessica Taylor left home on November 15, 1969, she thought she was simply picking up supplies for her cosmetic studio.
Instead, a single misstep sent her plummeting down a dark staircase, shattering her skull and erasing her entire memory.“My slate was wiped clean, all memory of everything in my life and what life was, gone. Totally all memory was gone.”
In a recent episode of LOA Today, host Walt Thiessen invited Jessica to share how that devastating accident became the doorway to a lifelong metaphysical awakening and what it can teach us about consciousness, soul, and who we really are.
After the fall, Jessica didn’t recognize her husband, her daughters, or even herself. There were no MRIs, no CAT scans, and no hospital insurance for her immigrant family. She was sent home after two weeks, where the real struggle began.
“I literally had to start all over again, learning everything from scratch.”
She had what she calls a Third Eye vision - like a tiny, hyper-detailed television series in her forehead of about twenty women standing on grand steps in front of a white building. She could see lips moving, eyes blinking, every detail.
Later, she watched what looked like the sun falling from the sky - a terrifying “sun spin” experience that she later found mirrored in historical accounts from places like Fatima and Bosnia.
When Walt asked how long she had lived in this metaphysical overlap, Jessica didn’t hesitate: “Oh, for years. For years, I seemed to wake up in the metaphysical world. I didn’t know the reality of this world.”
A spiritual man eventually urged Jessica to go to the library and “just start studying.” What happened next felt fated. “The books literally fell out, my readers say, ‘Jessica, your name was on them. They were waiting for you.’”
Those books? Encyclopedias from the Vatican, introducing her to theological science - the science of the supernatural. She learned about Theurgy, an almost forgotten term for people who tapped directly into what she calls God consciousness: healing, clairvoyance, deep spiritual insight.
She later met a retired Canon of the Roman Catholic Church who quietly shared “secrets of theology” he had never been allowed to tell his congregation - teachings about reincarnation, hidden biblical texts, and a universe alive with consciousness.
Through decades of study, Jessica came to a simple but radical understanding: “The universe is alive, it emits a conscious energy to all life on planet Earth. I call it God consciousness instead of the word God.”
Walt connected this to the work of Neville Goddard and other teachers of the Law of Attraction, who also describe a universal consciousness expressing through everything. Together, they explored:
Is everything conscious - even a bottle on a desk?
Does the soul carry our energy from life to life?
Are we separate from God are we God in expression?
Jessica believes every being has a vibrational frequency tied to its accomplishments and growth. Raising that vibration means transcending anger, jealousy, greed, and fear. “One of the things I was blessed with was that I rose above anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, envy, in all those 60 years.”
For years, she slept with barbiturates under her pillow, suicidal but unable to leave her family or ignore the quiet pull of her higher self, whom she affectionately calls Yiska.
Today, despite a permanent brain injury, she has written two books and guides others to a more holistic, soul-based view of life. Walt summed it up beautifully: her tragedy became a tremendous gift not only for her, but for anyone ready to awaken to a universe that is conscious, loving, and always calling us home.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/jessica-taylor
Jessica Taylor's Website: https://jessicaetaylor.org/
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What if the quality of your life is not random, not unfair, and not “just the way it is” but a precise reflection of the standards you quietly live by every single day?
In this powerful conversation, Walt and Joel unpack how much our lives are shaped not by what we say we want, but by what we’re actually willing to accept, repeat, and tolerate - in love, in work, in health, and in how we treat ourselves.
Walt asks a question most of us live but never say out loud: “Which organ is the standard coming from? Is it coming from my heart, or is it coming from my brain?”
He shares that when he finally decided, “I can always trust my heart” and let his heart make the final decision. Using his brain only as a tool, not the boss - life got “a whole lot easier.” Choices became kinder, calmer, and more aligned with joy.
Joel explains why this shift is so hard. The brain is constantly scanning for danger using old failures as evidence: “The brain is scanning the horizon for problems, using historical events, where the heart is simply saying, ‘Okay, well, let’s give that a shot, see what happens.’”
So when your brain and heart disagree, your standards decide who wins.
One of the most uncomfortable takeaways from this conversation is that people often defend beliefs and patterns that are quietly destroying them.
Walt admits he used to cling to things that hurt him: “I didn’t feel good about myself. If we don’t have ourselves to hang on to, we have to find something else, ‘I’m going to be right about this thing, even if I’m wrong.’”
Joel sees this every day in his coaching work: people whose lives don’t match what they say they want, because their actions match their wounds, not their standards. He puts it simply: “You’re living a life that you’re willing to accept.”
So how do you change standards that live deep in your nervous system? Not with a single insight but with repetition.
Joel talks about his decades-long routines: writing five things every morning, walking, and going to the gym every day, even through COVID. When he woke up from an anxious dream with his heart racing, he didn’t analyze it to death. He went straight to his routine, and his system regulated itself.
Walt ties this to neuroplasticity and standards: “Those neural pathways are going to pay off when I have a day like the one where I need to just wake up from the bad dream and get past it quickly.”
The message: your routines are not just habits; they are physical proof of your standards.
If someone watched your life for a week - your choices, your reactions, your routines, and then answered this question: “What are this person’s real standards?”
Would you like their answer?
Because whether you’re following your heart or your fears, your life already reflects it.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/your-life-reflects-your-standards
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What if the worst thing that ever happened to you became the doorway to the life you actually want?
That’s the emotional heartbeat of this powerful conversation between Walt, Anne-Marie, and guest Dwight, who shared how a full-blown health crisis and career burnout forced him to reclaim his life, purpose, and freedom.
For years, Dwight was the classic high-performing IT consultant: a global internet security specialist, running a computer consulting firm, a retail store, and a service division. He wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. “I used to go days on end without sleep, it’d be nothing for us to be up three days,” Dwight recalled.
Then his body pulled the emergency brake.
At a casual birthday gathering, a friend accused him of “winking” too much. Confused, Dwight went to the bathroom and realized the right side of his face was paralyzed. It was a severe facial-nerve event tied directly to stress and exhaustion. “I went into the bathroom, and the right side of my face was paralyzed. In three months, I couldn’t work”.
Doctors and a long-time friend delivered a brutal truth: if he didn’t change, he might not be around much longer. That friend also challenged him: “You make a good six-figure income, but you’re broke all the time. You need to do something different”.
That painful wake-up call led Dwight out of IT and into financial education and coaching - but done his way: relationship-first, heart-first, and purpose-driven.
Walt connected deeply with that arc. He shared his own crash in 2008 - business destroyed, years of debt, and profound burnout as an IT guy who was good at the work but never really loved it. That burnout eventually pushed him to create his podcast and, later, discover a genuine passion for AI: “For the first time in my life, I actually like IT. AI is like, " Oh my God, this is so much fun” .
Both men asked the same pivotal question in different words:
Do I really want to keep living this way?
If not, what am I willing to do about it?
Dwight framed it simply: " Are you 'the willing”? “Are you willing to embrace the uncomfortable? If you’re not willing, then be honest with yourself and be honest with me. I’m going to go help somebody, that’s the willing”.
A major takeaway was the shift from brain-only living to heart-centered living. Walt described the turning point: “My heart never misleads me. My brain is really, really good at misleading me. My heart never gets it wrong”.
Dwight reinforced that with a simple physical practice, hands over heart - as a reminder that the heart is the true compass: “This is more of a north on a compass than this is. This fools itself. This reacts in real time”.
Anne-Marie pulled it all together with one core theme: be kind to yourself, build awareness, and refuse to have a bad day by always finding the silver lining - even if it’s as simple as, “I opened my eyes today.”
So ask yourself:
Where am I still on the hamster wheel?
Am I willing to be “the willing”?
Am I listening to my brain’s fear or my heart’s quiet truth?
Because as this conversation proved, burnout and crisis aren’t the end of the story. They can be the beginning of finally living life on purpose, not by accident.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/dwight-heck
Dwight Heck's Website: http://www.giveaheck.com/
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When Walt sat down with life coach and LOA teacher Joel for an episode of Your Daily Dose of Happy, a simple phrase from one of Joel’s TikToks became the doorway to a powerful, uncomfortable truth: “Excuses are expensive.”
At first glance, it sounds like a clever slogan. But as Walt admitted, the moment he read it, he realized how true it was - we pay a real price for excuses, while getting nothing of value in return.
Joel explained that for him, excuses are usually a procrastination tool and often a symptom of something deeper: a victim mindset. He doesn’t want excuses from people who work with him. As he put it, he’s fine with someone saying, “I got 4 of the 5 things done; I’ll do the last one tomorrow.” What he doesn’t want is the story:  “My dog did this, this happened, and that’s why I couldn’t do it.”
Walt pushed the idea further, asking why people cling so hard to excuses. His take: we’re often pre‑emptively defending ourselves from anticipated blame. We’re bracing for the blame game, so we start playing it first. Joel agreed, connecting this to the broader culture of blame, where responsibility is dodged instead of owned.
One of the most powerful moments came when Joel described appearing before a judge back in 1995 for crimes related to his gambling addiction. The public defender told him, “Everybody pleads not guilty.” Joel refused. When the judge asked for his plea, he simply said, “I’m guilty, Your Honor.”
Joel didn’t use his addiction as a shield: “That’s not an excuse. I knew exactly what I was doing. I stole the money, and I’m ready to pay the price.”
Instead of five years in prison, the judge gave him 30 days and probation, openly admiring his courage. That moment became a cornerstone of Joel’s philosophy: radical responsibility moves life forward; excuses freeze it.
Walt contrasted excuses vs. explanations. Both are rooted in real events, but they’re used differently. An excuse carries emotional charge and self‑protection. An explanation simply states what happened without trying to dodge responsibility. As Walt noted, when Joel described his gambling at sentencing, he was offering context, not justification - fact without victimhood.
The conversation then turned to relationships and the destructive need to “be right.” Walt shared how he realized that, when he insisted on being right with someone he loved, what he was really doing was trying to prove they were wrong and unconsciously choosing “being right” over the relationship itself.
Joel now regularly asks people, “Is being right worth more than the person you care about?”
A recurring theme throughout the conversation: energy. Excuses, blame, and the quest to be right are emotionally expensive. They drain energy that could be invested in healing, action, connection, and joy. As Joel put it, the faster he simply accepts what is and asks, “What’s my next step?” the easier life becomes.
In the end, Walt and Joel brought it back to happiness and responsibility: when you drop the excuses, you don’t just lose your defenses - you gain your power back.
Key Takeaway Questions to Ask Yourself:
Where am I making excuses instead of taking action?
Am I offering an excuse, or a simple explanation without blame?
Is being right more important to me than this person I care about?
What is my next actionable step, right now?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/excuses-are-expensive
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
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