As part of my series about prominent entrepreneurs and executives that overcame adversity to achieve great success, I had the pleasure of interviewing…
Lorna J., CEO of Lorna J. Enterprises, Business Oracle and Dark Goddess of Consciousness, who runs a multimillion-dollar consciousness consulting firm helping neurodivergent entrepreneurs become giants in their field. Lorna is also neurodivergent and took herself through a process she calls “going sane,” which allowed her to go from broke, bipolar and suicidal to spiritual millionaire, thought leader and influencer in the transformational coaching world in just ten months, without the aid of medication or therapy. Lorna J. is also the inventor of the Magic Man Method for Manifesting on Demand, the missing link to manifestation and Law of Attraction. It is her mission to introduce everyone to the power they have to create miracles and magic at will.
Jason Crowley: Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?
Lorna J.: I come from a long line of Christian missionaries, priests and evangelicals and I always knew I was meant to lead, teach, and inspire others to their greatest calling in the world. For most of my life I was completely unwilling to step into that, because it would mean going against my family’s beliefs, as well as our cultural conditioning that looks down on those who claim to be spiritually gifted psychics (which, in fact, everyone is).
I was way too afraid of the backlash, judgment and disdain I was certain I’d get, so instead I went to work in corporate America. To my surprise I found I was gifted at sales, marketing, building and running companies, and making the “Davids” of an industry successful against their “Goliath” competitors.
But it didn’t last, because my spirit was dying from not following my calling.
I had to get fired three times from top executive positions, lose my home, marriage, reputation, all my savings and eventually my sanity (two nervous breakdowns, two suicidal depressions, and diagnosed with four mental illnesses), before I was willing to strike out on my own and claim my true calling as a spiritual leader of visionary, neurodivergent entrepreneurs and someone here to change consciousness on a global scale.
It was very much Jonah and the whale. And then another whale. And then finally one. more. whale.
Crowley: Can you share your story of when you were on the brink of failure? First, take us back to what it was like during the darkest days.
J.:I actually had four years of darkest days. I call it my four-year Dark Night of the Soul. The blackest came after everything fell apart for the second time, after I’d gone back to corporate America to try and get my life together.
I’d been fired four years earlier, twice over the span of twelve months, from senior executive and Board Member positions in multimillion-dollar companies that I was helping build and grow. I was making multiple six figures, and even though I was a master of company turnarounds, I was losing the war of turning around my mental and emotional state. Though I was a rockstar at breaking records and doing the impossible, I was a nightmare to manage and work with, so my CEOs fired me. I swore I’d never set foot inside corporate America again and went to work trying to build my own business. But with ADD undermining my ability to make even the simplest of decisions and stick to them, bipolar sabotaging my ability to sustain a stable emotional state long enough to bring any of those indecisions to fruition, severe mood and anxiety disorder causing me to constantly question the legitimacy of my dreams and goals, and PTSD sending me into constant depression and blackness, the endeavor was doomed before it even began.
I spent four years and over $250,000 trying and failing to build my business. At the age of 42, and with a nine-year-old daughter, I had to move back in with my parents for seven months to get back on my feet.
I landed a six-figure job opening a new territory and spent six months emotionally paralyzed and unable to sell. So before they fired me, I quit. I got a job working for the CEO of a technology company, with the mandate to build a new division, and after ten weeks, he fired me. Over the phone.
With fourteen hundred dollars between the streets and me, a destroyed reputation and career, and clearly overqualified and therefore unemployable for even basic, minimum-wage jobs, I descended into a nervous breakdown and suicidal depression and had a panic attack at a gas station near my house, almost blacking out against the side of my car.
I couldn’t go forward. I couldn’t go back. I was paralyzed emotionally, financially, spiritually, mentally. That was the blackest of black days.
Crowley: What was your mindset during such a challenging time? Where did you get the drive to keep going when things were so hard?
J.: My daughter. She’s the reason I decided to stay alive and figure out a way to make a success out of my life, because I couldn’t imagine leaving her with the story — which she’d have to tell for the rest of her life — of how her mom killed herself when she was ten years old.
As much as I couldn’t figure out how to live, I was even more unwilling to die.
My parents decided enough was enough, and they supported me financially to both cover my living expenses and get psychiatric help. This is when I was formally diagnosed with bipolar and PTSD, and told I needed to go on two forms of medication just to stabilize.
But, I knew this had been my problem all along: listening to others, to the so-called experts, to my friends and family, to authority figures, and to my culture, about what I should and shouldn’t be doing and why. I knew in my bones that the answer was decidedly not medication; that this would simply dull my mind and my emotions so that I’d be a walking zombie, unable to access my depths, yes, and so protected from deep depression, but also unable to access my depths, which is the source of my genius.
I knew that my job was to stop lying to myself, stop living a double life, stop running from my calling and instead turn and face the truth of who I am, my unusual spiritual gifts (which everyone has, but most are unwilling or unable to accept) and my purpose in the world. I knew if I did this with no holds barred, as well as what I refer to as alchemizing my shadow, which really just means take myself through a total, root-level reboot from my dysfunctional mental state to one where nothing and no one had power over me and where I could finally access my own ability to make magic in my life, I would not only survive, I would thrive.
Crowley: Tell us how you were able to overcome such adversity and achieve massive success? What did the next chapter look like?
J.: The next chapter is one I still think about with awe.In ten monthsI went from broke, bipolar, and suicidal to doing a million dollars in revenue working only part time. I came out of nowhere to achieve a level of influence and thought leadership in the spiritual coaching community that usually takes years, and I did it all without the aid of medication or therapy.
It’s been two years now, and my business is just about to cross the two million dollar mark. I’ve continued my habit of working only part time; I’ve been able to take my daughter to five star, luxury vacations; I’ve visited my own bucket list locations around the world; and I’ve had no return of the negative symptoms of my past.
I and my life are completely transformed, inside and out. I call this process “going sane,” because the truth is that mental illness — what I call neurodivergence — is a gateway to spiritual awakening and genius, if treated not as a curse but as a blessing, and if handled with a radically new set of spiritual technologies, psychological tools that allow the neurodivergent brain to thrive in its natural state. I invented these technologies, took myself through them, and then began taking other neurodivergent entrepreneurs through the same process. These are clients who, for the most part, had done and tried everything to turn their lives, businesses and states of mind around, to no avail. Not only did their businesses leap to unimaginable levels of financial success in no time but very often their emotional and mental states improved so much that they were able to go off their medication. I’ve also had clients spontaneously cured of decades-long physical illnesses that resisted every attempt at a cure.
It might seem miraculous and over-the-top, but it’s not. Magic is not a mystery. It’s a spiritual science. And once you learn it, anyone can make magic on demand.
Crowley: Based on your experience, can you share a 3 actionable pieces of advice about how to develop the mindset needed to persevere through adversity? (Please share a story or example for each.)
J.: Find a mentor who does not apply their own tried and true methods, but can tap you into your own unconventional genius. This will open up a much more rapid and delightful path to success than anything a “guru” mentor can do. I worked with a woman early on in my career who did this for me, and I will be forever grateful to her for what I learned and for the fact that she went far beyond the traditional mentoring methodology of “teach someone how to fish.”
Find someone who doesn’t teach you how to fish, but how to fly. Someone who believes in you beyond your ability to believe in yourself.
Develop a deep understanding of spiritual law, the way energy works and the way you cause what happens in your life, and then trust this law completely. When you are stepping into your greatest calling, into true thriving, all the rules for survival no longer apply and are in fact backwards: Believing is seeing. You must leap before you look. And the bridge over the chasm only appears (and always appears) under your feet after you’ve taken the first step over the abyss. These are spiritual laws. They’re as immutable as gravity. And it was only when I decided to trust them 100% that I was able to truly take flight in my life and business.
Third, develop the lived truth that nothing and no one has power over you, over your wellbeing, your success, or your safety and security. In other words, establish yourself as the source of your mental, emotional, financial and spiritual wellbeing, in all situations, no matter what. This is not easy to do. But once you master it, you will experience a rare life filled with consistent wonder, magic and a magnetism and joy that sustains itself no matter what challenges you encounter. I’ve been viciously criticized online, in ways that would have crippled me in the past. It didn’t so much as register as blip in my emotional state. Coming from someone diagnosed with severe mood and anxiety disorder, this would have been completely unthinkable just a few short years ago. You truly do have the ability to cause every condition, thought and feeling you desire and not be the victim of external situations or your own out-of-control mind and emotions.
Crowley: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
J.: Yes. Carl Jung. And yes, I mean the man who pioneered the field of depth psychology, of delving into the subconscious mind, and who has been dead for fifty-eight years.
But if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have had the courage to carve my own wildly unconventional and, many would say, very ill advised path to success and forgo medication in return for taking myself through the process of going sane.
It was during my darkest month, right after my panic attack and nervous breakdown, while still in the depths of suicidal depression, and after having just been diagnosed with bipolar and PTSD and told I needed to go on medication, that I came across an article in The New York Times Magazine (so perhaps it’s a combination of Carl Jung and the author of that article, Sara Corbett, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude) where I discovered that Carl Jung, whose work in archetypes had been the heart and soul of my spiritual studies for the previous fifteen years, himself went through a psychotic break that lasted six years. And he took himself through this experience intentionally, masterfully and consciously because he knew the content of his “psychosis” was meaningful and that his experience was meant to be a gateway to deeper understanding and spiritual growth. He chronicled this journey in The Red Book and credited what he learned with delivering all the insights and understanding that became the foundation of his groundbreaking work on the subconscious and on archetypes. And he did so without the aid of medication.
I also learned that his inner circle kept The Red Book under lock and key (literally) for twenty-five years, for fear it would damage and possibly ruin his reputation. It was the combination of reading about his own radical relationship with his mental break, and the shame with which it was met and handled, that ignited the fire that burns in me still and is at the core of my mission in the world.
It was then that I determined to take myself through a similar honoring of my divergence, and to do so openly and with no shame right from the beginning, to highlight the truth about mental illness, which is that it is a powerful gateway and a bridge to awakening, and should be seen for what it truly is, not as an illness or a curse.
Crowley: Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
J.: Yes, several! I’m launching the Magic Man Academy, an intense, deep-dive training and certification program for entrepreneurs, coaches, and creative visionaries who want to learn the mysteries and the spiritual science of how to make magic on demand in their lives and businesses. It’s my mission to bring to light our true nature as beings capable of “ordering the miraculous.”
I’m also in the process of launching a new business that is pioneering the creation of a brand new market: SuperConscious Commerce. These are products coded with what I term ‘living consciousness’. Our first product is in the super-nutrition field. It’s a suite of superfoods and activated essentials to activate higher consciousness and turn on the body’s intelligence. We recently delivered a prototype to an A-list celebrity’s publicist and will be gifting the products to the 2019 Oscar Nominees. We also sent a box to Ellen DeGeneres for her 60th birthday. We’re madly proud of this product and know it will not only change bodies but minds, hearts and spirits.
And last, I’m finishing my book, which is part spiritual memoir, part philosophy of consciousness, and part brass tacks business building guidance for neurodivergent entrepreneurs. It’s the story of my journey, catalogued in such a way that others can use what I’ve learned and take themselves through their own process of going sane and building a million dollar business from their genius.
Crowley: You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
J.: I’ve already started! It’s called the #MagicManMovement, which was a hashtag conceived by someone in my UnTribe. (I don’t have a tribe. Tribal consciousness is the very thing I’m here to overturn 😉 ) The heart of this movement is to bring an understanding of and intimate relationship with the magical masculine energy of the universe, to teach others how to activate their innate power to create miracles on demand, and to tap them into their genius, giant nature.
Crowley: Any parting words of wisdom that you would like to share?
J.: Genius is in our bones. Every one of us is coded with the ability to bend time and reality to our will and desire. The only thing in the way is our conditioning and our limited consciousness, which we adopted subconsciously through our DNA and cultural upbringing. I believe there is a way to unlock your own personal frequency of success and step into your true legacy calling in the world, and it is not found in the mindset or paradigms offered by traditional mental, emotional or physical health institutions. You have to travel far outside the known world, to where, in ancient times, was written “hic sunt dracones” across wide swaths of the unexplored lands. Here be dragons is what it meant in Latin.
The truth is that in our dragon nature lies our divinity.
Crowley: How can our readers follow you on social media?
J.: I’m at www.lornaj.com, Instagram is @lornaj, and I have a Facebook Group of over 3,500 members called Masters of Energy Alchemy (https://www.facebook.com/groups/mastersofenergyalchemy). Come join us!
Crowley: Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
J.: Thank you for having me!