Journey to Authenticity: A New Way of Being | Mike Fecht | TEDxTampaBay

so it's only appropriate that I do this from a yoga rug where I feel most comfortable hi someone tell you guys a little bit about my yoga experience and even more specifically what took me into yoga practice so it was Saturday morning in Atlanta Georgia about eight years ago or so and my wife Shanee and I were getting ready to go out and enjoy the day in the city when I reached for a towel underneath my sink and immediately felt this stabbing pain in my lower back now I'd had back problems going all the way back to high school so I knew immediately what I'd done I knew I'd thrown my back out and then I needed to find my way to the bed as quickly as possible before that thing locked up on me completely so Shanee makes her way into the bedroom and sees me lying there and asks what's going on and she immediately got upset with me and started yelling at me she said if you were practicing yoga this wouldn't have happened and you completely ruined our day so now I'm going out to enjoy the day and you can think about it all day is you lie there in bed and so I did I had all day to think about it Shanee actually had a really strong yoga practice at that point in her life not from just a physical perspective either the mental emotional and even spiritual benefits of the practice had really started to help her deal with some post-traumatic stress and complicated grief that she dealt with over the murder of her mother at the hands of her father in an act of domestic violence when Shana was just 21 years old so she'd been preaching at me for years to pick up a yoga practice but I was your typical meathead guy in the health and fitness industry I like to workout I like weights and need any of that mystical humming and chanting you know least that's where I was at then but with all day to think about it I decided that I was gonna go with her to a yoga class and not because I thought it was gonna do anything to help me with my back but because I was just gonna get her to quit bitching at me about taking yoga so we went about a week or two later and the instructors name was James and he played Motown during this yoga class which I found really intriguing it was extremely challenging and at the end of the practice I just felt lighter I felt this sense of clarity this sense of calm the sense of focus and I needed more of it so long story short a whole lot of yoga later this thing became an essential part of my life and really a compass that I went to on a daily basis so flash-forward two years later you know it's the spring of 2009 I'm in the best shape of my life mentally emotionally and spiritually I'm just living a much more conscious lifestyle and training for a triathlon and in May I accepted the job as a general manager of a sports performance facility in South Florida that dealt with very high profile professional athletes and amateurs that also competed at a very high level and for Shanee and I both this was just kind of like the culmination of years of hard work in the gym business and an opportunity to you know go after my dream job and do it at the beach so we were on our way to South Florida I was in I was staying in a corporate apartment in down near Miami and she was in Atlanta getting her loft ready to be rented out on the afternoon of June 2nd at about 2 o'clock or so Shana called me to tell me that she was on her way to visit her son Zeke her 18 year old son from a previous marriage and my stepson he'd recently moved out got in his own apartment and he called his mom up at work and said you know I'd like you to come over and see it so she was on her way to go see him she said she'd called me later on that evening when she was done so that night as I'm wrapping things up in my office it's about 6:45 or so in the evening I received a call from an Atlanta that I didn't recognize and for whatever reason I felt compelled to answer it when I picked up the phone the caller identified himself as Detective trainer of the Sandy Springs Police Department he asked if I was Shane effects husband and said that he needed to see me when I told him that I was in South Florida on business there was kind of a moment of silence and he said well mr. Beck there's been an accident an accident okay well she's okay mr. Fech she's been shot still doesn't register makes no sense whatsoever she's okay she's okay she's okay no mr. Fech I'm sorry she's dead and even as I say that right now I can feel that familiar wave of shock just kind of come up because it just seems so unnatural and so I with that news I fell into kind of a kneeling fetal position and I was just screaming no no no no no and the detectives on the other end of the phone trying to get me to calm down he says he needs some information for me that they believe Zeke her son had done this he was the suspect and he was still on the loose so I gathered whatever I could in that moment gave him the information that I could and then he just said you know we'll be in touch call me tomorrow when you get into town so my dad took the last flight out of Atlanta that night and together we took the first flight out of Fort Lauderdale back to Atlanta the next morning and when we made our way back to our loft as soon as we got into our place I walked straight back to our bedroom and I sat down on the side of the bed where Shane II slept and as soon as I sat down it was like the entire wave of the whole experience just came to me the whole Twilight Zone feeling this had happened before with her mother and and whole families wiped out and how could this happen and this couldn't have happened and so I just kind of looked up and I and I started talking to her and I said Shanee I have no idea how I'm gonna get through this but you cannot leave me right now and so I looked down at the nightstand and her journal was sitting there and so instinctively in that moment I just kind of grabbed the journal and I start thumbing through it kind of looking for whatever information I could find and I keep thumbing through it and it takes me all the way to the very back page in the journal Shanee wrote at night and there was an entry from June 1st the night before she was killed that entry from June first finished her journal she signed off and that was it and there was an empty journal that had yet to be written in that was sitting on the kitchen counter so even in that moment of tragedy and trauma and craziness I could kind of sense that there was still since there was something a little deeper going on I couldn't help but see the symbolic nature of her finishing her journal and finishing her life and I knew that that journal was for me so that afternoon we went to the police station and I met with the detectives we got all the details about what had happened Zeke was apprehended the night before late that night without any kind of struggle and that afternoon friends and family from all over the country started showing up at my place and then we started to plan a private memorial on one of those early nights just to try to get away from the people that were gathering in my place I went back into our bedroom and into our walk-in closet where I just kind of leaned up against the wall and then just slumped down in kind of a heap and straight ahead on this bench on this shelf that I could have only seen at eye level was this little clay turtle with green eyes just like Shanee and a smile edged in its face and it was almost immediate that I went from crying to laughing and I picked up the turtle and I couldn't help but think this was Shane ease way of kind of just letting me know that she was still around and she was gonna be around and so I took the turtle out into the living room where everybody was and I put it with some of the other knickknacks and pictures that we had collected that reminded us of her so on Monday May 8th we had a memorial it was a beautiful memorial and it was private and after the memorial everybody went home and there I was alone Shane he was dead Zeke was in jail for probably the rest of his life my relationship with my sixteen-year-old daughter at the time wasn't exactly on the best of terms and it really felt to me like I had just lost my whole family you know thankfully my mom and dad are still around and they were there to help out big time I couldn't have made it through without him or without some of my extended family and friends there was a lot of support there but during those early days it got pretty dark and the constant visions of what I'd seen of her lying in front of me post autopsy after being shot to death the visions of of playing the crime out again and again and again in my head just like the horrible post-traumatic stress disorder I couldn't sleep for days if not weeks and months following that and like I said it just became really really dark at the same time I couldn't help but see how Shanee was actually my biggest resource for healing from her death you know she gave me the yoga practice might have actually beat me over the head until I started practicing yoga she gave me meditation she left me the journal and she left me a library full of books of a spiritual nature most of which were actually even earmarked it was like I could go to a book open it up and I could see what she was reading to get through the loss of her mother and that helped carrying me through and then at the same time I couldn't help but notice things that were kind of going on around me you might call him God shots or signs from God or signs from the universe or whatever you want to call it but my life went off the rails in a cosmic sense it was bananas It was as if the universe was just speaking to me and I was wide open to listen so just a few days later on June 11th and what would have been Chinese 41st birthday I woke up and the weight of the day hit me as if it could have been any heavier but realizing that it's her birthday and she's not there I went through my routine that I'd established to get myself going in the day and that was to put my feet on the floor to get up and go make a cup of coffee once I made the cup of coffee I was taking a walk around the block and as I started to walk up the street behind our building and this is in Atlanta this isn't cabbage town in Atlanta which is basically you know if you think a concrete jungle it's summer it's the smell of asphalt in the air I noticed something in the middle of the street and it looked like a turtle shell so sure enough upon further investigation there's a live turtle in the middle of the road right behind my building and practically downtown Atlanta and has absolutely no business being there whatsoever so I pick up the turtle and there he is by the way this is our this was our turtle what you can't see is is my friend Tommy and me on the other side looking at it like the is that you Shaney and and no so cheney was was an animal rights person and so i immediately went there it's like you got a rescue the turtle right so I get the turtle up out of the middle of the road I brought him inside and we had to look at him and then my dad and and Tommy and I decided that what we needed to do was to release the turtle in the Chattahoochee River where Shanee and I used to hike when we had first moved to Atlanta and we did and there's me letting go of the turtle that day so that afternoon as I was on my way home my friend Therese sent me an email that had an excerpt from the book animals speak by Ted Andrews for those of you familiar with that or not familiar with that book it's a book on animal totems or basically what it means spiritually when animals start to show up in your life and reading that email it spoke to me on the deepest of levels and so I took this and I went with it then I went within my shell and for the next few months I traveled a lot I spent some time down at the beach and I eventually just made my way back to my mom and dad's house where I just let go for a while and let other people take care of me and so for the better part of the next year I spent that time training for a triathlon practicing yoga incessantly meditating and to be completely honest the signs were crazy I mean I could tell you stories for days almost every day something was going on it seemed absolutely electric I had TVs popping on and off in the middle of the night like it was poltergeist we had lights pop in the middle of the room out of nowhere I mean it it was crazy my mom still gets bothered by it she would say Shanny stop it I can't take it anymore you're driving me nuts but lo and behold all of those science eventually led me back to Atlanta Georgia of all places I never expected to be back in Atlanta that would have been the last place I would have thought I would have landed with all of the triggers and everything else but it did and not long after moving back to Atlanta I met someone she was the same age as me she'd never been married she had no kids and she moved to Atlanta to find mr. right from South Florida of all places we were an item relatively quickly Barbara was one of the kindest and most compassionate people I'd ever met in my entire life and as I was driving to her apartment on New Year's Eve 2010 December 31st 2010 going into 2011 I pulled up behind a car that had a license tag that really spoke to me and so I took a picture and I put it on Facebook and I said I hear you loud and clear 2011 and sure enough as we moved into the following year I started teaching yoga full time I found a calling and a passion for helping other people dealing with emotional issues and using the practice to get through and I also carved a niche out and working with athletes and helping them implement the benefits of yoga into what they do on the competitive playing fields Barbara and I were married in 2012 and in December of that year we found out that she was also pregnant moving into 2013 I got an opportunity to go back down to South Florida once again to work at a sports performance facility that catered to very high-profile professional athletes but this time teaching yoga instead of being the general manager and totally intrigued by the opportunity of course Barb and I go down for a visit it was working with the same strength coach that I'd worked with previously in 2009 I knew that he had moved back into the old building that we were in back then but I had no idea where yoga space might be in that particular building so when we went to visit walk through the front door he says hey why don't I show you your space and we end up walking up stairs back to where my old office was in 2009 lo and behold what was my office was totally remodeled into hardwood floors in a yoga studio so when Barb and I moved down to Miami I was teaching yoga to athletes in the exact same space I was standing in 2009 when I got the call from the detective that Shanee had been killed just last Christmas Eve as Barb and I were getting ready to go for a bike ride with Nicki are now two-year-old son I went out into the parking lot I was just making a few rounds with my bike when I happened to come upon a particular license tag again only 650 miles away and almost four years to the date that I had first seen this tag and this time I had my new life right between my arms as life and luck would have it this spring a friendship grew into a business partnership and all of the signs led me back to st. Petersburg Florida of all places where we opened a yoga studio downtown this summer and as I sit here in front of you with all of you today right here right now and looking back on everything you know I've got barb now I've got Nicki my relationship with my now 22 year old daughter is wonderful I've got a great business partner amazing people in my life when I look back on all of it I think life is really about three things it's about showing up it's about doing the work and it's about letting go of the results you got to put your feet on the floor you got to do the best with what's right in front of you and then be open to all of the opportunities that life has in store for you you know in my experience I think life is a whole lot less about lacing up the bootstraps and just plowing through life and a whole lot more of taking what life throws at you and learning to ride the waves and you know I really to be completely honest I have absolutely no idea what's next but I'm sure the next sign is right around the corner

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 81,615

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Humanities, Change, Death, Faith, Fear, Hope, Positive Thinking, Tragedy

Id: TPs9Et43rB0

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2015