I had always known The Secret and was a multi millionaire by the time I was 30, but I didn’t know that I knew The Secret until I watched www.TheSecret.tv. I always believed myself wealthy, even when I was a teenage runaway sleeping on the streets, because I just knew that I was capable of creating my physical reality. At the age of 16 I was paralyzed in a car accident, breaking my neck in two places, and told I would never walk again, but that didn’t fit the image I had in my mind and in six months I was working as a waitress. I haven’t had a cold in 9 years because I just tell myself, “I don’t get sick.” Everyone kept telling me I was lucky and I believed that must be it until I watched The Secret.

In 1992 I started the world’s largest accredited rescue facility for big cats; lions, tigers, cougars, bobcats and such. Even in a post 9/11 world where animal charities are folding all across the nation due to the lack of funding that resulted from the public being deluged with images of Katrina victims, tsunami victims, terrorism victims and war, our sanctuary has prospered. The principals of The Secret at work are what I would attribute that to, but after watching The Secret I have been inspired to fine tune these principals to create the world of compassion that I want to live in.

This is a work in progress and I have converted The Secret to an iPod movie file so that I can carry it with me everywhere I go. While I am driving I listen to the soundtrack. While I am standing in line, I watch and listen, over and over again. Every time I listen to it, I hear something that resonates in a way that I didn’t quite catch the time before. While the wealth attraction element of the video is something I am very comfortable with, I am listening intently to try and discern the best way to deal with “what I don’t want.”

I don’t want to see lions in circus acts. I don’t want to see tigers being bred, used for photo booths and discarded. I don’t want to see bobcats and lynx killed for their fur… and I know now how important it is to re-frame all of those issues into what I do want. Our web BigCatRescue.org site gets more than 250,000 hits per day and I use the site to move people to action by either having them contact their legislators about laws to protect the animals or in educating them so that they don’t support industries that cause suffering and abuse. So much of the message is negative and I have been asking people to NOT do things, or NOT support things that cause harm, so my challenge now is to find a way to make sure all of this energy is focused on what we do want which is a planet that recognizes that we are all ONE.

I still don’t have it all sorted out yet, and welcome positive suggestions, but there have been such tremendous successes just since I have started to re-focus on what we do want. In the past year seven states enacted bans on the keeping of large exotic cats as pets (AR, IN, KY, KS, LA, MD & NY) and several cities and counties have banned this dangerous and inhumane practice. Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, India and the U.K. have all passed landmark legislation to protect exotic cats in captivity and in the wild this year as well. The Secret is working on a global scale and I am so thankful that you have made this powerful movie available.