An Inspired Life is an Authentic Life An Interview with Kat Mische Elle
John, what was life like at the beginning for you? hen I was a child, I had learning disabilities and a speech impediment. I was also constrained and had to be put into braces as a child because I had an arm and leg deformity. When I was in first grade, I was told by my first-grade teacher in front of my parents, “I’m afraid your son is not going to be able to read or write, not be able to speak or communicate effectively, probably not go very far in life, and probably not amount to much.” I think the teacher cared, because she said, “But it seems now that he’s out of his braces, he wants to run. So, put him into some sort of sport.” At the time, baseball was significant to me. And my interest in surfing had begun. I made it through elementary school by asking the smarter kids questions, which I’m known for today—by the questions I ask. As long as other brighter kids would share what they had learned from the classes and provided me with information, I could retain a bit, and I was able to at least get by in primary school. My parents then moved from Houston, Texas to Richmond, Texas, when I turned 12 and we lived in a lower socio-economic area of the state. Without a group of smarter kids to learn from I ended up dropping out of school, left home at age 13, and became a street and then beach kid. I lived or hung out in various places – in a 24-hour bowling alley, a diner, and in a car on the streets. I lived in friends’ houses and became sort of the “resourceful street kid.” At fourteen, I hitchhiked with my surfboard to California. That journey of hitchhiking was quite challenging but inspiring. I met Ted Nugent, the Rock and Roll guy in Austin at the Armadillo club, Howard Hughes in El Paso on the street, Texas, and Timothy Leary in Idlewild, California. I then hitchhiked down into Mexico later that summer almost to Central America. At fifteen, I decided that I was going to panhandle enough money to fly from Los Angeles to Honolulu, Hawaii because I wanted to ride big waves on the North Shore of Oahu. I made it there. I slept underneath the Kamehameha highway bridge at Sunset Beach. I became a big wave rider. I wasn’t in the top tier, but I was in the second tier of surfers. I ended up though with strychnine and cyanide poisoning without realizing how it was accumulating. My diaphragm temporarily spasmed and I almost drowned. Luckily, I soon fell unconscious, was taken to my tent and left for three days but was luckily found by a lovely lady who helped me. She soon took me to a health food store. It was here, that some albino man said after seeing me with spasms, stated; “You need to take a yoga class and learn how to have mind over body.” Upon leaving the health food store I noticed a flyer on the exit door announcing a yoga class. I went to this yoga class, and Paul C. Bragg was a guest lecturer. In one night, in one hour, this one man, there in the North Shore at Sunset Recreation Center at Waimea, inspired me in a way nobody in the world ever did. I was literally in tears for probably 20 minutes. And he said, “If we take command of our thoughts, our visions, our words and our actions we can take command of and transform our lives.” He said, “We must set goals for ourselves, our family, our community, our city, our state, our nation, and our world and beyond.” He said, “What we visualize, what we affirm, what we feel, and what we think about becomes our destiny.” Paul said, “You don’t want to ever let anybody on the outside distract you from what you want to do on the inside.” Nobody ever spoke to me like that. But he was so sincere and so present that that was the night I birthed a dream, a vision, an inspiration, an epiphany. I felt inspired to want to overcome my learning problems, learn how to read, and someday become intelligent, travel the world, and be a great teacher. That night, I saw a vision of me standing on a balcony in front of a million people speaking. 88
I N S P I RE D S U CC E SS MAGAZINE | SP RING/ SUMME R 2022
DR . JOHN DEMARTIN I
J O U R N EYS
