We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelvin Chin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelvin below.

Alright, Kelvin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?

I help people worldwide to reduce their fears and anxieties, and especially to overcome their fear of death. In the process, they tend to expand their conscious capacity for experience in their daily lives, and generally live with more contentment and inner peace.

A few years ago, I was contacted by a married couple. The husband was suffering from extreme anxiety. He was in his early 30’s, had been sleeping 36 hours a day due to years of depression, so he could not study for his country’s civil service exam to get a job. His wife was supporting him, which in his culture was especially embarrassing, only adding to his anxiety. You may ask how he could sleep 36 hours in a 24-hour day? He would sleep 24 plus 12, then wake up for an hour, and go back to sleep for another 24 plus 12. Repeat that for years.

I taught both him and his wife my “Turning Within” Meditation technique, and within months he was able to get his sleep schedule more normal, so he could study for his exam. Eventually he took the civil service exam (in his country a government job pays much more than the private sector jobs), passed it with a high grade, got multiple interviews, and landed a “Level 1” finance job. He now has several additional finance certificates and is anxiety-free.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born and raised in and around Boston, Massachusetts. When I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College, I learned to meditate to help me with my high anxiety. That was the sole reason I learned. At the time, I was not into meditation for its spiritual benefits. I just needed help with my anxiety. I was desperate and was unaware of modalities like psychotherapy, etc. So, I learned TM in 1970, studied personally with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1971 and 1973, and became an international leader in his organization for about 10 years teaching worldwide, including at West Point and on all the U.S. Army bases in Korea, as well as on the DMZ. After teaching about 1,000 people TM, I left the organization when they went off in a different direction. Since then, I have removed all the cultural trappings from the teaching and made meditation even easier and more flexible. Now I call what I teach “Turning Within” Meditation. Over the past 50 years, I have taught many thousands of people in over 60 countries, mostly on Zoom or other online platforms. I have taught all ages from 4-94, all walks of life, including clergy from every major religion. I have even taught Buddhist monks this meditation technique. So it is not religious, nor does it conflict with any religions. I teach a monthly public group class, as well as private classes.

After Yale Graduate School, when I was in my third year of law school at Boston College, my mother died. I was very close to her and her death was sudden due to an acute cancer. I was devastated. She was only in her 50’s. I grieved her death very deeply, and it inspired me to help others in their journeys of loss. I found that sharing my story with others helped me in my own processing, which led to others contacting me for my help with their losses. So, in a sense, in 1982 I “back ended” into the death and dying arena, helping people nights and weekends for free, after I was done with my day job at the law firms. This continued for decades culminating in my first book, “Overcoming the Fear of Death: Through Each of the 4 Main Belief Systems,” published in 2016.

In 2015, I started my nonprofit organization to help people worldwide with Overcoming the Fear of Death and reducing their fears and anxieties in life. My clients now span the full range from the unemployed and terminally ill to celebrities and professional athletes. I teach anyone who needs my help without regard for their station in life, in whatever culture of the world they come to me from.

To capture the ideas I have been writing about for the past ten years, as well as the many spiritually transformative experiences I have had for the past 50 years, I have written two more books. Published in 2021, “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” is a collection of 67 essays I wrote spanning topics in emotions, life principles, meditation and the spiritual. It is a nutshell of short essays giving practical tips on how to live life with less suffering and more contentment. My newest book just came out this year, “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives” and describes in great detail my past life memories that reach back 6,000 years, how they resurfaced since 1977, and most importantly, what they have taught me about myself that helps me on a very practical level today in my present lifetime.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I will share two stories from two different journeys — one from this lifetime and one from a lifetime 2300 years ago.

I have been laid off five times since I was 50 years old. The layoffs were for reasons out of my control: company sold to another larger company that already had one or two people in my position, law firm line of credit canceled by their bank in 2008, company in financial distress, etc.

What I learned about myself from my memory of almost dying in 250 B.C., when I saw myself as a Carthaginian slave on a piece of wreckage in the Mediterranean after a major naval battle with the Romans, was that my mind was very powerful. I recalled “willing myself” to stay alive long enough for some fishermen to save me.

I have used that memory and knowledge about the power of my mind to help me through those five layoffs in this lifetime. Each time was very stressful as I was the sole breadwinner for a young family of four. So I had to “recreate” myself each time for the new positions I was applying for. I also had to “put on a good face” and project a sense of confidence in the interviews without revealing that my family’s financial stability and very sustenance depended on my getting that job I was applying for.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

For many lifetimes I have been involved in helping people in their self-development. However, in the past I had a tendency to be more invested in whether they would change and improve themselves that was healthy. Now in retrospect, I realize that it was not only unhealthy for me, but also to some degree my perspective was also unhealthy for them.

This took the form of sometimes being more pushy in trying to persuade people to improve themselves. It also resulted in my state of happiness often largely being based on whether I was successful in getting them to improve and move forward in their lives — at least how I thought “moving forward” was defined.

Now, or actually over the past couple of decades, I have come to a different position. While I always understood intellectually what “Free Will” meant, I realized I didn’t always allow the other person’s “personal choice” to play out in the way they wanted it to. Even though I was well-meaning, I now realize that reflected a level of hubris in me. So now, I am more emotionally acceptant of whatever the decisions or choices others make. I realize that I now more spontaneously embrace the fact that I cannot change them. Only they can choose to change themselves. I can influence, yes. But the decision to change is theirs. Or to not change — that is also their choice.

This greater alignment between my emotional and intellectual regarding the issue of Free Will choices being made by others has afforded me a tremendous surge of freedom within myself, and at the same time, I think other people feel more acceptance by me of whoever they are and whatever they choose.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kelvinchin.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kelvin.h.chin
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kelvin.chin1/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelvinchin/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KelvinHChin
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KelvinChinTurningWithin
• Other: Book website: https://www.kelvinhenrychin.com/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@kelvin.h.chin