Dave Kehnast, recovering addict and professional coach, joins Tonya Dawn Recla to talk about finding God within an addiction stronghold. He has an experience in education, sales and marketing, search engine marketing, and have settled on business and life coaching because for him helping others to understand their potential is the most rewarding work he has done thus far. His methodology identifies the way a person is being more than what they are doing.  This leads to lasting, transformational results that often exceed his clients’ expectations. Listen in as he shares his experience and deep wisdom about turning to God in the midst of an addiction stronghold.
Hello, everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and I have with us such a fun guest today. Dave Kehnast has been coaching people and everything else since 2011 when he became an accomplishment coach but that’s cool and everything. So he’s phenomenal in that space, he looks really good on paper, he’s got all of this training and leadership development background and what we’re talking to him today about is finding God within an addiction stronghold. So he is not shy about really talking about what pulled him out of a really intense addiction phase of his existence and the constant kind of connection with God.
I’m laughing because before the show he’s like, “We’re all God all the time.” And so, anyway, we kind of went off on that so you can feel that from him and that’s an area he and I really connect in is just being willing to give voice to this walk of faith, whether it has any religious undertones or any spirituality aspect to it but to me it is the purest walk of faith, this journey, my own evolution is become so far beyond what we think of when we think of communing with God or faith and so I’m excited to unpack this conversation with him today. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dave Kehnast to the show. Welcome, Dave.
Thank you so much for having me today.
Oh, I’m so excited about our conversation but first what are your superpowers?
Well, there are few full, I don’t know, it’s kind of I was out surfing just before this interview and I recalled this time, this is about five years ago, it was actually … Yeah, it was five years ago in February and I was doing a mastermind call with a couple of my current or former clients and it was late at night that we were doing the call and one of them asked me, “Dave, what’s your biggest vision for yourself?” And I said, “I want to inspire people by the millions.” And so, one of my former clients said, “All right Dave, why don’t we just rest in this space right now and sort of throw this energy up in the universe.” I said, “Okay, great.”
I rescued the dog and got back to shore and was surrounded by television cameras.
So we sort of did the whatever, woo-woo, kind of threw the energy up in the universe and so then, I had completely forgotten about this conversation. And the next day, I used to live on this private beach in Lake Michigan for about nine years and the next day I’m minding my own business, it’s the dead of winter, it’s the middle of the afternoon and I get this call from my neighbor and my neighbor says, “Dave, there’s a dog stranded out on Lake Michigan.” Now, I was a Lake Michigan winter surfer, right, so I would surf Lake Michigan in the winter and so I have this intimate knowledge of the lake and the ice and all that and I analyzed the situation and I realized it was okay so I put on my wetsuit and I grabbed a kayak and I went out onto the lake and maybe about a half mile out through this sort of icy gauntlet, I had to navigate and I rescued the dog.
And when I got back to the shore, I’m surrounded by television cameras and within a half an hour, the story had hit the BBC, ABC, NBC, and the Ellen Degeneres show called me and I was on television and then I had inspired people by the millions. And the funny thing about that story is that I hadn’t even realized that I had made that sort of declaration until after the fact when the client called me and said, “You realize what we talked about last night, right?” I was like, “Oh my god, I just manifested this thing that I said I would.” And I think the rub here is that I was so unattached to this kind of superpower that it left all the room in the world for the universe to just manifest because of absolutely no attachment to it, right? And so I kind of relate to my superpowers as I’m still honing them in because when I’m in this state of complete and total non-attachment, it’s like wow, miracles happen.
Look at that, ’cause I could just feel God like dancing in that moment and sort of laughing, right? So that’s like one of them and then this other superpower is just this ability to just … It’s much more mundane, it’s just walking this sort of like … Walking the path of God. Just doing the right thing. And part of my coaching has superpowers in it ’cause you just have to figure out people real quick from this place of unconditional love and be able to show them a picture of themselves they’re not used to seeing. And therefore, a glimpse of reality that they’re not used to seeing and that’s beautiful too so.
I love that. Well, and it’s like as I work more and more around in this arena, my sinking suspicion is that really, all we’re here to do is teach each other to love ourselves and love each other. And I think that, that circles around everything, everybody does no matter what the genre or topic appears to be, it really does come back to that in connection with self, connection with source and then connecting with everyone and ultimately that’s the same thing but we use all these different kind of lenses to do it in. And so I love your story about being unattached to this concept and that’s when we really are at our most magical, most powerful, most superpower-y state of existence and yet sometimes even in talking about that we form those attachments, right?
Right.
So I’d imagine your journey, your walk with God has assisted in that, so how did … Talk to us just a little bit about the addiction process and how you were led to the concept of God within that.
I had a gnarly battle with addiction.
Yeah well, I mean, so first of all, I did not have a … To say I had a low bottom is an understatement. I had a gnarly, gnarly, gnarly, gnarly battle with addiction. It is only by the grace of what I choose to call God that I am alive, right. It’s only by the grace of God that I’m not sitting in a prison cell right now and so through that, in the 12 step programs they’ll say I was given the gift of desperation, right. And I’m facing … It was to the point where I was facing, I don’t know, one to three years in prison or three to seven years in prison, not for doing anything violent or anything like that, just for being a stupid drug addict, you know what I mean?
But I was sitting in a treatment center, my second treatment center. So I had been to rehab once in 2006 and then this is in June, this is probably mid-July of 2007 and it was nap time at rehab, right, so I’m 32 years old and I’m being forced to take a nap before dinner and that’s just the most degrading thing in and of itself and I pick up a book by Stephen Hawking that I had brought in there and the book is called A Brief History of Time, you may have heard of it and there’s this little glitch. He’s talking about the Big Bang Theory and there’s this little section where he’s talking about the Big Bang kind of glitch but a section where he’s talking about the Big Bang Theory and he says, “We need not concern ourselves with what happened before the Big Bang. Such events could only be described as an act of God.”
Something along those lines, paraphrasing but at that very minute, the word God flew off the page at me and surrounded me in this just beautiful divine white light and I just felt the presence of angels all around me and I can remember there was a tree outside the window and the sun was coming through the blinds. I have a song about it I wrote called “The God Song.” And the chorus of the song goes, “It came shining through dusty blinds in the dimly lit room, and I saw the light, I saw the light. It was the sweet, sweet, sweetest of surrender.” And in that very moment, I went from this complete and total hopeless state of mind and body to step into the sunlight of the spirit.
I went from God being this abstract concept that I really knew nothing about but that I’d become willing to learn about because of what I had been through. There was no place left for me to go. So that’s the gift of desperation but then it was that willingness and then all of a sudden this sunlight and spirit appeared and I became reborn in an instant. And I gave a talk about it recently here in San Diego called “The Reason I Call It God” was the name of the talk, and the reason I call it God is because it was that word God that flew off the page into my … It flew off the page at me and so God is the name he, she, it introduced itself to me as so I just call it God. You can call it whatever you want.
Well, so what do you attribute that to? How do you in your rational mind, how do you reconcile that? ‘Cause I’m sure there have been moments of like, did that really happen? Was that a thing? Or maybe you didn’t question it. What was your experience of that?
Yeah, I didn’t question it at all. It went from agnosticism, is just without knowledge, agnostic, without knowledge. Gnosis is knowledge. So I went from being agnostic essentially but willing to believe in something to be a gnostic so I consider myself a gnostic, meaning I have a knowing, so it’s beyond belief. A belief is something that you can take away that can be disin- whatever … I’m missing the word. I just relate to myself as a gnostic in the sense that I just know. It’s very deep knowing. To the point where I’m not even going to engage in arguments about, with people regarding the existence versus the non-existence of whatever that is just because I find them to be pointless. And it’s just a place I like to go with people, you know?
Right, absolutely, well, and it kind of gets to a place of futility after a while because from that knowing-ness place, I always tell people, that you know that you’re there and that you’re speaking what’s true for you when it’s not debatable at all. Like when you say I have this deep knowing, how does anybody argue with that? Like, no, you don’t? Really, there is no arguing when you truly do speak from your own truth, we’re just not really conditioned to do that, right? We’re conditioned to debate and to have conversations and to go from our minds and everything else and so getting in touch with that true knowing-ness, it’s such a gift. And what happened after that for you?
Yeah, so that happened about maybe 25 days into this treatment center that I had been in and I ended up actually spent 124 days there. So from there it was I just got really involved in the 12 step work that was available there ’cause I have always just shrugged it off, like don’t tell me to believe in this higher power B.S. kind of a thing and I really embraced it ’cause, I mean, I had nothing better to do and then through this very peculiar serendipitous turn of events I ended up breaking my leg there after about 100 days, breaking my foot and as a result of that I ended up living in this beautiful building on Lake Michigan and I really just rebuilt my life. I mean, I took my life … I rebuilt my life from just … My life had been shattered into, it’s like a book, into like a million different pieces and it was just staring back at me as like this fragmented version of who I had once been and I just put my life back together one day at a time.
I got a bicycle and I got a job and I had a meeting directory for the 12 step meetings and I probably went to 750 meetings in my first year because that’s what I had to do. It was like the only place left that would take me was these meeting rooms and that’s what I did. And I ended up getting a job. I actually got a job, a really good job selling software as a convicted felon. So I’m a convicted felon in Cook County and I just got this job off Craig’s List. This guy just, he’s a good friend of mine today, he just liked me for some reason. I had no sales experience and he interviewed me on the phone and he just liked me for whatever reason and he gave me a chance and my first day of work I had to be there at 8:30 in the morning and I think I left my house at probably 5:45 AM because there was nothing in the world that was gonna stop me from … If I had to crawl and be there on time I was gonna be there on time ’cause I was so grateful.
Wow.
This is like an opportunity for me to rebuild my entire life. There was no background check. No questions were asked that could have been asked and yeah, that was it, I just rebuilt my life one day at a time.
Beautiful.
I look back at that time in my life and get teary eyed.
Yeah, it was beautiful. I look back at that time in my life and get teary eyed.
Aw, I love it. So we’re gonna take a quick break but before we do where can people go to find out more about you?
You just go to my website, it’s davekehnast.com.
Beautiful.
You can find me on Facebook too. I’m on there quite a bit.
I love it. So we’re talking with Dave Kehnast today about finding God within an addiction stronghold and when we come back we’re gonna get some ways for those of you who are really on that fence and trying to figure out howdo you kind of make that leap into face and he makes it sound so easy. So we’re gonna talk with him about how to do that. We’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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