Dear Dolphins,

I hope you are having a wonderful autumn, with many blessings overflowing in your life. American Dolphins will be celebrating our Thanksgiving holiday, and we invite all our fellow Dolphins from around the world to share in our gratitude for the abundant blessings in our lives.

The Dolphin Club is up and running online at www.chellie.com! We have over 100 members with more joining every day. It’s so much fun to see all your listings, wonderful businesses, and messages of inspiration. You can view the members listings and forums without being a member, so take a look – we’d be delighted to have you join us.

The New Bonus Gift for November ONLY: Free download of "Power Journey to Abundance and Prosperity" audio CD! This fabulous self hypnosis CD uses prosperity affirmations from my book, The Wealthy Spirit, and features the soft and soothing voice of hypnotherapist Lynda Malerstein. It’s delightful! My literary agent, Lisa Hagan, has extended her offer to review the book proposal of any Dolphin Club member, so be sure to tell all your writer friends to join now. In addition, the audiotape of one of my talks - Three Keys to Prosperity - has been posted for members to download.

If you have something to share with Dolphin club members, please email me at Chellie@chellie.com. It’s a great advertising bonus for everyone!

Wishing you smooth seas, sunny skies, and treasure ships in your harbor.
Love and blessings,
Chellie

ARTICLE:

Mr. Grumpy

Unreasonable joy and happiness came to me on an ordinary day, an unremarkable day, when I was playing poker. The clatter of chips and the shuffling of cards played background music to the conversation of the players. Now and then, the dealer would call “Seat open!” and a floorman would escort another player to a table. The nine players at my table were all sizes, shapes, and colors. Some were Asian, some Persian, some black, some white-bread American like me. We were all enjoying the game, taking turns winning a pot, whining a little when we got beat.

A wizened old man who spoke with some sort of European accent was losing a bit more than the rest of us. I named him “Mr. Grumpy” in my mind as he threw his cards on the table with a curse again. “Just take your losses with good grace or go home,” I thought primly to myself.

A brash young player named David sitting next to me lost his patience. “Don’t throw your cards like that,” he lectured the old man. “Mr. Grumpy” yelled back at him and as he did, his shirt sleeve fell askew, and I saw the tattoo on his arm. A blue tattoo, a number. Like they engraved on you at Auschwitz. Or Sobibor. Or Bergen-Belsen. As he stood up waveringly, clutching his cane, and then stalked off for a few minutes, I thought of what horrors this man had seen, what terrors he must have endured in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

David hadn’t noticed it. He continued to complain about the old man shuffling out the door. “They should reprimand him for throwing cards,” he said angrily. “He shouldn’t be allowed to play.”

“He has a tattoo,” I said.
All the players looked at me.
“He has a tattoo,” I said again. “Here.” I motioned to my arm. “A concentration camp tattoo.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”

Nothing else was said. In the silence, I could see everyone at the table making an inner shift to understanding, sorrow, kindness. He had a tattoo. We all knew what it meant. And we knew that none of us knew what it meant.
When he came back to the table, the Chinese man next to him helped him with his chair. The Iranian player smiled and nodded. The old man showed his cards at the end of the next hand he played, and several people said, “Nice hand.” I saw David’s winning cards as he folded them face down and smiled at me conspiratorially. “Good job, David,” I whispered, as we watched our newly discovered friend rake in the pot. A little moment, a little gift, a little win. But I had won something bigger than a few chips that day.

As I threw my own cards into the muck, I felt the thrumming of humanity. My focus on the game dissolved; I looked around the tables at the players and saw Indians, Arabs, Persians, Israelis, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. I saw African-Americans, Jamaicans, Latinos, Swedes, French, Vietnamese, and Thai. Men, women, old, young, sober, tipsy, rich, poor, criminal, virtuous, all were playing. And in that moment, I saw the tattoos on all of them. Tattoos of sorrows endured and tragedies survived. Tattoos written in invisible ink on old arms, swarthy arms, pale arms, hairy arms, smooth arms. Tattoos whose needle incisions had driven stakes into hearts. Tattoos of courage, of shame, of glory, of a million tears. And all these tattooed warriors sat next to each other, playing the next hand they were dealt in the card game of life.

In that moment, I loved everyone in the room and beyond the room, full-out, whole-hearted, helplessly, generously. We were the same; of one breath, one body. We had all suffered, all wept, all loved, all laughed, all prayed to our own version of the zillion aspects of God. When James Lipton asked Meryl Streep what she would want God to say when she arrived in heaven, she said, “Everybody in!” I read of a man who told of his near-death experience where he passed through a great light and saw Jesus. Was he judged? he was asked. He shook his head and said, “The Jesus I saw had room for everybody.”

I tried to hold on to that deep welling joy, but it was like trying to put smoke in a bottle. It faded away in wisps on the air as I grasped at it. I dropped back into my own separate self. The larger picture on the jigsaw puzzle of life was lost once more and I saw only my own little, worn piece.

But I haven’t forgotten. I want to feel that love again. And so, sometimes, when someone is cranky, or tired, or out-of-sorts, I recall that somewhere deep, in some hidden spot on their soul, they wear a tattoo. And I smile at them in remembrance of this ordinary day when, for a few brief moments, I was in love with the whole world.

CHELLIE’S UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

December 4, 2006: Chellie will be on a complimentary teleclass with the faculty of the Visionary Biz Conference Dec 4- 4-5pm PST with Jack Barnard, Chellie Campbell and Stewart Levine. Jack Barnard speaks on Fire in the Belly: The Critical Need for Creativity in the Workplace and Stewart Levine will share Resolution Works: Forging Strong Partnerships with Shared Vision. To read more and register for the teleclass http://speakerservices.com/teleclasses/detail/69.

January 25, 2007: The NAWBO Ventura County Chapter has invited Chellie to be the guest speaker at their dinner meeting from 6-8 PM. She will speak on how to go from Zero to Zillionaire in your business and your life! For more information and reservations, contact Julie Merrick at 805-504-6006 or Julie@spadayplanningservices.com.

February 1-3, 2007: Chellie will be a presenter at the Visionary Business Conference: Creating Business from the Inside Out which will be held at the LAX Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles . You will learn to connect business and spirit, implement spirit-driven strategies to make a living and have a life, and become a visionary leader. BJ Gallagher, Jamie Walter, and Linda Landon are also on the program. For more information and to register, visit www.speakerservices.com/visionarybizor call 310-822-4922.

Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops in Los Angeles : New evening classes begin Monday, October 23rd and Wednesday, October 25th from 6:00 – 8:30 pm and the daytime class begins Tuesday, October 24th from 1:00 – 3:30 pm for the 8-week series. Achieve extraordinary results in your life! Call 310-476-1622 or visit www.chellie.com for more information.

CHIP CHATTER POKER NEWS:

Yippee! I went down to the Bicycle Club Casino in Bell Gardens August 31st, and sat down in favorite $6-12 Omaha game (like Texas Hold'em but with each player dealt 4 cards instead of 2, and the high hand splits the pot with the low hand).

I hadn't been playing but a half hour when I was dealt 2-7-10-10 - a bad hand, but with the jackpot in effect if you have 4 eights or better beaten, I want to see a flop (first 3 community cards the dealer "flops" onto the board) with any big pair larger than eights.

Sure enough, the flop is 10-10-8 and I was first to act. Yowza, I have 4 tens! I checked meekly, because I want all the other players to stay in and try and make a hand that will beat me. Everybody checked (of course they did - nobody else had any tens!)

The turn card (the fourth card on the board the dealer turns up) was a six of hearts. I bet this time, and three people called. The last card was another six - the six of diamonds, which made a straight flush possible, as the 8 and 10 of diamonds were also on the board. So if someone held the 7 and 9 of diamonds in their hand, they would have a straight flush.

Well that's exactly what happened. I bet the river (the last bet after all five cards are dealt on the board) and a woman raised me. I reraised her and she reraised me again. Whoo hoo! The whole table knew what that meant and started whispering “jackpot!”...the energy was electric! I called and she turned over her cards and announced her straight flush. The other players looked at me hopefully. I shouted "Four tens" and everyone stood up and started screaming! Everyone at the table had won money, because the bad beat jackpot gets split this way: 50% of the money in the jackpot goes to the person who got beat (me) 25% to the person who had the winning hand (the gal with the straight flush) and the other 25% gets split amongst all the other players in the hand. So it was a group win!

How much? Well the total money in the jackpot pool was $23,600. So I got $11,800, and I was a very happy camper!

What to do with the money? I got $10,000 in a check and put it in my savings account. I kept $900 cash for me to have fun with, and I gave $900 away - tipped the dealer, tipped the staff, tipped the waitress, etc. It's so much fun to share money!

A Little About Chellie . . .

Chellie Campbell is a former musical comedy actress and past owner of a business management firm who’s been a professional speaker for over sixteen years. She’s the author of The Wealthy Spirit: Daily Affirmations for Financial Stress Reduction (Sourcebooks, 2002), a GlobalNet book-of-the-month selection. Chellie has been quoted in Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman’s World and many books, and she’s featured in How to Run Your Business Like a Girl by Elizabeth Cogswell Baskin and Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash by Liz Perle. Her new book, Zero to Zillionaire: 8 Foolproof Steps to Financial Peace of Mind (Sourcebooks, 2006) has just been released.

The Wealthy Spirit News is written and published by Chellie Campbell, © 2006 All rights reserved. We hope you enjoy receiving this newsletter—but if you would like not to, just let us know by sending a “please don’t send us this anymore” note to the above address. Thank you!

Contact Chellie!

Chellie can be reached at chellie@chellie.com or call 310-476-1622.

Campbell Consulting Company
409 Bonhill Road,
Los Angeles, CA 90049.