Bright Lights, Big Empty: A Journey of Profound Awakening

Advance Praise for

bright lights, big empty

Ron is a gifted teacher and healer who has helped thousands of people transform their lives, myself included. Let his story and soul medicine guide you to your more authentic and fully embodied self.

—Kris Carr, New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and cancer thriver

"Ron takes you on his journey, setting out as a pathfinder and wayshower for your own re-remembrance. This is a story of ‘green lights,’ magic, synchronicity, and intuitive hits to finally bring you into full alignment and deep connection with yourself and beyond."

—Yanik Silver, creator of The Cosmic Journal, author of Evolved Enterprise

"In Bright Lights, Big Empty, you will meet the man who has helped me get out of my own way and work through anxieties that prevented me from having deeper relationships with my friends, my family, and myself. I now have a deeper sense of calm, a more open mind, and a richer compassion for my fellow humans."

—Jimmy DiResta, designer, author, YouTube sensation, and cohost of the Making It podcast

Ron is one of those individuals who makes you feel better about yourself when you are in his presence. Calming and supportive, Ron truly cares. I am better by knowing him. You will be too.

—Garrett Gunderson, entrepreneur, educator, and New York Times bestselling author

Ron’s work and approach to healing opened my eyes, my mind, and my heart to an entirely new way of feeling and seeing myself, in addition to what’s possible going forward. His method and understanding of the human journey is not like any traditional therapy—it’s unique, and it’s powerful!

—Bill Miles, Co-Founder of Best Self Media

"Ron was the first man to show me the transformative power of loving myself. I’m eternally grateful for the impact his tender presence has had on my life, and am so thrilled for the world to experience that love through this book.

—Raj Jana, Founder of JavaPresse Coffee Company, host of the podcast Stay Grounded

Bright Lights, Big Empty

A Journey of Profound Awakening

Ron Baker

copyright © 2022 ron baker

All rights reserved.

bright lights, big empty

A Journey of Profound Awakening

isbn

978-1-5445-2708-6 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-2706-2 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-2707-9 Ebook

For Robert…

without whom none of this

would be possible.

Contents

Introduction

I. The CALL

1. The Curtain Rises

2. Surprising Twists

3. New Possibilities

II. Child

4. Snakes and Stitches

5. The Lake

6. The Pivotal Challenges of Eight

7. Music to My Ears

8. What Makes a Man Great?

9. Contradictions and Mixed Messages

10. Finding My Feet

11. New Territory

12. Drinks and Debuts

III. Adult

13. Courage and Confession

14. Gradual Percentages

15. Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

16. Helping and Healing

IV. Soul

17. Unprecedented Shifts

18. Miracles of Birth

19. A New Mission

20. Soul Considerations

21. Profound Change

22. Looking Forward

Final Words of Encouragement

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Even as a child, I just knew there were deeper truths about Life and why things happen as they do than people around me were able to offer. While so many things about the world seemed unfair and confusing, I always had a nagging feeling that so much more was possible. What I could never have guessed, however, was how exciting, challenging, and inspiring the path to those more complete answers would become, or that the reason my initial hunches never wavered was that they were coming from the deepest part of myself: my own Soul.

I will begin my story in 1990 because that’s the summer when everything changed for me. Making my debut on a major New York City stage became the gateway to doing more than sixty leading roles on important stages around the world. Though I’m grateful for all of it—singing with celebrities, dining with royalty, sharing the stage with two Supreme Court justices—these beautiful opportunities are not what ultimately led to extraordinary levels of personal fulfillment.

Those achievements, exciting as they were, did not have the power to outweigh my constant inner battle with emptiness and Self-doubt.

Fortunately, other doors opened for me as well that summer—this time as two pivotal connections. One became my dearest friend and business partner, and the other was a profound teacher whose wisdom blew my mind. Not only did he provide priceless clues for resolving my fear and doubt; he also showed me how to align with my Soul purpose.

My hope is that the journey I now share with you—which reveals the specific steps that allowed me to immerse myself in this new sense of Self-value—will help you understand how to make similar enhancements by learning to become the nurturing authority in your own life. In the early years of your life, your Soul set up important challenges for you. Once you learn how to turn them into gifts and guideposts, you will discover how essential those past challenges will become.

Before I experienced the adventures I will share with you, I would have never believed how differently I would eventually see my own painful and confusing challenges, but the truth is that I actually appreciate and value them now.

I also want to mention how much it meant to me to discover some of the practical realities of being on an extended Soul journey. Just relieving the pressure I had always felt to figure everything out in one lifetime was priceless. By learning how to integrate the profound layers of education about the Self, I was able to shift from a desperate attempt to prove myself to a much more immediate commitment to Self-love and Self-value. That made all the difference.

Once my day-to-day experiences became predictably richer, I felt inspired to share all that I was learning with the people around me. Once they, too, began to experience reliable enhancements in their lives, word spread rather quickly. As more and more people began showing up to explore the unique, nurturing approach that I was gradually forming, it became clear that nothing could be more meaningful than creating deeply authentic connections and being able to impact others’ lives. Those motivations led me to establish a School of Self-Mastery in New York City.

In the twenty-five years since I made that pivotal decision, I’ve had the privilege of walking beside thousands of courageous individuals who have initiated a broad spectrum of personal transformations. Some have shifted from jobs that were not so fulfilling into careers that are more aligned with their particular gifts and interests; others have focused on investing in relationships that consistently grow into meaningful intimacy and trust; while others have worked more fully on healing physical ailments, from simple issues to advanced stages of cancer. In each case, positive changes in people’s lives were made possible when they learned how to become their own nurturing authority.

Based on what I have witnessed, I now live in a state of deep trust that we can all build more intimate, fulfilling relationships. We can all inspire more passion for our lives, focusing on the things that are truly important to us as individuals. We can also sustain more consistent health than what our traditional systems have taught us, and even go for decades without getting sick. Those are just some of the things that my own experiences have taught me.

Still eager to reach as many people as I can with this unique education about what it means to claim our Whole Self, I decided to write this book. The process of sharing my story so intimately has been a profound one. The thought of sharing my life—including many of my core challenges—with people I’ve never met brought up distinct fear.

While I was concerned about how some people might react to such vulnerable parts of my life, my motivation to affirm how safe we can all be to admit our challenges, fears, and doubts in order to take back our personal power was much stronger. Besides, the last twenty-five years had already taught me that the most meaningful way to inspire others is to simply walk the walk, offering a clear example of willingness, courage, and compassion.

I’m so glad to bring you a clear message about what is possible in this world of accelerated shifts, affirmed by my work with thousands of individuals through the School of Self-Mastery. The exciting truth is that we all hold much more potential than most of us were ever taught to access. I now live with meaningful capacities and depths of intimacy in every aspect of my life, and I watch that taking place around me on a daily basis. I’ve even had the opportunity to experience the reality of miracles, which I look forward to sharing as my story unfolds.

The last thing I will say in these opening remarks is that I’m fully aware that the challenges and gifts in your life will differ from mine. However, the principles of healing transformation that I will pass on to you are universal. In other words, they will work for you, just as they have worked for so many others who have explored this awesome approach with me.

Know that no matter where you find yourself in your journey, jumping into healthier, nurturing choices is always an option. I’m glad you’re here and that you’re willing to explore possibilities with me. When you have a deeper understanding and alignment with your own journey to Self, so much more will be possible. The choices you will begin to make will be a clear investment in what is most important to you, rather than doing what I initially did—magically hoping some outer achievement, job, or relationship would be the main source of fulfillment. You hold the power to make the biggest difference in your own life, and that is exciting.

So let’s begin.

1

The Curtain Rises

Standing behind the imposing red velvet curtain that dressed New York City’s Lincoln Center stage, I could hear the excited buzz of three thousand people finding their seats. Heightening the moment were the muted sounds of a sixty-piece orchestra warming up in the pit and the more immediate pounding of my nervous heart. In just a few short minutes, the lights would dim, and I would walk out to the other side of that curtain in complete silence—the first actor to appear in the 1990 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music .

Since this would be my New York debut, staying grounded was a challenge. At some point in my dance between excitement and nervousness, I was interrupted by a tap on my right shoulder. The last thing I expected to find when I turned was Mr. Sondheim himself, standing beside me.

Ron, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’d like to change some of the lyrics in this first number. Would you mind making a few shifts?

Oh, my God.

Don’t get me wrong. I would have done backflips if this musical theater genius had asked, but I also knew that Sondheim’s lyrics, known for being quick and witty, could sometimes be a mouthful. Of course I agreed, which meant that my nerves went into overdrive. Once Mr. Sondheim turned and disappeared into the darkness, I started feverishly repeating the new words in my head. What I did not remember in that moment was that I’d been preparing for this opportunity for years.

Without warning, I became aware that the muted whispers of the audience had ceased, which meant that the lights in the theater had likely been dimmed. Confirming my suspicions, the stage manager gave her cue that it was time to make my move. Ready or not, two stagehands pulled the curtain aside, and within seconds, I was hit by a bright spotlight from the back of the theater. This meant the giant space in front of me that boasted four impressive levels of balconies now became an endless cavern of darkness.

Just as I had rehearsed, I found my way to the grand piano that waited for me like a reliable friend. After the strike of a single key, I launched into the opening passage, which brought me rather quickly to the excitement of a sustained high G. Fortunately, four other cast members soon joined me for the opening number. We were off, and there was no looking back.

The following morning, the New York press hailed A Little Night Music a resounding success. In fact, the inspired guidance of director Scott Ellis, choreographer Susan Stroman, and conductor Paul Gemignani turned our show into the hottest ticket in town. I will never forget the rush of excitement that moved through my body when a wall of deafening cheers hit the stage at the completion of the first act and then at the finale of the show when that huge red velvet curtain returned to its familiar resting place. Without a doubt, this debut was a real milestone in my life, complete with the unique memory of having successfully delivered last-minute lyrics from one of Broadway’s most important icons.

Wow, you are certainly living the dream! friends and acquaintances claimed when they heard the New York City Opera had hired me to perform a handful of roles over the next six months.

While I was aware that being part of that historic company was an incredible opportunity, what most of my supporters couldn’t see—because I had become so well practiced at hiding vulnerabilities—was that on the inside, I still felt like the insecure boy from North Carolina whose father had never engaged in a single conversation growing up.

While I enjoyed each expression of congratulations, I was also filled with Self-doubt. I simply had no idea how to value myself as a person. Now that I had reached my goal of performing at Lincoln Center, it was clear to me how deluded I had been to think that proving myself on major world stages would somehow erase my insecurities. Instead, the main thing this milestone affirmed was that I had a real gift for magical thinking. Fortunately, the string of performances I was scheduled to do that fateful summer of 1990 was not my only opportunity. Much to my surprise, an entirely different event ended up changing the trajectory of my life.

Backing up a bit, this second opportunity took place prior to Night Music’s opening night in the big city, when the cast and crew were traveling to do performances in the charming town of Saratoga Springs, New York. Out-of-town tryouts were a long-held tradition in the theater community. They were established to give creative teams an opportunity to make shifts and enhancements to their shows prior to facing the make-or-break reviews of New York City newspapers.

When we boarded the bus for our ride to Saratoga, I took my place in an aisle seat near the front. Not long into the three-hour journey, I heard an interesting conversation taking place behind me. Curious about who was doing most of the talking, I turned my head just enough to see a slight, unassuming man in his early forties. The story he was recounting, which centered around a near-death experience on his last City Opera tour in Thailand, was so compelling that it sent a surge of energy up my spine.

The man’s experience began in a ground-floor hotel room, with him lying on a single bed. While staring up at a light bulb hanging at the end of a simple black cord, he suddenly discovered he couldn’t move his body. Almost immediately, the light bulb started to shine much brighter. The next thing he knew, he was somehow hovering above his own physical body, which was visible on the bed below.

I was on the edge of my seat as he talked about moving through a tunnel of light that eventually brought him to a vast, empty space. Once there, he experienced a surprising depth of pleasure, connection, and peace—sensations that were quite new to him. Just recalling it was so moving to him, I heard his voice crack with emotion as he continued.

"After spending a few brief moments enjoying those new sensations, I suddenly heard a voice inside my head announcing, You must go back. You have not yet learned how to love." With no time to respond, he was suddenly back on the hotel bed, focused on the gradual sensations of his physical body becoming mobile again.

Hearing the man so honestly share the details of his spiritual experience caused distinct memories from my own past to rise to the surface. Though what occurred to me was not so direct or dramatic, it still reminded me of how connected I had felt to something spiritual ever since I was a young child. For instance, when an especially upsetting or confusing event took place, I, too, would be filled with a strange sense of peace—as if I were being offered some unspoken assurance that there were deeper answers waiting to be discovered. I couldn’t explain it logically, but that was how it had always felt.

In addition, the surge of energy that had shot up my spine while listening to the man’s story was a sensation that had occurred many times over the years. This typically happened in moments when I heard something that seemed particularly important and true. By the time I was a teenager, I started referring to those energetic releases as my internal green lights. For me, they were like a mysterious nudge, encouraging me to pay close attention to whatever was happening or being shared.

Over the years, I figured out that whenever I ignored one of those green lights, I’d end up regretting it. With that in mind, I was determined not to miss out on making a connection with this interesting new person who was now sitting behind me.

As soon as he finished his story, I turned around and said, as calmly as I could manage, I don’t know who you are, but I know that I’m supposed to talk with you.

From our first meal together, that night in Saratoga Springs, Robert Baker and I became immediate friends. The moment we sat down, we began to swap stories about our lives, starting with some of the synchronicities that had led us both to choose careers in the performing arts. The more we shared, the more excited we became about the parallels we discovered, starting with the fact that we shared the same last name, Baker.

Though we were born twelve years apart and grew up on opposite sides of North America, we had both started out in tiny towns and were brought into the world by parents who were quite young. My family lived in Pinetops, North Carolina, while Robert’s family had settled into a logging camp near Vancouver, British Columbia. I remember how comforting it was when Robert told me that his parents had almost no idea how to provide help or guidance when he was growing up. This was something about my own life that I’d long felt frustrated by.

Hearing Robert share his experiences so openly was like a breath of fresh air. The experience was so unusual that I realized I’d never felt safe enough to share myself like he had. It was comforting to find someone I could relate to, someone who had also figured out so many things on his own as a young person. Even though this was our first real conversation, these similarities between us created an immediate ease that made me feel less alone.

The impact was so clear that I eventually shared some of the more personal and unusual spiritual phenomena that had taken place in my own life. One of those events took place almost ten years earlier, when I was performing at the Brevard Music Center Summer Festival in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

The main highlight for me in the festival involved being cast as Billy Bigelow, the brooding male lead in the musical Carousel. The icing on the cake was that my mom and younger sister, JB, would come to help me celebrate the opportunity. An extra bonus was that my mother had spent a summer or two performing at this very place when she was young. From the moment they arrived, I relished introducing them to my summer home. At some point during that first afternoon together, I reached over to give JB a sideways hug. Much to my surprise, she winced and pulled away.

It turns out that she’d been diagnosed with a kidney infection a couple of days earlier and was still experiencing some pain.

Wow. That is so strange, I responded. That same part of my back has been bothering me today, and even though I haven’t seen a doctor, I’ve been guessing that I might be having an issue with my kidney.

We both thought this was an interesting coincidence but tossed it off and moved on with our weekend together. Things got a bit more intriguing when my family left to return home, and the pain I’d been feeling simply disappeared.

Over the course of the next year, I noticed that whenever JB developed any physical discomfort, I would feel the exact symptoms she was manifesting. At first, I imagined it was the strong sense of protection I felt for her, as she was my baby sister. However, I started to experience physical symptoms that other members of my family were going through as well. At that point, I knew there had to be more to the story.

It was during my fateful dinner in Saratoga that I learned there is a name for this phenomenon.

Robert listened to my story and then simply informed me, Some people have a heightened sensitivity to what is taking place energetically in other people’s bodies. When that empathetic sense is particularly heightened, it is known as clairsentience.

Wow. Yet another way that Robert was able to comfort me. Of course I had to ask, How do you know about things like that?

I have some wonderful teachers in New York City who’ve been educating me about many things over the last couple of years, he replied.

Up to that point in my life, I’d worried that someone would think I was crazy if I shared these phenomena. Now I felt encouraged and accepted, so much so that I decided to take it one step further, telling Robert about the most surprising clairsentient experience I’d gone through.

On what seemed like a typical day in grad school, while listening to one of my professor’s lectures at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, I was jolted by an intense surge of pain in my stomach. The sensation was so strong that I ended up doubling over and falling out of my chair and onto the floor. At that same moment, a fleeting image of my mother flashed through my mind.

Wanting to find out what was going on, I left class and went to call my mom. When I wasn’t able to reach her at home or at work, I contacted a family friend. It turned out that my mother had an undetected stomach ulcer that had ruptured around the same time I felt the surge of pain. What made the experience so hard to believe was that she was six hundred miles away.

Robert nodded knowingly, moved but unfazed by what I was telling him.

I told him that my mom had lost almost seven units of blood before an ambulance was able to get her to a hospital, which had left her in a truly vulnerable state. Fortunately, she was in stable condition by the time I spoke with her that evening, but the whole experience had taken my gift to a completely new level, leaving me a bit confused.

If there is nothing I can do, what is the point of having this gift? I wondered. I told Robert I was curious. Was there a way for me to use this unusual capacity to feel? Could I use it to help the people who were in trouble?

Robert told me that he had also been wondering, since his near-death experience, how he might use everything that had begun to shift in his life to help and inspire others. He said that his experience had opened and shifted him so much that he no longer felt as satisfied with his life as he had previously felt. As one example, he had worked as the head of the makeup department at the New York City Opera for almost twenty years, a position that had provided him with a wonderful way to express his creativity. Now he was questioning whether there was something different he was supposed to be doing.

One of the first differences he noticed when he returned from Thailand was a strong desire to meditate. He decided to follow his intuitive hunch and joined two meditation groups. There, he found the teachers who were now so important to him. Prior to making those moves, he hadn’t approached his life from a very spiritual perspective, which I found interesting. By the time our evening came to a close, we both sensed that we had begun what would surely become a rare and beautiful friendship.

Once our performances in Saratoga were over and we returned to the city, Robert and I started spending more time together. The fact that we both needed to be at the opera house on most days for the next six months gave us plenty of opportunities. Going out for Mexican food was one of our favorite things to do, which typically included me enjoying iced tea, chips, and guacamole, while Robert sipped blue margaritas.

I was pleased that it didn’t take long for Robert to invite me to join him at his meditation groups. The first was led by June Graham and Jim Spencer, two wonderful people whose home in the West Village quickly became a safe haven for my beginning explorations of the inner Self. A few weeks later, I accompanied Robert to my one and only visit to the second meditation group. This one was led by a gentlewoman named Alma Daniels. Alma lived in a beautiful apartment that overlooked Central Park.

Once everyone had arrived for the evening, we all took our places. We formed a circle on various cushions and chairs that had already been set up. Alma began by asking us to close our eyes, and then she had us take some deep breaths, encouraging us to let go of the day’s