Who We Are
I founded the Living Adventurer Program for one reason and one reason only! I needed help! As a sensation seeking, highly sensitive man, I like most sensitive men grew up in a very dysfunctional society. I say dysfunctional because we, highly sensitive people were treated as if we were broken is some way, and like all things made to feel broken, we looked upon anyone we could to help fix us, but there was little to no resources available, nor was society even interested in helping us develop them.
As a result, we learned ourselves. Not how to be “unbroken” but how to live in a society that made us feel broken. We adopted these things called costumes to wear over our true selves in fear that the people around us would reject us. We buried our emotional states, for we were told we too emotional.
Some search frantically for professional help, costing them thousands of dollars and gaining very little. Others became stone walls, learning to just not care but many more hid away, believing if they just weren’t visible, then society would leave them alone.
In 1996, a study was conducted and published that identified a trait within what at the time was believed held by 15 to 20% of the population. More recent studies have concluded that this figure may be as high as 30%. That trait was labeled Highly Sensitive People or HSP’s. While women adopted the label easily, men on the other hand had massive rejection to it. Being called sensitive as a man meant by society that we were weak and weakness to a man is a demeaning and insulting connotation.
While women promoted their Highly Sensitiveness, men climbed even deeper into the darkness of brokenness. As a result, men with a high sensing nervous system, feel ashamed even more than they did. I know, for I was one of these men! Every time I heard the term Highly Sensitive it was like finger nails on a caulk board to my nerves.
It was when I decided to leave my career in Industrial Construction and head out on a 25,000-mile adventurous motorcycle trip through the wilds of Central and South America alone, that I discovered something amazing. While trapped at the tip of Baja Mexico I found I had to engage with certain people that tested many of the skills I had developed during my 15-year, 50 country adventure seeking to understand myself. I realized, I was not a Highly Sensitive man, instead I had become a Highly Responsive man.
The program I have developed, with the aid of others who see the same vision I hold is to take people who consider themselves broken, who see themselves as highly sensitive people, who are told they over react and feel overwhelmed and anxious and offer them an affordable enhancement program that teaches them the arts and skills to achieve higher levels of self-care, Effective decision making, gratitude, appreciation and optimism s well as self-discipline, emotional centering, communication skills, healthy caring, good habit formation, materialistic management, belief structures, guilt management and so much more.
Through all my adventures and all my experience, I have learned one very valuable thing. People born with a high sensing nervous system are not broken, their gifted. Like the days of old, those with elevated gifts were deemed witches and burned at the stake, today they are shamed into believing there is something very wrong with them, this simply is not true.
Who is the founder of The Living Adventurer?
Randy Grasser
High Responsive Training combines the teaching aspects of Martial Arts, Leadership training, Toastmasters and the Cessna flying schools training methodologies into a unique affordable emotional development program that creates highly responsive, highly productive and highly desirable people.
As a Strong independent Highly Responsive man, I faced many challenges in my youth and even into my adult life. Constantly confused as to why I was so emotionally driven, and yet held this insatiable desire to please others, I found adventure to be my only escape.
In on November 11th 1997, I and two of my climbing colleagues were buried in a freak avalanche. Trapped in a frozen tomb with the thoughts of my children growing up without a father burned into my subconscious and conscious mind. My escape from that tomb is captured in my book, “Facing Fear through adventurer, an HSP’s Story”.
My wife, made it clear that I had children to provide for and that I could no longer be the sensation seeker I was. Believing that I could hang up my sensation seeking trait I, like so many donned on a costume for the next 13 years. I patiently fought the person I was inside, holding him back to ensure my children had a father to provide for them. Unfortunately, in doing this, I slowly lost touch with the true person I was and became a person I no longer recognized or believed in. That is, until I met a 93-year-old man during a Christmas party.
My children where graduating high school and were about to begin a life of their own. My wife, had become so distant from me that it was like strangers living under the same roof. You see, in my attempt to change as she had demanded, I found the person I was dying inside. Much like when I was fighting for my life in that icy tomb on the mountain, so too was the sensation seeking man inside me trying to escape a tomb.
My family came to expect me to continue wearing the costume that imprisoned my true self, but I knew I could not any longer. If I had, well I might as well have given up that cold and dark night in November 1997. In 2010, I decided to make a drastic change in my life, feeling I was lost and alone in a world that would not accept me for who I was. Demanding I be the person they expected of me.
I was then faced with a decision, a very difficult but necessary decision. Allow the person I had imprisoned free, or to remain wearing the costume and continue living a miserable life. Some would have you believe that making such a decision would be easy, but it is not. For setting that person free after being caged for so long was like setting a wild animal free, with little to no regard to what they did or who they did it too.
Not realizing it at the time, I choose to set him free and as a result lost everything I had. My house, my bank accounts, my vehicles, even my baby pictures for the rath of divorce can rip deep into souls of vengeful people. The one and only things I so desperate wanted to hold onto from my old life, was my children, having given so much of myself to them for their success. But that too was not to be, and I found myself very alone with a sensation seeking Highly sensitive man whom I had trapped for far too long.
It took 15 years traveling through the wilds of 50 different countries for me to figure out how to tame this creature as well as how to manage his emotional behavior. Taking lessons from the vast experiences we shared together in an attempt to discover who I was. We all have an inner voice, one that speaks to us in ways only we can hear. Mine was split into two, one my left was this fire breathing sensation seeking dragon who was strong and fierce. He held no fear, for he knew death already and he embraced it.
The other was a kind and gentle soul. Angelic in nature, generous, empathetic and emotional. The task I had was to unite these two sides, convince them that they must work in harmony in order to, not just survive, but to live an amazing life that satisfies both the dragon and the angel. And as much as I wish I could say, I have, truth is, it’s not that easy.
You see, through all my travels, all my adventures around this planet, I learned a great many things. One of which is, these two entities that exist inside of me, will always be in constant flux. There is no one pill solution to bind them together. Instead, it’s a collection of skills one needs to learn. To constantly practice and improve upon that keeps them united in a way that creates the harmony I need.
This is what I now call the High Responsiveness training program. And it is now my life’s mission to develop it, share it and most importantly, implement it.
