Tony Achmat’s Legacy
I received the one phone call I didn’t want to hear – Tony Achmat, my dear friend and co-creator of the Value Anatomy project died last night. He’s been in intensive care in the past few days after a heart-attack, so I’ve been thinking about this possibility and dreading it. But I’ve also thought about the incredible Tony-way of doing things.
He spent the past few months in Sri Lanka, building a school for children and his new life with an “adopted” Sri Lankan family. He came back to Prague to dismantle what he built here over nearly thirty years. As I write this, his flat is practically empty, as he gave away or sold everything he owned. He also visited friends to say goodbye. Then, a few days before his flight back, he ended up in intensive care.
Whenever someone dies, I feel as if lights went out in a part of a city. Suddenly we see how vast the grid was, as a black gap appears in the landscape. Tony’s network of light is one of the largest I’ve ever seen. Over decades of training and coaching, he transformed lives of thousands of people, then secondarily the lives of their colleagues and families. His landscaping business back in Australia gave livelihoods to employees and created public parks that are still there, growing and flourishing.
But I’ve had the privilege of being his personal friend and collaborator and understanding the depth of his spirituality, the source of what seemed to be magical powers. Those powers healed little kids with his hands and made millions for businesses that he coached. Those powers also made sure that he could always find a parking place, to my husband’s utter envy. His extremely high intuition helped him identify targets in the middle of the jungle in the Vietnam War. He became an expert “tree doctor” in the landscaping business, because he could “talk to the tree’s spirit” to find out what’s wrong. This is what I call 3D spirituality – there was nothing airy fairy about Tony at all.
That same guidance then enabled him to discover cores of people’s problems, at times delivering the truth quite harshly, but always spot on. Most people thought it was his difficult childhood in an orphanage, his military career, years in a Buddhist monastery or business experience that made him special. To me, it was obvious that he had what we call spiritual skills and he confirmed that they were there since childhood. They were what enabled all of the above.
He opened this subject only two years ago, surprised I knew anything about such things. “People here in the Czech Republic never talk about it,” he said. When he first got here, people got scared at the mention of anything “out of the ordinary” others dismiss it as unscientific. He lost friends that way. Like me, like many, he learned to shut up about his spirituality. He was a Buddhist. He meditated. That was usually the end of the conversation.
I explained to him, that my experience is the opposite – my friends always talk about it and barely talk about anything else! This is no longer 1990’s either. Prague has experienced a spiritual and esoteric boom, along with the materialistic one. But Tony lived in the business world and never really noticed it. He just used his superpowers for business. There must be hundreds of people out there who made piles of money through Tony talking to his spirits – and theirs. Just as many people have advanced in their careers because he could sense the right direction or talents.
A few days ago, I sat on a rock in the middle of fields and talked to Tony’s spirit as best as I could. The message was clear – we need to “come out” about this. Both of us. People have to know that they too have a Spirit, a Soul that has a mission in this world. Our only job is to figure out what it is and go with the flow to execute it. I don’t doubt that he fulfilled his to 150%. I wished for him to have the well-deserved retirement and new life in Sri Lanka, but his Spirit had better plans. It’s up to us now to pick up that thread.
The last time I saw him, we were moving some things he gave us from his apartment. In the midst of handling bags, he handed me an envelope. “These are the last ones,” he said. They were the last drawings for the Value Anatomy cards. I didn’t know they would be the last ones in his life.
It’s now our job to make his legacy come true. His powerful Spirit will live through this project and continue changing people’s lives. Because that’s what Tony does. I would say RIP, but the idea of Tony’s Spirit resting is ridiculous. He’s busy looking for his next mission and I’ll be looking for him in the little kids that I meet from now on. With Buddhists, it’s not a goodbye, but – until we meet again!
Thank you for everything, my friend! You will be missed.