About

By all accounts, I shouldn’t be here, doing what I do, knowing what I know. By all accounts, I should be uneducated and living in Panama, or a blue collar worker in Miami.

Instead, I’m a successful life coach and ordained minister in Houston, Texas, with a Ph.D.

My name is Timmothy Alexander Ledgister, although I go by Alex. I was born in 1977, in Dallas, to a family with a very diverse background. My father is from Panama, and had a Panamanian father and Jamaican mother. My mother is from Panama, but her dad was French and her mother was Brazilian.

When I was two years old, my parents separated, and I went with my father to live in Panama. In fact, I didn’t see my mother again for 15 years.

My father had it pretty rough as a single dad for a while. He was trying to raise my brother and me, and work at the same time, so we spent a lot of time with friends of the family. But eventually he got remarried to my stepmother, who was the one who actually raised us.

When I was five, my father relinquished all care of me and my brother to our stepmother, and rarely came home. She did a great job raising us, but it wasn’t enough for me. I was constantly angry and frustrated, and would get into fights at school, refuse to do my homework, and generally avoid doing anything I was supposed to. My behavior, and my grades, were bad.

Don’t get me wrong. My stepmother was doing her very best. But she had a long work schedule too, and our father just wasn’t around. He would be missing for weeks or even months at a time. So when I was 13, my stepmother decided to leave my father, and come to the United States to find a better life for her kids and us. She had two sons of her own, plus my brother and me, and our little sister.

She came to the US, and us boys were left to fend for ourselves. For two years. Things got worse before they got better, and we eventually found ourselves with no electricity or food. We had to borrow money or work odd jobs just to have enough money to buy a donut or two for dinner. Donuts were really cheap, and that’s all we could afford at the time.

My dad would stop by occasionally and leave us some groceries and money, but then he would leave again. But finally in 1992, he agreed to send us to live with my stepmom, who was overjoyed to have us with her, and we ended up in California.

I was a stranger in my own country — I didn’t know the culture, and my English was very limited. My first two years of school were pretty tough, because I worked nights as a janitor, cleaning car dealerships. We needed the money, and at 15 years old, I knew I had to do my part to take care of the family.

But my mom was very busy working full time, and even overtime, to take care of all of us, so once again, we had little supervision. So I did whatever I wanted to. Luckily, that involved school activities, rather than getting into trouble. I boxed, played soccer, played the trombone in the high school marching band and symphonic band, and worked full time when I wasn’t going to school.

That was my routine for two years, until I moved to Miami. I spent eight months there, going to school and working full time. But things weren’t going that well, so I contacted my biological mother.

In the fall of 1994, I finally met my biological mother, and moved to Arizona to be with her. Finally, with a stable home life and someone to watch over me, I felt the stability I had been looking for all those years. I excelled at everything I set my mind to, and graduated from high school two years later.

But it wasn’t until two years later that my life really changed: that’s when I joined the U.S. Marine Corps.

I graduated Marine basic training in April 1998, and became a Military Policeman. Shortly after I became an MP, I joined a special operations-capable unit, where I spent my entire Marine Corps career. I served two combat tours in Iraq before I finally got out in 2005 — 7.5 years after I joined.

Because of my military background and training, I was hired by a private security firm charged with protecting US diplomats in war-torn countries around the globe. My work has taken me to some amazing places, where I have seen both some incredible and very sad things.

After experiencing and seeing so much devastation, poverty, and ignorance around the world, I decided to emerge myself into a new life path, and sought to learn things that would be beneficial to humanity.

In Winter 2006, while working overseas, I found myself contemplating life and what we know as “reality.” I began thinking about the ideal world — Plato’s “Forms” or “Ideas” from his Allegory of the Cave — and how this knowledge may benefit human life, both individually and collectively.

It was those contemplations that brought me to the study of metaphysics. From the Ancient Greek, Metaphysics, which means “after” or “beyond the physics.” I immersed myself into my new interests and my new passion. Not only did I become an ordained minister by the International Metaphysical Ministry, but I graduated in 2009 with a Ph.D in Philosophy, with a specialization in Holistic Life Coaching from the University of Sedona.

I went from being a poor boy from Panama, to a member of U.S. military, to a teacher, a coach, a minister, and most importantly, a father. Without realizing it, my journey finally brought me to where I was supposed to be, despite what “all accounts” would have led me and anyone else to believe.

I believe deep within my heart that by coaching others and giving my all to humanity I have finally found my true purpose in life. But it’s only the life I have led that brought me to it.