Tag Archives: Relationships

I’m Quarantined With My Abuser And Don’t Feel Safe At Home

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Silence

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In his autobiography Ben Franklin shared that one of his virtues was silence. He included this description:

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.

Think about how much time and energy you could save by avoiding trifling conversation and communicating just for the benefit of others or yourself.

I suppose this depends on how you define benefit.

How beneficial is it to comment on what someone shares for the sake of commenting? So you connect for an extra second or two. How much does that matter?

How much of your conversation will even be remembered the next day, let alone a week or a month later?

There’s an opportunity cost when we engage in trifling conversations. We may experience some connection, but it’s a shallow and forgettable form of connection, like being sprayed with a mist that evaporates when the conversation ends.

Do you have any conversations that you still recall years later because of how deep, meaningful, or special they were? How often do you have conversations that you still remember one year later? And how many just blur together in a sea of nothingness?

If you do a lot of online commentary, try to recall some of the most significant commenting you’ve engaged in from the past five years. How much of your communication really benefits others or yourself?

How much criticism have you offered to others that fell on deaf ears or that actually made a situation worse?

I encourage you to play around with your definition of trifling. See what happens if you raise the floor and refrain from making the bottom 25% of commentary that you’d previously considered okay.

What’s borderline trifling that you don’t actually need to share? What cheap laughs could you pass up, even when you have a witty remark on the tip of your tongue that you’re immensely proud of? What debates could you decline to get involved with?

This is an exercise in training up your self-control and self-discipline. When you learn to hold your tongue and be more selective in what you share, it can yield meaningful benefits, including improving your relationships and productivity. Sometimes it’s more beneficial to communicate nothing.

When you release some trifling conversation, you may feel a void in its place, and it may be a deeper void than you expected to see. The invitation is to fill that void with something rich and meaningful to you. If not for trifling conversations taking up space, where else could you invest your time and energy?

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Finding Cuddle Partners

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In Conscious Growth Club, there was a recent discussion about finding cuddle partners – i.e. someone to physically cuddle with when you want – so I thought I’d turn what I shared about this into a blog post with some tips on finding cuddle partners. Obviously this will be more useful when you’re not under a virus lockdown. 😉

Basically what I shared in CGC was a list of tips for increasing the chances of finding a cuddle partner. Here’s a refined version of that:

  • Hang out with cuddle-friendly and touch-friendly people more often. Spend more time around the hugger types. This helps a lot in picking up the vibe and getting more comfortable with people offering various forms of touch.
  • Spend less time with touch-avoidant people in person, so you can do more of the previous item. Don’t invest as much time and energy in the non-hugger types of people; if you do it will probably just hold you back. You need to move away from that mindset / vibe.
  • Ask for advice from the most huggy and touchy people you know, especially if you find someone who didn’t start out that way. I definitely didn’t start out that way, and it helped to just hang out and talk to people who had touch-abundant lives. At first it seemed they had skills and experiences that were far beyond my reality, but eventually I came to see that this was an invitation to a personal growth journey.
  • Be patient with yourself, but keep leaning into this if it’s what you want. You can get there. It will just take time. You probably have some misaligned behaviors and attitudes to overcome.
  • Tell the hugger types you know that you want the most truthful feedback they can give you, so you can raise your awareness of your problematic behaviors and attitudes that could repel what you want. They probably won’t tell you truths like “you have a put-offish attitude” or “you hug like a dead bird” or “you’re coming on too aggressively” unless you invite this level of honesty from them. Then take these hard truths as invitations to grow, not as personal attacks.
  • Invite people to cuddle when you feel they might be up for it. Do this in person ideally. Commence cuddling immediately if the answer is positive. I’ll share examples of cuddle invites after this list.
  • Publicly write, speak, and share about this pursuit, so people will know you’re into in it. Don’t hide if you want different results. If anyone gives you serious flak for it, I suggest dropping them from your social circle. Who needs that kind of friction? Purge the unsupportive social riff-raff. It’s challenging enough to have growth experiences with good social support from people who respect your goals and desires. Sharing human touch is beautiful. Own that desire fully.
  • If you think there’s something wrong with cuddling or with wanting a touch-abundant life, then journal the heck out of those false beliefs till you’re ready to replace them who a more empowering frame. Note the many benefits of cuddling, including better health and happiness, you’ll understand the point of offering cuddle invitations. There are lots of people who like and appreciate cuddling, and their mindsets are aligned with experiencing it. This isn’t just about meeting your needs. You’re helping someone else meet their needs too. Cuddling is to gift to yourself and to another person.
  • Be on the lookout for more cuddle opportunities like cuddle parties or cuddle meetup groups. Ask around to see if anyone knows of one happening soon. I think one-on-one invites are much better, but cuddle parties could be a good way to get started if you think that inviting a specific person takes too much courage. You may even find a cuddle meetup group in your area.
  • If you want a super cuddly long-term partner, don’t bother investing too much time in connections with people who aren’t into cuddling, at least not while you’re interested in finding a good match. Focus on what you want, and don’t settle for partial matches. There are lots of cuddle-friendly people out there, so there’s not need to try to convince someone to stretch themselves to be into it. If you meet someone who isn’t into it, move on quickly.
  • Visualize enjoying cuddles, and smile. You can cuddle a blanket, pillow, or teddy bear for practice. Feel what you think it would feel like to be enjoying this for real.
  • Realize that there are lots of people out there who’d love more touch, so the odds of finding matches are great if you just make enough invitations.
  • When you’re ready for it, push your cuddle skills higher by cuddling two people at once, one on each side. It’s super yummy but can get a bit hot in the middle if it’s overnight, so make sure the room is cool.
  • Remind yourself that as with many other personal growth pursuits, if you just keep investing in exploration and growth, some form of abundance is likely. It’s just a matter of time.
  • A key behavioral change to focus on is making cuddle invitations. The more you invite, the more you get to experience. You can make such invitations through any medium you like: in person, phone, text, email, social media direct messages, etc.
  • With enough practice you’ll get locked into the vibe of having these experiences, so making more cuddle invitations becomes pretty natural and easy. Experience builds confidence. There’s no need to fake confidence before you have experience. It’s totally fine to be a beginner. Just be a growth-oriented beginner, and keep nudging yourself to lean into action.
  • If you’re cuddling someone who’s inexperienced with cuddling, try to be extra kind and sensitive to their needs and concerns. Also help them discover what they like. Do your part to give others a good experience, so they can feel more confident in continuing their journeys as well.

Cuddle Invites

Cuddle invites are actually very simple and may go something like this:

Me: You look super cuddlable by the way.

Her: Oh how observant you are. I’m actually one of the best cuddlers in the world!

Me: Well I’d love to cuddle you right now.

Her: That sounds yummy, but the experience might spoil you, and then you’d feel sad cuddling anyone else.

Me: You’re that good, eh?

Or…

Me: If you feel like cuddling sometime, just know that I’d definitely be up for it.

Her: Hmmm… I think that would be nice.

Me: How about right now?

Her: Okay, why not? How should we do it?

And sometimes it’s the other way around, partly due to sharing about this openly…

Her: By the way… I’ve been reading your blog for many years, so I know you really like to cuddle. I like cuddling too.

Me: Would you like to cuddle right now?

Her: Yes, that sounds really nice.

In this last scenario, it’s also common for the woman to make some comment that lets me know she’s available too. For instance, she may note that she doesn’t have a current partner, that she just went through a recent breakup, or that she’s currently in an open relationship.

Usually we’d cuddle on the spot if the invite was done in person. Or if it was online, then it would happen later of course. I was surprised that my cuddle invites resulted in about 95% yeses. I didn’t think it would be so high. But I think that’s mainly because of what I’ll share in the next section.

Playfulness

Conversations don’t normally start out like the snippets above. There may be a lot more chatting before that, usually at least 15 minutes.

This little pieces of dialog assume that we were already having a bit of a playful banter beforehand, so we already created a nice connection with some laughter.

Sharing laughs, I would say, is one of the best precursors to a cuddle invitation. Laughing together builds trust and connection. I tend to think of cuddling as rather playful too, so when there are laughs and smiles, it tends to lead nicely into cuddling if there’s mutual interest.

I remember one time I got a gentle no for a cuddle invite, and there were no laughs in our conversation beforehand. It was too serious, which made the invitation not feel as natural. And I think the lack of laughter was a sign that the connection and rapport just wasn’t there.

If a conversation is very mental, such as talking about work or business ideas, I think it would be pretty awkward to turn that towards a cuddle invitation. The vibe just isn’t proximate enough.

If you can’t be playful, it’s likely because you’ve got a clogged and crusty heart-brain connection. A poor diet is one of the main culprits there. It takes emotional energy to be playful, and the body won’t generate much emotional energy if it’s overburdened with various other problems to deal with. Hence poor health habits can indeed be a barrier to feeling playful enough to invite cuddle experiences.

Cuddle Abundance

For some people it can be a long journey to cuddle abundance. It certainly was for me. What feels natural to me now was nothing of the sort many years ago.

I think the challenge of the journey just creates extra gratitude later on though. Thanks to a super cuddly wife who loves sharing touch, I rarely go more than a few hours without some kind of touch, cuddling, or affection in each day, which is especially nice to have while under virus lockdown. I think this is probably why we don’t mind it so much.

The key is simply not to give up. It may take years to create the experiences you desire, but the time will pass anyway, so you might as well invest in growing in this area. Lean into behavioral changes such that the passage of time shows you how much progress you’ve made.

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Conscious Growth Club Will Open on April 27

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In the last week of this month we’ll open Conscious Growth Club for new members. The last time we invited new members to join was in the last week of April 2019, so it’s been a year.

I expect the overall structure of Conscious Growth Club, including the private member forums, member portal, coaching calls, quarterly planning sessions, course access, and monthly 30-day challenges to remain largely unchanged. I’m going to review all the features and benefits, decide what to add or tweak, and record a new invitation video for it, so that’s when I’ll share the exact offer details for the upcoming year.

I intend to keep the price the same: $1997 per year. There are no payment plans and no refunds. It’s meant to be an all-in or nothing type of deal, such that the members who join really want to be a part of it.

Some members have already renewed for the next year early, although I haven’t sent out renewal invitations yet.

The full CGC year runs from May 1 to April 30, although people will get access to the group as soon as they join in the last week of April.

Some people have asked if we’ll open twice this year. While that is a possibility, I don’t have any current plans to do that this year, so I’d say that the chance of a second 2020 opening is very low. Presently I just intend to open CGC once for new members for 2020. The doors will open on April 27, and the doors will close on May 1st. So if you miss it, you’ll have to wait a full year for the opportunity to come around again. As long as you’re on my email list, you’ll be notified about the opening. Or you could mark your calendar to check back on April 27.

Even though people have asked to join mid-year, I haven’t allowed anyone to do so. I like welcoming new members together once per year, so we can be in service mode the rest of the year.

CGC currently has about 150 members. About 60 of them joined last year, and the other 90 joined during the Early Access period. The group initially started in April 2017, so we’ve been going for three years now, and this next year that starts on May 1st will be our fourth year.

Coronavirus and CGC

Given the current virus situation, I thought about how it may impact CGC’s 2020 opening and how we should adapt. So I’ll share my thoughts about that. The short version is that we’re proceeding with the opening as we normally would.

It’s obvious that many people are going to tighten up on their spending right now. For some people, spending $2K on a personal growth program will go on the back burner relative to other expenses like rent and food. I understand and accept that.

I also think there’s a compensating factor, which is that some people will be more likely to invest in CGC right now. They’ll want to take advantage of the resources of the group for helping them through their personal and professional transitions. Having such a group to lean on for a year (or more) will be seriously beneficial for some people who want that kind of support, especially when social media just isn’t doing it for them.

Given the current situation in the world, it would not surprise me if the group shrinks in size after the April opening. But pushing back the opening (and by how much) would be a matter of guesswork, and it might not make things any better. The reality is that there doesn’t seem to be any better time for opening the group relative to the current plan, so I think it’s best to stick with the current opening plans.

Fortunately we’re on very stable financial footing, so I don’t feel any neediness regarding numbers for the next opening. If the group shrinks in size, that’s okay. And if some people want to skip it this year, they’re still welcome to rejoin in a future year.

CGC was designed with resilience in mind.  It can function well with 20 members, with 200 members, or with 2000 members. It will just operate differently at different scales. With a small group, it will be more intimate. With a larger group, there will be more energy and activity.

I also like thinking that even when the world is in chaos, CGC can serve as a stabilizing presence for those who want it. While the Olympics may need to be rescheduled, CGC can still open as usual and continue to serve its members through a global crisis.

I’d like this group to endure for decades, so when I think about it from that perspective, it makes sense to proceed with the opening as normal each year, as long as it’s possible to do so. Since this is an entirely online group, it can still function just fine.

I was actually planning to do a new live event in October 2020 in Las Vegas, actually two events back to back. The first part would be a special event just for CGC members so they could connect in person. And the second part would be a new three-day workshop open to all. But I’ve had to take that off the table due to the virus situation. I can’t be certain that the circumstances will allow for a live event at that time. And I’d need to book the dates before the CGC opening, so I could let people know the dates and location. That isn’t possible right now because all of the event spaces in Las Vegas are closed, so we can’t look at meeting rooms even if we wanted to.

I still want to make live events a regular part of CGC as well as doing more workshops for everyone who wants to go, but the current circumstances make it unrealistic to plan anything until we see where the dust settles. And that could be a while, maybe not till 2021 or 2022. In the meantime I’m taking this as a directive to focus more deeply on the online experience of CGC.

Sheltering in Place with CGC

A friend helped me see that CGC is a beautiful group to shelter in place with. It’s a sanctuary for connecting with growth-oriented people in a space free of the craziness that you’ll find elsewhere on social media.

We’ve been actively discussing the coronavirus situation in CGC since February 26th, so our members had a chance to start preparing for this sooner than most people and definitely sooner than the mainstream media caught onto it. Now there are many ongoing discussion threads about adapting to this situation, including trying to predict where things are heading, handling the psychological side, home fitness routines, and more. We even have a check-in thread to keep tabs on members who’ve gotten sick themselves.

Video chats among members seem to be increasing as well. We have a 24/7 video chat channel, so members can talk live whenever they want. While some people are just discovering Zoom today, we’ve been using it since 2017, including for our member coaching calls.

There’s even a discussion about which movies to watch while sheltering in place, and a new subgroup that picks a movie to watch and then discusses it afterwards.

I love seeing how this group has evolved during our first three years, and I’m excited for our future. While I understand and accept that some people will categorize CGC as a non-priority for this year, and I empathize with the reasons they may do so, I think that some people will sensibly prioritize CGC higher precisely because of the circumstances that we’re in now.

Some will want help navigating the uncertainty. Some will want to invest in relationships with people they can trust to be there for them. Some will want to add that stable rock of stability and cool-headedness to their lives.

If you intend to join (or renew) CGC this year, I look forward to sheltering in place with you and supporting you through these current challenges.

And if you decide to pass for this year, I understand and accept that. Please know that you’re welcome to join us in a future year.

And if you’re on the fence, no worries. Just sit tight, and I’ll share plenty of details about CGC as we get closer to the opening week.

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Trusting the Virus

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In November when I did four days of ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica, the first night was really rough. About an hour after drinking the tea, I started feeling very strange, and this feeling continued to intensify. My body began to feel really heavy, and after a while I felt like I was mostly paralyzed and could hardly move. I couldn’t sit or stand up. All I could do was lie down.

It was reasonably cool in the room, but I was sweating profusely. Soon I started feeling like it was hard to breathe… like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I began to feel concerned. This was my first ever experience of this nature, and I hadn’t heard of anyone having breathing issues, so I didn’t feel prepared for that. I had the sensation like something was pushing down on my chest. So I started pushing myself to breathe harder and faster, which made me sweat even more.

The shaman’s helpers came over to check on me, probably because they could hear me struggling, encouraging me to try to relax and slow my breathing. But it was like listening to them through a fog. Mentally I was telling myself that I’d be okay, but my physical sensations were very confusing and unpleasant.

Meanwhile my mind was flooding with vivid, brilliantly colored fractal imagery at the same time I was trying to get my breathing under control. The feeling of discomfort kept increasing. I started wondering if I was going to pass out from not being able to breathe. What if no one realized what had happened in time? What if I died right there?

The worst was feeling so physically paralyzed, not 100% but maybe 90%, while trying harder and harder to get more air in. I was breathing really loudly and forcibly, almost like a woman in labor, yet I still felt like I wasn’t getting enough air.

But then when I feel really uncomfortable, disturbed, and concerned, I reminded myself to seek out my primary source of grounding, which is my relationship with reality. Despite the labored breathing and the psychedelic imagery, I found immediate comfort in remembering that relationship. And I reminded myself of the importance of trust in reality.

I didn’t know if I’d be physically okay. I hoped so, but it didn’t feel like things were okay in that moment. So I decided to trust on a different level that the experience was spiritually okay. In my mind I just began repeating: I trust you. I trust you. I trust you. I did my best to let go and surrender to my commitment to always trust reality. This included trusting that if it was my time to die, then it was my time to die, and fighting that wasn’t going to help.

This effort to lean towards trust started making me cry, not from desperation though. It was a feeling like I was linking up and opening a communication channel to some aspect of life that runs deeper than what I normally experience on a day to day basis. It felt like the tears were just my body’s reaction to what felt like an energetic response from reality. In some ways it felt like I was really just remembering that this channel is always there. It’s a similar channel to what I often experience while writing, but the frequency range was a bit difference.

Never in my life have I had to lean so far in the direction of trust before. Intellectually I can trust reality because I’ve reasoned out that it makes sense to do so. But it was something else entirely to lean into trusting reality when I wasn’t sure which way my body was going to go in the next hour. I didn’t have much control over my body in that situation, and even the contents of my mind were a bit out of control too, but I still had the ability to acknowledge this relationship with reality and to commit to trusting it no matter what happened.

Somehow when I leaned into trust, my body began to follow. My breathing started to ease up. My heart rate came down. It was still uncomfortable, but I began to relax into internal rhythms that felt safer to me. Soon I could tell that I was out of the woods and would be okay physically.

Afterwards I still had several hours of deep imagery and intense emotional processing to go through, including a storm of tears, but that was the easy part relative to the physical sensations. I still spent hours feeling semi-paralyzed and super dizzy like the room was spinning, so I needed help just to walk to the bathroom at one point.

And then I went through three more ceremonies in the next three nights. As you might guess, it took a lot of trust to drink the tea again after knowing what happened the first night. But I also felt that since I’d gone through it once and learned that trusting reality helped a lot, I was perhaps better prepared if I had to go through something similar again.

It turned out that each night was a different experience. I only had the labored breathing, profuse sweating, and semi-paralysis on the first night. The other nights were so different, with some of the worse nausea and dry heaving I’ve ever experienced, including retching over a bucket for more than an hour – quite the ab workout.

Overall that week was a physically difficult experience but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually beautiful. I may even go back again this November, but we’ll have to see if that’s possible.

For some time after that experience, I’ve been wondering about that night where I felt like I could barely breathe. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I understand the purging aspect, which most people experienced during that week, some more than others. But I didn’t hear of anyone else struggling to breathe like I did, at least not among our group of about 40 people. And why did I have to endure that only on the first night? I saw so much evidence of rich meaning in other parts of the experience, but this part stood out to me as a piece that didn’t seem to fit.

At the time I decided to just trust that reality was giving me that experience for a reason, but I didn’t know why. It did help me appreciate life afterwards, and it also shifted my relationship with death. It reminded me that if death is approaching, it’s best to relax and do my best to trust reality rather than tensing up all over.

What I didn’t know or expect about ayahuasca is that it seems to leave a permanent trace effect behind. I feel like it opened up some kind of communication channel has never fully switched off or closed since November. Most of the time it’s muted, but it’s still present, and I can tune into some threads of information or energy currents that remain accessible.

As the virus situation has been escalating this month, I’ve been feeling this channel open up more, as if the ayahuasca energy signature is tapping me on the shoulder and trying to get my attention. I also keep hearing music looping in my mind that I heard during the ceremonies.

When I learn about people being on ventilators and struggling to breathe, this channel opens up more clearly, and it reconnects me back to the vivid memories of when I felt that I could barely breathe. I even feel some of the sensations in my body, like I’m acting it out again. Sometimes it becomes so uncomfortable that I have to pull my attention away for a while and allow my body to relax.

Meanwhile the reason why this is happening comes through clearly as well – empathy.

Whenever I think about the people who are struggling to breathe – and the many more who will soon be joining them – I can’t help but feel some of those physical sensations myself. I’m reminded of how terrifying that can be, and all sorts of emotions come up. And I have to keep surrendering to those feelings and reminding myself to relax into trust again.

Even though a virus isn’t a plant, this open ayahuasca channel is somehow showing me that plant intelligence and viral intelligence are connected. Maybe they’re linked via the energy patterns or intelligence of nature. I can’t really explain it. I just sense that this viral situation isn’t some random or chaotic event but rather that there is an intelligence behind it, and it’s part of the same intelligence that I danced with during the ayahuasca ceremonies.

These realizations have been guiding my behavior in recent days. On the one hand, I’m strongly motivated to encourage people to practice good social distancing, and I want us to move towards stronger measures faster and sooner, partly because I don’t want anyone to have to go through the experience of feeling like they can’t breathe. Knowing that more and more people will soon be gasping for breath brings up a flood of emotion, especially this feeling of connection to the fear and stress they’ll experience as they go through it. Putting my attention on this creates strong sympathetic sensations in my body.

And yet there’s this other aspect of trust as well, which has multiple layers to it. One part tells me that if people have to go through this experience, then it’s best for them to lean into trusting reality as much as possible, even going so far as to trust that it may be time to die. Mentally and emotionally resisting and tensing doesn’t seem like it would help, but letting go and allowing the body to respond with its own intelligence just might help.

Another layer, which might sound odd to many people, includes trusting the virus itself. This doesn’t mean trusting that it won’t infect me and running around risking people’s lives.

By trusting the virus, I mean trusting that it’s part of nature and part of reality, and so if I lean into trusting reality, that includes trusting the purpose of whatever this virus is doing. I can’t say exactly why, but I do sense that this virus has a purpose, both for us as individuals and for the world.

So while one part of me empathizes with seeing it as a threat and wanting to prevent harm, another part of me trusts that it’s not really here to vanquish us. When I look at it this way, even death doesn’t look like a form of harm per se, just a type of transition.

Because of this perspective, I feel that if I got infected, one part of me might want to frame the virus as an invader that I have to defeat in order to survive. But another part of me somehow knows that this level of perception isn’t accurate and that it would only fuel more tension and make the experience worse. It makes me consider that perhaps I should welcome the virus as a form of intelligence, to let it do its dance with my body and trust my body to respond appropriately. Maybe its purpose is to teach me something or to give me an experience that might actually be a precious gift.

So presently I don’t feel aligned with the “war on virus” frame that I’ve been hearing lately. To me that sounds about as ludicrous as declaring a war on kale. I don’t think the virus is declaring war on us. I sense no hostility or belligerence in its intention.

I do think the virus has a positive purpose to serve, and I don’t think that going to war with it acknowledges that purpose. I’m not 100% sure what it’s purpose is, but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t here to make everyone stock up on toilet paper.

I sense that this new virus is here to teach us something. I see its presence in the world as an invitation – a complex invitation with many layers to it, both individually and collectively. I know that I’m not the only one who’s considering this perspective right now.

Whenever I write a new blog post, I pick a frame and write from within that frame. This virus situation has many layers to it, which makes this an especially big challenge because no single frame can address the entirety of the situation. One day I may write from a frame that encourages social distancing, which may be a rational course of action within that frame. Another day I may write from a frame that suggests the rationality of acceptance and surrender. Some people may see these as being in conflict. I don’t. They’re just different lenses for viewing the same reality, and when we consider multiple lenses, we discover deeper levels of rationality that make sense across multiple frames.

Recognizing the value of surrender doesn’t make me want to abandon social distancing, for instance. I can and do practice both. I can do what I can to reduce suffering, even while feeling intense sympathetic emotion. And I can simultaneously accept and align with where this story wants to go without feeling like I’m fighting reality. What binds these together is trust. When we trust, life plays us like instruments.

I think a common objection to trusting reality is that it will make you passive, complacent, or foolish. I think that’s an irrational objection though.

If you consider this virus situation as an invitation for you, what kind of invitation do you think it is?

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Feeling Grounded in the Midst of Spiraling Changes

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As much as you’ve seen unfold this month already, this is still the early game for the virus, so there will be even more changes coming up quickly. The last 10 days of the month could be even bigger than the first 21.

With so much uncertainty, how can you still feel grounded? Is that even possible? Or do you have to simply surrender to the feeling of being uprooted, knowing that it’s going to last for a while?

I think it’s entirely possible to continue feeling grounded in this situation, but in order to do that, you have to ground yourself to something permanent – something that remains constant in a sea of change.

If you’d previously been grounding yourself to something temporary or vulnerable to change, such as your job, lifestyle, social life, or the state of the economy, then it’s predictable that you may be feeling ungrounded, stressed, or scared. That isn’t so much due to the current circumstances though. It has more to do with where you chose to ground yourself.

Many years ago my life went through a lot of upheaval, especially while I was struggling financially. It was hard to make good plans because I often felt like my situation was unstable or vulnerable. Eventually I realized that I could never feel truly grounded if I rooted myself to the contents of reality because that’s always subject to change. If I ground myself to something impermanent, it’s just a matter of time before life eventually pulls the rug out from under me.

I learned that I could lose all my money and go bankrupt. I learned that I could go through a divorce. I learned from growing up in L.A. that even the ground could shake and break a bunch of stuff. I learned that whatever I assumed would endure might not endure. Anything inside this reality is subject to change.

Yet I still wanted to feel secure. I wanted to feel like I could trust some aspect of life to remain stable. I wanted to feel like I always had something to grasp even in turbulent times.

Eventually I came up with an approach that worked pretty well. I decided to ground myself to certain principles, namely truth, love, and power. Since these principles were abstract and universal, they could help me find my way in any situation. No matter what we have to deal with in life, there’s always a truth aspect, a love aspect, and a power aspect. We can always explore and consider what’s true. We can connect with and acknowledge our feelings. And we can consider our capabilities and consider actions to take.

This has been a helpful model, and to some extent I still lean on it today. You may notice that in a lot of my recent blog posts, I focus on these aspects, especially truth alignment. I ask questions like: What’s the truth about what’s happening? Where are we heading? What’s likely to happen next? Sometimes I make predictions about where things are heading. For instance, I mentioned the possibility of the Vegas Strip closing and Disneyland closing a while back, and now of course that’s a reality.

Even when it seems like the world is going crazy, I still feel pretty grounded. The world may be shifting rapidly, but the principles I use remain the same. I wrote about them in my book Personal Development for Smart People, which was published in 2008. Twelve years later I’m still using the same principles to guide me. They remain unchanged and constant. Only my understanding of them and my ability to apply them changes.

I’ve used these principles as my primary source of grounding for many years. They work well and have withstood the test of time. They can adapt to any situation that life throws at us.

But these days my top method for feeling grounded isn’t to lean on these principles. They’re still great for that purpose, but some years ago I found an approach I like even more.

Currently I like to ground myself to my relationship with reality. The nature of that relationship may shift around, but the existence of that relationship is a constant. No matter what’s happening in life, I have a relationship with reality. That’s always true, and so I can always trust that this relationship is here for me as a source of grounding.

I could be sick, and I’d still have a relationship with reality. I could be in prison, and I’d still have a relationship with reality. I could travel to Mars (maybe), and I’d still have a relationship with reality. I could die and continue on to some other phase of existence, and I’d still have a relationship with reality. As long as I exist, so does this relationship. This relationship is as permanent as my awareness is, which is long enough to be a reliable source of grounding.

The key is to ground this relationship in unwavering trust. This doesn’t mean trusting that reality will do what I want or expect. It means trusting that reality is always here for me and always on my side.

I imagine this probably sounds a bit abstract, so in tomorrow’s post I’ll share more details about applying this idea, including in life and death situations.

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When a Virus Derails Your Plans

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This will be a quick add-on for the recent post on framing the coronavirus.

Obviously this situation has derailed many people’s plans, some more than others.

So how do you frame a situation like this where reality seriously derails your plans?

First off, reality can do that, as it’s obviously demonstrating right now. This is true whether you use an objective or subjective framing. The simulation doesn’t have to obey your intentions. It has a mind of its own.

This is why I like to view intentions and goals as offers to reality. Reality gets to respond in kind. It can accept my offers, reject my offers, or counter my offers. (We explored this framing in depth in the Submersion course.)

One of my goals (i.e. offers) for this year involved taking my character in the direction of some social expansion locally, as I’ve blogged about earlier. Two direct actions I took included joining a local meetup group and a new local fitness studio that does group classes, both of which happened in February.

So I was able to lean in with action, and it was going nicely for a few weeks. Then this virus situation exploded and of course took my plans with it. Social distancing is pretty much the opposite of what I’d intended for the months ahead.

So what gives? Do I treat this as a smackdown from reality?

Not at all. It’s a response from reality. And if I don’t understand it, I can ask, which in this case I did. I often dialog aloud with reality, and I speak aloud what I think its response is. Or sometimes I do this in the form of journaling.

When I asked why the change of plans, the answer that came through was pretty straightforward. I got a taste of my intention for a few weeks, enough to validate that it is indeed a direction I want to keep pursuing. The way I was pursuing this social expansion was working nicely too.

However, reality’s response is that it’s not time yet for the full intention to manifest just yet. It’s time for me to attend to other aspects of life for the next several weeks or possibly months. Reality’s directive is to also attend to a bunch of other tasks that aren’t social in nature.

The details don’t really matter in this case, but the direction was to focus on some other items first and clear those out. These are other projects that are pretty well-defined, some business and some personal, so I could finish them and move them off my plate fully. That would lighten up my plate and allow more room for social expansion activities when the time is right. Think of it like a spring cleaning of my other projects.

I can see and accept the wisdom of this. While the social expansion that I was engaging in seemed to be going well, I still have a lot on my plate, so I had to be pretty minimalist about the new direction to keep my life in balance. It would be nice to have some extra capacity, and that can happen if I clear out several more completable projects first and then revisit the social expansion later this year.

So while initially I was a bit disappointed that my plans seemed to be derailed, I can see that there may be intelligent reasons for it. So I’m good with accepting reality’s counter-offer in this case, which includes becoming a social minimalist for the time being.

Now clearly there’s a lot more to framing this situation that goes way beyond my little social expansion goal, but I just wanted to share this quick update to demonstrate the idea of receiving reality’s response and dialoging a bit to understand it better.

And if I didn’t like reality’s counteroffer in this case, I could have made another counteroffer of my own, and then reality could have given me its response to that. So there can be some back and forth negotiation if you’d like. What’s most important is to preserve trust in your relationship with reality, regardless of how it responds.

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Thoughts on LGBTQ

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People who know me well won’t likely see any surprises here, but I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job of clearly sharing certain values publicly, so I’d like to correct this now.

I’m pro-LGBTQ rights. I think LGBTQ people should have the same rights as anyone else, and I don’t think they should be discriminated against. I feel this should be a worldwide right, not a local issue.

I think everyone should be free to marry whomever they want. Truth be told, I’m even in favor of poly marriages that include more than two people.

I think people should be free to choose their bathrooms based on their gender identity. Really though I think that gendered bathrooms are a throwback and unnecessary, at least for mature adults. When I was in the dorms at UC Berkeley, we had one shared co-ed bathroom on the floor that everyone used, and it worked just fine. We all used the same sinks, showers, and stalls (separately of course). There were no urinals.

I have personal friends, colleagues, and business partners who are LGBTQ, and that’s been the case for years. Some are in gay marriages or partnerships.

I welcome more LGBTQ friends into my life. We usually connect well, especially values-wise. Living a non-mainstream life is one way that many people embark on a path of conscious growth, so that’s a big piece that we usually have in common, regardless of our different life experiences.

Business-wise I welcome LGBTQ customers. We’ve had LGBTQ workshop attendees at (probably most of) our live events since we started doing them in 2009. We’ve also had some LGBTQ members in Conscious Growth Club since we started in 2017. Inside CGC we maintain a very sane and welcoming community based on reasonableness. Here’s a snippet from our community rules:

Exercise Good Judgment, Reasonableness, and Mutual Respect

This is a community for members to help each other grow, so please treat it as such. Personal attacks and name-calling as well as profane, pornographic, racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ, or otherwise demeaning or offensive communication will not be tolerated. Recognize that there’s a human being behind every post, and behave accordingly. When you disagree, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

I actually just added the “anti-LGBTQ” item to the list today. I felt like it was already covered less directly, and adding it doesn’t affect what we’re already doing, but I’d like to call it out explicitly. I want LGBTQ people to know that making them feel welcomed in our community is important to us (especially in ways that other parts of the world may not make them feel welcomed).

Recently I’ve been making a conscious effort to make my creative work more inclusive. For instance, instead of using words like boyfriend or girlfriend, I’ll use partner instead. I’m also watching out for when I use gendered pronouns where it may not be appropriate to do so. I’m not perfect at this since my upbringing and education were rooted to different standards. For at least the past year or two, I’ve been consciously thinking about this and trying to catch these unconscious behaviors that could make my work less welcoming. If you catch something that you think I’ve overlooked in my work this year and beyond, please do point it out to me.

You could also say that I’m anti-(anti-LGBTQ), meaning that I will kick people out of my sphere for anti-LGBTQ expressions or behaviors, especially those that make LGBTQ people feel unsafe or unwelcome. So if you’re one of those people who thinks that anyone should be free to decline business to LGBTQ patrons, I don’t want you to patronize my business. If you think that the gender identity or lifestyle of many of my friends is wrong or misguided, I will take it personally even if some of them wouldn’t take it personally. You can still read the free articles on my blog as much as you want though, and hopefully some of it will help you crack open your crusty-ass heart. But definitely don’t try to bring that attitude into our community, such as our live events or CGC.

To me this isn’t about the business ramifications. I just think it’s the right stance as a human being.

If I know that someone is closeted, I’m not going to out them of course. I think people should be free to disclose what they want to, when they want to, and with whom they decide to share it. I’m disgusted by the idea of forcefully outing someone without their consent.

I think LGBTQ people should be free to show PDAs (public displays of affection) whenever they want. I often hold hands, hug, and kiss in public, and I think anyone should be free to enjoy that form of expression openly.

I’m straight and always have been, and I love being male. I do have some sexual kinks, but they only involve women. I’d say I’m a solid 0 on the Kinsey scale (0 = straight, 6 = gay), and I don’t think I could stretch to a 1 if I tried. Apparently that’s unusual though. Most people tend to be somewhere in the 1-5 range, and it’s also common to fluctuate in one’s sexual preferences over time. So my pro-LGBTQ values aren’t because I count myself a member of this group based on gender identity or sexual preferences, but I do resonate with them on values alignment.

My wife is bisexual but more into men than women. I think she rates herself around a Kinsey 2.3. I rather like that we’ve been able to share a mutual interest in some women that we’ve both found attractive. On a day to day basis though, I can’t say that this aspect is a big part of our lives. I’m sharing this part because it’s true, not because I want to lay claim to the “married to a bisexual woman” as the main reason for my values here. Rachelle does have strong pro-LGBTQ values though, and it’s fair to say that her values in this area have influenced me to pay more attention to LGBTQ-related fairness and justice than I did before we met. So she does deserve some credit for that.

In truth what’s more real and visceral to me is feeling a lot of compassion for what LGBTQ people have to deal with in today’s world, not just people I know personally but everyone. This also links up with personal feelings of disgust towards religions that promote anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

A specific triggering event that made me want to write this post now was watching the recent Apple TV+ documentary series Visible, which reviews the past few decades of how LGBTQ people have been portrayed on television. Rachelle and I watched it together, and I highly recommend it. While most of it didn’t surprise me, and much of it was like a walk down memory lane with old TV shows like Three’s Company, I will say that it helped me feel even more empathy for the struggles LGBTQ people have had to deal with – and are still dealing with.

So if you count yourself among the LGBTQ community or their friends, I just want you to know that I care, not just with words but also with actions to make our community more welcoming, compassionate, and supportive of you being you.

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How Hidden Mail Enables Domestic Abuse – From Missed Appointments To Mounting Bills

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Conscious Conversation – Steve Pavlina and Martin Rutte

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Here’s the video of my Conscious Conversation call with author, speaker, fellow Transformational Leadership Council member, and long-time friend Martin Rutte.

We had a lively chat about Martin’s Project Heaven on Earth (which is about how to create a better world for all of humanity), pursuing impossible goals, and many other personal growth topics.

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Here are some related links:

I hope you enjoy the conversation. 🙂

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