Tag Archives: Abundance

Hard Cares

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What do you care about?

Go ahead and rattle off your initial list – the people you know, doing a good job at work, making a positive difference in the world, etc.

Then dig deeper.

What are your high-risk cares? What do you care about internally but never share because you might be judged for it? What are your unusual cares?

Once you go beyond the the easy-breezy cares, what are the harder cares that require more investment or risk?

Here are some of mine:

  • I care about the long-term future of humanity and where it’s heading.
  • I care about politics. I respect and admire good leadership and intelligent decision making. I find the opposite deplorable.
  • I feel a connection with people who are feeling alone right now, not getting their needs met, wondering if they’ll ever find someone to share their life with or if they’ll even pull out of the slump they’re in. I care about helping them. I like playing the role of being a stable, positive presence in their life, someone who will keep encouraging them with limitless patience.
  • I care about the people who are in hospitals right now, many dying from COVID, especially those wishing they had more time to live. Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to not be able to breath.
  • I care about my relationship with this reality. This is a wondrous dimension of existence. I want to keep this relationship rooted in trust. I want to keep making this relationship stronger as I grow older.
  • I care about my wife. I want her to have a fabulous life full of delightful experiences, playful adventures, warm cuddles, sensual pleasures, inspiring challenges, and cherished memories. I love seeing her stretch herself as we grow together. I love that we are each other’s best friends.
  • I care about death. I want its presence to keep reminding me to live fully and not to settle for partial matches. I like that it keeps me aware of the potential pain of regret, sometimes with gentle reminders and sometimes with powerful ones.
  • I care about animals, especially those in the factory farming system that suffer daily in ways that would be unimaginable to humans. I would love to see humanity graduate to a more caring relationship with animals.
  • I care about technology. Its evolution fascinates me. I love seeing how my relationship with tech has evolved since the 1970s. It’s fun to think about how it will continue to evolve and what possibilities are just over the horizon.
  • I care about my character. I want to look within myself and like and appreciate what I see. I want to delve into the darkest regions of myself and replace shame, fear, and guilt with love, forgiveness, appreciation, and warmth. I want to live as a fully integrated being, not as a collection of parts arguing amongst themselves.
  • I care about my relationship with time. I want it to be my friend and ally, not my enemy. I want to look forward to my later years with positive anticipation and pre-appreciation, not with worry or angst. I want to look in the mirror and smile as I watch myself getting older.

Some of these cares led to major changes in how I live my life or how I run my business.

Hard cares are very motivating, but they’re difficult invitations to accept. It’s challenging to move beyond the easy-breezy cares and to admit that they just aren’t giving you enough motivational juice.

When I imagine doing things that other people seem to care about, like showing up to a corporate job each day, they just seem demotivating and pointless… like why would I want to waste my precious life on that, even for one day?

But I can easily get myself to spend days on end delving into esoteric aspects of personal growth that few people who like corporate jobs would understand or care about, but these explorations matter to me.

If I want to experience a life that flows with lots of motivational juice, I have to pursue and explore what I truly care about, not what society expects me to care about. This includes accepting that my cares are good and that they’re mine to explore and understand.

One care that’s been fascinating me a lot lately is my relationship with aging. I turn 50 in a few months, so knowing that I’m about to enter a new decade of my life is pushing this idea to the front of my mind. Society in general has a tremendously negative relationship with aging. I want to create a vastly more positive relationship with this aspect of life.

My hard cares are mostly relationships with different aspects of life. I care about making those relationships healthy, positive, and rich in appreciation. When I spot a relationship that isn’t working, I ask myself if I truly care about that relationship, and then I think about what changes I’ll need to make to invest in long-term improvement.

Investing in hard cares, especially by defining them as relationships, works very well.

I found it difficult to care about money, but I was able to care about my relationship with money. I didn’t want that relationship to be full of stress and angst. I wanted it to be full of abundance, playfulness, trust, creativity, and fun. I still don’t care much about money, but I love that I’ve been able to create this kind of relationship with money. I appreciate the relationship way more than the money itself.

I found it difficult to care about business, but I definitely care about my relationship with my business. I want this relationship to be rich in exploration, variety, connection, purpose, positive ripples, creative flow, and inspiration. I also want my relationship with my business to be light, playful, and flexible, not so heavy and controlling. I never want to feel trapped by my business. I want to feel engaged and uplifted. The desire to have this kind of relationship led to some careful decisions, including avoiding many “opportunities” that could easily turn the experience into a stressful trap. I love my business, and I want to keep that relationship happy and healthy for many more years.

I encourage you to take a hard look at the relationships with parts of your life that aren’t working so well. Describe the current relationship based on how you feel about it. Then describe how you’d like that relationship to be. Recognize that these are your hard cares, and to get aligned with them, you’ll need to make some hard decisions.

Be willing to say no to relationships that aren’t working for you. Elevate your hard cares from “nice to haves” to the level of “must haves.”

Many years ago I tolerated partial matches in my professional and personal life. I treated my hard cares as soft cares. That was very unsatisfying.

It was tough to go against the social grain and to demand better relationships from life. It was hard to admit the truth that these relationships really do matter a lot to me, and I’m not willing to sacrifice what I want to live up to someone else’s expectations.

It was hard to say, “No, I’m not just going to suck it up and suppress my feelings.”

It was hard to leave… again and again… till I got these relationships right.

But oh it was so worth it.

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Secure Attachment and Investment

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In psychology there are three general ways to relate to other people, depending on how you interpret and manage emotional risk.

  • You can avoid deep emotional investments in people (avoidant attachment).
  • You can try to control other people (anxious attachment).
  • You can intelligently bond with people and invest in secure relationships (secure attachment).

You can generalize these dispositions to consider how you relate to different areas of life. Are you hiding? Are you over-controlling? Or are you securely investing?

There’s really a spectrum here for different aspects of life and for relating with different types of people, so in practice there are a lot more than just three options.

Your root relationship is your relationship with reality itself. That’s the most important one to get right because it’s the one from which all other relationships flow. All of your relationships are a part of your reality, so if your base relationship with reality is shaky, that will negatively affect all the others. This relationship is so important that I created the full 60-day Submersion course to help you explore, improve, and invest deeply in this core relationship to make it stronger and healthier. Do you feel grounded and secure in this life? That answer needs to be a yes.

Another relationship that’s critical to get right is your relationship with yourself. This is what the 65-lesson Stature course delves into in tremendous detail. It’s the deepest and most thorough self-exploration course that I’m aware of. The purpose is to help you face the full-spectrum truth about yourself and and to develop a healthy and empowering lifelong relationship with all aspects of yourself, including your inner critic, your inner child, and more.

From here you can consider relationships with people and with other aspects of life.

Our next deep dive (for the first quarter of 2021) will be about creative productivity. This new course will help you develop a healthy and secure relationship with your own creative flow. This doesn’t just mean doing creative work like writing or game development. It means managing the creative flow of your entire life as well. What kind of life are you creating? Do you like the direction your life is going? Are you over-steering or under-steering? How can you intelligently manage this flow on each time scale, hour by hour, year by year, and decade by decade, especially with an increasing rate of change?

For many years I’ve enjoyed a secure and healthy relationship with my creative flow, but I didn’t always have that kind of relationship. I had to work through issues like procrastination, selecting projects for the wrong reasons, seeing too many projects die on the vine, feeling too anxious about certain modes of expression (public speaking, being live on camera), overplaying the importance of money, etc.

I continue to invest in improving this relationship, which is really a collection of many different relationships. This year I discovered more depth and nuance in my relationship with creative output through the 365-day blogging challenge. If I wasn’t securely bonded in this relationship, it could have been a difficult year requiring a lot of discipline. But I was exploring a relationship that was already very healthy and positive, so I found the overall experience to be beautiful, warm, and relaxing.

Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries connects with these ideas as well. We can’t deeply invest our time and energy in relationships with everyone and everything. Do you know which relationships you want to deepen and which relationships you’d prefer to avoid? Do you know where you want to plant your social and emotional flag? Is that flag securely planted where you want it to be?

I especially love the depth of exploration that comes from secure bonding, so I can really invest long-term.

One of my personal flags is securely planted in a vegan lifestyle and vegan ethics. I’ve invested almost 24 years of my life in this path, and I want to keep investing for the rest of my life. I love being vegan, and my relationship with veganism keeps growing stronger and deeper. Next year I want to deepen this relationship even more by investing in a full year of a raw foods lifestyle.

I also really enjoy the secure bonding I have in my relationship with Rachelle. Lockdowns and social restrictions seem almost trivial when I get to spend each day with her. I never tire of spending time with her. Day after day I always look forward to even more time with her – hours, days, weeks, months, and years ahead. I love investing in our relationship.

Here’s the key that I struggled with for a long time: the notion of settling. I got stuck for so long by trying to settle for less than I really wanted.

The problem with settling for a partial match is that you don’t feel good enough about the relationship to full invest in it. Some part of you always holds back. The thought of investing may even give you a queasy feeling.

That was me in my first business. I liked many aspects of game development, but I too often felt like I was falling short when it came to contributing, making a difference, and really caring about people as much as I could. There was a certain coldness to the work, and I wanted to invest in more warmth. It was always going to be a partial match for me, so I could never unlock 100% of my desire to invest. Some part of me was always going to have doubts, wondering if maybe I should be doing something else.

My first marriage followed a different trajectory. I did feel very invested in it in the early years, but eventually incompatibilities grew, and it became clear that each of us wanted to invest in different directions. Looking back I do feel good about investing in that relationship while it lasted. I also see that it was best for us to move on when we could no longer truly invest in building a life together going forward.

What I love about my life today is that I feel securely bonded with people and aspects of life with which I’m can really invest long-term.

I can also see where I’m not investing as a sign that I may be dealing with a partial match, in which case the solution isn’t to settle but rather to find a full match where I can really invest.

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A Growth Heartset

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You may have heard about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and how important a growth mindset is for self-development. You may not have considered how important a growth heartset is too.

While a growth mindset is wonderful, it’s not enough. There are plenty of people with growth mindsets who struggle, burn out, and give up. And even when they don’t give up, it’s painful to watch sometimes because they invite struggle, struggle, and more struggle. They keep trying to “earn” happiness and fulfillment, and it keeps eluding them. They may work hard and try hard, but they always look like they desperately need a massage or a vacation… or a vacation full of massages.

What’s going on? Such people may have a growth mindset, but if they lack a growth heartset, they’re very likely to find themselves grinding through year after year of struggle with no end in sight.

A few lists can help clarify this.

A growth mindset includes:

  • opportunity awareness
  • expecting that you’ll keep learning and growing
  • never using “I don’t know how” as an excuse
  • expecting that you’ll gain new skills
  • expecting that you’ll continue to improve your skills and gain new skills
  • expecting to become more capable over time
  • investing in long-term self-development
  • job and career flexibility
  • adaptability to change
  • deliberately challenging yourself
  • setting stretch goals
  • inviting and embracing new experiences
  • willing and able to make new friends and build new relationships
  • maintaining strong personal boundaries (so your boundaries aren’t being violated by. misalignments)
  • learning and bouncing back from failure (resilience)

A fixed mindset includes:

  • opportunity blindness
  • figuring that you’ve already learned most of what you need to know
  • figuring that school is for learning and life after school is for doing
  • identifying with your job or career
  • identifying yourself based on personality attributes
  • identifying yourself based on what you’re good at or not good at and not expecting that to change much over time
  • resisting change
  • expected to earn a pre-determined annual salary (fixed income mindset)
  • feeling stuck with the same social group (fixed social/family mindset)
  • dismissing ideas and opportunities with the “I don’t know how” excuse
  • tolerating boundary violations
  • avoiding failure by not trying

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, it’s very likely that you lean towards a growth mindset. It’s probably obvious why a growth mindset is better for you.

The next two lists, however, can be more polarizing. For some people these will be at least as obvious as the two lists above. For others there may be some surprises that invite self-examination and reassessment, especially the items related to aging.

A growth heartset includes:

  • seeing your biggest fears as invitations to grow and expecting to eventually master what you fear (such as public speaking)
  • expecting to eventually outgrow your major fears, knowing that someday you will no longer feel fear in those situations
  • feeling pleasure and enjoyment from facing fears
  • weaving playfulness, fun, and other positive emotions into your goals
  • shifting away from overly head-based goals that don’t excite you emotionally
  • expecting that your boldest and most courageous years are still ahead of you
  • doing some things just for fun, completely shamelessly
  • expecting to become happier and to have more fun as you age
  • looking forward to your future years with positive anticipation, including your 70s, 80s, and beyond
  • growing in boldness and courage over time
  • expecting to be emotionally stronger and more confident in your later years
  • expecting to set and achieve more ambitious goals as you age
  • taking alignment problems seriously, knowing that you’ll do whatever it takes to solve them
  • being willing to let go of people who aren’t aligned with the direction you want to go and the kind of life you want to have
  • falling more deeply in love with your life with each passing decade
  • expecting your relationships to become more aligned and harmonious
  • expecting to appreciate and enjoy your relationships even more as you age
  • feeling centered, grounded, and at home here (even while alone)
  • speaking your truth and letting your social circle realign as needed
  • feeling inspired and encouraged by people who are further along similar paths (seeing them as allies, not competitors)
  • feeling patient, persistent, hopeful, and determined
  • being willing and able to fully commit yourself to new actions and behaviors, even when you aren’t sure how they’ll turn out
  • investing in a relationship with reality based on deep and abiding trust
  • expecting to trust life even more as you age
  • appreciating vulnerable honesty in yourself and others
  • embracing intelligent risk taking
  • being coachable and willing to ask for help, advice, or coaching
  • wanting and expecting to care even more as you age (about people, animals, life, social issues, etc)
  • deeply enjoying and appreciating your leisure time
  • knowing that your feelings matter tremendously
  • knowing that you can always invite and tune in to the flow of inspiration

A fixed heartset includes:

  • feeling threatened by change
  • avoiding growth experiences that require facing fears
  • expecting that your fears will always be your fears
  • fearing or worrying about aging (dreading getting older)
  • feeling clingy and attached to what you have and not wanting to risk it
  • worrying about financial decline or financial threats
  • complaining about what you don’t want
  • feeling jealous or envious of people who have what you struggle to achieve
  • feeling discouraged, impatient, or frustrated when your goals take longer than you’d like
  • unwillingness to fully commit yourself
  • unwillingness to take emotional risks that could lead to failure or rejection
  • dismissing your feelings as less important than your logical thoughts
  • avoiding commitments that would require a significant emotional risk or emotional investment
  • feeling like you must justify doing “just for fun” activities (such as to your spouse or to colleagues)
  • feeling guilty or unsettled when taking time off
  • setting vague goals like “make more money” or “get healthier” (no real commitment, no emotional investment, also highly ineffective)
  • being too proud, self-sufficient, or timid to seek help, advice, or coaching
  • feeling alienated, disconnected, and alone (and expecting this to continue)
  • feeling that you must hide your true self from the world
  • avoiding actions that could invite criticism
  • staying emotionally aloof or emotionally anxious
  • expecting to retire someday (in terms of reducing your emotional investment in life)
  • never really knowing if you can trust this reality and therefore holding back on your willingness to invest
  • holding back on expressing your feelings
  • surrendering to the “fact” that no one will ever say “I love you” to you and mean it

Which way does your heartset currently lean?

If you know in your mind that you can grow, but your heart isn’t onboard with that, you’ll likely succumb to a lot of struggle and stuck-in-your-headness. You’ll often be pushing against your own emotions instead of enjoying the long-term benefits of strong, positive motivation that helps you flow through life with lightness and fun.

The good news is that you can use that fancy growth mindset of yours to recognize and acknowledge the importance of developing a growth heartset too. You can learn to spot the predictable problems that could throw your life off track, such as fear of aging and lack of commitment, and you can decide to work on improving these aspects. When you begin to grasp the value of emotional alignment, that’s a big step in the right direction.

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Heartstorming

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Heartstorming is brainstorming with the heart (or the emotional part of your brain).

The mental kind of brainstorming is good for generating problem-solving ideas. It’s useful for mapping out the logical space of solutions. Generate lots of ideas, and sift through them to pick the best ones.

That kind of brainstorming, however, is terrible for setting goals and priorities, especially big picture goals for your life.

That’s because you can’t set priorities dispassionately. Goals are emotional in nature. The logical brain doesn’t distinguish between the value of brushing your teeth versus transforming someone’s life. You have to feel your way into priorities.

Evaluating Options

How do you evaluate options on a brainstorming list? You’ll likely evaluate them based on effectiveness, practicality, or impact – or something along those lines.

To evaluate options on a heartstorming list, look for emotional resonance. Look for passion, excitement, playfulness, love, joy, silliness, connection, scariness, etc. Look for ideas that rile you up and make you want to take action. Look for ideas that might scare or embarrass you. Notice which ideas keep drawing your attention, even if they seem a bit ludicrous.

What if none of your ideas are like that? Then you suck at heartstorming. That’s okay. Lots of people suck at this because many of us are taught a different way of thinking that gets in the way of heartstorming. We learn to silence the voice of our hearts. Big mistake… but we can correct that.

Young children tend to be naturally good at heartstorming. Ask a kid what they want for a gift. Then listen to their answers. Are they brainstorming or heartstorming? You’ll probably see mostly heartstorming, including answers that may be impractical or illogical but which clearly have some emotional resonance.

You probably knew how to do heartstorming when you were very young. Did you lose touch with this skill? Have you forgotten (or overlooked) the value of doing this as an adult? How’s that working out for you?

The Value of Heartstorming

I rely on heartstorming more than brainstorming for making decisions about what to do with my life. I imagine what would be fun, fascinating, courageous, a little bit insane, growth-oriented, social, creative, and so on. I look for emotional resonance. Then I pick something that fascinates me, and I push my brain to get with the program. My brain almost always objects initially – it’s stubborn that way – but the heart is very powerful when it leads.

A brainstormed goals list would include things like making a certain amount of money. That’s boring as hell, Mr. Scrooge. It’s logical, but why should the heart care? It probably doesn’t care. So where will the fire come from? Your motivation to act will probably evaporate as soon as you set a goal like that. Your money goal just makes everyone yawn.

A heartstormed goals list will include weird and wild ideas that you’re afraid to share with other people. But some of these goals will excite your heart anyway. And if you describe them to other people, their brains will likely reject those goals, but their hearts may feel some resonance. And if they’re really in tune with their hearts too, they may even encourage you to go for it.

One of my heartstormed goals is to visit every Disney theme park in the world with my wife. We’ve been to all six USA parks, so we have six left: Paris (2), Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo (2). Is this a logical goal? Nope! It just sounds like fun. So we’ll probably do it (when it’s safe to do so). We’ve been to Paris twice before, so it would be a simple matter to pick that one up, but this goal will also get us to visit Asia finally.

I especially love that I have a wife who enjoys working on heart-based goals and having heart-based experiences together. That’s a special kind of joy when I can share a wild idea with her, and her reaction is basically, “You had me at hello.”

Heartstormed goals that feel emotionally resonate are easier to act on. Motivation is emotional, so if you lean into the emotional aspects, it’s way easier to flow into action.

What’s also great about heartstormed goals is that because action is easier, you can achieve more goals. Additionally, you’ll pick up some head-based goals that come along for the ride; they’re easier to achieve when you use a heart-first approach.

I like to pick fun and interesting projects that also happen to generate income, as opposed to setting income-based goals. I do my best to make the income-generating parts fun too. One day I earned $30K while spending a day at Disneyland with my wife. Doing an online launch while going to Disneyland isn’t a logical goal, but it is fun and motivating. I enjoy the silliness of it. And oddly it’s easier for me to earn money in ways that are silly or unusual.

Brainstormed goals make your brain lazy. Your brain will come up with the most dreadfully dull and predictable ideas that you probably aren’t going to implement anyway.

But if you assign idea generation to your heart, it will fill up your list with wild and crazy ideas, some of which will indeed be stupid, but others will be fun and worthwhile. The best ideas will challenge your brain to stretch creatively. They’ll expand your conception of what’s possible. They’ll wake you up.

Would you rather earn an extra $30K by slaving away at some corporate job for however long that takes? If so, keep generating ideas from your headspace. For the heart, earning an extra $30K is a fun and silly goal – pretty easy when you’re motivated and creative.

Would you rather put your heart in charge of your project choices and demand more from your brain? Why the hell can’t you earn $30K in a day while going in rides at Disneyland? And do this with your best friend and lover that you enjoy spending time with? Create fun memories together, and get paid for the experience. With the heart there’s no compromise. You get enjoyment and results. You get a full, rich, and balanced life.

The logical brain generates embarrassingly crappy priorities – so uncreative, unambitious, and uninspiring.

When you do heartstorming, you’ll probably be laughing and crying along the way. Sometimes you’ll get scared by an idea. You should FEEL something as you generate ideas. The emotion should get stronger as you dive deeper into heartspace.

How to Heartstorm

Give this a try. It’s very easy, but it does take practice.

Open a new page in your journal. Write at the top what kind of list you want to make. Then start typing or writing ideas. But instead of focusing on your brain to generate ideas, put your attention on your heart. Go into your heartspace, and listen from there. Invite your emotions to speak. Tell your logical brain to shut up for a while. Invite your heart to generate ideas.

Pretend you’re four years old again. You can do this. It’s a no-brainer. 😉

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Being a Source of Pleasure

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To extend the topic of yesterday’s article on your relationship with pleasure, let’s flip that idea around and consider what it’s like for someone else to relate to you on the basis of pleasure.

How do you feel about playing the role of being a source of pleasure for someone else?

Such a relationship can be corrupted by weaving in manipulation, lying, abuse, victimization, etc. And just as with yesterday’s article, I encourage you to set aside those aspects because they aren’t endemic to pleasure-based connections.

Is it possible to connect with someone simply on the basis of giving and/or receiving pleasure without weaving in any negative aspects? Could you keep the pleasure aspects simple, clean, healthy, fun, and pure?

Of course. Many people connect this way very naturally. They’ve developed a healthy relationship with pleasure that’s good for them and for others.

It’s tempting to throw away the whole concept of sharing pleasure with someone when you’ve lost your childhood innocence about it and you’ve been subjected to abuse. Pleasure isn’t to blame for that though.

Abuse and pleasure don’t have to mix. Some people are adamantly opposed to mixing them. You can still engage with the purity and simplicity of pleasure-based connections without making them complicated.

Imagine having another person in your life who is willing and able to do things for you that feel really good. And suppose they enjoy playing that role for you. And suppose they’re honest about their intentions and you can trust them.

For some people it might seem like a monumental task to reach this point. For others it’s just their normal daily reality.

For me it’s been both. These days it seems totally natural as part of the daily flow of abundance, both to play this role for someone and to have someone in my life who enjoys playing this role for me. It’s delightful to enjoy pleasure abundance instead of pleasure scarcity.

But it’s so easy to push this kind of pleasure away, both in terms of giving and receiving, when you wrap negative aspects into it. It’s very easy to succumb to a dysfunctional relationship with pleasure.

For me the negative aspect I wrapped into it involved guilt and shame, mainly because that’s what I was taught from childhood. Pleasure was some kind of temptation from the devil and couldn’t be trusted. Many activities that felt good were deemed sinful and wrong. Sometimes I did things just for fun that I later had to confess to a priest as sins and ask for forgiveness. You can imagine what a messed-up relationship this creates with pleasure itself. It was confusing to grasp why some pleasure was wrong and some was okay when it didn’t align with my intuitive impressions.

It took a while to unload and release this corrupted mindset. Admittedly it’s still a part of me today, but I can at least see it for what it is and set it aside when it tries to rise up. It’s especially helpful to have reference experiences to remind me that sharing pleasure with people is actually really nice and that not every situation needs to be approached with suspicion and jadedness.

I also learned that some previous forms of pleasure do feel wrong to me, so I no longer engage in them. For instance, I don’t relate to animals’ bodies as products to be bought and consumed. I can never achieve a purity of pleasure there because this type of action always feels wrong and abusive to me. Trying to cultivate a pleasure-based relationship with animal abuse, as I was taught growing up, only pulled me out of touch with my deeper feelings.

Because of so many negative associations to pleasure, it’s hard to simply invite a pleasure-based experience, but the biggest blocks really are internal. When you transform and purify your relationship with pleasure, you’re much more likely to connect with others who feel similarly, and you’ll probably feel more compassion towards people who still wrap fear, guilt, or shame into it.

Another risk is that if you don’t come to terms with your relationship with pleasure, you may develop a distrusting and jaded relationship with this part of you that endures for years or decades. And that may make it hard to connect with people because a lot of human connection flows through the realm of pleasure. People will give you space instead of inviting you to share experiences with them because they’ll sense that you prefer to keep your distance.

What I found especially helpful here was to take a deep and honest look at my own intentions for pleasure-based connections and to consider how I really felt about them. Which intentions seemed good and honorable? What seemed problematic? Where were the right boundaries for me?

Is it wrong to want a hug? A make-out session? A massage? A sexual experience? A kinky sexual experience?

I had a lot of gunk in my mind that wrapped guilt, shame, or fear into many types of experiences that didn’t require those negative associations. Why feel guilty about receiving a massage from someone who willingly gives it? This guilt about receiving also corrupted the experience of giving, as if giving pleasure to someone automatically did them a disservice by potentially stirring up some negative feelings related to receiving pleasure. It was difficult to see that many people simply don’t have such negative associations to pleasure. That’s because these associations are learned, and we don’t all have the same learning experiences.

I found it especially helpful to journal about this to work through my thoughts and also to discuss this with people on similar journeys. It was eye-opening to connect with people who didn’t have negative associations to giving or receiving pleasure. For them it just seemed like a normal and natural thing to do… no big deal. They could still be cautious about risks and make careful choices regarding partners, but this caution didn’t devolve into suspicion of pleasure itself. They still trusted pleasure.

Take a look at your relationship with pleasure on the giving side. How do you feel about serving as a source of pleasure for someone else? Are you ever in the mood for that? Do you ever feel like it’s okay or even fun and rewarding to allow someone to enjoy you for their own pleasure? Could you do this without feeling resentful, abused, victimized, or used in a bad way?

Under the right conditions, I like playing this role. It’s nice to make someone feel good. It’s nice to be enjoyed and appreciated as a source of pleasure for someone. I like making people feel good. I love the simplicity and the purity of it. It’s a delightful way for humans to connect.

There are lots of ways to be a source of pleasure for someone. Maybe someone finds you intellectually stimulating. Maybe they want to do something physically or sexually pleasurable with you. Maybe they love your sense of humor or your positive attitude. Maybe they enjoy your beauty, they love hearing the sound of your voice, or they just feel delighted to be in your presence.

Do you ever feel this way towards other people? How do you feel about someone feeling this way towards you?

Could you even say to someone, “Enjoy my body. Have fun with me. Do whatever you like. I want you to feel good”? Does that seem exciting or threatening? Of course you can still specify any boundaries to define your limits.

How would you feel if someone said these things to you? Could you receive this happily and deservedly without feeling like you have to earn it? Could you say a “hell yes” to it? Or is it too much muchness?

This is an area where we can benefit tremendously from more honest and courageous communication. Instead of having to disguise pleasure-based intentions and sneak or manipulate your way into someone’s space, we could just be honest and upfront about what we’d actually like to share and explore together.

Suppose that what you really want is to explore a pleasure-based experience with someone. Could you invite or offer that when you realize that it’s what you want? Or do you need to disguise your intention and pretend you want something else?

My romantic relationship with Rachelle began with a mutual intention to share and explore pleasure together. We didn’t go on any dates first. We simply decided to play together. We wanted to enjoy each other. Co-creating and co-exploring fun and pleasure have been embedded in our relationship from the start, and this is still a significant part of our relationship today. We enjoy making each other feel good – physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. I like being a source of pleasure for her, and she likes being a source of pleasure for me. As I noted in a previous article this week, we see each other as gifts.

If you’d told me 30 years ago that I could someday have a relationship like this, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was a long journey to recover from so many negative associations to pleasure. But I have to say that it’s been an immensely rewarding path. In fact, I think I enjoy pleasure even more because of how much work I had to do to clean up this relationship and restore it to a state of health, flow, and abundance.

How do you begin such a journey, especially if your concept of pleasure is wrapped up in negative past experiences or associations? You decide that it’s time to heal this relationship. That won’t happen overnight. It may in fact be a very long journey, but it begins with the decision to heal your relationship with pleasure.

You can have a lot of pleasure in your life – every day if you want. You can share pleasure with willing partners, free of fear, shame, or guilt. You can restore your relationship with pleasure to a pure and healthy state. You can have abundance instead of scarcity in this area of life.

Pleasure isn’t evil. It isn’t addictive. It isn’t dangerous. It isn’t abusive. It isn’t unsafe or unhealthy.

Pleasure is satisfaction. It’s smiling. It’s feeling good. It’s a hug from reality. It’s a gift.

How will you relate to this gift?

Healing this relationship is just one phase of the journey. Beyond that you can continue to explore and elevate this relationship, such as by weaving in caring, beauty, playfulness, and curiosity. Once you feel safe and secure in the space of pleasure, you can also do a bit more risk-taking to explore your boundaries and other people’s boundaries if they’re willing. You can map out more of the possibility space to discover where the most delightful gifts are.

Do you trust pleasure? Do you think it’s a curse that just messes people up? Or can you see it as an invitation? It really is an invitation to grow, to heal, to connect, to align with abundance, and to have more fun in life.

Your relationship with pleasure is a delicate one to get right. It may seem like it’s leading you astray now and then, and sometimes you may be tempted to swear it off completely, but the invitation to dance with it is always present, and pleasure is a very patient dance partner.

Here’s another key benefit of healing this relationship. As you go through this inner journey for yourself, you can also help others who also want to heal this relationship. That helps to put this challenge in context. You’re not just healing this relationship for yourself alone. This isn’t just about your own pleasure. Your healing journey will also influence and uplift others who want to heal this relationship too. This may help you see that this is a more meaningful and purposeful pursuit than you initially realized.

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Your Relationship With Pleasure

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What is your relationship with pleasure like?

Do you experience and enjoy pleasure when you’re in the mood for it?

Do you have an addictive relationship with it?

Do you have an on-again, off-again relationship with it?

Does your relationship with pleasure feel healthy, supportive, and fun?

Is your relationship with pleasure simple or complex?

Here’s one of more interesting questions to ask yourself:

Do you trust pleasure?

And here’s another meaningful question:

What kind of relationship would you like to have with pleasure?

Pleasure is just pleasure. In its simplest form, it is pure enjoyment. There is nothing else wrapped into it – no distraction, no addiction, no escapism, no guilt, no shame, no fear, no negative consequences.

This past summer I loved eating delicious peaches – so sweet, juicy, and flavorful. I’d often buy 2-3 boxes at a time because I would eat so many of them. Even when I ate five of them in a day, there were no negative consequences that I could discern. They were simply delicious, and I enjoyed the energy they gave me too. This is a a very uncomplicated form of pleasure, and it’s easy to have a healthy relationship with it.

Last month my wife and I did a 30-day challenge of kissing each other for at least one minute each day. It hardly took any time, it was among the easiest “challenges” ever, and it was pure pleasure for us both. It was a nice daily reminder to kiss just because we enjoy it. It feels good to share tender kisses, playful kisses, and passionate kisses alike. Just one minute of kissing is very emotionally satisfying.

But of course there are other forms of pleasure that can become problematic because they’re wrapped up with some negative qualities like addiction or abuse. Choosing a healthy and pleasurable experience isn’t the same as choosing an unhealthy one.

We can project a lot of neediness onto pleasure. We can want it to play a bigger role for us, such as saving us from our problems or providing a substitute for real human relationships. But projecting such neediness onto pleasure isn’t likely to lead to a healthy relationship with pleasure.

Some people wrap so much angst into various forms of pleasure that they try to fix this by swearing off pleasure altogether. They try to get control over it through abstinence. It isn’t necessary to go this far though, just as it isn’t necessary to swear off all human relationships just because you’ve endured some rough ones. It’s not the pleasure that’s the problem. It’s the neediness and projection you bring to it. Pleasure is fine. It’s your relationship with pleasure that needs some improvement.

Consider instead that you can change your relationship with pleasure by relating to it in a much purer and simpler way. Pleasure isn’t an escape. It isn’t a solution. It isn’t an achievement. It isn’t a source of fear, shame, or guilt.

Pleasure is simply a gift. You open it. You receive it. You enjoy it. You appreciate it. And that’s it.

Don’t make it complicated.

Pleasure is fearless, guiltless, and shameless. If you feel fear, shame, or guilt, it isn’t the pleasure itself that made you feel that way. Enjoyment is just enjoyment.

In 2016 when Rachelle and I spent 30 days in a row going to Disneyland, it was a monthlong deep dive into fun. I found the experience transformational in ways I didn’t expect. I like that Disneyland’s ethos gave us permission to engage with fun in such an immersive way for 10-16 hours per day. That experience was beneficial on multiple levels – good for our relationship, nice to spend so much time outdoors, great for incubating business ideas, 10-12 miles of daily walking, and it led to the launch of Conscious Growth Club about six months later. I was hesitant to do it, but it was one of the best deep dives ever.

You can healthfully engage with many simple forms of pleasure, such as by enjoying a juicy peach or a delightful kiss with a willing (and uninfected!) partner. You don’t have to descend into a complex and perilous relationship with pleasure.

When you engage with different forms of pleasure, pay attention to the relationship. Is it still clean, pure, and simple? Are you still engaging to experience pleasure? Or have made the relationship complicated? Do you feel addicted or compelled to engage? Are some negative consequences occurring such as guilt about wasting time, damage to your health, or feeling ashamed that you violated your values?

If you notice that your relationship with some form of pleasure has grown complicated in undesirable ways, you can transition out of that relationship and reinvest in other forms of pleasure that are simpler and purer.

If you clean up this relationship with pleasure, you can sustainably experience a wide variety of healthy forms of pleasure, which can enrich your life tremendously without dragging you down.

Here’s a good way to frame this from a spiritual perspective:

I invite and intend a lifelong relationship with pleasure that is pure, clean, and healthy – and free of any fear, shame, or guilt.

When you do feel fear, shame, or guilt, trace it back to its source. Figure out where those feelings are coming from. Notice that they aren’t coming from the pleasure itself. They’re coming from somewhere else, like the meaning you’re attaching to the experience or the negative side effects of the particular form of pleasure that you’ve chosen. So then you have an invitation to clean up this relationship. Cleanse it. Elevate it. Purify it.

Let your relationship with pleasure be a clean, pure, and healthy gift.

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The Spiritual Purpose of a Relationship

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Each relationship that you’ve had, whether short-term or long-term, can be interpreted through the lens of spiritual purpose.

Why are you and your partner in each other’s lives? What are you here to do for each other spiritually?

I’d learned of this concept during my 20s but just in a very limited way. The idea was that we’re all spiritual teachers for each other. A relationship is supposedly a spiritual growth experience.

I think that framing held me back because it doesn’t fully encompass what’s possible.

My first marriage to Erin did seem to have that purpose of being co-teachers to each other. In the early years of our 15-year relationship, Erin and I often noted that I was teaching her courage while she was teaching me compassion. We both learned a lot from each other, sometimes by example and something through direct help and advice.

That relationship was challenging at times, but it was also loving, supportive, and patient. We shared a long journey together, which eventually came to an end. When I look back upon that relationship, it feels like it fulfilled its purpose for us both. One friend said to me afterwards, “You completed your marriage.” That’s still how it feels today, now that more than 11 years have passed since we separated.

But is that the only possible purpose of a long-term relationship? Must we always be in a relationship where the main purpose is spiritual teaching?

Not at all. The spiritual purpose of a relationship can be a lot more flexible than that. It doesn’t have to go in a co-teaching direction.

My current (almost 11-year) relationship with Rachelle isn’t about co-teaching. While we can play those roles for each other if we want, this isn’t a big part of our relationship and never really was.

Last night we had a short discussion about the spiritual purpose of our relationship. Neither of us look upon each other as spiritual teachers. The way we actually see each other is more like spiritual gifts.

Rachelle said she feels like her role is to be my reward, and that’s how I see her as well. I enjoy and appreciate her so much that it feels very natural to just revel in that space of appreciation and enjoyment when we’re together.

She feels much the same about me – that I’m her reward. We aren’t co-teachers for each other. It’s more accurate to say that we’re co-playmates, co-lovers, life companions, and best friends.

Spending time with Rachelle is like watching my favorite movie, The Princess Bride. Even when it’s familiar, it’s still fun and enjoyable, and I always find something to appreciate in it.

I feel like the main role I play for Rachelle spiritually is to fully and deeply appreciate her as she is. I feel delighted to be in her presence each day, and I love that I see and appreciate so much beauty and wonder in her that other people might miss. I feel like she needs to be fully appreciated and that my role for her spiritually is basically to gush appreciation at her each day. I especially love to make her laugh and smile.

We fit together like puzzle pieces. What she offers in a relationship is what I naturally appreciate and enjoy, and vice versa.

Being spiritual teachers to each other doesn’t really describe us. But I can say that we do help each other to spiritually grow. This doesn’t have to do with challenging each other though. As much as we both love a good challenge, we’re both already very good at challenging ourselves in a variety of ways. So we don’t particularly need to push each other. When one of us suggests a new challenge, we’ll sometimes agree to do it together when it makes sense, and otherwise we won’t.

I’m doing a one-year blogging challenge this year. Rachelle just passed 440 days in a row of closing all of her Apple Watch rings, so she has 60 more days to reach her goal of 500. Last month we both did NaNoWriMo and successfully completed that challenge. This month she’s doing a 30-day decluttering challenge along with some other CGC members. I’m preparing for a one-year experience of eating all raw in 2021, so I’m spending some time each day re-familiarizing myself with raw meals and practicing various raw recipes. I’d also like an easier December since I’ll be working on a new deep dive course early next year, which can be an intense experience.

If we weren’t in a relationship together, Rachelle and I would still be working on our personal growth as individuals. So we don’t need the relationship to play that role for us. We share this part of our life together, but it doesn’t seem to connect with the purpose of our relationship.

In terms of spiritual growth, our relationship feels like the universe said to each of us, “You’re doing great. How about a nice reward that you’ll surely enjoy and appreciate? Here you go! Have fun!”

This is a very different framing to place upon a relationship instead of being co-teachers for each other. It’s especially different from the lens that says you should be in a relationship with someone who antagonizes you because it will help you grow.

Rachelle and I are already good at identifying and diving into new growth experiences. Neither of us really wants or needs to push each other to grow more than we’re already doing. We can simply trust that we’re both going to keep learning and growing no matter what, and there’s ample evidence to prove that to each other.

It feels to me that maybe these aspects are connected, like the reason I get to be in a relationship with a “reward” at this stage of life is that I’ve locked in a consistent and perpetual flow of growth experiences without feeling overwhelmed. I’ve figured out a flow that works for me, and Rachelle has found a flow that works for her.

We both spend a lot of time helping and serving others too, so that may be part of this as well.

I’m not sure about this aspect of the framing though. It could just be the ex-Catholic in me that feels that every reward must first be earned. It would be interesting to know if other people are in relationships that feel like spiritual rewards that they didn’t have to spiritually earn first.

What Rachelle and I love doing for each other is to be each others playmates and to share love, appreciation, affection, friendship, and encouragement.

We’re also co-adventurers. We love traveling together. We love having shared experiences. Our favorite type of “challenge” to do together would be to share in some new kind of adventure together. We’ve always had a good time exploring new cities together. We’ve been to dozens of different cities throughout our relationship, which began as a cross-border relationship where switching countries was necessary just to see each other.

Even under COVID conditions where we’re spending way more time at home than in a typical year, I never feel bored with her. As much time as we’ve already spent together, I still crave more. I love spending each day with her. Somehow this continues to feel fresh and new, even when the setting and circumstances are familiar. She’s a source of beauty that I enjoy each day without feeling like the enjoyment and appreciation could ever run out.

This relationship feels like it’s exactly what we both want and need. It’s wonderful to spend each day with a partner who feels like a gift and a reward. It’s fascinating to be in a relationship with a woman who sees me in the same light.

This kind of framing is relaxing and restorative. Neither of us feels like we must “work” on the relationship to fix problems or to improve it. We actually succeed in our relationship mainly by being, not by doing. Simply being present makes our relationship fulfill its purpose. Just cuddling each other on the couch feels very purposeful.

Remember that feeling you have when you buy a new piece of tech like the latest smart phone, and for a while you feel extra special because you have the latest and greatest? But then a year later, a new version comes out… and then another new version a year after that. And now you’re behind the times and wondering if you should upgrade. But what if you could have that new-tech feeling every day, so you felt that extra appreciation above the baseline, and it never went back down again? That’s similar to how my relationship with Rachelle feels each day.

Almost 11 years ago, a significant increase in appreciation, gratitude, and enjoyment came into my life, and it never went back down again. Those aspects of my life have remained elevated this whole time.

But what I find most interesting is that I never developed a tolerance for it. It’s like having coffee where every cup is as stimulating as the first one, and your body never adapts to higher caffeine levels and brings you back down again. So the same dosage remains very stimulating, and you don’t need to keep increasing the dosage to get the same effect.

Each day with Rachelle feels like it exists above my baseline. But somehow my old baseline hasn’t raised itself up to match my current day-to-day experiences. That seems very odd to me. Why hasn’t the baseline come up? Why doesn’t each day with her just feel okay and normal now? Why do I still experience delight and appreciation with her after all this time together? Why does she still seem like a gift?

I don’t know, but I do like it.

Before I experienced this relationship, I didn’t think it was possible for a real human relationship to have the spiritual purpose of being co-gifts, co-rewards, and co-playmates for each other. That seems too easy and too good to be true. I wondered if we must be in some realm of co-denial about all the real spiritual work and tough love we must surely engage in sooner or later. It took a while to get aligned with the co-reward idea.

Why share this? One reason is to let you know that a healthy and happy relationship doesn’t have to involve working on your partner or on the relationship to improve it. For some that may sound like heresy. While people can enter a relationship to directly help each other grow and improve, that doesn’t have to be the case. You could also be in a relationship with someone whose beingness you enjoy and appreciate.

I think the more challenging aspect is when you flip this around and ask: For which person could I be a gift that they’ll appreciate and enjoy each day, just by being myself as I am right now?

That’s another special aspect of my relationship with Rachelle that I don’t notice as often, but it is nice to acknowledge when I see it. I like looking at her and thinking, “I’m good for her. She’s lucky to have me in her life.” I can understand why she appreciates and enjoys me. I can see the value I add to her life. And this feeling is very much mutual. She can readily see how good she is for me too and how much value she adds to my life. It’s nice that neither of us have to wonder about that or question it. It’s plain as day to us both that we’re good for each other and that we enhance each other’s lives by being together.

You can attract a relationship that’s a lot of work, but you have other options too. What do you feel ready to experience spiritually at this time in your life? Do you want a co-working type of relationship? Do you want fun and adventure? Do you want grace, ease, and lightness? Do you want lust and passion?

If you’re in a current relationship now, is it still aligned with a spiritual purpose that feels aligned with who you are today? Is it what you want to experience at this stage of your life? Or do you feel called to explore and experience a new relationship with a different spiritual purpose?

Pay attention to that purpose alignment. If your relationship has lost its connection to such a purpose, consider that it’s also your purpose to fulfill a meaningful role for someone else – to be their teacher, their reward, and so on.

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Is Manifesting a Physical Skill, a Mental Skill, or a Spiritual Skill?

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People often frame their manifesting skills as something spiritual, mental, or a combination of the two. Manifesting is often treated as something akin to prayer. Ask the universe for what you desire, and hopefully you’ll receive it.

But what if manifesting is actually a physical skill in disguise?

Other mental skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and solving math problems, are actually physical skills too. Your physical brain implements these skills on your neural hardware. If your brain is damaged in certain ways, you could lose some of your mental skills.

We often overlook the connection between the mental and the physical except when it becomes really obvious, like after consuming alcohol or when feeling sleep deprived. But the connection is strong and clear. The mental and the physical are inseparably linked.

What about so-called spiritual skills, however, such as manifesting or prayer? If you focus on your desires to manifest what you want, clearly that’s a mental activity too. You have to think about it to do it. You’re engaging your mind in a mental activity, which means you’re also engaging your brain in a physical activity.

Are you following this so far? The mental and physical conneciton seems pretty straightforward up to this point, right? Now here’s where it gets a bit weird.

If manifesting is a spiritual skill and a mental skill, then it’s also a physical skill. This suggests that the health of your brain could affect the results of your manifesting experiments, just as the health of your brain can affect your other skills and the results you can generate with them.

Any mental skills you have can be degraded with drug and alcohol abuse, right? And any mental skills can be upgraded with better health habits, right?

Have you considered that this isn’t just true for skills like writing, solving business problems, and computer coding? Have you considered that it’s also true for any and all spiritual skills, including prayer and manifesting?

Yes, I’m actually suggesting that the health of your brain is inextricably linked to the results you’re able to achieve with any of your so-called spiritual skills. Sure you can still use your skills under suboptimal conditions, just as a drunken writer can still write well sometimes. But in general, a cleaner brain will yield better and more consistent results.

How can you tell? One way is to do health experiments that will significantly affect your brain health. When your brain gets physically healthier, do you notice a difference in your manifesting skills?

I absolutely do notice this when I do certain health experiments, as long as I’m making big enough changes. The improvement in “spiritual” results is very pronounced. Whenever I eat 100% raw for a while, my manifesting skills undergo a major upgrade. Positive synchronicities amp up tremendously, and my desires flow into my life with much less effort. It’s almost a magical experience. Every time I change my diet this way, I’m blown away by this change. I expect to experience physical and mental improvements, but it’s weird when spiritual improvements occur as well.

I also experience a huge increase in intuition. This part makes sense to me because I can say that intuition is a mental skill, so when my physical brain runs cleaner, of course my intuitive insights may improve as well. I can explain this by saying that intuition is a function of the subconscious mind, so when the underlying hardware runs better, the software runs better too, and this leads to more accurate neural computations.

But it’s harder to explain why manifesting skills are so much better when eating raw. Sure I can say that my mind works better because my brain works better. And I can see the surge in results that stays high as long as I keep eating raw. I can notice that those results decline again when I return to eating cooked food. But what’s the connection between my brain and the universe? Why does having a cleaner brain make a difference in reality’s responses to my intentions and desires?

That aspect does puzzle me. I don’t doubt that there’s a connection though because it’s so pronounced. To doubt it would be like having six shots of alcohol in a row and pretending that there’s no effect. You’ll notice the difference plain as day, especially when the shift happens so rapidly.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed similar effects. Other raw foodists have written about this too. It’s a common subject of conversation in person. Many explain it differently though – as something spiritual or soulful.

I find the spiritual explanation unsatisfying. I think there really is a link that runs through the physical. I think it’s probably similar to the application of communication skills.

For instance, if you eat a super clean raw vegan diet, your social life will change. People who’ve never eaten raw may assume one’s social life would get worse, but it actually gets better – usually a lot better. This could be explained by a physical chain of events. You’ll soon look healthier, and people will start to notice. People will find you more attractive. Your thinking will become clearer, calmer, and more focused, so you’ll communicate differently in your writing and speaking, and people may pick up on those differences too. Hence it makes sense that changes in your brain functioning will change what you’re communicating, and this will change the social response that you receive.

My experience is that when I eat raw, people are friendlier and more social around me. Interestingly this effect happens not just in person but also online. I wouldn’t have understood this effect if I hadn’t tested this lifestyle enough times, but it’s pretty pronounced and hard to overlook. I don’t have to try to be more social. It just happens.

I suspect that there’s a similar pathway for communicating with reality itself. Or maybe it’s a pathway of communicating with life, like a form of telepathic signals that we collectively broadcast and receive. Perhaps when we eat cleaner, our internal hardware and software for broadcasting and receiving these signals works better than before. And perhaps there’s an aspect of manifesting that uses these communication channels, and this in turn affects our manifesting results.

When I eat raw, I feel like reality is better at reading my mind. Instead of feeling like I’m pushing intentions out into the universe and hoping for some positive echos, it feels like reality reaches into my mind, pulls out my desires, smiles, and gives me a receipt. Then it brings me what I want rather quickly. I don’t really need to ask. It’s like I’m always automatically broadcasting what I want, and reality is hearing me loud and clear.

Opportunities and invitations flow into my life so synchronistically. My thinking and reality’s responses achieve a level of synchronization that I don’t experience when eating cooked food. I can still achieve an okay level of alignment on a cooked vegan diet, but it’s way, way better on 100% raw foods.

Have you ever considered the link between your manifesting skills and your diet? Have you considered that manifesting is a physical skill too, not just a mental and spiritual skill? Do you realize that your spiritual skills are still running on physical hardware? Have you wondered if cleaning up your diet could yield a significant increase in your ability to manifest your desires?

Have you also pondered that eating cooked food could be negatively affecting your communication pathways with reality? Is it possible that your mental transmissions are getting garbled and that reality isn’t actually receiving your intentions accurately and powerfully? Is it possible that most of the time, reality dismisses your requests as the misaligned ravings of some drunken human who eats a very strange and unnatural diet?

Cooked food affects the body and brain very differently than raw food. For instance, when you eat cooked food, your body generates an immune response with a surge in white blood cells. The body doesn’t response this way when you eat raw foods. If your body must expend extra energy on digestion and waste cleanup, maybe it won’t devote as much energy to transmitting your desires.

What if your life is much harder than it needs to be? What if your eating habits are preventing you from experiencing a level of flow that would make abundance easy and natural?

Are you trying to manifest abundance? What if this could be automatic, just by eating a cleaner diet? What if your natural state of being is to be outstanding at manifesting your desires, and you’ve degraded this flow at the physical level?

And what if your mental and spiritual framing of this skill set has been keeping you stuck? What if manifesting was mostly a natural physical ability all along, and you just had to let it out of its cage, so it could run at full speed?

All of this can be personally tested.

This is one of many factors that’s motivating me to test eating raw for all of 2021. This month I’m reloading those skills, practicing making different raw meals to get back into the flow of eating raw while still permitting cooked food when desired for the next few weeks. I want to do a deeper dive into this aspect of life, especially with respect to what I can glean about reality’s responses. I recently reviewed some of my old blog posts that I wrote during the time when I was eating fully or mostly raw (about 11-12 years ago), and I was struck by how easily I manifested various desires back then.

I think 2021 is going to be a very fun, flowing, and social year.

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Goals of Being

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Many years ago one of my goals for public speaking was to design and deliver my own three-day workshop on the Las Vegas Strip. I first achieved that goal in 2009. That was a goal of doing.

Another goal I had for public speaking was to develop such strong comfort with public speaking that I could feel fully present in front of an audience, so I could be spontaneous and in the moment and not feel anxiety or nervousness – just enjoyment, fun, playfulness, and connection. I achieved that goal somewhere along the way. I demonstrated it at the three-day 2015 Conscious Heart Workshop, delivered spontaneously with lots of fun, playfulness, and inspiration in the moment – and no nervousness or anxiety. There was no plan or content preparation for that workshop. I facilitated it from the flow of inspiration and audience suggestion moment by moment. That was a goal of being.

At another time I had a goal of writing a book and getting it published. That was achieved in 2008. More doing.

But I also had a goal of writing that book in a way that I could always feel really good about it, and I wouldn’t feel like I’d outgrown it a decade or two later. I wanted to have a timeless relationship with that book and its principles throughout my life. More being. I still feel such a connection to that book, now 12 years after it was published.

The culture that I find myself within gives a lot of weight to doing and not enough to being. Pursuing goals “at all costs” is lauded by many. But we pay a price for this focus – a loss of connection to being.

When you set goals for the New Year (or anytime really), give some attention to the beingness aspects, not just to your activities and results.

Beingness is surprisingly powerful. A lot of doingness takes care of itself if you invest in the right experience of beingness.

Results of Beingness

Here are some examples of goals that I’ve achieved that have enhanced my life greatly, which have more to do with being than doing.

  • I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman who makes me smile when I see her. We laugh together every day. Even after spending so much time together, especially this year, I still look forward to more time with her.
  • My vegan diet forever changed the way I relate to animals. I look upon them with a sense of fellowship and reverence, not as objects to be bought and consumed.
  • I have written millions of words of published content, but for me the more important goal was learning to write from inspiration. I never get writer’s block. That’s due to trust, not because of self-discipline. I don’t have to force anything. I’ve learned how to invite, tune into, and trust the flow. With the right beingness, the doingness is relatively easy. Most of the content I’ve written, including all of my blog articles and YouTube videos, are donated to the public domain, so anyone is free to republish, repurpose, or translate them.
  • I’m happy. I like my life. I look forward to each day. I often feel appreciative and grateful and lucky, not as some kind of deliberate practice but just as an automatic inner response. I’ve made it a priority to live my life in such a way that these feelings naturally arise. I say no to a lot of doing-based projects that would predictably reduce my happiness. I say yes to invitations and activities that will predictably increase my happiness. And I test that predictability now and then to see if my predictions are still accurate.
  • I get up at 5am each morning. This doesn’t require any force. I’m simply in love with the early morning hours. I seem to have a special relationship with that time of day. It’s that relationship that makes it easy to get out of bed – no force or discipline needed.
  • I feel that I have a healthy and positive relationship with money. I enjoy earning it and find it fairly easy to earn plenty of it when I want. I like spending it too. I like saving it. I invested a lot of thought and experimentation into improving my relationship with money – to drive out the fears and worries about it and to replace those fears and worries with play, trust, creativity, appreciation, inspiration, and other positive aspects of beingness. I used to struggle with money during my 20s, and that struggle didn’t occur during my 30s and 40s. This was solved not with more doing but with better being.
  • I have friends who inspire me to be a better person. I find that such people naturally flow into my life and stick around, not from working on my action-based social skills but from deepening my connection to the person I really want to be in each moment. When I express my beingness in the moment, people who are aligned with me seem naturally attracted to me. I also find it beautiful, remarkable, and empowering when someone else really expresses their beingness. It makes me feel in awe of that person. I tend to feel more awe from a person’s beingness rather than from their actions and accomplishments.

I tend to value my gains in beingness more than my gains in doingness. That’s because the right beingness makes the doing part easier and more fun.

Setting Goals of Being

I encourage you to actually set some goals of being. They may look like doing-based goals on the surface, but how you experience them is at least as important as the doing part. So the goal is really about the presence you bring to the experience.

Here are some examples:

  • Deliver a one-hour presentation with zero nervousness or anxiety.
  • Learn to enjoy doing your taxes that you file them at least a few weeks ahead of the due date. Find a way to fully enjoy the process with little or no resistance.
  • Earn $10K in one day, in a playful and inspired way. Form the intention, and then act on the flow of inspiration moment by moment. This seems like it’s about the doing, but it’s really about working through self-limiting beliefs and creating a more playful and inspired relationship with reality. You have to stop the self-censoring and self-doubt and learn to “yes, and” the ideas that flow through. This goals is nearly impossible if your relationship with inspiration is weak. It can be fun do it if that relationship is strong. You might even set such a goal and then find that you’re getting redirected towards an even better or bigger goal.
  • Prepare and eat a meal that’s super healthy, super delicious, and feels delightful to prepare it, eat it, and digest it. This requires that you really listen to how you’re connecting with the food during each step. And then you must be present to how your body is experiencing the food after you’ve eaten it.
  • Become a hugger. Become a person who gives and receives willing hugs, maybe even every day. Create a life rich in consensual touch. Oh, this was an amazing one to achieve, given my starting point. It took years to get there, but it was so worth it.
  • If you start a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or something similar, define what kind of relationship you want to have with the many loops of creating and publishing new material that you’ll experience. What I’ve found helpful is that the process must be a growth experience for me; otherwise I’ll get bored and resist it. I also have to write for people I care about helping. This is more important than traffic or numbers. I need to love the process of creation. If I don’t love it, it means the beingness is wrong, and I need to approach it differently.
  • Make a really good, new friend. Good luck with turning this into a step-by-step action plan. With the right beingness though, this one is a lot easier. What makes you a good friend? Are you being that kind of person consistently?

So don’t just consider the what aspect of your goals. Pay great attention to the how and the why. Consider what kind of life you’re creating. Look at the inner experience of what it will be like to achieve your goals one way versus another way. There are so many ways to achieve results externally, but many approaches won’t feel very aligned or pleasant on the inside.

When you ignore the beingness aspect of a goal, you’ll likely sabotage the doingness part as well. It’s hard to take action when you’d rather procrastinate. If you’d rather play video games, how can you bring the beingness aspect that you enjoy while gaming into your other goals? What kind of player are you being in those game worlds? Are you being that player in other areas of life?

One sign that I have the beingness right is that I smile warmly when I think about my goals. It makes me happy to think about doing them. I look forward to working on them day by day. I’m not just motivated by the end result. I can savor the journey as well.

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NaNoWriMo – Day 30

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Today is the final day of NaNoWriMo. I added about 2000 more words to my novel-in-progress this morning. My final word count for the month came in at 55,051 words. The challenge of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is to write 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days, so I exceeded this target by about 10%.

Here’s my daily progress log, showing my total word count (darker color) versus the daily pacing needed to hit 50K words (lighter color).

I surpassed the target pacing by a small amount on Day 1 and then padded my lead every day afterwards. It felt good to always be a little bit ahead throughout the challenge. I knew that if I just maintained this steady pacing, I’d never need to do any catch-up writing at the end.

Before starting this challenge, I learned that a major reason people fail at NaNoWriMo is that they fall behind in the first couple of weeks, and then they feel disheartened when facing the extra effort needed to catch up. Even skipping one day means you’ll have to write more in the remaining days. Most people who fall behind give up and don’t complete the challenge. This is an easily preventable point of failure.

My strategy was to approach this as a daily challenge, which plays to my strengths. I’ve done lots of 30-day challenges where I practice a specific behavior for 30 days in a row. In this case the desired behavior was to add at least 1667 words to my novel each day. If I just focused on that, the monthly goal would be accomplished too. It’s just typing after all.

Here’s what my daily word count looked like for all 30 days.

As you can see, I was pretty consistent throughout the month.

I averaged 1835 words per day, which works out to an extra 10% per day. Once I passed the 1667 words for the day, I kept writing till I felt like stopping, such as when I got to the end of a scene. If I felt like stopping but I wasn’t at 1667 words yet, I took a short break and then continued writing.

Final Reflections

This was a wonderful personal growth experience, and I’m glad I did it. The novel isn’t done and will need a lot of work to finish, but the daily writing got me well into the project.

I don’t have a completed book yet, and it would take a lot more work to drive this towards a version ready for publishing, but NaNoWriMo got me moving forward with meaningful progress. It helped me turn a mere idea into something a lot more tangible.

At this point I don’t have a completed story. I’ve written a first draft of many scenes. I have several well-developed characters. I have a well-structured three-act story with interesting plot twists. But there are still many more details to work out.

This is a very rough first draft. I’d say it’s not bad for a month’s work. I estimate that I averaged about 75 minutes per day of writing time (including thinking about what to write). I’m very pleased with how far I got for about 40 hours of effort. There was also some incubation time when I’d be thinking about characters or plot ideas while doing unrelated tasks.

The “words are cheap” mindset worked very well. It’s easy to throw words onto the screen, read them back the next day, and learn something useful. I’ll end up throwing away much of what I wrote this month, and I don’t lament that at all. Everything I wrote helped in some way. Each day I gained more clarity about the story, the characters, and the world. Even when what I wrote seemed like a chaotic mess, it still felt like forward progress.

Other writers have said that you write the first draft for yourself, not for anyone else. I adopted that mindset from Day 1, and I found it very helpful. I didn’t expect to show this early draft to anyone, not even Rachelle. So I just wrote whatever came to mind. It was my own personal exploration of the ideas and possibilities, nothing more. By framing it that way, I felt totally free to experiment and to make lots of mistakes. This helped me figure out what kind of story I wanted to tell. I let the words flow without any concern about who might read them.

One clear gain was that I understand my characters so much better than when I first started. Now I can write their words and actions much more easily, as if they tell me what they would say and do in every situation. So the writing got easier as I went along. The first few days were the most challenging; after that it was smooth sailing.

Another gain was that my “why” for writing this story improved as I kept writing. Around halfway through the month, I developed a stronger sense of purpose for why I wanted to write and share such a story. I had a more compelling answer to the questions: Why bother with this project? What’s the point? Who would want to read this? My purpose was more exploration-based in the beginning, but by the end I felt like I was creating something I really wanted to share with the world to see how it landed with people. I had a clearer sense of the story’s potential impact.

This was similar in some ways to designing a new video game from scratch, but the medium is very different. I liked how easy it was to explore the characters, story ideas, and world without having to deal with tech constraints. I could play around with any ideas I could imagine. I really enjoyed that type of experience – it was like pure play.

Most days I looked forward to my writing sessions. I didn’t experience much inner resistance after the first week, and that small resistance was just due to being too green at this type of writing. I think having lots of nonfiction writing experience – and a healthy willingness to make plenty of mistakes – was helpful. I never had writer’s block. I could connect with inspired ideas for fiction writing as easily as for nonfiction articles or courses.

Next Steps

I’m going to set aside the novel writing and coast into a more relaxed December since I want to focus on other aspects of life for the rest of the year. That includes finishing up my one-year daily blogging challenge, which has 31 days left to go.

Stephen King recommends setting aside a novel for at least 6 weeks after writing the first draft and then coming back it to fresh. He says it’s wise to get some distance from the story, so you can see it with fresh eyes before you start editing.

My first draft isn’t good enough that I can just edit it into a finished book. It’s way too messy for that, especially since there are a lot of scenes I’ll need to cut or rewrite differently. I’m still going to set this aside for 6+ weeks, probably until after our next deep dive is complete, but my next steps will different than Stephen King’s.

Sometime next year I’d like to revisit this novel project, re-read everything I wrote, and then begin working on a second draft. I’d like to do a round of more detailed plotting before I add more words to the book. I think the story would benefit a lot by clarifying the scene-by-scene layout.

The pantser approach was great for getting started since it helped me map out the possibility space for the story by writing a lot of scenes. Now I have enough understanding of the story and that characters that a good next step would be to map out the scenes for the story in the right order. I’d also like to fill out character and location sheets to fine-tune the characters and settings. Then I can write the second draft.

It’s going to be a long process, and I’m not in a rush to race through this. I do want to see this through to publishing. It’s an original story with some fun characters that I think people would enjoy reading. I might approach this project as a series of 30-day challenges to push it forward through different stages of development.

I’m especially happen that I framed NaNoWriMo in a way that made the experience enjoyable, especially by always being ahead of schedule. This makes me eager to re-engage with the novel when I’m ready. There are other priorities I want to engage with next, so I’m happy to put this aside for now, but I do look forward to getting back into it with fresh eyes.

Our Next Deep Dive

My first big priority for 2021 is to launch and develop our new creative productivity deep dive, which is tentatively called Amplify. This is for people who do creative work and want to increase their productive output. It’s also for people who’d like to get into a better creative flow. You could think of it as a course in how to be a prolific creator who publishes frequently. How can you express yourself creatively year after year without burning out?

I have tons to share about this topic that I believe would be unique and different from anything else out there. I’ve gone through many books and courses on creativity and on productivity, but I still haven’t seen really good coverage regarding connecting the dots between creativity and productivity. It’s like creativity is play, and productivity is work. There’s a lot of conflicting advice that treats creativity as inherently unproductive and productivity as inherently uncreative.

What if you want to excel at both together? What if you want to be a fountain of creative expression?

How can you be super creative and highly productive without sacrificing too much on either side? How can you get into the flow of creating and publishing – and stay there consistently without burning out?

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m convinced that this is an area where I can add some real value to people’s lives. I’ve created and published across many different media: articles, videos, podcasts, a book, video games, music, live events, and more. This year I’ve published something new every single day, adding hundreds of thousands of words to my collective work, which is already well into the millions of words, not counting translations into other languages.

I love to keep exploring new media too, such as I just did with NaNoWriMo. Partly I did NaNoWriMo as an experiment to test some of the ideas for this upcoming deep dive.

I’d love to do this new deep dive co-creatively too, like we did with our previous ones, so the lessons will be created as we go, designed for the specific needs of the people who enroll.

I haven’t decided on the exact the format yet. My intuition says it will likely be something different from our previous courses, perhaps a combination of live interactive parts along with structured audio lessons. People loved the audio format of Submersion and Stature, and there was also something special about the live sessions that we did for Deep Abundance Integration. So I’m thinking of merging those for the new deep dive. Would that appeal to you?

I’ll share more info on this new deep dive next year as we get closer to launching it. We’ll be launching it during the first quarter of 2021. I tend to get an intuitive ping when the timing is right for launching. In the meantime, I’d like to clear my plate of some other projects first, mostly on the personal side.

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